The Navigator (NUMA Files 7)

Angela examined the hidebound box, and then she went through the pages from top to bottom. The handwriting looked familiar. She went to the stacks and came back with a book on the American Revolution. She opened the volume to a photo of the Declaration of Independence and held one of the papers next to the page. The similarity of the flowing, tightly written script on both samples was remarkable.

“Notice anything?” Angela said.

“The handwriting is practically identical,” Stocker said.

“It should be. Both these documents were written by the same person.”

“Jefferson? It can’t be.”

“Why not? Jefferson was a gentleman farmer, a scientist, and a meticulous keeper of records. Look here, in the corner of the title page. Those tiny letters are TJ.”

“This is great! There isn’t much here that would interest the average reader, but the fact that a Jefferson document on artichokes ended up with all this other stuff is worth at least a couple of paragraphs.”

Angela wrinkled her brow. “It must have landed here by mistake.”

“How could someone misfile original Jeffersonian material?”

“The society has an incredible filing system. But we’ve got eight million manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand volumes and bound periodicals. My guess is that someone saw the title, didn’t notice who had written the treatise, and tossed it in with the other agricultural material.”

He handed over the diagram. “This was in the file. It looks like a garden that was laid out by a drunk.”

The assistant librarian glanced at the diagram, then picked up the perforated cardboard and held it to the light. An idea occurred to her. “Let me know when you’re through. I’ll want to make sure that it goes back in with the other Jefferson material.”

She returned to her desk. As she worked, she glanced impatiently from time to time at the writer’s table. It was near closing when he stood and stretched and slid the laptop into its bag. She hurried over.

“Sorry for the mess,” he said.

“Not a problem. I’ll take care of everything,” she said.

She waited for the other patrons to leave and took the Jefferson file over to her desk. Under the light of her desk lamp, she placed the cardboard on top of the first page of writing. Individual letters showed through the small rectangles.

Angela was a crossword buff and had read a number of books on codes and ciphers. She was sure that what she held in her hand was a cipher grille. The grille would be placed over a blank sheet of paper. The message would be written in the holes by letter. Innocent-looking sentences would be built around the letters. The person on the receiving end would place an identical grille over the message and the words would pop out.

She tried the grille on a number of pages, but all she got was gibberish. She suspected that there was another level of encryption that was far beyond her amateur skill to decipher. She turned her attention to the parchment with the wavy lines and Xs. She stared at the words accompanying the strange markings and then called up a lexicon site on her computer. She sometimes went to the research site as a cheat to find obscure words that were used in the crossword puzzles.

Angela typed the words from the parchment onto the site’s search function and hit the ENTER key. There was no immediate translation, but the site referred her to its ancient-language section. She requested a translation once more and this time the program responded with an answer that both startled and puzzled her.

She ran off a printout and copied it, along with the Jefferson material. Leaving the copies in her drawer, she gathered up the original files and walked down the hallway to her supervisor’s office.

Angela’s boss was a middle-aged professional named Helen Woolsey. She looked up from her desk and smiled when she saw her younger protégée.

“Working late?” she said.

“Not exactly. I came across something unusual and thought you might be interested.” She handed the packet over.

As the librarian examined the papers, Angela explained her theory about its authorship.

The librarian let out a low whistle. “It gives me a thrill just to touch something that Jefferson held in his hand. This is an incredible find.”

“I think it is,” Angela said. “I’m just guessing that Jefferson encoded a message in those papers. Jefferson was an accomplished cryptographer. Some of the systems he devised were used decades after he died.”

“Obviously, it was sensitive material he didn’t want made public.”

“There’s more,” Angela said. She handed over the printout from the language website.

The librarian studied the sheet for a moment. “Is this website reliable?” she said.

“I’ve always found it to be,” Angela said.