Free Time Riders: The Doomsday Code by Alex Scarrow

sounded. ‘Anyway, I’m telling you that because, well, because I spotted two very specific glyphs from the cave wall … in the Voynich Manuscript.’
    Maddy nearly dropped an Oreo in her coffee.
    ‘They’re very important glyphs. They were used by the Windtalkers to separate ideas. Sentences, if you like. Much like we use a capital letter and a full stop. One glyph always appeared at the beginning of a sentence or an expression and the other at the end.’
    ‘So, what? You’re telling me the Voynich was written by, like, Aztecs ?’
    ‘No. It’s not. The glyphs are only used once.’ He raised a finger. ‘On just one occasion. The Voynich Manuscript is hundreds of pages crammed full of random characters, some of them Roman Latin, some Egyptian, some Greek, some mathematical – and then there’s this one passage of those same random characters, which begins with a Windtalker glyph and ends with one.’
    ‘My God!’
    He nodded. ‘Yes, like it was flagged up. Like someone was saying, Focus on this passage alone .’ He stirred uneasily. ‘Like they were saying, Focus on this passage … Adam Lewis .’
    A nervous grin skittered across Maddy’s lips then slipped away. ‘That is so-o-o creepy.’
    He nodded. ‘Anyway, I won’t bore you with the technical details of breaking open a cipher, but if you can isolate a chunk of meaningful language from random gibberish – a technique often deployed to throw cryptanalysts off the scent – then it’s just a matter of time before you can break it down. Those Windtalker markers were the reason I’m the only person who’s ever managed to extract something meaningful from the Voynich.’
    He set his mug on the table. ‘And that’s the reason why I couldn’t explain myself publicly. That’s why I was dismissed as an attention-seeking nut. I couldn’t say some medieval bloke knew I was going to take a field trip to the Amazon and discover the key to breaking the code! I just had to take all the criticism, all the mickey-taking on the nose. It’s a period in my life I’ve tried to put behind me.’ He smiled. ‘Then of course this bloody film comes out.’ He sighed. ‘Luckily they changed the character’s surname.’
    ‘And who’d want to be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, eh?’
    They both laughed politely at that.
    Maddy weighed him up silently. She realized he already knew too much. That at some point they were going to have to undo history and see to it that Adam Lewis never found his way here. Until then, though, he appeared to be a reluctant part of this mystery, linked to Pandora somehow. Perhaps even the key to it all. Just like his pre-Aztec glyphs.
    ‘Cookie?’

CHAPTER 17

2001, New York
    ‘So where’s this place you’re taking us?’ asked Liam.
    ‘It’s a theatre and antique junk shop that does expensive fancy-dress hire. The clothes are the proper thing, not all the nasty cheap polyfabric and synthetic shadd-yah you get in, like, joke shops.’
    ‘Polly …?’
    ‘Horrible.’ She shuddered. ‘In my time my parents used to wear bright-coloured polyfab kurtas and these imported jogging suits … and plastic jewellery. Ughh. Hideous. There,’ she said, gesturing along the street, ‘it’s just a couple of blocks down this way.’
    ‘Right-oh,’ he said, nodding. ‘It’ll be good, though, to try on something more comfortable.’
    She looked him up and down. ‘You don’t like the jeans and the hoody?’
    He couldn’t help but grimace a little. ‘The trousers seem a little tight around my legs, so they do. It’s quite difficult to walk. And it’s rubbing me sore in places I’d rather not talk about.’
    She quickly lifted the bottom of his hoody up and laughed at what she saw. ‘That’s because you’re wearing the waist way-y-y too high. They should, you know, hang really low.’ Liam had the belt cinched tightly and the waistband of his Diesel jeans hawked up high over his hips to just beneath his navel. With that, the