“Hey, Chris!” Wopner yelled. “Time for the dog and pony show!”
Hatch realized that Wopner must have been aiming at a small door set in the far wall of the stateroom. “Allow me,” he said,
stepping toward the door. “Your aim’s not so good.”
Opening the door, Hatch saw another stateroom, identical in size but completely different in all other ways. It was well lit,
clean, and spare. The Englishman, Christopher St. John, sat at a wooden table in the center of the room, pecking slowly away
at a Royal typewriter.
“Hello,” Hatch said. “Captain Neidelman volunteered your services for a few minutes.”
St. John stood and picked up a few old volumes from the desk, a fussy expression creasing his smooth, buttery face. “A pleasure
to have you with us, Dr. Hatch,” he said, shaking his hand, not looking at all pleased with the interruption.
“Call me Malin,” said Hatch.
St. John bowed slightly as he followed Hatch back into Wopner’s stateroom.
“Pull up a seat,
Malin,”
Wopner said. “I’ll explain the real work I’ve been doing, and Chris can tell you about all those dusty tomes he’s been lifting
and dropping in the back room. We work together. Right, old chum?”
St. John compressed his lips. Even out here on the water, Hatch sensed a certain air of dust and cobwebs about the historian.
He belongs in an antiquarian bookshop, not on a treasure hunt
, he thought.
Kicking aside the detritus, Hatch pulled a chair up next to Wopner, who pointed to one of the nearby screens, currently blank.
A few rapidly typed commands, and a digitized picture of Macallan’s treatise and its cryptic marginalia appeared on the screen.
“Herr Neidelman feels that the second half of the journal contains vital information about the treasure,” said Wopner. “So
we’re taking a two-track approach to break the code. I do the computers. Chris here does the history.”
“The Captain mentioned a figure of two billion dollars,” Hatch said. “How did he arrive at that?”
“Well now,” said St. John, clearing his throat as if preparing for a lecture. “Like most pirates, Ockham’s fleet was a ragtag
collection of various ships he’d captured: a couple of galleons, a few brigantines, a fast sloop, and, I believe, a large
East Indiaman. Nine ships in all. We know they were so heavily laden they were dangerously unmaneuverable. You simply add
up their cargo capacities, and combine that with the manifests of ships Ockham looted. We know, for example, that Ockham took
fourteen tons of gold from the Spanish Plate Fleet alone, and ten times that in silver. From other ships he looted cargoes
of lapis, pearls, amber, diamonds, rubies, carnelian, ambergris, jade, ivory, and lignum vitae. Not to mention ecclesiastical
treasures, taken from towns along the Spanish Main.” He unconsciously adjusted his bow tie, face shining with pleasure at
the recital.
“Excuse me, but did you say fourteen
tons
of gold?” Hatch asked, dumfounded.
“Absolutely,” said St. John.
“Fort Knox afloat,” said Wopner, licking his lips.
“And then there’s St. Michael’s Sword,” St. John added. “An artifact of inestimable value by itself. We’re dealing here with
the greatest pirate treasure ever assembled. Ockham was brilliant and gifted, an educated man, which made him all the more
dangerous.” He pulled a thin plastic folder from a shelf and handed it to Hatch. “Here’s a biographical extract one of our
researchers prepared. I think you’ll find that, for once, the legends don’t exaggerate. His reputation was so terrible that
all he had to do was sail his flagship into harbor, hoist the Jolly Roger, and fire a broadside, and everyone from the citizens
to the priest came rushing down with their valuables.”
“And the virgins?” Wopner cried, feigning wide-eyed interest. “What happened to them?”
St. John paused, his eyes half closed. “Kerry, do you mind?”
“No, really,” said Kerry, all impish innocence. “I want to know.”
“You know very well what happened to the virgins,” St. John snapped, and turned back to Hatch. “Ockham had a following of
two thousand men on his nine ships. He needed large crews for boarding and firing the great guns. Those men were usually given
twenty-four hours, er,
leave
, in the unfortunate town. The results were quite hideous.”
“It wasn’t only the ships that had twelve-inchers, if you know what I mean,” Wopner leered.
“You see what I have to endure,” murmured St. John to Hatch.
“Terribly,
terribly
sorry about that, old chap,” Wopner replied in a travesty of an English accent. “Some people have no sense of humor,” he
told Hatch.
“Ockham’s success,” St. John continued briskly, “became a liability. He didn’t know
how
to bury such a large treasure. This wasn’t a few hundredweight in gold coin that could be slipped quietly under a rock. That’s
where Macallan came in. And, indirectly, that’s where
we
come in. Because Macallan kept his secret diary in code.”
He patted the books under his arm. “These are texts on cryptology,” he said. “This one is
Polygraphiae
, by Johannes Trithemius, published in the late fifteen hundreds. It was the Western world’s first treatise on codebreaking.
And this one is Porta’s
De Furtivus Literarum Notis
, a text all Elizabethan spies knew practically by heart. I’ve got half a dozen others, covering the state of the cryptographic
art up to Macallan’s time.”
“They sound worse than my second-year med school textbooks.”
“They’re fascinating, actually,” St. John said, a flush of enthusiasm briefly coloring his tone.
“Was code writing common in those days?” Hatch asked curiously.
St. John laughed, a kind of seal bark that gave his ruddy cheeks a brief jiggle. “Common? It was practically universal, one
of the essential arts of diplomacy and war. Both the British and Spanish governments had departments that specialized in making
and breaking ciphers. Even some pirates had crewmen who could crack codes. After all, ships’ papers included all kinds of
interesting coded documents.”
“But coded how?”
“They were usually nomenclators—long lists of word substitutions. For example, in a message, the word ‘eagle’ might be substituted
for ‘King George’ and ‘daffodils’ for ‘doubloons’—that sort of thing. Sometimes they included simple substitution alphabets,
where a letter, number, or symbol replaced a letter of the alphabet, one for one.”
“And Macallan’s code?”
“The first part of the journal was written with a rather clever monophonic substitution code. The second—we’re still working
on that.”
“That’s
my
department,” said Wopner, pride and a trace of jealousy mixing in his voice. “It’s all on the computer.” He struck a key
and a long string of gibberish appeared on the screen:
AB3 RQB7 E50LA W IEW D8P OL QS9MN WX 4JR 2K WN 18N7 WPDO EKS N2T YX ER9 W DF3 DEI FK IE DF9F DFS K DK F6RE DF3 V3E IE4DI 2F
9GE DF W FEIB5 MLER BLK BV6 FI PET BOP IBSDF K2LJ BVF EIO PUOER WB13 OPDJK LBL JKF
“Here’s the ciphertext of the first code,” he said.
“How did you break it?”
“Oh,
please
. The letters of the English alphabet occur in fixed ratios,
E
being the commonest letter,
Q
being the rarest. You create what we call a contact chart of the code symbols and letter pairs. Bang! The computer does the
rest.”
St. John waved his hand dismissively. “Kerry is programming the computer attacks against the code, but I am supplying the
historical data. Without the old cipher tables, the computer is hopeless. It only knows what’s been programmed into it.”
Wopner turned around in his seat and stared at St. John. “Hopeless? Fact is, big mama here would have cracked that code without
your precious cipher tables. It just would have taken a little longer, is all.”
“No longer than twenty monkeys typing at random might take to write
King Lear,”
said St. John, with another brief bark of laughter.
“Haw haw. No longer than one St. John typing with two fingers on that Royal shitwriter back there. Jeez, get a laptop. And
a life.” Wopner turned back to Hatch. “Well, to make a long story short, here’s how it decoded.”
There was a flurry of keystrokes and the screen split, showing the code on one side and the plaintext on the other. Hatch
looked at it eagerly.
The 2nd of June, Anno D. 1696. The pirate Ockham hath taken our fleet, scuttled the ships, and butcherd every soull. Our man-of-war
scandalously struck her colours without a fight and the captain went to his ende blubbering like a babe. I alone was spared,
clapped in chaines and straightaway taken down to Ockham’s cabin, where the blackguard drewe a saber against my person and
said, Lete God build his owen damned church, I have ye a newe commission. And then he placed in front of me the articalls.
Lete this journal bear witnesse before God that I refused to sign…
“Amazing,” breathed Hatch as he came to the end of the screen. “Can I read more?”
“I’ll print out a copy for you,” said Wopner, hitting a key. A printer began humming somewhere in the darkened room.
“Basically,” said St. John, “the decrypted section of the journal covers Macallan’s being taken prisoner, agreeing on pain
of death to design the Water Pit, and finding the right island. Unfortunately, Macallan switches to a new code just when they
began actual construction. We believe the rest of the journal consists of a description of the design and construction of
the Pit itself. And, of course, the secret for getting to the treasure chamber.”
“Neidelman said the journal mentions St. Michael’s Sword.”
“You bet it does,” Wopner interrupted, hitting the keys. More text popped up:
Ockham hath unburthened three of his ships in hopes of taking a prize along the coast. Today a long leaden coffin trimmed
in golde came ashore with a dozen casks of jewells. The corsairs say the coffin holds St. Michael’s Sword, a costly treasure
seized from a Spanish galleon and highly esteemd by the Captain, who swaggerd most shamefully, boasting that it was the greatest
prize of the Indies. The Captain hath forbidden the opening of the casket, and it is guarded by day and night. The men are
suspicious of each other, and constantly make stryfe. Were it not for the cruell discipline of the Captain, I feare every
one would come to a bad end, and shortly
.
“And now here’s what the second code looks like.” Wopner tapped on the keys and the screen filled again:
34834590234582394438923492340923409856902346789023490562349083934290863998123
49012849123400494903412089509868907347605783568496324098735078390457092340458
95390456234826025698345875767087645073405934038909089080564504556034568903
459873468907234589073908759087250872345903569659087302
“The old boy got smart,” Wopner said. “No more spaces, so we can’t go by word shapes. All numbers, too, not a character to
be seen. Just look at that fucker.”
St. John winced. “Kerry,
must
you use such language?”
“Oh, I must, old
thing
, I must.”
St. John looked apologetically at Hatch.
“So far,” Wopner continued, “this puppy’s resisted all of Chris’s pretty little cipher tables. So I took the matter into my
own hands and wrote a brute-force attack. It’s running as we speak.”
“Brute-force attack?” Hatch asked.
“You know. An algorithm that runs through a ciphertext, trying all patterns in the order of likelihood. It’s just a matter
of time.”
“A matter of a waste of time,” St. John said. “I’m working up a new set of cipher tables from a Dutch book on cryptography.
What’s needed here is more historical research, not more CPU time. Macallan was a man of his age. He didn’t invent this code
out of thin air; there must be a historical precedent. We already know it’s not a variant of the Shakespeare cipher, or the
Rosicrucian cipher, but I’m convinced some lesser-known code in these books will give us the key that we need. It should be
obvious to the meanest intelligence—”
“Put a sock in it, willya?” Wopner said. “Face it, Chris old girl, no amount of hitting the history books is gonna break
this
code. This one’s for the computer.” He patted a nearby CPU. “We’re gonna beat this puppy, right, big mama?” He swiveled around
in his chair and opened what Hatch realized was a rack-mounted medical freezer normally used for storing tissue samples. He
pulled out an ice-cream sandwich.
“Anybody want a BigOne?” he asked, waving it around.
“I’d as soon eat takeaway tandoori from a motor stop on the M-1,” St. John replied with a disgusted expression.
“You Brits should talk,” Wopner mumbled through a mouthful of ice cream. “You put meat in your pies, for Chrissake.” He brandished
the sandwich like a weapon. “You’re looking at the perfect food here. Fat, protein, sugar, and carbohydrates. Did I mention
fat? You could live on this stuff forever.”
“And he probably will, too,” St. John said, turning to Hatch. “You should see how many cartons he has stored away in the ship’s
kitchen.”
Wopner frowned. “What, you think I could find enough BigOnes in this jerkwater town to satisfy my habit? Not likely. The skidmarks
in my underwear are longer than the whole main street.”
“Perhaps you should see a proctologist about that,” said Hatch, causing St. John to erupt in a string of grateful barks. The
Englishman seemed glad to find an ally.
“Feel free to take a crack, doc.” Wopner stood up and, twitching his behind invitingly, made a gesture as if to drop his trousers.
“I would, but I’ve got a weak stomach,” said Hatch. “So you don’t care for rural Maine?”
“Kerry won’t even take rooms in town,” St. John said. “He prefers sleeping on board.”
“Believe you me,” Wopner said, finishing the ice-cream sandwich, “I don’t like boats any more than I like the damn hinterland.
But there are things here I need. Electricity, for example. Running water. And AC. As in air-conditioning.” He leaned forward,
the anemic goatee quivering on his chin as if struggling to retain a foothold. “AC.
Gotta have it
.”