The Magdalene Cipher

by Jim Hougan

  Dunphy shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Then you’ll like this one. It’s a classic. A Cabriolet C—like Hitler’s.”

  “Do you know where his house is? The Villa—”

  “Mun-sal-vaesche!” the clerk declared, laughing. Then he became serious. “I’ve never seen the place, but one of the rangers told me the park folds around it—so it’s in the park, but not of a the park, you know? A rich man’s scheme . . .”

  Dunphy nodded. “When do they pick up the mail?” he asked. “Maybe I could talk to them.”

  The clerk shrugged. “Tuesdays and Fridays.”

  “Today?”

  The clerk nodded. “If you look for them this afternoon . . . maybe you’ll see them.”

  There was a small café across the street, with tables and chairs on the terrace. They drank coffee and read the Herald Tribune, keeping one eye on the post office. The air was brisk and sharp, the sun strong, so that when a cloud passed overhead, the temperature seemed to drop about twenty degrees. At noon, they ordered sandwiches and beer, which came in towering pilsner glasses, ringed with frost. At one, Clem went for a walk, leaving Dunphy to work the crossword puzzle in the Herald Tribune. If the Mercedes showed up, he said, he’d dash for their rental car and hit the horn—a very un-Swiss thing to do, but she’d hear it. Only, it didn’t show up.

  Clem returned to the table about half an hour later, bringing a topo map of the park. They spread it out on the table between them and looked for an opening where Gomelez might have his villa, but there was nothing to be seen.

  Then, when the post office was just about to close, Dunphy noticed heads turning in the street, and shot straight up to see an antique Mercedes-Benz driven by a dark-haired man in a black suit and string tie. Grabbing Clem by the wrist, he threw a one-hundred-franc note on the table and ran to the car that they’d rented. It was a block away, and by the time they got back, the Mercedes was already on its way out of town, heading east.

  They followed at a discreet distance, the map in Clementine’s lap. “There aren’t any roads into the park,” she said, “just equestrian trails and paths for hiking. So I don’t know where he thinks he’s going.” A gray and fast-moving river ran beside the road, its waters roaring with gravel.

  They were in a deep glacial valley now, with the sun behind them, and the day’s shadows getting longer. The river began to twist and turn, and so did the road, mirroring the water’s path. A hundred yards ahead, the Mercedes entered a hairpin turn, and Dunphy touched the brakes. Then he followed the other car’s path through the turn, pulling out of it onto a straightaway. A sign on the shoulder announced IL FUORN 8 KM.

  He began to accelerate.

  “Where’s the Mercedes?” Clem asked.

  Dunphy blinked. There was nothing and no one ahead of them. Applying the brakes, he pulled off the road and shut off the engine. “Where did he go?” he asked. It was as if they’d been following a hallucination.

  Clem turned around in her seat and craned her neck. After a moment, she said, “Look,” and pointed back the way they’d come. A gently arched stone bridge, no wider than a car and of uncertain strength, spanned the river just behind the point at which the road came out of the last turn. The bridge was behind a low hill on the passenger’s side of the car, and coming, as they were, from the north, it couldn’t have been seen until they’d passed it—and then in the rearview mirror. To reach the bridge, the Mercedes’s driver would have had to have pulled off the road and backed up. Which, undoubtedly, is what he’d done.

  Dunphy squinted. Next to the bridge was a small sign: PRIVé.

  “It isn’t on the map,” Clem said, pointing to where the bridge should have been. “Everything else is. Fire towers, hiking trails, picnic tables, resting places, ranger huts . . . And bridges. Lots of bridges. But not this one.”

  “And not that road,” Dunphy said, pointing to a dirt track that began on the other side of the bridge and disappeared into the forest. “Wait here,” he said, opening the car door. “I’ll be back—”

  She was already out the other side and putting on her coat. “I’m not waiting anywhere,” she told him. “Certainly not by the side of the road. Not this road.”

  They crossed the bridge together, hand in hand. Knowing he had the Glock made Dunphy more confident, perhaps, than the situation merited—but there was nothing obvious to be afraid of. And the road actually improved as it went deeper and deeper into the forest. After a kilometer or so, the rough surface turned to gravel and, a little farther on, to asphalt. Walking faster now, they saw a light flickering in the distance and headed for it.

  This turned out to be a gas lamp that hung from a post in front of a towering set of wrought-iron gates. Flung open, the gates were at least twenty feet tall and spanned the road from one side to the other. Dunphy squinted at the ironwork, which was covered in moss and lichens.

  VILLA MUNSALVAESCHE

  1483

  Dunphy looked at Clem, whose almond-shaped eyes were round as billiard balls. “You wanta?” he whispered. She nodded, and together they stepped through the gateway. It was dark now and very difficult to see, but there were lights up ahead, glittering in the trees. They made their way along the road for almost half a mile until, quite suddenly, they found themselves standing upon a broad expanse of lawn.

  In the distance, the castlelike Villa Munsalvaesche could be seen, riding the swell of a hill. A sprinkling of stars overhead, and—

  “Look,” Clem said, tugging Dunphy by the sleeve.

  An old man sat in a wheelchair, silhouetted against a black pond that glowed in the moonlight. There was a blanket over his knees, and he was feeding crusts of bread to swans. Though they couldn’t see his face, a mane of white hair hung down to his shoulders.

  “It’s Gomelez,” Dunphy guessed, and took a step toward him—only to freeze at the sound of a low and very authoritative growl. Turning slowly, Dunphy and Clem found themselves face to muzzle with a brace of Rhodesian Ridgebacks. Blond and muscular, the shortest of the two dogs was as tall as Dunphy’s waist—and without knowing how he knew it, Dunphy realized that the dogs had been following them ever since they’d stepped through the gates.

  The old man tossed a handful of bread crumbs at the swans and, without turning, said, “Welcome to the Villa Munsalvaesche, Mr. Dunphy. ‘You can check out any time you like, but you’ll find it hard to leave.’ ”

  Chapter 29

  “You’re an Eagles fan?” Dunphy asked.

  “Just the one song,” Gomelez replied, spraying an orchid with a crystal mister. “It makes a lot of sense to me.”

  They were standing with Clem in the Villa’s conservatory, reporting and fertilizing the old man’s Dendrobium orchids. The flowers had a raspberry-citrus fragrance that was subtle and seductive. Gomelez said that he had been growing them for nearly fifty years.

  “I got into it after the war,” he explained. “One of my hobbies. I have lots of hobbies.”

  Among them, it seemed, was the study of languages, of which he professed (half-jokingly, Dunphy thought) to speak every one. Obviously, this was an exaggeration, but how much of one neither Dunphy nor Clem was in a position to say.

  One of the largest rooms in the Villa was the wood-paneled library, a vaulted great room filled floor to ceiling with books, most of which could be reached only with the help of sliding ladders. Most of the books appeared to have been written in one or another of the European languages, but there were whole sections of the library devoted to more arcane scripts at whose identity Dunphy could only guess: Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, and . . . Euzkadi?

  It was possible, Dunphy thought, that Gomelez was more of a bibliophile than a linguist—but he didn’t think so. He had seen the old man’s mail, and it consisted almost entirely of subscriptions to scientific and medical journals in the native languages of countries as far apart as Denmark and Indonesia.

  By any standard, though, the library was a magnificent ro
om. About thirty meters long, it accommodated displays as well as books. There were antique telescopes and ancient astrolabes, chronometers and violins. Etruscan coins and terra-cotta pottery vied for space with a Honus Wagner baseball card and a collection of Byzantine and Roman oil lamps.

  But it wasn’t the library that seemed to delight Gomelez the most. It was a small workshop reached through an alcove between two standing shelves of books on Japan and Judaica. In the room was a medium-sized desk that supported an array of electronics equipment. On the wall behind the desk was a poster with the words, La vérité est dehors là!

  Gomelez watched with a look of bemused curiosity as Dunphy and Clem took a closer look at the equipment on the desk. Two machines were hooked in tandem to a printer, which even as they watched generated a continuous paper feed on which a penlike instrument described a wave of spikes and oscillations. “What is it?” Dunphy asked, squinting at the lighted dials and knobs.

  “It’s a spectrum analyzer,” Gomelez told him, “hooked up to a digital-to-analog converter. And the printer, of course.”

  “But what’s it for a?” Clem wondered.

  “Well,” the old man replied, “what it’s actually doing a—what it’s doing right now a—is examining radio signals from space, paying particular attention to frequencies in the ‘water hole’ between hydrogen and hydroxyl.”

  “Oh,” Clem said. And after a moment, added, “Why is it doing that a?”

  “Well,” Gomelez said with a chuckle, “it’s doing that because I’m part of an amateur effort to help professional astronomers look for signs of intelligent life in deep space.”

  “You mean—”

  “There’s a radio telescope on the roof. It’s small, but it works.”

  “This interests you?” Dunphy asked.

  Gomelez shrugged. “Not really.”

  Dunphy started to ask another question. “Then why—”

  Gomelez put a finger to his lips. “You’ll understand later.”

  Dunphy hated to stay in other people’s houses (even when they were palaces). He was a hotel guy all the way. But Gomelez had the answers he needed and, although Dunphy pressed his questions (Did you know Dulles and Jung? What was the Society after?), the old man had his own timetable for revelation, and it was clear that he would not be hurried. So Dunphy was patient. As patient as he could be.

  After a week in the Villa Munsalvaesche, they’d come to know Gomelez rather well. The old man—and he was an old man, having just celebrated his ninety-second birthday the week before—was the perfect, gentle host, attentive to his guests’ every need, intelligent and good-natured. He had a way about him, a mixture of gravity and sweetness, that made Dunphy wish that his father had been more like him. As for Clem, she was head-over-heels for the guy, spending each morning with him in the conservatory, then wheeling him outside to feed the swans in the late afternoon.

  Not that Gomelez lived alone. There were a dozen people on staff at the Villa—some on the outside, some in. These included two gardeners and a chauffeur, a nurse and four housekeepers, a secretary who doubled as a valet, two cooks and some seldom-seen security guards who patrolled the estate’s perimeter, riding golf carts.

  “I can’t talk to any of them,” Gomelez said. “They’re idiots.”

  Dunphy scoffed. “They’re worse than idiots,” he said. “They’re slackers. I don’t know where they were the other night, but they weren’t watching the gate. We walked in—on the road—in the moonlight. We could have been the Russian army.”

  “Well, of course you did,” Gomelez exclaimed. “That was the idea.”

  “What do you mean?” Clem asked.

  “They wanted you here. In fact, we both did.”

  “But why?”

  “Because they couldn’t find you. It seems you kept finding them a—first in London, then in Zug. And then, again, in Paris. So I think your friend, Matta, had a brainstorm. And they decided to let the mountain come to Muhammed.”

  “So we’re trapped,” Dunphy said.

  Gomelez shrugged. “There’s never been any violence in the Villa, Mr. Dunphy. There never will be.”

  “And if . . . I mean, when a—we try to leave?” Dunphy asked.

  “They’ll kill you as soon as you step off the grounds.”

  Dunphy thought about it. “Before . . . you said, ‘They wanted you here. In fact, we both did.’ What did you mean?”

  “Ah,” Gomelez said. “Now you’ve hit upon the question. What I meant was that I’m as much a prisoner as you are. And, while I can walk, I can’t walk far. I’m old, and the motorized wheelchair is a great convenience. So, as you can imagine, it would be very hard for me to leave on my own. . . .”

  Dunphy saw immediately what he was saying. “But you’ve given some thought to how a. . . .”

  Gomelez nodded. “I haven’t thought of anything else—not since I was a child of fifty.” Then he sized Dunphy up from head to foot. “How strong is your back?” he asked.

  Dunphy shrugged. “Pretty strong, I guess. Why?”

  “Just wondering.” And, with that, the old man did a sort of wheelie in his chair and beckoned for them to follow. “Let me show you something,” he said, and pressing a button on the wheelchair’s arm, shot forward.

  They passed through the library to the great hall, where a turn-of-the-century elevator awaited them. Dunphy saw that the wrought-iron doors had been forged into a scene recreating the fall of Lucifer and his angels. Dunphy held the doors open for Gomelez and Clem, then stepped inside himself. The doors rattled closed as Gomelez inserted a key in the control panel. Slowly, the elevator began its descent.

  After what seemed a very long time, they arrived in the Villa’s subbasement, where the scene took Dunphy by surprise. He had expected a wine cellar, or perhaps a block of dungeons, but found instead a sleek corridor outside a suite of ultramodern offices. Telephones rang. Keyboards clicked. Copiers hummed. Men and women in dark suits went about their business with only the most furtive glances at Gomelez.

  “It’s like they’re afraid to look at you,” Clem told him.

  Gomelez shrugged. “They think I’m God,” he said. “It makes for a complicated relationship.” Then he wheeled a little way down the corridor, stopped, and nodded at a wall of glass. “Look.”

  Inside the dimly lighted room, men in dark suits sat before a bank of green-glowing monitors, manipulating toggle switches on a brushed-aluminum control panel. On the wall beside them was a map of the surrounding forest, crisscrossed by fiber-optic threads.

  “What are the blue lights?” Clem asked.

  “Trails through the park,” Gomelez replied.

  “And the red one?” Dunphy asked.

  “That’s the perimeter of the Villa’s grounds. It’s constantly monitored by cameras.”

  “Even at night?” Clem asked.

  Gomelez nodded. “They’ve synchronized image intensifiers with thermal-imaging equipment,” he explained. “So they have the best of both worlds. Light from above, light from within.”

  Clem frowned, not understanding.

  “Starlight and body heat,” Dunphy muttered.

  “That’s another way of putting it,” Gomelez agreed.

  “How come you know so much about this stuff?” Dunphy asked.

  “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands,” Gomelez replied. “In fact, I’ve had my whole life on my hands.”

  Rolling a little farther down the corridor, Gomelez gestured over his shoulder for the two of them to follow. After he’d gone about twenty feet, he stopped outside a darkened room whose corridor wall was mostly glass. The glass wall reminded Clem of a hospital’s nursery, and looking through it, she almost expected to see a row of incubators. Instead, there was a single man seated in front of a computer monitor, reading a book. On the monitor, a cartoon character walked in a circle with a beatific smile on his face.

  “Who’s that supposed to be?” Dunphy asked. “Mr. Natural?”

  Gomelez s
hook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s me.” Then he rapped on the window, and the man in the chair looked up. Gomelez waved and smiled. The man dropped his head in a deferential nod, then returned to his book.

  “I don’t get it,” Dunphy said. “What’s the point?”

  Gomelez reached down and lifted the cuff of his right pants leg. “This is the point.” A black strap encircled the old man’s ankle. Attached to the strap was a small plastic box.

  Clem peered at it. “What’s that?”

  Dunphy shook his head in disbelief. “It’s a monitoring bracelet.”

  “Very good!” Gomelez remarked.

  “It sends out a weak radio signal,” Dunphy told her. “The signal’s picked up by a transponder, somewhere on the grounds. The transponder rebroadcasts it to the receiving station. Am I right?”

  Gomelez nodded, obviously impressed. “Absolutely.”

  “So long as he stays in range of the transponder—which is what that guy’s monitoring—everything’s Jake. But once he moves out of range . . .” He turned to Gomelez. “How far can you go?”

  “About a hundred meters from the house—around the pond, if I like.”

  “But why don’t you just take it off?” Clem asked.

  “Because I’d have to cut it off,” Gomelez said, “and then I’d break the circuit. No circuit, no signal. No signal—big trouble.” Suddenly he smiled. “C’mon,” he said, “I’ll show you something else.”

  Steering his wheelchair farther down the corridor, Gomelez came to a stop, then opened the door to another room and flicked on the lights. Dunphy and Clem peered in.

  The room appeared to be a state-of-the-art surgical suite, replete with X-ray and other diagnostic equipment, and a recovery bay with life-support machines. Gomelez snapped off the light and shivered. “I wanted you to see that,” he said.

  That night, they dined off TV trays in the armory and watched a Seinfeld rerun under the protective gaze of the old man’s Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Emina and Zubeida. The dogs followed Gomelez wherever he went, padding silently behind him, in and out of the house. Occasionally, he’d reach out blindly from his wheelchair, and one of the dogs would lope up to him, cocking an ear to be scratched.