The Voynich Cypher Read Online Free Page B

renowned for resting on his laurels, once they’d established their new home in the Tuscan countryside, Steven had become increasingly engaged in his burgeoning hobby of cryptography – pursuing it with single-minded focus until Antonia suggested channeling his energy differently. At her goading he’d started a boutique software company, which had quickly blossomed into a five person organization that managed the efforts of nine remote programmers in Russia, the Ukraine and India. Ironically, neither of them needed the income – Antonia’s travel magazine sale had made her a small fortune, and Steven had accumulated enough in the market to never have to work again.
    But that wasn’t his nature. Steven had already retired once, after selling his original company while in his late thirties, only to discover that his personality required more stimulation than endless napping. After a brief but deadly dalliance with the U.S. stock market and a whirlwind education on the lethal factions that congregated wherever big money circulated, he’d switched his interest to the internet – at a time when social media was coming into its own.
    That had ultimately resulted in his current venture, which was precariously close to a real job. The company was supposed to run itself, but he was still inexorably sucked into the day-to-day operations far more than he liked.
    And he still had his hobby. The challenges involved in cryptography had grown from being light entertainment to borderline obsession. He’d spent countless hours working on medieval and Renaissance cyphers, and had gone so far as to write several programs for tracking character repetition and analyzing coded messages. Many of his weekends had involved trips to ferret-out original parchments, hundreds of years old, written in the cyphers that were fairly common from the twelfth through eighteenth century. Steven didn’t get to spend as much time as he would have liked on it these days, what with the company seemingly going through one operational emergency or another, but he still took at least two days a week to work on his ‘projects’, as Antonia called them.
    Which was why he was going to miss the party of the century, or at least, of this year, near Venice.
    He’d been courting an octogenarian antique and rare parchment dealer from Bologna; his intention was to buy the man’s private collection of parchments, some of which were the stuff of rumor – scrolls from Morocco, thirteenth through fifteenth century England, Italy, France, and even some older works from Greece. These were museum pieces, rare and unseen, and would make perfect additions to Steven’s growing collection. They’d been in the old man’s possession for eons, many of them passed down from his father, who had also been in the business as well as being a counselor on rare documents to such entities as the Romanoffs at the turn of the 20th Century. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Steven, although he knew that the truly valuable works would have long ago been committed to heavyweight private collectors from Russia and China. Still, this man’s table scraps were probably as intriguing as the most highly-touted finds in the Italian trade, and Steven was anxious to seal a deal.
    Steven checked his watch, a platinum Lange & Sohne perpetual calendar Antonia had gotten him as a forty-second birthday gift. He walked back into the house; his meeting wasn’t until five o’clock that evening but he was impatient to view the old man’s trove.
    After a few minutes wandering aimlessly through the empty rooms, he resolved to go into Florence for a few hours to work out at his favorite Dojo. Steven’s fascination with martial arts was still as strong as ever, and even though he was an adept in most of the disciplines, he loved the ritual of performing his workout. He patted his stomach – after eating Italian food for the last three years, he needed every opportunity for exercise he could