5

“Wow!” Nikki said when she and Finney retreated to his chambers. “How’d you figure that out?” She had grabbed the letters from the judge’s bench on her way in and was even now counting the words.

“Elementary, my dear Watson.”

“Huh?”

Finney shook his head. “It’s Cryptology 101. These inmates all think they’re Einsteins, but the code in those letters is as basic as it gets.”

Nikki watched as Finney walked over to his bookshelf and pulled down a small hardback with a brown parchment-like cover and maroon lettering. The cover featured a ghosted picture of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. Finney handed it to Nikki. “Ever see this before?”

The book was titled The Cross Examination of Jesus Christ, written by some guy Nikki had never heard of. She flipped through a few pages. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“Not many people have.” Finney gave her a cockeyed smile, then grabbed his Bible off the corner of his desk. The black leather cover was tattered and well-worn. Nikki had caught him reading it on a few occasions.

As the judge searched for the right page, he started in with one of his coughing fits. He turned his head, covered his mouth, and hacked like he might spit his lungs out at any moment. Eventually he stopped coughing and started turning pages again as if nothing had happened. “Did you know that the Old Testament scribes encrypted a few words in the biblical text using a Hebrew substitution code called the atbash cipher?”

“Uh, no. But I’m not exactly a Bible scholar,” Nikki admitted. “I think I did hear something about Bible codes once, though.”

“I’m not talking about that nonsense,” Finney said. “Here.” He rotated the Bible for Nikki to see. “Jeremiah 25:26. See that word Sheshach?”

Nikki nodded.

“That’s really a Hebrew code word for Babel, or Babylon, produced using the atbash cipher. Someday I’ll show you how it works.”

“Thrilling,” Nikki mumbled.

The judge put the Bible back on his desk and reached for The Cross Examination of Jesus Christ. “I wrote this book,” he said, taking it from Nikki. “I used a pen name because a lot of people might think it inappropriate for a sitting judge to be writing a religious book like this.” He opened the book to the introduction. “It’s tells how Jesus handled the hostile questions of the lawyers, the Pharisees, and ultimately Pontius Pilate. You ought to read it sometime.”

Nikki didn’t know what to say. She knew that her judge was a religious man, but she had been working for him almost a year and never realized he had written a book. “Sounds interesting.”

“Oh, it is.” Finney’s eyes sparkled with mischief, and he became more animated. “Christ’s answers are masterful on so many levels. Every time you think you’ve got Him figured out, there’s another whole layer you’re completely missing. So I decided to add an element to the book to symbolize that.”

“Of course,” Nikki said, trying to remember how they had started talking about this. “Which is?”

“I’ve encrypted hidden messages in the book,” Finney responded. “I figured if the Old Testament scribes could get away with it, so could I. Like this one in the introduction. See these hidden letters?”

Nikki looked at where the judge was pointing. She probably wouldn’t have noticed the small letters on her own. But even now, as Finney pointed out the faded images that seemed like part of the page design, it looked like a haphazard jumble of meaningless letters, like trying to figure out who was sitting where on the bus all over again. “I don’t get it,” she said after enough time had passed so the judge would think she had tried.

Unfortunately, he picked that moment for another coughing spasm. When he finished, his eyes watering, he handed the book back to her. “Figure it out and I’ll buy you lunch,” he announced.

Don’t hold your breath, Nikki thought, though you couldn’t really speak that way to a judge. “You’re not going to tell me?”

“Nope. I don’t give away my secrets. I just wanted you to see this so you’d know why Stokes’s method was mere child’s play.”

Now Nikki was curious. And she had zero chance of figuring it out on her own. “Why would you go to all the trouble to hide these messages in your book and not tell anybody what they mean? What if nobody figures them out?”

“Somebody will.” Finney plopped down in his desk chair, looking tired from his coughing fits. He placed his cigar in the ashtray. “John Wesley once said that there are things hidden so deeply in Scripture that future generations will always be drawing out new truths. In some small way, I wanted this book to symbolize that—hidden truths yet to be discovered by future generations.”

Nikki paused to think about that, struck by the effort the judge had put into these codes. In some ways the codes were like the judge himself. A family man who never reconciled with his son. An outspoken Christian who wouldn’t stop smoking. A puzzle. A walking contradiction. “Really, Judge? That’s why you did this?”

“Nah,” Finney said. “Actually, I just like puzzles.”