The Sacred Cipher (4 page)

“Louis, what is this?” she whispered. “Your desk.” She waved a hand at the mangled
papers and broken bindings pulled from overflowing bookshelves. She turned to glance
at the broken door to the closet. “Your books. Why should someone do this?”

“Bandits . . . robbers, I suppose. Perhaps they were searching for money.”

Klopsch walked over to the closet door. The wood was shattered, the broken lock lying
on the floor. He picked up one of the old, leather books from where it had been thrown
into the hallway.

“They were searching, yes . . . but not money,” said Gerta. “Perhaps those men from
today come back.”

It was an old book. Written in Latin. He stroked the leather binding, straightened
the gilded edges where they were gouged. “Why would anyone want to steal these books?”

Klopsch picked the books up from the floor and, one by one, returned them to the shelves
in the closet. He was no fool. Neither was Gerta. Danger lived here.

“Perhaps in your new office, you should a safe put.” Gerta’s brow furrowed at the
closet with the shattered door, the one that held so many of Spurgeon’s treasures.
“A big safe.”

Tom Bohannon looked at the gap between the ladder and the scaffold. It wasn’t that
far. Tim Maybry, the construction manager, had just done it, stepped off the ladder
with a spring, landing on the wooden plank while grabbing the metal scaffold frame
with both hands. It wasn’t that far. But once he stepped off the ladder, there was
no going back. It was either land on the wooden plank or land on the hard, ceramic
tile floor thirty feet below.

Bohannon, slightly overweight, but still fit in his late fifties, stood on the ladder
and knew two things. He wasn’t going to get on the scaffold without getting off the
ladder. And if he wanted to see what was on the other side, what had so excited his
construction manager, he needed to get on the scaffold. Eyes fixed on the wooden plank,
he stepped into space. A flashing moment of panic, and he was there, grabbing the
metal scaffold, pulling in a deep breath. Looking to the left, he saw Tim waiting,
smiling. “Okay,” Bohannon said with a shrug. “Okay, I’ll be right there.”

Keeping his eyes straight ahead, Bohannon inched his way along the plank on the scaffolding
and ducked into a very snug space behind the organ pipes. Maybry was in front of him,
leading the way through the tight, dark crawl space between the pipes and the wall.
Maybry disappeared to the right. Reaching the same spot, Bohannon peeked into a short,
narrow crevice. He followed Maybry, shimmying through a hole that had been punched
in the wall.

Bohannon hit the floor with a thud. He didn’t care. His eyes had already been scanning
the room, flashing back and forth, astounded at what he was seeing, a secret room
hidden behind the organ pipes in the chapel of the Bowery Mission.

The room was tucked in behind the organ pipes, hard against the connecting wall of
what had been a casket maker’s factory a hundred years ago, suspended, high up in
the vaulted ceiling, at the very rear of the Bowery Mission’s chapel. Coated with
decades of dust, Tom Bohannon, executive director of the mission, saw that the room
was furnished in antiques: a large, oak desk against the wall facing the organ pipes,
with a matching chair; on the side, a row of six, four-drawer oak filing cabinets;
and against the far wall, a large, antique safe that occupied the entire wall. The
room was small, the ceiling less than six feet off the floor. Bohannon had to stoop
to maneuver his way around the small space. Within moments, he and Maybry were covered
in soot and dust.

“We found it by accident, this morning,” Maybry said as Bohannon crossed to the rank
of filing cabinets and began opening the drawers. “One of the workers dropped his
hammer, and it must have fallen through a crack and into the room. When he went behind
the organ pipes and couldn’t find it, he realized there must be something behind this
wall. You know these guys. You’ve got to watch them all the time.”

“Is Henry Chang running this job?” Bohannon asked as he rifled through the file folders
in another drawer.

“Not on this job,” Maybry said, wiping his hand through the dust on the desk. “I’ve
got a crew of guys from the Middle East—Lebanese they said, but hey, who knows these
days. They must need the work because their bid came in under the Chinese. Anyway,
my foreman came up as the guy was digging a hole in the wall, and here we are.”

Bohannon started working on the second cabinet, flipping through the files, his back
to Maybry. “How could anybody ever get in here?” Bohannon asked as he opened another
drawer.

“This room is part of the original building, before they purchased the casket maker’s
building behind,” said Maybry. “Before the organ bellows was removed, there must have
been a way to get up here to clean the bellows. It looks like the door was over here
in the corner. For some reason, it was covered over, and the room was forgotten. Hard
to believe, with all this nice furniture.”

“Hard to believe; that’s an understatement,” said Bohannon as he began rifling through
the files faster and faster. Behind him, he heard Maybry move toward him.

“Do you know what this place is?” asked Bohannon, turning to face Maybry with a pack
of file folders in his hand. “It’s the office of Dr. Louis Klopsch, the first president
of the Bowery Mission. These files, these cabinets, appear to be filled with Klopsch’s
records, the ledgers of the mission, and copies of all his correspondence.”

Maybry, a trusted compatriot who had worked with Bohannon and the mission on several
other projects, walked over to one of the cabinets and began searching through the
drawers himself. “You mean this stuff has been hidden up here all these years?”

“It could get even more interesting, now,” Bohannon said, pulling a file folder out
of one of the drawers. “I think this is the combination for the safe.”

Both men turned to face the other side of the room, where the immense, antique steel
safe dominated. The decorative touches at the corners had muted over time. The safe
had to be more than eight feet wide and five feet high, barely under the low ceiling,
and a good three feet deep. It had double doors on the front that, when opened, would
give access to the entire safe. In the center of each door was a raised, decorative
design, blooming, steel geraniums, red paint still dully visible in the crevices of
the flower’s petals.

“If he kept his ledgers and records in these file cabinets,” said Maybry, turning
to look at the oak cabinets, “I wonder what he could have kept in a safe that large.”

Bohannon drew a sheet of paper out of the file folder and stepped up to the steel
door, his uncertainty and anticipation growing. It took a moment, but he realized
that the dial for the combination lock had to be sitting under the large, floral-design
ornament on the front of the door. Pressing here, pushing there, Bohannon finally
located the spring switch, and the floral design swung away. He spun in the combination,
heard the bolt drop, and pulled hard on the twin doors.

Bohannon moved more than the doors did. “Here, grab one side.”

With Maybry tugging on one side and Bohannon on the other, the doors creaked, squeaked,
and barely moved. Then, like opening a vacuum-sealed can, they swung apart with a
whoosh
.

Bohannon stepped from behind the door and stood in front of the safe. His mouth dropped,
his eyes popped, and his breath stopped—and not from the accumulated dust.

The safe was filled, packed to the edges, with what looked to be dozens of museum-quality
books, scrolls, manuscripts, and pamphlets. There was more gold gilt in that safe
than one would find at a convention of military despots.
Without question
, thought Bohannon,
whatever the specifics of the contents, this collection could prove to be priceless
.

“What are you going to do now?” Maybry asked. There was no answer from Bohannon.

Nondescript shadows in the night, the four men descended the gangplank. Few lights
shone at this end of the vast dock on Staten Island. And at 3:30 in the morning, few
people were moving in any part of the facility.

With the silent sweep of a serpent, the four men melted into the darkness separating
staggering stacks of cargo containers. They paused at an unobserved junction.

“You know your targets. You have your directions.” Sayeed Farouk once again inspected
the three men before him. He could find no detail that would raise an alarm. All of
them were dressed in the colorless work clothes of veteran seamen. Though all of them
were hardened in body and devoted in ideology, none of them projected the frenzy of
a zealot. They looked foreign, but not frightening.

“Remember why we are here.” Farouk looked each of his brethren in the eyes. “We are
here to restore the honor of the Prophet’s Guard. Now that the mullah has discovered
this connection between the infidel Spurgeon and this mission, we have been offered
this great opportunity to serve—perhaps to serve unto death and become a revered martyr.”

Farouk reached under his shirt at the neck and withdrew an amulet, a Coptic cross
with a lightning bolt slashing through on the diagonal, and watched as the other three
echoed his movement. Each man held his amulet firmly, next to his heart. “May Allah
be praised!”

Slipping the amulets back under their shirts, the four men exchanged glances, then
peeled away in four separate directions.

Thirty minutes later, stepping off the Staten Island Ferry at the awe-inspiring tip
of Manhattan Island, Farouk casually wandered into Battery Park. He found an unoccupied
park bench, well into the shadows, stretched out his body on the bench, rested his
head on his seabag, and went to sleep. It was still dark when the policeman lightly
struck the sole of his shoe with a nightstick.

“Come on, you can’t sleep here. You’ve got to move along.”

Wearily, Sayeed rose to a sitting position. “Officer, then, could you tell me how
to get to the Bowery Mission?”

Joe Rodriguez was a down-to-earth guy. Lean, strapping, muscular, his 6-4 frame and
intense brown eyes combined with a relentless stride and boundless energy. Raised
in the South Bronx, the son of Puerto Rican natives, his “New York attitude” sometimes
added an alarming edge to his already imposing figure.

Stepping across the void and onto the scaffolding at the rear of the Bowery Mission’s
chapel, Rodriguez brought something much more important to his friend and fellow Yankees
fan than his size, his attitude, or that he was Tom’s brother-in-law. Joe Rodriguez
was also curator of the periodicals room in the massive, main research facility of
New York’s public library system—the Humanities and Social Sciences Library—a historic,
Beaux-Arts landmark building on Fifth Avenue that was often incorrectly referred to
as the “main branch.” Rodriguez was both a computer wizard and one of the most highly
respected apologists of library science in the country. He had worked his entire career
for the New York Public Library System, the last fifteen years in the historic marble
halls of the research mecca on beautiful Bryant Park, and had authored two acclaimed
books explaining how to unlock the astounding research and information resources of
the world’s libraries.