remembered the recording that Anna had played them of her session with Klaus Rheinfeld. Rheinfeld had been muttering similar sequences of alternating numbers and letters. Ben had written them down.
He searched through his pockets and found the little pad. Rheinfeld had been repeating the same sequence of letters and numbers over and over. N-6; E-4; I-26; A-11; E-15. But these didn’t appear anywhere in the notebook. Did that mean Rheinfeld had been working the code out for himself? Ben remembered Anna describing how he’d obsessively counted on his fingers while he repeated the figures. He’d also counted on his fingers while repeating that other phrase…what was it again? Something in Latin, some alchemical saying. Ben screwed his tired eyes shut, trying to recall.
The phrase was somewhere in Rheinfeld’s notebook. He flicked through the grimy pages and found the ink drawing of the alchemist standing watching his bubbling preparation. There it was inscribed on the side of the cauldron. IGNE NATURA RENOVATUR INTEGRA. By fire nature is renewed whole.
If Rheinfeld was counting on his fingers while chanting the phrase…did that mean…Ben counted the letters of the Latin phrase. Twenty-six. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Was this the key line for the code?
He wrote the phrase out on a piece of paper. Above and beneath the words he ran the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1-26. It looked too simple, but he’d try it anyway. He quickly discovered that while the numbers in the code could only equate to one letter, because of the repeated letters in the phrase the coded letters could have a variety of meanings. Using this key he decoded the first two words of the hidden message, N 18 / U 11 R:
The horizontal letters should have been able to form into some kind of recognizable word, drawing on the vertical columns of alternatives thrown up by the code. But it was nonsensical. Try again, it was too obvious anyway. He reversed the numbers 1-26 so that they ran backwards against the key line, and decoded the first two words again.
Now it was looking as though he’d got this all wrong. The key line was probably something completely different.
‘God, I hate puzzles,’ he muttered to himself. Chewing on his pen, he gazed back at the notebook for inspiration. His eye settled on the picture of the alchemist with his cauldron. Beneath the cauldron was the fire. Beneath the fire was the inscription ANBO.
Then it hit him. Of course, stupid. ANBO was the coded form of IGNE, Latin for fire. If ANBO was IGNE, then it meant that the alphabet had been lined up against alternating letters of the key line. When it reached the end it simply started again at the beginning, filling in the gaps.
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I G N E N A T U R A R E N O V A T U R I N T E G R A
A N B O C P D Q E R F S G T H U I V J W K X L Y M Z
Set against the numbers running backwards from 1-26, this gave a totally different key to work with. ‘OK,’ he muttered, ‘here we go, one more time.’ N18 U11R, the code read. Based on his new key, N could be B or C or G or K; 18 could only be E. Moving on to the second word, U could be Q or V; 11 could only be U; and R could be any of E, F, J or M.
He stared fixedly at his scribbles, starting to feel a little snow-blind. But then his heart gave a jump. Wait a minute. A shape was forming. Out of the available letters he could spell out two distinct words. CE QUE. THAT WHICH. He wrote the key out more neatly.
And now the hidden message began to reveal itself quickly as he used the key to unlock the code, picking out the words from the available letters.
| i. | N 18: | CE |
| ii. | U 11 R | QUE |
| iii. | 9 E 11 E | VOUS |
| iv. | 22 V 18 A 22 V 18 A | CHERCHEZ |
| v. | 22 R 15 O | CEST |
| vi. | 22 R | LE |
| vii. | 13 A 18 E 23 A | TRESOR |
| viii. | 20 R 15 | DES |
| ix. | N 26 O 12 I 17 R 15 | CATHARES |
WHAT YOU ARE SEARCHING FOR IS
THE TREASURE OF THE CATHARS
The excitement of his discovery gave Ben a new surge of energy. He flipped through the notebook pages, looking for more messages that could cast further light on what he’d found. At the bottom of the page where he’d found the coded word TRESOR was a block of three more encrypted words.
| 22E 18T 22 E 18I | 26 | T12 U20 A18 |
22E 18T 22E 18 I–26–T12 U20 A18. The pattern was looking familiar now–but when he applied his key to crack the message, his heart sank.
There was no way to create meaning out of it. COEICSEW A IHVDRE?
All right, you old bastard, you can’t throw me off that easily. Beginning to understand the mischievous tricks Fulcanelli seemed to enjoy playing, he reversed the key, now running the numbers forwards along the key line and the alternating alphabet backwards. This threw up a very different reading.
Running across the line and scavenging odd letters from the vertical columns, he was suddenly able to form intelligible words in French.
CHERCHEZ A…
SEARCH AT…
Only the last word baffled him. It could have been any of RHEDIE, WHEDIE, WHEDAE, RHEDAE, or a number of weirder alternatives such as CHJKE which obviously made no sense at all.
He scratched his head. Search at… Judging by the context, the mysterious third word had to be a place name: search at somewhere. He looked up all the possible
