Francesca was quite aware on some level that there were others in the room, but that part of her mind was no longer engaged. When she was working, the entire universe consisted of the problem before her – in this case a deceptively simple set of letters, printed on black and white paper.
At first it had seemed hopeless – how does one assemble meaning from disconnected letters? But at some point she noticed telltale patterns in the way the pieces were cut. She now knew that the original message had been entirely contained on two sheets of paper – one white printed on black, the other black printed on white. The same scissors had been used to cut each of these two messages into its component letters. Slight irregularities in the angles of the cuts had already told her something of which letters went alongside which others.
She could also tell from the frequency of occurrence of the letters that each of the two original messages was incomplete – solving its meaning would require assembling its sister message. For example, the white on black message did not contain a single occurrence of the letter ‘e’ – a statistical near impossibility. The other message contained no occurrences of the letter ‘t’, which was equally unlikely.
Cryptological analysis was second nature to Francesca – a subject second nature to her since she had been a girl growing up in the Lombardia countryside. She could recite the descending sequence of letter frequency in many languages with greater facility than the alphabet itself. For English, this sequence was, more or less:
with ‘e’ being the most commonly occurring letter in the written language, and ‘z’ being the rarest. Depending upon which book one analyzed there were slight variations in this order. For example Mickey Spillane would not produce exactly the same ordering as, say, Jane Austin – although they would be close.
She had already deduced that the creator of this puzzle had a particular order in mind, and had separated out the even and odd letters – placing only the one set on the message from the sun and moon box, and the complementary set in the message from the earth box. The two messages, if separately assembled, would each remain fairly incomprehensible. But when properly interwoven those two messages would reveal their secrets.
She was still engaged in the first phase of the process – the arduous task of physically matching the scissor cuts to find the adjoining fragments of each message. Slowly but surely the two sheets of paper were each becoming whole again. Now it was only a matter of time.
She took a moment to look up at Clay, and they shared a worried glance. They both realized full well that their opponent would soon discover how to open the boxes now in his possession, and would then find that they were empty. Once that happened, the lives of everyone in this room would be in danger. It was essential that the puzzle be solved before then…