spot a forgery by the way certain words or phrases are used within a text.
Annja struck out there, too.
Her doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript were starting to take a beating in the face of what she was reading. So far, the manuscript had passed every test.
Knowing she’d been at it for hours, she got up and stretched a bit. She noticed a small serving tray had been left by the door at some point, and lifting the lid she discovered a plate of turkey sandwiches, complete with cranberry sauce and a bed of lettuce, along with a soft drink that was still icy cold. She gratefully dug in.
When she finished eating, she decided to give the text a rest and turn her attention to the map that had been hand drawn in the back of the journal.
She was in the midst of rereading the document for the sixth or seventh time when she saw a key piece of the puzzle. Several words on the page started with a funny little curlicue, as if the writer had left the pen on the page for a few seconds too long. At first, she thought it was just an artifact of the particular pen the author had used. Perhaps its point hadn’t been cut properly and the ink had pooled where it shouldn’t have. But then she began to notice that there wasn’t a consistency to its appearance. On one page a word starting with the letter T would have the little curlicue, but two pages later the same word would not.
Curious, she went back to the beginning and began to flip through the images of each page, looking for the strange little mark. Her trained eye began to pick out a pattern to its occurrences, something a little less than random.
“That’s interesting,” she told the empty room around her.
Grabbing a piece of paper, she went back to the beginning of the text again, but this time she wrote down every word where the strange mark appeared. She listed them in a vertical column, one after another, until she had reached the end. Scanning down the list, she quickly noted that the words seemed to form sentences and so she rewrote them in horizontal lines instead, guessing where one sentence left off and another one began. When she was finished, she was left with several paragraphs of text.
Her eyes widened as she realized what they were.
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