2017/2a.plaintext

   1 harry,
   2 i am very grateful for the file on jodie. following your tipoff about her travel we tracked her to a book trader in el-khalili souk,  put a tail on her and i have been carrying out a few background checks of my own. like you i found little to raise my suspicions, and, given her profession, there is nothing unusual about her being here in cairo. she seems to be well known, well liked, and most importantly, well trusted. if we had nothing else to go on i too would have written her off as a lead, however two days ago my agents lost track of her and she disappeared.
   3 we ran all the usual checks and found her in cleopatra hospital, recovering from an assault. the local station procured credentials and cover for me as a local detective and i carried out a standard field interview which has given us a headstart on the investigation. jodie's misfortune is my luck.
   4 she is here to track down a document apparently written by the roman historian tacitus. the hunt for the book started when someone found a document in the vatican library written by la touret. it included extracts from a latin document that appeared to be an edited version of the agricola and jodie tells me that the style was recognisably tacitus, and some of the sentences were the same as known versions of the original. however there were a few significant changes and jodie travelled to rome to search for more. in the archives she found tacitus’ deathbed confession which referred to a document so shocking that tacitus himself had ordered it to be split up and concealed across a number of sites in the ancient world. no clues were given to the nature of the sites, but the document concluded with the statement “my legacy will be a truth which outlasts the mountain of gods which guards its gateway“. this led jodie to suspect that the pyramids at giza were a good place to start. that was where she was attacked.
   5 it took jodie three days to find the document hidden among the stones, and my guess is that someone was watching her until she found it late on the third day. she only had it for five minutes before she was robbed, but she made the most of that time, photographing the fragment. the attackers took her phone, but the image had already uploaded to the cloud, so at least we know what it said. perhaps more importantly we may have another clue to the location of the next fragment, “the full truth must remain hidden for now, and as remarked by my trusted slave and confidant tiro, what better place to hide a book than among books?”