The Magdalene Cipher (22 page)

“We have to get up early,” Dunphy said. “It's critical.”

“What time?” she asked
.

“I don't know. Five-thirty or six. The thing is, I've only got from seven to one—and that's cutting it close. Seven to noon would be safer.”

She took a sip of wine, smacked her lips, and smiled. “Foxy,” she said
.

“Just like Clem.”

She smiled. “You should call me Veroushka.”

“Clem . . .”

“Anyway—what is this place you're going to?”

“It's called Monarch Assurance—on Alpenstrasse.”

“So it's an insurance company.”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Dunphy shook his head. “I'm not sure,” he replied. “Some kind of special archive.”

“For who?”

“The Company,” Dunphy said
.

“You mean . . .”

“The company I used to work for.”

“And they keep this archive over here? In bloody Zug?”

Dunphy nodded
.

“But why?” she asked. “Why would anyone keep
anything
over here?”

“I don't know,” Dunphy answered. “But it's the most sensitive information they have.”

“Then I should think they'd want to keep it close to home.”

“Right. That's exactly what you'd think. But you'd be wrong.”

Clem frowned. “How do you know about this place?” she asked
.

Dunphy poured himself a second glass of wine, swirled it in the firelight, and told her what he'd done as a reference analyst on the FOIA desk
.

“No wonder they're angry with you,” she exclaimed
.

“Yeah,” Dunphy muttered, “no wonder . . .”

“So how are we going to get out of this? Because if that Frenchman doesn't kill you for stealing his money—”

“It wasn't his money.”

“—the CIA will.” She looked at him expectantly, but he didn't say anything
.
“Well?”

“Well
,
what
a?”

“What are you going to
do
about it?”

“Which?” he asked. “The Frenchman or the Agency?”

She just looked at him
.

“Because they're two different problems,” he said, “though I don't think we'll have to worry about Blément—unless you were followed. And I don't know why you
would
have been followed. They don't know you. Anyway, I didn't see anybody, so . . . that leaves the Agency. And I don't know what to say about the Agency, because I don't even know what the question is.”

“Then it's hopeless,” Clem opined
.

Dunphy shook his head. “No, it's not hopeless. Because even if I don't know what the question is, I know where the answers are. They're in that archive, just up the street. And you're going to help me get at them, because otherwise . . .”

“What?”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he leaned forward in a confidential way and whispered, “Yikes.”

They awoke the next morning at five-thirty, and breakfasted on toast and coffee in a café on the Alpenstrasse, a couple of blocks from the Monarch Assurance Company. The idea was for Dunphy to talk his way into the Special Registry while Clementine made reservations for a flight to Tenerife that same afternoon
.

“Go to the airport,” Dunphy said. “Buy the tickets and then come back for me.”

Clem nodded. “At one.”

“You have to be
waiting
at one—right here, with the car running. Or I'm fucked. Because timing's everything. There's a six-hour difference between Washington and Zug—and that's the window. Max's pass will get me in the building, but getting into the archive . . . they're gonna want to check with Langley. And not just Langley, they're gonna want to talk to a guy named Matta.”

“And he'll say it's okay?” Clem asked
.

“No. He'll tell 'em to kill me. But that's where the time difference comes in. They won't call him in the middle of the night because there's no real emergency. Or no obvious one, anyway. And it's not like I'm going anywhere. I mean, not as far as
they're
concerned. So they'll wait until it's morning in the States, and then they'll call. I figure my pull date's about one o'clock in the afternoon. After that, it all goes bad.”

Clementine thought about it for a moment. Finally, she asked, “What if they don't mind waking him up?”

Dunphy hesitated, and then he shrugged. “Well
,
Veroushka
,
if I'm not sitting in the car with you by five after one? Just take the money and run.”

Leaving Clem with her coffee, Dunphy walked up Alpenstrasse in search of Monarch Assurance. He didn't bother looking at the numbers. He could see the building ahead, about three blocks away. It was an ultramodern, blue-glass cube, six stories high and completely opaque. It had CIA written all over it—only, as it turned out, he'd come too far. The cube was the headquarters of a commodities trading firm. Monarch was back the other way
.

Retracing his steps, he would have walked past the building a second time if he hadn't overheard American voices. Turning, he found himself outside 15 Alpenstrasse. Nearby, a dull brass plaque clung to the wall of a cross-timbered old pile with leaded-glass windows
.

The building needed renovation, but it was busy nonetheless, with people streaming into work even at this early hour. Most of them, Dunphy saw, were men, and almost all of them were wearing dark topcoats over dark suits—a circumstance that made him want to keep his coat on. Who knew what they'd make of his houndstooth sports jacket?

Taking a deep breath, Dunphy joined the stream, passing through a towering doorway whose antique wooden doors were thrown open to the winter
.

Inside, a bank of male receptionists sat behind a polished mahogany counter, fielding phone calls and visitors. Dunphy did his best to ignore them, joining a queue of office workers waiting to pass through a high-tech turnstile. Thronged and buzzing, the place reminded Dunphy of a hive
.

Observing the people in front of him, Dunphy saw how each of them inserted his building pass in a slot on the left side of the turnstile, while at the same time pressing his right thumb on an illuminated glass panel to the right. Barely a second went by before the turnstile went
chnnnk!
a—as if it were a time clock being punched—and the worker passed through to a hallway on the other side
.

When Dunphy's turn came, he was beginning to hyperventilate. Inserting his building pass in the slot, he pressed his right thumb to the glass and waited . . . counting the seconds as they passed
.
Three. Four. Five
.
A low murmur, more impatient than threatening, washed up against his back
.

“I don't get it,” he said, muttering to no one in particular. “It's always worked before.” He could see one of the receptionists getting to his feet, eyes on Dunphy. The man looked worried
.

I'm gonna kill that fuckin' Russian, Dunphy thought, and tried the pass again. Once again, nothing happened. The receptionist was on his feet now, and Dunphy was about to bolt. With a little luck, he could hit the door at a run and lose himself—

“You're upside down.”

The voice made him jump, so that when he turned to its source, Dunphy's heart was slamming against his ribs. Black trench coat. String tie. Bifocals
.

“What?”

“Your pass—it's upside down.” The guy nodded toward the turnstile
.

Dunphy looked. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and rumbling, reinserted the pass so that the hologram went into the slot
.
Chnnnk!
a “Thanks.” He was sweating
.

The hallway ran in a straight line for about thirty feet, then doglegged to the right before emptying into a mezzanine that seemed to have been lifted from a Batman film. Black marble floors and travertine walls glittered against a backdrop of stainless steel elevators. And in the center of the room, its only ornament, stood a transparent cylinder on a golden pillar, surrounded by flowers. Inside the jar, a replica of
la protectrice
.
Blacker, even, than the marble on the floor. And a most unusual installation for a government building—if that's what this was
.

Dunphy watched the elevator indicators sweep from one to five, and realized, a little belatedly, that he was in the presence of a major contradiction: a one-story building with five floors. Which meant that most of the place was underground
.

“Heyyy, stranger!” A clap on the back made Dunphy start. Turning, he saw the man with the Vandyke beard, the one from the abbey, the guy with the posse
.

“Heyyy,” Dunphy replied, forcing a smile. “You're up bright and early.”

The man shrugged. “That's nothing new. But what about you? This your first time here?”

Dunphy shook his head. “It's been a while, but—yeah, when I saw you, I'd just gotten into town.”

“And you
couldn't! wait!
to see Her!” The man laughed and shook his head in mock amazement
.

For a moment, Dunphy didn't know what he meant. But then he understood, and treated the guy to what he was looking for: a sheepish smile. “I guess,” he said
.

The elevator arrived, and the two of them got in. Classical music played softly on the intercom. The
Messiah
,
Dunphy thought, but, then, that's what he always thought when he heard classical music. His own tastes ran to Cesaria Evora or, if he'd been drinking, the Cowboy Junkies
.

“Where you headed?” the man asked, punching a button
.

For the second time in the same minute, Dunphy didn't know what to say. The guy with the beard stood there with an expectant look, his forefinger pointing at the control panel. Finally Dunphy replied, “Chief's office.”

The man made a moue, to show just how impressed he was, then stabbed at the panel with his finger. A couple of other people got on, the doors closed, and the elevator began what seemed like a motionless descent. A few seconds later, the doors opened, and when no one moved, Dunphy stepped out
.

“It's on your left,” the guy said. “All the way down the hall.”

The corridor was broad and softly lighted, with plum-colored carpeting, mauve walls, and Art Deco sconces. Paintings and drawings hung from the walls in elaborately hand-carved and gilded frames. An ancient woodcut, limning
The Tombe of Jacques de Molay
.
An architectural drawing, rendering the floor plan of an unidentified castle—cathedral—both. An oil painting in which a recumbent knight is shorn of his hair by a beautiful maid. A second painting that Dunphy thought of as an alas-poor-Yorick number, depicting a shepherd in what can only have been Acadia, contemplating the skull of . . . Yorick. Meinrad. Someone
.

Finally, Dunphy arrived at a smoked-glass door at the end of the corridor. On the glass, a single word:
DIREKTOR
.

His heart was banging against his chest, so that it took all the courage he had to rap smartly on the door and then, without waiting for an answer, to barge in. A birdlike woman with salt-and-pepper hair looked up from behind a wafer-thin computer screen. She was wearing tortoiseshell reading glasses and seemed more irritated than startled
.

“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?”

“Not unless you speak English,” Dunphy told her, and glanced around the room. “I'm here to see the
Direktor
.
a”

She gave him a skeptical look. “That's impossible,” she said, speaking in a clipped German accent. “For one thing, you must have an appointment. And I don't think you have one.”

“No,” Dunphy replied, “I don't. But I've got something better.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I've got an assignment.” He nodded toward a door in the corner of the room and began to move toward it. “Is this his office?”

He thought she was going to levitate. As it was, she half rose out of her chair. “No! I mean, yes, of course it is—but that has nothing to do with you. He isn't here. And who
are
you, anyway?” She had her hand on the telephone
.

With a show of irritation, he pulled out his building pass and held it out to her. She squinted at it for a moment, then copied his name into a little book on her desk
.

“You've been here before,” she said, looking unsure
.

Dunphy nodded uncomfortably. “Once or twice, but that was a long time ago.”

“Because I remember your name, but . . .” She peered at him over her reading glasses, then shook her head
.