Laurent turned to him. “Because of your work, Mr. Maxwell.”
34
11:52 a.m.
Duncan stumbled away. “My work?”
Laurent nodded. “Your graduate thesis at Oxford. After learningwhohad taken possession of the book, I prepared dossiers on all of you. In doing so, I read your research paper. I might have ignored it, but your work built upon methods devised by your grandmother and others at Bletchley Park. All of which was critical in helping Turing build his Bombe machine, an early computer that broke the Nazi communication codes.”
“You said those same methods helped you solve the First Adage,” Duncan noted.
“They did.”
Duncan swallowed down his shock. He had chosen this angle for his research to honor his grandmother’s efforts during the war, to demonstrate how one can build on the past, to use its foundation for greater achievements.
“Your paper proposed a unique method of advancing the abilities of Turing’s Bombe machine. To use AI machine learning to boost its functioning, to make it a millionfold more powerful. You even referenced how AI methodologies had been used to decipher the Voynich Manuscript.”
Tag frowned at Duncan. “What is that?”
“A fifteenth-century text. Crammed with strange drawings and written in an unknown language. Some believe it to be an encoded treatise that holds the secrets to lost knowledge.”
Naomi scowled at Saint-Germain’s book. “Sounds familiar.”
“Or it could’ve been a total fraud,” Duncan admitted. “But that didn’t stop cryptologists from using AI to try to decipher it. Applying machine learning to enhance Word Recurrence Intervals, N-Gram relationships, enhanced image processing. Plus, a slew of other methods that I’ll skip over.”
“Thank god,” Archie mumbled.
“And that worked?” Tag asked.
“No, it failed. Like I said, the whole thing might’ve been a hoax, but the manuscript proved to be a great sounding board to test new AI decryption methods. Several of the most promising I outlined in my thesis.”
Sharyn turned to Laurent. “And you think one of these might solve the Second Adage.”
“It’s worth attempting. I find it perhaps providential that this technique builds upon the methods from Bletchley that solved the First Adage.”
“But my paper was mostly theoretical,” Duncan warned.
“Still, you offered methods we had not considered. TheGardienshad already been working with AI. It’s why we have made progress of late. But your techniques offered a unique tweak to it all. I reached out to a cryptologist in our group and had him adjust our methodology, recoding it accordingly. While waiting for your boat to arrive at Le Havre, I received word that he had revised our module and left it buried on our mainframe, accessible only to him and myself.”
“You’re saying you turned my theory into a practical reality?”
“Hopefully well enough.” Laurent drew Duncan toward the computer case, while glancing toward the library door. “With the dogs on our heels, we only have a narrow window to test it. But I’ll need your expertise to truly judge if this will work.”
Duncan found his heart thumping harder. “Show me.”
Laurent nodded, powered up the portable device, and set about connecting to the estate’s encrypted VPN network
Sharyn raised a concern. “Will reaching the mainframe expose us?”
“Non.Anyone monitoring the headquarters’ array will know someone has accessed it with the proper key, but they will not know who or where we are. In fact”—Laurent shifted and removed a pair of small iPads from a pouch in his case and slid them across the table—“you can follow our work on these, or even safely get on the internet.”
Naomi grabbed one, which she shared with Archie. Tag took the other, but Sharyn remained focused on the book.
Laurent instructed them on how to link to the estate’s network. “With the encrypted VPNs, you’ll be insulated from anyone following your digital trail. Still, I suggest you avoid checking email or anything that requires personal passwords.”
Duncan ignored most of this, concentrating on the computer. Laurent set about creating a handshake between his device and theGardiens’mainframe.
Finally, after they passed through several layers of firewalls, an eerie phantom of Saint-Germain’s diary glowed on the screen, rendered in 3D. Laurent typed a number into a blinking box, and the book opened on its own, cascading through pages to land on the title page to the Second Adage.
