The Dying Day by Vaseem Khan

Author:Vaseem Khan [Khan, Vaseem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529341072
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2021-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

The guard watched her, smoking a roll-up, as she crossed the street and entered John Healy’s home for the third time. He looked like the same man she’d seen on her first visit; she wondered if curiosity would compel him to ask after the missing Englishman.

Inside, she wasted no time, heading straight for the bookcase in the living room.

She took out the six volumes there and set them down on the coffee table. Next to them she set down her notebook and two more volumes, books on codes and ciphers, sent over by her father.

She checked her watch. It was already two and she had a four o’clock appointment at the Margaret Cousins College.

Quickly, she skimmed through her father’s books until she found the relevant sections on book ciphers. To her irritation, it appeared that, though relatively well known, book ciphers could be applied with numerous variations. These variations were usually agreed between the correspondents in advance. However, what was common to all book ciphers was the use of a single text as a key. Once you knew the codebook or codetext, it was only a matter of working through the various ciphers until you struck upon one that produced a meaningful message.

She picked up Through the Looking-Glass. Healy had already used it once in his trail of clues; logically, it was the best place to start.

She began with a simple cipher.

She posited that the first number in Healy’s set of numerical clues indicated the page, the next, the line on that page; then the numbers that followed the oblique stroke were either the location of the words to be used from that line or the location of characters. So, taking the first sequence – 1.3/1.7 – she turned to page one of the book, looked at the third line down and picked out the first and seventh words. This gave her ‘kitten’ and washed’.

Nonsense.

The next sequence was 1.2/5.8. So, again, first page, but this time second line down, then fifth and eighth words. ‘Was’ and ‘kitten’.

With the third sequence – 2.11/52.64.71.72.92.97.102.146. 157.158.221 – she realised that she couldn’t possibly be on the right track. The numbers after the stroke couldn’t indicate words on the eleventh line of the book’s second page because there simply couldn’t be 221 words on a single line, or even 52, for that matter. Nor could the numbers refer to characters on the line, rather than words. She’d been around books long enough to know that no line in any normal book contained over two hundred characters, even if you included the spaces between words.

The answer was simple: she was using the wrong cipher.

She dug back through the reference books her father had sent her and, after some further effort, quickly concluded that none of the book ciphers detailed there would work.

She spent another hour going through the same process with the other books on Healy’s bookshelf.

Nothing.

Had Sam guessed wrong? Perhaps Healy hadn’t employed a book cipher at all.

Disappointment wrapped itself around her and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.