The Crystal Code (11 page)

‘Oh, well done. You're good at this,' Felicity sa
id. ‘
Whining
fits perfectly. It connects
Dire
with
Monotonous
.'

Gerald gave Felicity a guilty look. ‘Have I been going on about the weather a bit?'

‘Only to the exclusion of everything else,' Felicity said. She put down her pencil and looked up at Gerald. ‘It's okay to talk about your parents, Gerald. It won't make you any less of a man.'

Gerald couldn't maintain the eye contact—he had to look away. ‘I prefer to talk to myself,' he mumbled.

Felicity cocked an eyebrow. ‘Yes, that's healthy.'

Gerald didn't reply. No one could confront the kidnapping of their parents, or any other major trauma, by bottling everything up. But Gerald had spoken about it with Sam and Ruby—they were in the same situation, after all—and with Mr Prisk, and the San Francisco police, and the assistant housekeeper Mrs Fitzherbert. Frankly, he had nothing left to say.

‘By the way, the Colonel is fine with me staying here a while longer,' Felicity said, breaking the silence. ‘That is, unless you want me to go back to St Hilda's?'

Gerald tensed. It looked like the Christmas-cuddle conversation was upon him.

‘Uh, look,' he said. ‘About that thing with Ruby…'

Felicity looked up at him. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘About that.'

Gerald swallowed and stared at the fire. He had absolutely no idea what he was meant to say. Maybe he should just throw himself into the flames. That would at least be less painful.

‘Um…'

‘Yes, Gerald?'

Why was there never a signpost pointing to the right thing to say? There were plenty of signs pointing to the M25 or the nearest Tube station. But never one to the nearest escape route.

‘It's like this…'

‘Yes?'

Then a thought slammed into his head, like a pigeon into a clean window. ‘It was Christmas,' he said. ‘Ruby's a really good friend and you always give your good friends a Christmas hug. It's traditional.'

He held his breath.

Felicity tilted her head a fraction more. ‘That's your tradition, is it?'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘Cuddling your friends.'

‘Yep.'

‘And I'm still your girlfriend?'

Gerald saw an escape hatch opening. He dived into it, head first.

‘Of course!' he said, a little too forcefully. ‘Girlfriend of the Year.' Gerald cringed as the words tumbled out.

‘Maybe I should get a T-shirt made up,' Felicity said. She stared at Gerald for a moment then a smile returned to her face. ‘Good. That's settled then.'

‘It is?'

Felicity nodded and went back to her crossword.

Gerald let out a silent sigh of relief.

That was that sorted.

Felicity understood exactly where everything stood with Ruby.

Gerald wished that he did.

‘Are we still meeting Sam and Ruby at the museum tomorrow to see this professor friend of yours?' Felicity asked. It was as if the previous conversation had never taken place.

‘Um, in the morning,' Gerald said, still not quite believing he was off the hook. ‘Mr Prisk has something he wants me to do in the afternoon. Want to come along?'

‘Sure—what is it?'

‘Something to do with me joining some billionaires' club. I think Mr Prisk is trying to keep me busy.'

Felicity chewed on the end of her pencil. ‘Sounds a bit—' She paused.

‘Six letter word for tedious, starting with B?' said Gerald.

Felicity laughed. Gerald couldn't bring himself to join in.

Chapter 15

P
rofessor McElderry's office at the British Museum was unchanged from the last time Gerald had visited. The same anxious secretary sat in the reception area. Through the open door to the office proper, McElderry's disaster of a desk was visible, with towers of papers and journals all in a state of imminent collapse. Even the professor's pet tortoise was in residence, dormant on the bookshelf. The only thing that was not there was the professor himself.

‘He isn't in,' the secretary said, returning her attention to her computer screen.

‘Oh, I hadn't counted on that,' Gerald said. Ruby, Sam and Felicity stood behind him, their faces registering disappointment. ‘When can we see him?'

The secretary ran a finger down a page on her desk calendar. ‘Let's see,' she said, ‘How about never? Is that good for you?'

Gerald was taken aback. ‘Excuse me?'

The secretary gave him a frail look of defiance, then crumbled. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. Her mouth sank and a tear formed at the corner of her eye. ‘I have no idea where Knox is.'

‘What do you mean?' Ruby asked. ‘Is he sick or something?'

‘I don't know,' the woman said. She pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabbed at her eye. ‘He took a week off before Christmas and was due back three days ago. He didn't show. There's no answer at his home. The mail hasn't been collected. His phone rings out. I've called his family, his close friends, his academic colleagues. No one has heard a thing.' She blew her nose in a sharp blast. ‘I know he's an irascible old bully and a pain in the posterior. But,' she blew her nose again, ‘I'm worried about him.'

There was an awkward silence. Then Sam piped up. ‘Maybe he had one too many drinks at Christmas, bumped his head and can't remember who he is?'

Everyone turned to look at him.

‘I know, I know,' he said. ‘I may well be the stupidest boy in the world.'

‘Have you called the police?' Felicity asked. ‘Missing persons—that sort of thing?'

The woman nodded. ‘His brother is handling all that,' she said. ‘The worst thing is not knowing. Do you know what I mean?'

Gerald glanced at Ruby and Sam. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes, we do.'

The secretary crushed the tissue in her hand and took in a calming breath. ‘Anyway, what was it you wanted to see the professor about?' she said. ‘Perhaps I can help you?'

Gerald pulled a folded page from his pocket—it was the photocopy of the message from the bottle.

The secretary inspected the string of random letters on one side and the hand-painted symbols on the other. ‘You need to talk with Dr Efron. Rare and Ancient Documents—third floor. I'll call and let her know you're coming.'

Ruby led the way back to the lifts. ‘What was that all about? Professor McElderry going missing?'

Gerald pressed the button for the third floor. ‘There seems to be a lot of people disappearing at the moment.'

Dr Efron was not what Gerald had expected. She wore a pair of faded blue jeans, orange Converse sneakers, a slim-fit T-shirt and her hair was a neat tangle of dreadlocks. She didn't look more than twenty-five years old.

‘You're, um, pretty young to be an expert on old stuff,' Gerald said.

Dr Efron—‘Call me Lucy'—had her feet on a large desk. She rocked back in her chair, studying the paper Gerald had given her.

‘And you're pretty young to be a billionaire,' she said with a wink. ‘Never underestimate the power of a young mind on a mission.' She ran her eyes over the symbols on the paper. ‘And this was in a bottle, you say?'

‘That's right,' Felicity said. ‘It looked pretty old.'

‘Who sends messages in bottles anyway?' Sam asked. ‘It's a pretty random way of getting in touch with someone.'

‘You'd be surprised,' Dr Efron said. ‘Bottles have travelled thousands of miles. Ocean currents can run very fast.' She pulled a thick book from a shelf above her head and flicked through some pages. She stopped and compared the photocopy with a photograph in the book.

‘It's a shame you didn't keep the original,' she said.

‘Why's that?' Gerald said.

‘Because it's probably worth a fortune. This is a page that was torn from the Voynich Manuscript.'

‘Torn from the what?'

‘The Voynich Manuscript. It's a cypher document from the late sixteenth century.' Dr Efron looked up at four confused faces. ‘It's written in a secret code. It supposedly contains the key to turning lead into gold, the recipe to the universal remedy and a bunch of other fantastical stuff.'

‘What do you mean “supposedly”?' Ruby asked.

‘No one has ever been able to crack the code,' Dr Efron said. ‘Even with modern-day supercomputers, the cypher has never been solved.'

She spun the book around for them to see: a double page spread of paintings of mysterious herbs and lines of indecipherable symbols.

‘The manuscript was bought by King Rudolph II of Bohemia in the late 1500s for six hundred gold ducats—a small fortune at the time,' Dr Efron said. ‘His castle was equipped with the best alchemy laboratories in Europe. Rudolph wanted to own the secrets of science. Alchemy would bring him endless riches and the universal remedy would cure him of any illness. He could rule for the ages.'

‘What happened?' Ruby asked.

Dr Efron closed the book. ‘He did his dough,' she said. ‘The code is either unbreakable, or a complete hoax. I'd vote hoax.'

Ruby studied the note from the bottle. ‘If the code is all symbols, what's with the letters on the other side?'

‘I'd say those have been added long after Rudolph's time. It's an entirely different type of code. The date at the bottom says 1835—that's about two hundred and twenty years after Rudolph's reign.'

Gerald took the note and held it under a desk lamp. ‘If this is a page torn from a manuscript, what happened to the rest of it?'

‘Until two weeks ago it was in a library of rare documents at Yale University in the United States,' Dr Efron said. ‘But it was stolen. No one knows where it is.'

‘You're kidding,' Ruby said. ‘Stolen two weeks ago?'

‘I wish I was kidding. A man pretending to be from an obscure research institute in the Netherlands made off with it. I'm guessing it was the Falcon.'

‘I'm sorry?' Ruby said.

‘A professional document thief. He's been raiding the collections of libraries and universities for years. The police can't catch him.'

‘The Falcon?' Gerald said. ‘Where have I heard that before?'

‘He called himself Professor Peregrine,' Dr Efron said.

Gerald looked at her blankly.

‘It's a kind of falcon,' she explained. ‘His idea of a joke, I suppose. He works for private collectors. They pay big dollars for rare documents like this.'

‘How big?' Gerald asked.

‘If they want it badly enough? Millions of dollars. Collectors can be kind of obsessive.'

Gerald folded the coded page back into his pocket and got up to leave. ‘An obsessive document collector with access to millions of dollars?' he said. ‘That narrows the field a bit.'

Gerald warmed his hands around the mug of hot chocolate in the museum coffee shop. ‘This has got Mason Green written all over it,' he said. ‘An old document worth million of dollars gets stolen. And Green has suddenly escaped from jail. He's got to be connected.'

‘Then why was Green's apartment turned upside down in San Francisco?' Sam said.

‘Maybe there's more than one person searching for whatever it is they're all looking for,' Felicity said.

Gerald looked at the photocopy. ‘If we could unscramble this code we might have some answers.'

‘I don't fancy your chances if a supercomputer couldn't manage it,' Sam said.

‘That was on the original code,' Gerald said. ‘Not this one on the back.' He ran his fingers across the jumble of letters.

‘I wouldn't blow a brain stem over it, Gerald,' Ruby said. ‘It's not going to get us any closer to finding our parents.'

‘Or Ox and Alisha,' Felicity said.

‘I guess you're right,' Gerald said. ‘We should concentrate on that.' He turned to Sam and Ruby. ‘I've got to go to some meeting that Mr Prisk has arranged this afternoon. But do you guys want to come round for dinner tonight? We can order pizza.'

‘Sounds great,' Ruby said.

Sam drained his mug and patted his stomach. ‘You had me at “dinner”,' he said.