“What’s the matter?” Rolly asked.

“This sucks, is what. There has to be an easier way. We’re not Jacobean spies. Shit! I’m looking at a computer and it never occurred to me…”

“What’re you babbling about, Crosetti?”

“This. Look at the grille. The first letter of the key is the third letter of the first line, then the fifteenth letter, then the twenty-second. Next line: letter two, then seven, then fourteen. The grille generates the same pattern for every page they used. They didn’t use title pages, did they?”

“No, the only pages marked were ones with solid text. And of course every other page so they wouldn’t confuse the pinholes that came through the paper.”

“Of course. They’d only use the right-hand nontitle pages. So all we have to do is bring up the digitized version of the 1560, strip out the chapter title pages, and the left-hand pages, and then write a simple search to count and list just the characters the grille indicates. We can generate the key automatically. I have a Vigenère solver in there too. If this works, we could be reading Bracegirdle’s secrets by morning.”

“Could I take a nap while you do that?”

“Be my guest,” he said and turned back to the desk.

As with all projects involving computers, it took a lot longer than expected. The first of the dawn had appeared in the bay windows by the time Crosetti mashed the Return key and sent the long string of letters comprising what he hoped was the key into the virtual maw of the Vigenère solver, which had already been charged with the entire string of characters from the Bracegirdle ciphers. The program screen showed “SOLVING…” and in a long blank slit below that word a string of little rectangles appeared one after another like a line of boxcars on a track. Crosetti had been drinking the hotel’s do-it-yourself coffee all night and he was dry-mouthed and twitching with it.

“Crosetti…Christ, what time is it?”

This in a mumble from under the quilt.

“Almost seven. I think I’m done. Want to see?”

“I smell coffee.”

“There’s some left, but it’s awful. Come and see this. This could be the solution.”

She rolled out of bed and stood next to him, smelling of bed. The last little rectangle appeared and was replaced by a screen showing a single file title:

Bracegirdle cipher plaintext.txt

Crosetti placed the cursor on it and said, “You should have the honor. Hit the Return key.”

She did. The screen changed to a solid block of single-spaced text, the first line of which read:

mylfrdithdsnowpascedtwowereksandsomedaitssincgilefmyouphowsa

“Oh, no!” she cried, “it didn’t work.”

“Yes, it did. Remember they were working out of two different Bibles, Bracegirdle’s and Dunbarton’s, and the average print quality was pretty bad, especially with a mass market item like the Breeches Bible, so no two copies were exactly alike. And they must have had the same problem back in the day. The grille on Bracegirdle’s copy would give a slightly different key letter set than Dunbarton’s but it’s close enough. Here, let me copy this to a new document-so-and put in spacing and punctuation and correct the obvious errors-so-and…here’s the first line.”

My Lord: It has now passed two weekes and some daies since I left your howse

“Oh, God! Crosetti, you’re amazing.”

There was a smile of delight on her face, the same that had penetrated his dream life for these many months, and he felt a similar grin break out upon his own face. “Not really,” he said. “It was obvious to any really transcendent genius. Are you going to kiss me now?”

She did. Soon afterward, he was naked under the quilt and so was she. Crosetti pulled away from her and looked into her eyes.

He said, “I guess we’re not going to read the ciphers right now.”

She kissed him again. “They’ve kept four hundred years. Another hour won’t hurt. And you’re probably too tired.”

“Tired of looking at text on a screen, yeah, not too tired for this.” Some more of this followed and then he pulled away from her abruptly and met her eyes.

“You’re going to stay now, right?” he said. “I mean you’re going to be here tomorrow and the next day…”

“I think I can commit to those particular days.”

“But not additional days? Or is this going to be a continuing daily negotiation?”

“Crosetti, please don’t…”

“Ah, Carolyn, you’re going to kill me.” He sighed. “I’m going to be a dead person if you keep this up.”

And he would have gone on longer in this vein, but she stopped his mouth with her tongue and pressed Richard Bracegirdle’s long-lost cipher grille against his groin.

“That was fast,” he said.

“It was. It was fast and furious.”

“I like the way your eyes pop open when you get your rocks off.”

“An unfailing sign,” she agreed, “so I’ll remember who.”

“Wise. Now, although I would like to extend this more or less indefinitely…”

“You want to read the ciphers. Oh, so do I but I didn’t want to say.”

“Lest it be misinterpreted. I understand. So since we’re agreed, let us visit the bathroom in turn and then make it happen.”

She kissed him briefly and slid out of the bed and he thought, There can’t be many things more lovely than watching a woman you’ve just made love to walk across the room, that way her back and her ass look in the dawn’s early light, and he was thinking about how to make that shot on film look like what it actually looked like in real life when Carolyn gave a yelp and dropped to the floor.

“What?”

“They’re here!”

Carolyn’s face had the fox-in-the-headlights look he recalled from New York, the animal fear in her eyes. In an instant it broke his heart all over again. “Who?” Although it was an easy guess.

“One of them’s standing in the garden, Semya. The others must be in the front. Oh, Christ, what’re we going to do!”

“Get dressed! And keep away from the window!” She slid into the bathroom like a lizard and Crosetti got up and went to the window naked, stretching and scratching his belly like a man who’d just slept the sleep of the just and had nothing to fear. There was indeed a man in the garden, a broad-shouldered fellow in a knee-length black leather coat and a knitted cap. He looked up, saw Crosetti, stared briefly, and then turned his attention elsewhere. So even if they knew his location, and that Carolyn might come to him, they still didn’t know him. Which was strange, because they had spotted him easily enough on the street in Queens. Unless that was a different group of people entirely. Carolyn had mentioned two rival organizations…

But he couldn’t think about that now. He pulled clothes on, yanked the phone cord out of the wall, plugged in a phone adapter for U.K. systems, connected it to his computer, compressed and encrypted the Bracegirdle material and dialed up his Earthlink mailbox. He hadn’t used a dial-up connection to the Internet in years, but it still worked of course. It seemed to take eons for the thing to go through-perhaps five minutes-and after that was done he used a disk-scrubbing program to strip the cipher, the key, the Bible, and the plaintext version from his hard drive. He looked up and saw Carolyn in the bathroom doorway.

“What are you doing?” she stage-whispered.

“Protecting our secrets. It’s funny, I’ve seen so many movies about this situation that it’s like I’m following a script. The guy and the girl have to escape from the bad guys…”

“Oh, fuck you, Crosetti, this isn’t a fucking movie! If they catch us they’ll torture us until we fucking give them the secrets. They use blowtorches…”

“That’s not in the script, Carolyn. Put it out of your mind.”

He sat at the computer again, worked for another few minutes, then switched off the machine and packed it in its case. “Now we have to pack you,” he said and dumped the contents of his duffel bag onto the floor. “I hope you’re limber enough to do this.”