The Magdalene Cipher (42 page)

And by then she wasn't breathing. Gomelez dragged her aboard, and Dunphy clambered onto the deck. At a glance, Dunphy saw that she'd been struck on the head, by the boom or the bow, and that she was bleeding. But there was nothing to be done about that
.

Dropping to her side, he brushed the blood away with his hand and tried to remember how the drowned might be brought back to life. Laying her on her back, he lifted her chin and pushed back on her forehead in an effort to clear the airway through her throat. Then he pinched her nostrils closed with his fingers and, putting his mouth over hers to form a seal, delivered two slow breaths. He could feel her chest rise, and fall back. But there was no other movement. And then it seemed her heart was still
.

So he tried again, and again, alternating rescue breathing with CPR, compressing her chest with the palms of his hands, pumping rhythmically, desperately trying to kick-start her heart. And breathing for her, too, until twenty minutes had passed and Dunphy, exhausted, rolled away, unable to do any more
.

She was gone. And with her, the fulcrum of his world
.

“Let me try,” Gomelez said, and sinking to the deck on his old man's knees, he lowered his face to hers and exhaled, then drew back . . . and again, and again, his long hair mingling with hers and fanning out over her cheeks
.

Dunphy was sitting, stunned with despair, on the smashed cabin top when he heard her cough, and cough again. And then her voice, bewildered, asking, “What happened? Where was I?”

In the morning, Gomelez was gone. His frail body lay in the bunk with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. But there was no breath left in him. With tears streaming down her cheeks, Clementine drew the sheet over the old Merovingian's face
.

It was a moment that all of them had known would come, and they were prepared for it. That the boat was a wreck did not matter
.

They sat for hours in the open sea, a hundred yards offshore, flaunting the
Stencil
a's position during the very time that satellite surveillance was likely to be the most intensive. Then they put in to a nearby cove, and while Clem gathered pine boughs from the shore, Dunphy laid Gomelez out upon the deck and carried out the promise that he'd made
.

With only a hammer and screwdriver to hand, he performed a crude trepanation on the old man's skull, releasing his soul in a Merovingian rite as ancient as the bloodline itself. “Free at last,” Dunphy whispered
.

When Clem returned, they banked the old man's body with branches of pine and soaked it all in gasoline. Then they fashioned a slow fuse, using candle wax and string, and lit it
.

“They'll have seen us by now,” Dunphy said. “The whole coast is under surveillance, so they'll be on their way by now. And when they get here, they'll see what's happened, and they'll know it's all over for them.”

Moving forward, Dunphy raised the little boat's jib and tied it off. Then he set the self-steering gear on a course for Jerusalem and, with Clem by his side, slipped into the water. Together, they swam for shore as the smoke began to rise from the floating funeral pyre behind them. Within a minute or two, they were standing on the beach, watching the boat as the rigging caught fire and the ruined mainsail burst into flames. Even so, it continued sailing, heading out to sea—when, suddenly, a dark shadow swept silently across the beach, and looking up, Dunphy and Clem saw an unmarked black helicopter race silently toward the burning sailboat, only to hover haplessly in the smoke above it
.

“It's over,” Dunphy said, and taking her hand, started walking toward a fishing village down the beach
.

Clementine shook her head. “I don't think it's over,” she said
.

Dunphy looked at her
.

“I think it's just beginning,” she told him
.

He wasn't sure what she meant. But, for a moment—when their eyes locked—he could have sworn he saw something in them that didn't belong there. A reflection, perhaps, of the
Stencil
a's jib, or a trace of blood from the blow she'd suffered the night before. Whatever it was, the mote had a shape, and in the instant he beheld it, he could have sworn that it was neither of the things that he'd imagined, but something else. Something that wasn't there before. Something of Gomelez
.

About the Author

JIM HOUGAN
has won awards for investigative journalism. He is the author of three nonfiction books, is an Alicia Patterson and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, and is the former Washington editor of
Harper's
magazine. He has reported for NPR's “All Things Considered” and has produced documentary films for “Frontline,” “60 Minutes,” A&E, and the Discovery Channel. With his wife, Carolyn, he has co-written a series of books under the pseudonym John Case, including the
New York Times
bestseller
The Genesis Code
. They live in Afton, Virginia.

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Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2000 by James Hougan

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-084626-8

ISBN-10: 0-06-084626-7

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EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062103253