Sara made coffee and eventually they settled around the coffee table while Dracup spread the papers out on the glass surface.
“Are you all right with this, Sara?” Dracup asked. He felt a stab of guilt as he took in Sara’s pinched face. Nothing personal had been taken, but it was still a violation. He had suffered a break-in a few years back, and he remembered that the anger had taken a week or so to fade.
Sara managed a weak smile. “Yes. Of course.”
He quickly found the sheet he was after: the page featuring what his grandfather had described as a curious iron object, with a tantalizing profusion of symbols. “This is significant,” he said. “It’s an object my grandfather’s colleague was excited about – you can read the entries. The script is some kind of cuneiform derivation.”
Potzner looked blank. “I’ll take your word for it, Professor.”
“Why don’t we have a look on the internet?” Sara said. “There’s bound to be a lot of info about cuneiform.”
Dracup nodded. “Right. Go for it.”
“I’ll shout if I find anything.” She sat down at the PC in the corner of the room, leaving Dracup to ponder the contents of the page in front of them.
Potzner pointed to a line of symbols directly beneath the diagram. “This looks a little different to the rest.”
Dracup grunted. Potzner was right. A footnote of some sort? There were no lines of connected annotation... The room fell silent save for the tapping of Sara’s keyboard. Frustrated, he got up and joined Sara at the computer. “Anything?”
Sara clicked a link on the favourites menu. “There’s this. A school website. I don’t know how accurate it is – it’s for kids really, to translate their names into cuneiform.”
“Does it work the other way round?”
“Cuneiform to English? Yep. There’s a key symbol chart. It’ll be pretty basic though.”
“Worth a try. Put this in.” He pointed to the line of symbols beneath the diagram. Anything was worth a try. Dracup realized he was holding his breath and let it out in a frustrated rush.
“Okay.” Sara’s tongue protruded slightly from her mouth as she concentrated on selecting the correct – or closest – symbol from the website’s cuneiform chart. “There. Here we go.” She completed the selection but Dracup grabbed the mouse.
“I’m not sure that’s the same symbol.” Dracup pointed to the third letter.
“Hang on – it looks the closest. Let’s see what happens.” Sara pressed the enter key. In the results box, a sentence appeared:
In time you will find the hole.
A cloud of smoke drifted across the screen. “Great.” Potzner said. “Very enlightening.”
Dracup felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. “But the point is made, isn’t it? That’s colloquial, not an inscription from the Ark – it’s a message from my grandfather. To the reader. Not to himself.”
“Okay, but what does it mean?” The American found a waste bin and flicked ash in its general direction.
“A reference to another compartment on the Ark?” Sara mused. “They originally found the curious iron object in a hidden cupboard of some sort.”
“Possibly.” Dracup wasn’t so sure. In some indefinable way the answer felt closer to home. He checked the symbols again. “Hang on a minute. Look – you missed this character altogether.”
“Right. Sorry.” Sara reselected the symbol and stabbed the enter key.
In time you will find the whole
“Much better,” Potzner observed.
Dracup had had enough. “Damn it, Potzner. A little encouragement wouldn’t go amiss.” He turned on the American. “Haven’t the CIA got any record of these expeditions? You must have something to go on. Maps, dossiers, anything. You’re an intelligence organization, for God’s sake.”
“The archive files were removed, Mr Dracup. There is no record.”
Dracup turned away in exasperation. Either the organization had been negligent in this case, or its adversaries were very clever. Or both. He turned his attention back to the screen, then to the photocopy. There was something incomplete; he’d noticed it before on the original sketch – something about the shape... Then he had it. “Ah. Look.” He waved the paper to attract their attention.
Sara and Potzner both looked at the diagram blankly.
“It’s not complete. Look at how the inscriptions run to the very edge.” He pointed excitedly. “And there is a border from the extreme left, as you would expect.”