Avery took a few minutes to explore the forum further before turning the computer around to show what she had discovered.
“This is a discussion forum devoted to something called ‘the Immortal Mysteries.’ The Immortal, in this case, is an Internet user who periodically releases strange messages on Reddit and other places, including this forum.”
“Strange, how?” Tam prompted.
“Well, at a glance they look like gibberish. Automatically generated text, like Lorem Ipsum.”
“Lorem...?”
“It’s the gobbledygook graphic designers use as a placeholder for text in advertisements. It looks like Latin, but it’s actually nonsense. I used to see it a lot in spam emails. This is in English, but the same principle.”
Tam nodded. “You said at a glance?”
“Right. The users on the forum are convinced that the messages from The Immortal are actually a code. They’re crowdsourcing the effort to crack it.”
Stone now seemed to take an interest. “A code?” He reached out a hand for the computer. “May I?”
Avery pushed it toward him, feeling just a smidgen of satisfaction. “It probably is a code, but whether it’s important or not is anyone’s guess. There are a lot of theories. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Some of the forum users think it’s a stunt. An ARG—alternate reality game.”
Tam shook her head. “Honey, I recognize the words you’re saying, but I have no earthly idea what they mean.”
“An ARG is a sort of real-world puzzle game or scavenger hunt. They’re sometimes used to promote upcoming movies and video games. It’s been suggested that the NSA might use them as recruiting tools, but most are just users trying to prove how clever they all. Challenging the Internet to break their code.”
“Okay. What are the other theories?”
“There’s a fairly large contingent that thinks the messages might be coded communications from a foreign government to their agents abroad. Sort of like the old number stations.”
Avery knew Tam would get that reference. Numbers stations were short-wave radio frequencies that broadcast only long chains of numbers. It was assumed that the transmissions had been coded messages to spies in the pre-digital era, but that had not been definitively proven in all instances.
“A lot of users have pointed to that. There are also strong similarities to the Markovian Parallax Denigrate mystery from the old Usenet days.”
Tam shook her head. “Is this going to be on the test?”
“The Markovian Parallax Denigrate is the oldest mystery on the Internet,” Stone interjected. “In 1996, strange messages began appearing on Usenet groups. Long chains of seemingly random words, like ‘jitterbugging McKinley Abe break Newtonian inferring caw update.’ Every one of the messages contained the words ‘Markovian Parallax Denigrate’ somewhere in the body of the text. It’s generally believed that the format was being used for espionage, just like the numbers stations you mentioned, but a lot more sophisticated. Some of the messages appeared to have originated from a Susan Lindauer at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.”
“Lindauer,” Tam repeated. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“Susan Lindauer is the name of a conspiracy journalist who was accused of spying for Saddam Hussein’s government. But she might not be the same Susan Lindauer associated with the MPD messages. There was another woman with that name at UWSP, but she graduated in 1994 and has always denied any involvement. Somebody probably hacked her account to send those messages.”
Avery gaped at him. “You know all that, but you don’t know whether Commander Sisko is from Star Wars or Star Trek?”
Despite his genius level intellect, Stone was surprisingly obtuse about most general knowledge subjects, and particularly pop culture. Playing Trivial Pursuit with him was almost painful.
“The MPD is a puzzle,” Stone replied, as if it was obvious. “An unsolved one at that. I’ve been trying to figure it out for years. Unfortunately, most of the messages have been lost over the years, so trying to see the pattern is almost impossible.”
“If there is a pattern,” Avery said.
“There is. And it’s the same pattern as these messages from the so-called Immortal. I’m certain of it.” He looked back down at the computer, and Avery saw his eyes going back and forth as he read the strange messages.
“Well,” she continued. “He’s right about the similarities. But the prevailing theory about both the Markovian Parallax Denigrate messages and what the Immortal is posting is that they were generated with a Markov chain process. And before you ask, don’t. Even I didn’t understand that one.”
Stone shook his head. “It isn’t. Markov chains would produce more coherent output. This is a code, and I’m going to...”
He paused abruptly, his forehead creased in concentration.
“Stone?” Tam asked.
“A new message from the Immortal just posted.” He turned the computer around to show them the message.
ZEPHYR ORBITAL COW EVERYTHING INDEX REPLAY DOMINION VIEW HOSING UNIVERSE HINCKY EMACS TREASURE NEO ONE MESSAGE ECHO BLUE AMOUNT DEATH MEANING NOT LEVEL OF EYES GUILD SUPERIOR EVOLUTION XMODMAP WE DOMINION MAGNUS ELDHUSET ONLY REGULATIONS BLACK ROME RADIOHEAD’S PATSY APPROXIMATE INDEPENDENCE CHARTRES FIND OSWALD NEVERLAND ORIGINAL REPLACE FORTY-TWO LIFE USING FIX MYSTIC GNOME TEMPLAR ESSENTIAL HILLBILLIES
“It posted exactly at midnight,” Stone said.
“Is that important?”
“It suggests that the post was scheduled in advance.” He looked up at them. “As much as it wounds my ego to admit it, I think Avery is right. This is from our Immortal. He...or she...is using these posts to send messages to operatives.”
“The guy who tried to run me off the road,” Martiel said. “He must know how to crack the code. You should have arrested him.”
Stone stared at Martiel for several seconds, then shook his head. “I doubt he would have been much help. A code like this will have a single-use key, sent to operatives independently of the message. The man you met tonight probably won’t get the key to this one since he’s been compromised. No, we’ll have to crack this the old-fashioned way.”
“Some of the terms here,” Avery said. “‘Eyes only.’ That can’t be a coincidence.”
“The only word I care about,” Tam said, “is ‘Dominion.’”
“That’s what I mean,” Avery pressed. “This is clearly some kind of scrambled code. We just need to rearrange the words, and it will make sense.” She pointed to the screen. “We’ve got Templar, treasure, and Chartres. There’s black, death, guild.” She snapped her fingers. “Council of Rome. There’s a whole thread devoted to it.”
“The think tank?” Martiel asked.
Avery nodded. She wasn’t surprised that Martiel, a banker, knew about the Council of Rome, an influential group of industrialists, scientists, economists, and the like, who had formed in the early 1970s to address the global consequences of unfettered economic and population growth. Their pro-environmental stance and repeated warnings of Malthusian doomsday scenarios had earned them the nickname “the Cassandra Club,” though many conspiracy theorists saw a darker motive behind their dire warnings, accusing them of being anti-Capitalist, and even going so far as to associate the group with the nefarious Illuminati. Many believed they were the intellectual arm—or rather the brains—of the New World Order, a globalist plot to rule the world under a single, secular government controlled by the uber-wealthy.
“The Dominion probably sees the Council as an enemy, the architect of the world financial system. Which might be why they’re targeting bankers.”
Stone shook his head. “That’s all just camouflage. A distraction. The words were probably taken from familiar phrases. Sort of like when kidnappers cut words from a magazine article to write a ransom note. Sometimes they take words from the same page, so it looks like there’s a connection, but there really isn’t.”
“Nobody actually does that anymore, Stone,” Tam countered.
“No, they do this,” Stone said, tapping the screen.
Tam looked at the message again, then sighed. “Stone may be right. Look at some of the other groups. ‘Oswald’ and ‘patsy’? Lee Harvey Oswald claimed he was a patsy.”
“The JFK assassination is a major component of most conspiracy theories,” Avery pointed out.
“Right, but what about ‘meaning life universe everything forty-two.’”
“‘Cow level.’” Martiel said, smirking. “That’s a computer game reference.” He dropped his eyes. “Sorry, I’ll just be quiet.”
“There are fifty-six individual words here,” Stone said. He spoke in a low voice, as if thinking aloud rather than trying to communicate. “Same as the only surviving Markovian Parallax Denigrate message. Fifty-six is eight time seven.”
“Is that important?” Avery asked.
“The word ‘Dominion’ is the only repeat. In the MPD message, there was just one repeat: ‘McKinley.’”
“The president or the mountain?” Avery wondered.
Stone looked at her and blinked as if he didn’t understand the question. “If we strike the repeated word, we’re left with fifty-four unique terms.”
“Why would you take out the repeated word?”
“Because it’s repeated. That’s significant. I think you’re right about the message being scrambled. In its original configuration, the message probably begins and ends with that word—‘Dominion’ in this case. Like brackets in a string of computer code. It might also indicate the specific code key to solve the message. The actual message is in the fifty-four remaining terms.”
“There are fifty-four playing cards in a deck, if you include the jokers,” Avery suggested.
“Fifty-four is six times nine.” Stone’s eyes dropped to the Sudoku puzzle book. “There are just nine single digit natural numbers.”
“You think Sudoku is the key to the code?”
“No. The Sudoku grid is nine-by-nine. Eighty-one. But a cube has six sides. Six sides, divided into nine segments on each side.”
“Like a Rubik’s Cube?”
Stone nodded, a look almost like pride shining in his eyes. “Very good. You’re getting it. When I was a kid, I had the crazy idea of using a Rubik’s Cube as a simple encryption tool. Write a message of fifty-four characters or less on the cube, then scramble it. The only way to read the message is to solve the cube.”
“You think that’s what the Immortal did? Only with words instead of letters.”
“It’s possible, but the method wasn’t practical, and not nearly as sophisticated as I thought it would be. With modern computers, a simple brute force attack can run all 43 quintillion possibilities in a matter of minutes.”
Tam blinked at him. “So? Try it.”
Stone shrugged, then turned the computer around and began typing. “Rather than limit ourselves to possible Rubik’s Cube outputs, I’m going to simply run all possible combinations of these terms. That’s actually a much bigger number—like 200 duovigintillion—”
“You just make that number up?” Tam asked. “Like bazillions?”
“No.” Stone didn’t look away from what he was doing. “I’ll put them through a Markov chain filter to look for combinations that make grammatical sense.”
After a few seconds, he shook his head. “It’s still word salad, I’m afraid.”
He turned the screen to show the results. Variations of the message were listed in blocks, beginning with what Stone’s decoder had judged to be the most likely combination of words.
DOMINION VIEW TEMPLAR TREASURE CHARTRES FIND APPROXIMATE AMOUNT ORIGINAL INDEX MEANING OF LIFE UNIVERSE EVERYTHING FORTY-TWO BLACK DEATH GUILD MAGNUS ROME SUPERIOR REGULATIONS NEO NOT ONE WE REPLAY COW LEVEL USING MYSTIC XMODMAP EMACS RADIOHEAD’S EYES ONLY ESSENTIAL MESSAGE ECHO BLUE ZEPHYR ELDHUSET HILLBILLIES HOSING INDEPENDENCE REPLACE HINCKY GNOME OSWALD PATSY FIX ORBITAL EVOLUTION NEVERLAND DOMINION
Below it were several more variations that reordered the apparent words strings, but none were any more comprehensible.
“Maybe the message is just one of those,” Avery suggested, “and the rest is camouflage, like Stone says.”
“If there is a coded message here, it won’t be in the literal text.”
“What if we took the first letter of every sentence?” Tam suggested.
“An acrostic?” Stone frowned again. “I tried that with the MPD messages. It didn’t work. Ordinarily, I’d say that’s a little too simplistic, but I guess we should try, if only to eliminate it.”
He resumed typing.
Z-O-C-E-I-R-D-V-H-U-H-E-T-N-O-M-E-B-A-D-M-N-L-O-E-G-S-E-X-W-D-M-E-O-R-B-R-R-P-A-I-C-F-O-N-O-R-F-L-U-F-M-G-T-E-H
“Okay, from the first letters of the Immortal’s fifty-six letter message as originally posted, we can create 85,000 different words, from ‘A’ to ‘zoogeographical.’” Stone tapped his fingers on the table top. “If we strike those two Ds, the number goes down to 56,000. I wonder...”
He grabbed his Sudoku book again, flipped it to a mostly blank page, and then drew a large cross-shaped box, which he began dividing into individual grids of nine squares. He then filled in the box at the center of each with a letter. “If this was coded using a Rubik’s Cube, there will be fixed values. For example, the squares in the center never change.”
“Unless you peel the stickers off,” Tam said. “Just sayin’.”
“We’ll assume that didn’t happen. The fifth word is ‘index.’” He wrote the letter I in one of the squares. “The next fixed value, not counting ‘Dominion, is the fourteenth word. ‘One.” He wrote the letter O in another center square. M, O, O, and M soon followed.
“So it’s more like a crossword,” Avery said.
“I was thinking hangman,” Tam put in.
“A little of both. There are some other rules that apply. On a Rubik’s Cube, the corner pieces have three colors, and there are no duplicates.”
Tam held up her hands. “Just skip to the part where you solve it.”
“I thought you liked watching me work,” Stone said with a grin, not looking up. He continued alternately scribbling on the paper and checking the computer.
Tam turned to Martiel. “You should probably get some sleep. You can take your pick of the bedrooms. No telling how long you’ll be here.”
The banker’s eyes went wide in alarm. “What do you mean you don’t know how long?”
“Until we know the nature of this threat, your life is in danger. It could be days. Weeks, even.”
“You can’t just keep me here like a prisoner. I have a life.”
“You call what you have a life?” Stone said, not looking up. “For what it’s worth, Tam, getting him back to his so-called life may be the only way to flush this Immortal out into the open again.”
“You mean use me as bait?”
Tam cleared her throat. “Stone, that’s not your call. Mr. Martiel, we’re going to keep you safe. That’s a promise.”
Martiel did not seem at all relieved by the assurance. “I... This is just...”
Stone made a humming sound. “I thought so.”
Avery looked over. “You solved it?”
“Well, yes, but it’s meaningless. A red herring, like I said.”
He spun the computer around again.
DOMINION RADIOHEAD'S ESSENTIAL TREASURE REGULATIONS INDEX EVERYTHING VIEW EYES TEMPLAR HINCKY ELDHUSET BLACK ROME ONLY NEO ZEPHYR EMACS HILLBILLIES EVOLUTION APPROXIMATE DEATH OSWALD FIND MEANING AMOUNT GNOME NOT UNIVERSE SUPERIOR FORTY-TWO REPLAY ONE MESSAGE COW ORBITAL USING NEVERLAND CHARTRES INDEPENDENCE LEVEL OF FIX REPLACE ORIGINAL MAGNUS ECHO LIFE PATSY WE MYSTIC HOSING XMODMAP BLUE GUILD DOMINION
“It is an acrostic,” he added, scrolling down to show the first letter of each word. “But it’s a joke.”
––––––––
D-R-E-T-R-I-E-V-E-T-H-E-B-R-O-N-Z-E-H-E-A-D-O-F-M-A-G-N-U-S-F-R-O-M-C-O-U-N-C-I-L-O-F-R-O-M-E-L-P-W-M-H-X-B-G-D
Avery scanned the message. Three words immediately jumped out at her. “‘Council of Rome’ again.”
“See what I mean?” Stone said. “It’s like nesting dolls. A puzzle within a puzzle. That’s how you can tell it’s not serious.”
“What about the rest of it?” Tam asked. “Does that make any sense? ‘Retrieve the bronze head of magnus.’ Avery, does that mean anything to you?”
“As a matter of fact it does,” Avery said quickly. “‘Magnus’ almost certainly refers to Saint Albert Magnus—Albert the Great—a 13th Century Dominican Friar from Cologne, Germany. He was a polymath. A scholar of philosophy and natural science. His writings paved the way for the Renaissance.”
“And the bronze head? Is that a statue or something?”
“Sort of, but not the way you think. There’s a story that Albert constructed a head made of brass—an automaton—that could breathe and speak. If you asked it questions, it would answer. It could even tell the future.”
“Sounds like a computer?”
“It’s not impossible that Albert might have created some kind of primitive difference engine,” Avery said. “Something along the lines of the Antikythera device.”
The so-called Antikythera device, discovered in a two thousand-year-old Greek shipwreck, was generally accepted as the earliest example of a mechanical analog computer. If the Greeks could create something like that, there was no reason to think that someone of Albert Magnus’ intelligence could not create something similar a thousand years later.
“And the Council of Rome has this brass head?”
“Well, that’s where it gets a little sticky. According to the story, Albert’s Brazen Head wouldn’t stop talking, so his student, Thomas Aquinas, smashed it to shut it up. That’s the story anyway. None of it can actually be verified.”
“So why would the Immortal think the Council of Rome has it?”
Before Avery could answer Tam’s question, Martiel interrupted. “Are you people for real? Talking statues and ancient computers? I thought you were trying to figure out who’s trying to kill me.”
Stone, who had been watching the banker the whole time, nodded slowly. “He’s right. This is a distraction. The Immortal is trolling us. He wanted us to solve this code, send us off on a wild goose chase. That’s why the code was so easy to crack.”
“You call that easy?” Martiel said, wagging his head.
Tam raised a hand. “One at a time. Avery, go on.”
“Well, I don’t really know much more than that, but I can look into it.”
She took her computer back from Stone, opened another browser window, and typed in “bronze head magnus council of rome.” Not surprisingly, the Immortal Mysteries Forum was one of the top results. The link took her to a thread in the Council of Rome topic, the gist of which seemed to be that the group was getting its marching orders from a demon-possessed statue recently acquired by Maxim Loew, the current secretary general of the organization. Avery noted that Loew’s name was bracketed in triple parentheses—a dog-whistle practice commonly used by white supremacists to identify persons of Jewish heritage in social media posts.
Avery ran several search variations using the secretary general’s name. Hidden in the haystack of dry papers on economic theory penned by Loew, and mentions on various conspiracy and openly neo-Nazi discussion forums, was a single needle—a news item about an auction at Southwick’s of London, which featured several items from the estate of noted author and collector Gerald Roche. One of the items, described as a “13th Century brazen head automaton” had been purchased by the secretary general of the Council of Rome.
“This has to be it,” she announced. “The Immortal clearly thinks Loew has the bronze head built by Albert Magnus, and he’s sending his followers to get it.”
“Why?” Tam asked.
Avery could tell the question was sincere, but the skepticism in Tam’s tone was unmistakable. “Gerald Roche, the former owner of the Brazen Head, wrote about the so-called Changeling conspiracy. And now he’s dead. I think it’s obvious that a lot of people think that particular artifact has special occult significance. Whether or not it really does, it’s a symbolic target. You know how important symbols are to these people. That message from the Immortal is proof that it’s somehow connected to what’s been going on here.”
Tam continued to stare back at her. “What course of action would you suggest?” she said, speaking slowly, measuring her words.
“We have to assume that the Immortal’s agents have already decoded the message. We’ve got to stop them from getting the Brazen Head. The Council of Rome headquarters is in Zurich. We need to get there, ASAP.”
Tam nodded, but Avery didn’t think it was an indication of agreement. “Okay. Stone, what’s your take?”
“This is a distraction. Scribbles in the margin. Maybe this Immortal really does want this bronze head for some reason, but it’s tangential to the pattern. We have to stay focused on what’s happening right here.”
Tam looked at each of them as she considered her choices, then seemed to reach a decision. “The only thing we know for certain is that someone is targeting bankers. We can’t divert all our resources away from this investigation to follow this tangent. But without this Immortal stuff, we’re back to square one, so I’m not inclined to dismiss it, either.”
She focused her gaze on Stone. “Is Bob Nichols still in danger?”
“Doubtful,” Stone said. “Mr. Martiel here was the preferred target, as what happened tonight clearly demonstrates.”
“But we’re okay to pull Greg and Kasey off protection duty?”
Stone gave Martiel another sidelong glance. “The short answer is, yes. Nichols is safe. Mr. Martiel here seems to have been the actual target. If he goes back to work, they’ll probably make another attempt. If he doesn’t, it will have the same effect. The risk factor arises from the niche he occupies. He doesn’t need to actually be dead. If his job becomes vacant, the net effect is the same to the pattern.”
“So the person who takes his place might be part of the conspiracy.”
“Not necessarily. It could be someone further down the chain. Or up, for that matter. A butterfly effect, if you will.”
“Hmm.” She turned to the banker. “I can’t compel you to stay, Mr. Martiel. If you decide to go back to work tomorrow, we will do our best to keep you safe, but there are no guarantees.”
“What are my other options?”
“Run away. Start a new life somewhere else. Or help us. Help Stone figure out the pattern.”
Martiel gave a resigned nod. “I guess that’s my best shot at getting my life back, isn’t it?”
“All right, here’s what we’re going to do. Stone, keep working on your pattern. Figure out what’s going to happen next, who the next target will be. Billy and I will stay here to back you up. Avery, you’re going to Zurich. Greg and Kasey will go with you. Pull on the thread and see what unravels.”