The Magdalene Cipher (35 page)

That night, Clem lay in bed, working the crossword in the
Herald Tribune,
while Dunphy stood at the window, watching the lights on the river.

“What are you thinking?” Clementine asked as she penciled a word into the upper right-hand corner of the puzzle.

Dunphy shook his head.

“Come on,” she said. “You can't
not
think.”

Dunphy glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the water. “I was thinking . . . how lucky we've been.”

Clem peered up at him without raising her head from the puzzle. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“No.”

“Because it seems to me that you've had a hard time of it. I mean, they really
nailed
you.”

“Ohhh—”

“I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.”

“The point is, we're still here. The Agency hasn't found us.”

“They found
me.
”

“Yeah, but that was then. We got loose. They haven't found us
again.
”

“That's because we've been careful.”

“Or lucky,” Dunphy said. “They have resources . . . you can't even imagine.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know . . . like Echelon.”

“What's Echelon?” she asked.

Dunphy hesitated. Echelon was one of the most closely held secrets in the intelligence community. It wasn't something you discussed aloud, outside headquarters. Then he laughed to himself.
They're trying to kill me, and I'm worried about OpSec
? “It's a collection system,” he told her. “The Agency gives a list of words to the NSA—”

“I don't know what that is, either.”

“The National Security Agency. It's the biggest component of the intelligence community. And what the NSA does is, it intercepts every electronic communication in the world—
every one.
No lie.”

“That's impossible.”

“No, it's not,” Dunphy said. “Every phone call, fax, and e-mail is filtered through the system. Every wire transfer and airline reservation, every satellite feed and radio broadcast. They're all picked up and run through this gigantic filter—Echelon.”

“And what does it do?”

“There's a watch list of words and terms and Boolean operators like
and, or,
and
not.
When the words on the list show up—”

“Which words? Where do they come from?”

“They come from lots of places. The Operations Division at CIA, the embargos office at Commerce, the bank-surveillance unit in the DEA, the counterterrorism center at the FBI. And that's just us. Then, there's the allies. The Brits, the French, the Turks—each of them has their own little list. That's how they grabbed Ocalan—and Carlos.”

“And you think—”

“I think we're on the list. And the Magdalene Society, too. When the words come up, Echelon kicks out the message they're in, and the message is copied and sent to whoever gave them the words in the first place. But that's not the end of it. Echelon is just one system. There are others. So, all in all, I'm amazed we're still out here.”

Clem pulled the sheet up to her nose. “Scary,” she mumbled.

“I'm serious.”

“So am I! Sometimes, I think I liked you better as an Irish accountant, or whatever you were supposed to be.”

Dunphy turned away from the window. Crossing the room to the minibar, he opened a bottle of Trois Monts and sat down beside Clem on the bed. “I'm thinking, maybe there isn't any point to this anymore. If we keep asking questions, they're going to find us. And when they do, that's it. So, maybe we should just sort of . . . disappear.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. Into the sunset.”

“The sunset?”

“Okay, you don't like the sunset. What about Brazil?”

“Brazil?!”

Her tone made him defensive. “We could get married.”

The idea seemed to alarm her. “Is this a proposal?”

Dunphy wasn't sure. “I don't know. I guess so. I mean—it's a suggestion, anyway.”

“You mean, like, ‘Do you want to see
Cats
?' ”

“No—”

“Of course,” she said, “if we were married, then we'd be Mr. and Mrs.
Pitt.
” She thought about that, then tested the sound aloud.
“Hola! Yo soy Señora Peeet!”

“They don't speak Spanish in Brazil,” Dunphy told her.

“I know, but I don't speak Portuguese, so Spanish will have to do.” Suddenly, a daft smile played across her lips, and her voice sank to a silky, bedroom timbre. “Hello, my name is Veroushka Pitt, and
I
pay cash for everything.” Looking directly at Dunphy, she lowered her voice even further. “This is Veroushka
Bell
-Pitt, hiding out in Florianópolis!” She wrinkled her nose.

“So, what you're saying is, no,” Dunphy said.

She shook her head. “What I'm saying is, we have this problem where everyone's trying to kill you all the time, and I just think we ought to solve
that
before I go shopping for a trousseau.”

“And what if there isn't any solution?” Dunphy asked. “Sometimes, you just have to walk away. And this is looking like one of those times. I mean, look at who we're dealing with. These guys have been in business for a thousand years. They
own
the CIA. And what it looks like is, no matter how much we find out, there isn't anything we can
do.
We can't go to the police—”

“Why not?”

“Because this isn't the kind of thing they do well. They write tickets. They look for car thieves. Sometimes they solve murders. But they never,
ever,
assign a special detail to the collective unconscious.”

Clem rolled her eyes. “We could go to the press.”

Dunphy shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I told you on the plane down to Tenerife. Whatever this is, it isn't ‘fit to print.' There's no bad guy—no lone assassin. We're up against a secret church, for Chrissake! And the more we find out about that church, the harder it gets for me to even
imagine
a way out. So you tell me. Where does that leave us?”

“In Paris,” Clem replied, and parted the bed. “Now come to mother.”

Dunphy frowned. “It's
momma,
” he said.

“What?”

“It's
come to momma,
” he replied. “Not
come to mother.
Only a Brit would think it's
come to mother.
”

“Whatever,” she told him, and patted the bed a second time.

Georges Watkin worked out of an apartment on the second floor of an Art Nouveau duplex in the ninth arrondissement. Van Worden's warning that Watkin “might be praying in a different church entirely” made Dunphy especially wary. Concocting a pretext, he telephoned the Frenchman to say that he was in Paris on behalf of the Church of Latter-day Saints, which was interested in retaining Watkin as a consultant on genealogical matters. Was Watkin interested? Would it be possible to meet?

Eh, bien! By all means!
Watkin was free that very afternoon. Dunphy was not surprised. The Mormon Church is to genealogy as Hollywood is to film. Even if Watkin were independently wealthy, it was unlikely that he'd dismiss the prospect of such a meeting.

And Watkin was not wealthy. According to Van Worden, he was a lowly hack with aristocratic pretensions. He wrote articles about the Royals—everyone's Royals—for the tabloid press in France and England. An authority on the Windsors, Hapsburgs, and Grimaldis, he supplemented his income by doing genealogical studies for private clients.

With the Glock resting in the bottom of his new briefcase, Dunphy arrived at Watkin's office, accompanied by Clem. Buzzed in, they climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the genealogist stood outside the door to his apartment, beaming.

He was a short and overweight man with a childlike face. He wore a threadbare, but respectable, black suit whose shoulders glowed with wear. Beneath the jacket was a white shirt and regimental tie, the stripes of which betrayed the genealogist's enthusiasm for soup. Scuffed shoes and a whiff of sweat completed Dunphy's first impression of the man.

“Raymond Shaw,” Dunphy said, protecting his alias even as he shook hands. “And this is my assistant, Veronica . . . Flexx.”

Somehow, her double take went unnoticed.

The office itself was large and comfortable, if overheated, its walls lined with bookshelves filled to overflowing. Stacks of documents and rolls of parchment rested on heavy wooden library tables at either end of the room. Along the north wall, a bank of grimy windows glowed with the gray light of an afternoon that couldn't wait to rain.

“Armagnac?” Watkin asked, pouring himself a glass.

“No thanks,” Dunphy said, dropping into a battered leather club chair. “We don't drink, actually.”

Watkin gritted his teeth and sighed. “Of course! How stupid of me. I'm . . .” The genealogist's voice dwindled to nothing, as if he'd lost track of what he'd been about to say, even as his smile segued into a look of surprise—or perhaps it was alarm. Whatever it was, it lasted only a second, and then he found his voice and was smiling again. “I'm terribly sorry,” he said.

“No need to apologize,” Dunphy replied, wondering if he'd just hallucinated. “Why don't you enjoy your drink, and I'll explain what we're after?”

The Frenchman sat down in the chair behind his desk, glanced at some papers, and nodded to his visitors to begin.

Dunphy had spent the morning in an Internet café not far from the Sorbonne. He'd run a search on Mormonism, made some notes, and composed a smarmy little speech that he hoped would be ingratiating. “It's Peter that brings us here,” he said. “I don't know if you're a religious man, but Peter tells us that the Gospel was ‘preached also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.' At the Church of Latter-day Saints, we believe that Christ suffered and died—not only for the sins of the living, but also for those of the dead. As you can imagine, this places upon us a very special obligation: to redeem the souls of those who have died—our ancestors in the spirit world. And as I think you know, we do this by means of a sacrament that is popularly known as baptism by proxy. Of course, before we can do that, we must first identify the ancestors in question—which is something we do using traditional genealogical methods.”

A complacent smirk from Dunphy. A beatific smile from Clem. A respectful, if distracted, nod from Watkin.

“We've been at this for quite a while,” Dunphy continued, “with each family working backward, one generation after another. We like to think that millions of souls have been saved. But as you can imagine—”

“The further back one goes,” Watkin suggested, “the harder it gets.”

“Exactly. And this is particularly so for Americans, whose generational roots—and records—are almost always on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Watkin nodded sympathetically.

“And that's why Ms. Flexx and I are here. We've been asked to set up a research institute in Paris to facilitate genealogical requests made by Church members in the United States.”

“I see,” Watkin said. “And you thought—”

“We thought you might be able to help. Yes.”

Watkin nodded slowly and, Dunphy thought, a bit regretfully—which was not what he'd expected. Finally the Frenchman asked, “How did you get my name?”

It was a question that Dunphy had anticipated. Reaching inside his jacket, he removed a photocopy of the article that had appeared in
Archaeus:
“The Magdalene Cultivar.” “We were very impressed with an article you wrote,” Dunphy said, handing it to Watkin.

The Frenchman took a pair of reading glasses from his jacket pocket and adjusted them on his nose. Then he cleared his throat and looked at the papers in his hand. There was no obvious reaction. If anything, he seemed, somehow,
stuck.
His face slackened as he stared at the story he'd written, lips moving over the words in the first paragraph. Finally he looked up. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

Dunphy had been waiting for that question, as well. “It was sent to one of our genealogists in Salt Lake City—he passed it on. I'm not sure what magazine it was in. . . .”