Six o’clock in the morning. When had she fallen asleep? She had stopped only to take a late supper of yet another bowl of Madame Thierry’s delicious soup, packed her suitcase for her departure the following day, and continued her task.The code used in the leather-bound journal had lacked the complexity she expected and was based on assigning a number to each letter of the alphabet. The problem was that the number was different for each page and even each word, depending on the nature of what was being recorded. Sometimes a page was inscribed on the basis of a five-four-three-two-one code, so that the word DOBBS might be spelled ISEDT, with I being five letters away from D and so on. If the first letter in a word was z, then the code began at the beginning of the alphabet. But then the code would change again, and another combination would be used. Though each code might essentially be simple to break, complete interpretation of the pages was a time-consuming task. And the book was not supposed to be found in the first place.
