The Magdalene Cipher (36 page)

“Everyone said the work was first-rate,” Clem remarked, sensing Watkin's discomfiture.

“Oh, no question,” Dunphy agreed.

Watkin looked from one to the other. “It wasn't widely circulated,” he mumbled.

“Oh?”

“No,” Watkin replied. “There were very few copies printed. It was a . . . special-interest publication. Written for a very special audience. Not the public. So . . . it was quite rare.”

“Well, then, I think we should count ourselves lucky to have seen it!” Dunphy told him. “And lucky to have found the man who wrote it!”

Watkin nodded slightly, still obviously distracted.

“It was so cleverly done,” Dunphy remarked.

“
What
was?” Watkin asked.

“The article,” Dunphy replied.

“So witty,” Clem added, crossing her legs with a zip of nylon. “The way you wrote about the Merovingian line—”

“As if it were an exercise in viticulture!” Dunphy finished. “Wherever did you get the
idea
?”

Watkin's distraction was now gone. His eyes snapped from Dunphy to Clem, and back again. Then, he seemed to relax—and began to play along.

“I don't know,” he said. “It was just an idea. I wrote it as an amusement.” He paused and then plunged on. “So! You're interested in the Merovingians?”

“Absolutely,” Dunphy replied.

“Who wouldn't be?” Clem exclaimed.

“I wonder if there are any of them still around,” Dunphy mused.

“You're not alone,” Watkin said with a smile. “Would you like to see the genealogies Napoleon commissioned? Not the originals, of course, but—”

“Hell, yes!” Dunphy exclaimed, and instantly regretted it. “Sorry. Sometimes, I get . . . overexcited.”

Watkin shrugged. “They're in the next room,” he said. “I'll just go get them. . . .”

When he'd left, Dunphy grimaced, and Clem leaned in. “I think you fucked up, your holiness.”

Dunphy agreed, but there was nothing to be done. Getting to his feet, he walked to the window and glanced outside. A light rain had begun to fall, and the street was slicked and glistening. “It's raining,” he said as he made his way around the room, studying the shelves of books for clues to Watkin's strange demeanor.

Newsletter of the International Society for British Genealogy and Family History.

Manuscripts Catalog of the Franco-Judaic Archives.

Documents Relating to the History and Settlement of Towns along the Dadou and Agout Rivers (with the Exception of Réalmont), 1330–82.

UFOs over Biarritz!

“Uh-oh,” Dunphy muttered, but continued with his stroll around the room, arriving finally at Watkin's desk. There, two things caught his eye. The first was a red diode glowing on Watkin's telephone, indicating that someone (almost certainly Watkin) was using line one in another room. The second thing to catch his attention was a photograph of himself.

This was a passport-sized picture attached to a memorandum from the director of the Security Research Staff, Harold Matta. Aghast, Dunphy read the memo, which identified the man in the photograph as John Dunphy, aka Kerry Thornley, aka Jack. The memo described Dunphy/Thornley as

armed and extremely dangerous. Mr. Dunphy is believed to be traveling with a female companion, using false identification. Subject impersonated a federal official in Kansas, wounded a federal agent in London, and breached security at a SAP facility in Switzerland, where Andromeda-sensitive MK-IMAGE documents were stolen after two members of the archival staff were viciously assaulted. SRS safari teams are TDY to our embassies in London, Paris, and Zürich. If sighted, notify the team closest to you.

Oh, shit, Dunphy thought. What the hell is a safari team? And the answer came back: It's just what you think. Removing the picture from the memo to which it had been attachéd, Dunphy took the photo back to his chair. Sitting down, he flashed the picture to Clem and whispered, “We're fucked.”

“What?!”

“We can give it maybe ten minutes,” he said, shoving the picture into his jacket pocket. “Then we have to get out—he's already on the phone.”

A moment later, a nervous-looking Watkin emerged with a bundle of charts under his arm. Spreading them out on one of the library tables, he weighted them down at their corners, using books. Dunphy and Clem joined him at his side.

“You're looking at the ancestral charts of the Merovingians,” Watkin told them, “as prepared by genealogists working for Napoleon in the first three years of the nineteenth century.”

“The Long-Haired Kings,” Dunphy muttered.

Watkin put his lips together in a moue. “They've also been called the Grail Kings.”

“They're like illuminated manuscripts,” Clem observed, pointing to the delicate traceries that crowded the margins of the charts. There were lions and cherubim, flowers and magi. And, in the middle, a latticework of relations, tracing a direct line back from the Napoleonic era to the Crusades, and from the Crusades to the Dark Ages, and finally, to Mérovée himself.

“It's beautiful,” Dunphy remarked.

“You have no idea,” Watkin commented.

Dunphy scrutinized the names and was somewhat disappointed to see that none of them was particularly recognizable.
Dagobert II. Sigisbert IV.
Those, at least, had been cross-referenced in the Andromeda files—though he had no idea who they were, or might have been.

“Who's Dagbert?” he asked.

Watkin winced. “Dah-go-bear. His father was king of Austrasia—”

“Which was what?”

“Northern France and parts of Germany. It's an interesting story,” Watkin confided. “Like a fairy tale. When Dagobert's father was killed, Dagobert himself was kidnapped by the mayor of the palace and hidden away in a monastery in Ireland. Apparently, they didn't have the heart to murder him. After some years, the mayor's own son became king, and Dagobert grew to manhood.”

“When was this?” Clementine asked.

“In 651. He retook the throne when he was twenty-three.”

“Then what?” Dunphy asked, thinking he had maybe five minutes left.

Watkin shrugged. “He died.”

“How?” Clem wondered.

“They slaughtered him while he slept—a lance through the eye.”

“Who did?” Dunphy asked.

“According to the histories? The henchmen of Pépin the Fat.”

“And in fact?”

A dismissive puff from Watkin. “The Vatican, of course.”

“What about this one?” Clem asked. “Who's he?”

“Sigisbert,” Watkin replied. “The line continued through him.”

“For how long?” Dunphy asked, bringing the conversation around to the reason for his visit.

Watkin looked uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”

“Where are they now? Are any of them still around?”

Watkin shrugged.

“Oh, come on,” Dunphy chided. “Don't tell me nobody's taken a peek since Napoleon!”

Watkin smiled bleakly. “Well,” he said, “it doesn't matter. The last was here, actually. In Paris.”

“No kidding,” Dunphy said. “Who was he?”

“A banker,” Watkin replied. “Bernardin something-or-other.”

Dunphy figured he didn't have anything to lose. “Gomelez?” he asked.

The genealogist stared at him.

“I'm right, aren't I?” Dunphy exclaimed. He turned to Clem. “I knew I was right.”

“How do you know this name?” Watkin demanded.

Dunphy shrugged. “Internet. I surf a lot.”

“What happened to him?” Clem asked.

“To who?”

“Mr. Gomelez,” she said, and as she spoke, a car backfired on the street outside. Watkin jumped as if he'd been given a shock. Averting his eyes from his guests, he began to roll up the charts. “I think he was wounded in the war,” he said.

“Which war?” Dunphy asked.

“In Spain. He was a volunteer.”

Clem walked over to the window, pushed the curtain aside, and gazed out at the street. “He must be very old now,” she said.

Watkin shook his head and lied. “I think he must be dead,” he said. “This was a very sick man. And not just the war. He had—how is it called?
Pernicieuse anémie?”

“Pernicious anemia?” Clem suggested.

“Exactly! And in the big war, when the Germans came, they make his house—a mansion in the Rue de Mogador—a hospital. No one sees him after that.”

“Even after the war?” Dunphy asked.

“As I said, he disappeared.”

“And the house—”

Watkin dismissed the question. “It changed hands. I think, now, this is a museum. For the archaeologists.”

Dunphy watched Watkin closely. He seemed to be unusually alert. Indeed, if the genealogist were a dog, his ears would have been standing at attention. It was then that Clem jumped back from the window.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

Dunphy went to her side and, looking out, saw five men in black suits and string ties climb from the back of a gray van whose front wheels were on the sidewalk. One of the men was punching buttons on a cell phone as he walked briskly toward Watkin's building.

On the desk, the phone began to ring. Watkin moved to answer it.

“Stay!” Dunphy ordered, as if the genealogist were a large and very excitable dog. Then he reached down for his briefcase and, opening it, pulled out the Glock. “Now, listen to me,” he said. “Tell 'em we just left, say we're on our way to the Bibliothèque nationale, tell 'em we're driving an old Deux Chevaux. Tell 'em whatever the fuck you want, Georges, but you'd better be convincing—or it's the end of the line for the Watkin family. Y'know what I mean?”

The genealogist nodded, looking terrified, and slowly picked up the phone. He spoke too fast for Dunphy to understand exactly what he said, but he heard the words Deux Chevaux and Bibliothèque—so he figured Watkin had taken his instructions literally.

Moving to the window, Dunphy glanced outside. He saw three of the men jump into the van, slamming the doors behind them. With a screech, the car backed into the street, came halfway around, stopped, and shot forward, heading for what Dunphy guessed was the library. Meanwhile, two men ran up the sidewalk toward the building. One of them was limping badly, and for a second, Dunphy thought it might be Jesse Curry—but, no, Curry was a bigger guy, and besides, it was too soon for him to be walking around.

“Did they leave?” Clem asked, her voice cracking like a young boy's.

“Some of them,” Dunphy said.

The doorbell rang. And rang again.

Dunphy turned to Watkin. “Let 'em in.”

Watkin walked to the intercom and pressed a button. Then he turned to Dunphy. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

It occurred to Dunphy that this was a question that Watkin might have asked
before
he pressed the buzzer. But he didn't say anything. He just shook his head. The truth was, he didn't know what he was going to do.

“Jack?”

Dunphy turned to her.

“What's going to happen?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don't know. I'll try to talk to them,” he said. Two men were coming up the stairs—he could hear them now—who, if given the chance, would happily kill them. But, of course, they wouldn't get that chance. Dunphy would have them in his sights by the time they realized he was in the room—and not on the way to the library.

But he couldn't just kill them. Not like that. He couldn't just shoot them coming through the door. They were people. Then again . . .

They were also a
safari team.
That was the Agency's term, and while Dunphy had never heard it before, it seemed to suggest that some poor, dumb, dangerous animal was being hunted—and he was it. Bambi with a Glock.

Then again . . .

A knock at the door.
Rap rap rap rap rap!
Like they were repo men, come to get the TV.

Dunphy motioned Clem into the next room, then stepped behind the door and nodded to Watkin. The genealogist took a deep breath, as if he were going onstage, turned the doorknob, and—

Dunphy had the Glock in both hands, pointed at the floor, when the men came into the room as if the building were on fire. He opened his mouth—perhaps to yell
Freeze
—when he saw, first, the clubfoot, and then the guns.

You wouldn't have thought they'd have been so indiscreet, coming in that way when Dunphy wasn't even supposed to be there. Maybe it was just good training—always be prepared, or something like that. But it didn't serve them well. At all.