Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. The world-famous WW2 codebreaker furiously twiddled his moustache. Suddenly, a shout – “I’ve solved the Voynich!” It was the television! A small boy and his beagle were smiling at the camera, holding a book up. They had “proved it was a hoax”. This meant one thing: war! The codebreaker slammed the door and drove to the library.
Part II
Seven hundred years earlier, Knights Templar pounded the monastery door. Roger Bacon answered. “We’ll taketh that”, said the knights, grabbing the mysterious book from his hands. “My secrets are safe with you idiots”, sneered the codemaker monk.
Part III
The security guard approached. The codebreaker was in his pyjamas, waiting at the library’s front gate. “You’ll have to wait till morning, sir”, said the guard. A shot rang out. The guard slumped. The codebreaker hid the body in a snowdrift. The history graduate walked warily past the man in bloodstained pyjamas on her way home. The boy on TV carried on smiling.
Part IV
The Knights Templar couldn’t decipher the book. “Torture him!”, the Grand Master screamed. They tried, but Bacon had a heart attack and died. Nobody would ever know. Or would they? And then the whole Templar Order was suppressed. Or was it?
Part V
The gate opened, and the codebreaker ran in past the history graduate, again. The librarian shrugged. But where was the security guard? The codebreaker sped through all the pages one last time, until – yes, there it was! A bloody fingerprint, overlooked by everyone. It wasn’t a hoax! Outside, the librarian noticed the trail of blood and called the police. The dog smiled even harder.
Part VI
Leon Battista Alberti borrowed the book from the Vatican, his oily fingerprints messing up the radiocarbon dating. Suddenly, a thud! Alberti lay unconscious in the street, mugged: the thief ran away with his prize, for his great-grandchildren to sell to the Holy Roman Emperor, and from there to Athanasius Kircher in 1665, the Jesuit archives, and then Wilfrid Voynich in 1912.
Part VII
Bang! The codebreaker lay shot, slumped by the book, his vividly red blood mingling with the ink, the paint and the blood spatter from Alberti’s head. His life ebbing away, he suddenly realized: nobody would ever know. They’d all think it simply a hoax, forever. He lifted his hands to the sky and shouted “Noooooooo!” The boy and the dog danced on top of the kennel, one last time.
THE END