The Holy Lance - Chapter 4 cont.

One of the innovations ascribed to Caesar, probably wrongly, but he was a famous historical figure at the right sort of time, was code-writing. It had been used by the Romans to send secret messages on the battlefield, to lessen the impact if the messenger was captured. And the type of code used was a substitution cypher, the easiest in the book.

While a one-time pad is potentially unbreakable, a substitution cypher requires only a degree of patience. Working on the principle of substituting letters, there are two forms. Either both parties have a key, telling them that A in the message actually means F and so on, or they just agree that each letter actually represents the letter a certain number of steps down the alphabet. Although the latter version is simpler, it was also, in the context of ancient warfare, safer. There was no need to carry a key on one’s person to unlock the cypher, a key which could be lost, stolen or captured. All one had to do was remember a number. And that was the version that Caesar had used.

Polibios. Moving each letter three places forward, that gave him Tsxemsph. And that made no sense. Although he was a Roman historian, Simon’s Greek was pretty good - it had been the dominant language in the Eastern part of the empire, so most of the writings from that part of the world, like the New Testament, had been written in Greek. But he did not recognise this new word. Flicking through the huge Lewis and Short Greek dictionary on his desk, a testament to Victorian scholarship, he confirmed what he had first thought. He had taken a word and turned it into garbage.

The results going backwards were no better, so deflated, Simon wandered off to his kitchenette to fix a cup of chocolate. It had seemed like a great solution, no, better, it had seemed like an elegant solution, but it had come to nought. Oh well, time to return to the real world and leave code-breaking to Dan Brown.

Stirring two teaspoons of cocoa mixture into his cup, he waited for the water to reach 100 degrees, watching the clock ticking off the numbers in its eternal race to the future. Numbers. How did numbers work? Well, we use a descendant of Arabic numerals, which were themselves related to Indian characters, but the ancient civilisations thought this unnecessary complication. They were quite happy to use the same symbols to represent letters and numbers, as anyone who had seen the end of a BBC television programme knew. What if Jonathan’s letters were in fact, numbers?

Using his Oxford Classical Dictionary as a reference, even tutors were allowed to cheat occasionally, Simon transcribed the mysterious word into numbers. 30020060540200500. Which meant what exactly? It wasn’t co-ordinates, of that much he was certain. There were too many numbers for that and Simon had enough experience of yachting to have a decent grasp of most mapping systems.

At the Golden Bottle, that had to be a pub, but what sort of numbers do pubs use? Simon’s experience of the drinks trade was strictly as a consumer, but he was stumped by this latest roadblock. The recent triumph seemed in the distant past as he confronted the fact that a half-solved riddle was still a riddle.

In desperation, he returned to his computer and searched for “Golden Bottle 30020060540200500” which returned no hits. Feeling some minor satisfaction that he had finally defeated the gods of Google, he began to remove the numbers one at a time, seeing if there was some sort of match available.

Eventually, when he got down to “Golden Bottle 3”, he came across reference to “The Golden Bottle Trust”, a charitable endeavour of the C. Hoare & Co. Bank. A bank. Banks have accounts and accounts have numbers. The strange code was Jonathan’s way of giving him a bank account number. That was the only explanation. He had solved the riddle. Not bad for someone who had yet to crack the Times crossword.

Understanding why Archimedes had felt the need to leap out of his bath and run naked through the streets of Syracuse, Simon undertook the modern day equivalent. He dashed to his bedroom, dressed, and headed for the bus stop and the coach to London.