The mayan prophecy (Timeriders # 8) Read Online Free PDF Page B

worn-away drip pools. A weave-work of dried creepers and desiccated roots snaked across the barren rock floor in a long-forgotten search for nutrition.
    Adam explored a dozen yards into the dark interior of the cave. It seemed to wind back deeper than he’d at first thought. His nerves got the better of him, however. The cave entrance was far enough behind him now that he was beginning to feel edgy. This was enough solo exploration for him. Far enough in. And darker than he’d like.
    A cave. Just a cave. And Adam would have turned to go back out again just then, if the beam of his torch hadn’t rested momentarily on a smooth section of cave wall.
    But it did, and what it revealed caused him to catch his breath.
    Carefully, he picked his way further towards the back of the cave, approaching the wall, then finally he reached out to touch the cool moist surface of the rock. More to the point, to lightly touch the faint markings of flaking mud paint – a cardinal sin – actually reaching out and touching it.
    ‘My God,’ he whispered as he studied the symbols painted on the wall.

Chapter 5
     
1994, Norwich
     
    ‘He’s going to be a little – what’s the term I’m looking for? Oh yes,
freaked-out
, isn’t he?’ said Liam. ‘What with you paying him another visit like this, completely out of the blue.’
    ‘Of course he is,’ replied Maddy.
    She had visited Adam Lewis once before. Now that was something else that seemed like it had occurred a lifetime ago. She and Becks had knocked on the door of his bedsit in a shared student digs and asked him to explain himself; to explain how he’d managed to decode that one passage of the Voynich Manuscript.
    The passage that had contained the word
Pandora
.
    The whole mystery had started with the smallest time wave occurring back in 2001. Just the gentlest of ripples that Sal had managed to sense. But then computer-Bob had alerted them to the sudden existence of a minor archived article in a British newspaper called the
Sun
. The article had mentioned in its own distinctly low-brow style that Adam Lewis (‘
hacker and computer geek, looking more like a scruffy animal-rights activist than a Microsoft pencil-neck
’) had singlehandedly managed to extract a single legible sentence from the impenetrable gibberish of the legendary Voynich Manuscript.
    Not exactly ‘legendary’ in the public eye. For most
Sun
readers Maddy suspected that article was the first and last timethey’d ever hear about the medieval document. But among cryptologists, hackers, amateur code-breakers, it was the gold-standard: the One To Be The First To Crack.
    Maddy and Becks had gone back to 1994, picking a date a week after the story had broken big in the national newspaper, and found an edgy young man very close to breaking point. A bag of rattling nerves.
    Oh yes, he’d decoded a passage that read: ‘
Pandora is the word. The word leads to truth. Fellow traveller, time to come and find it.
’ And that was the bit he’d rather excitedly announced by posting a letter to
New Scientist
. The bit he hadn’t revealed was the sentence that had come just before that …
    ‘
You must make public the last part of this message, Adam Lewis, and I promise you someone will come and explain everything. When she comes, it is important you tell her this: “Seek Cabot at Kirklees in 1194”. Do not reveal any more of this message to anyone else. The last part now follows. Pandora is the word …
’
    And
that
was the bit that had turned him into a jabbering nervous wreck. The inclusion of his name in an ancient medieval document. That had completely messed with his head. He’d ended up hiding away in his grubby bedroom, peeking out of the net curtains, paranoid that someone, somewhere, was coming for him.
    Which was true. But instead of men in black suits and dark glasses, or some killer cyborg robot assassin from the future, or whatever else the young man’s feverish paranoid imagination could conjure