Half under her breath, Julia murmured, “Interesting.” She brought the book back to the living room. Tellier had wiggled himself into a sitting position as he leaned against the chair. She waited until he looked at her before ripping the inscription page out of the book and tucking it into the inside pocket of her leather jacket. Tellier showed no reaction as she did this.
“Why would you have Bouchard beaten to death and hire men to kill me to keep me from finding this book?” she demanded.
Tellier’s eyes went wide as he goggled at her. “By God,” he uttered. “You really have no idea.”
The room grew uncomfortably silent as the two of them engaged in a staring contest. I groaned inwardly, expecting Julia to beat the information out of him, but instead she broke the silence by telling Tellier that she would see if she could discover the answer to her question without his assistance. She warned him that she was only going to give herself twenty minutes to do so, and if she failed she would be back to force it out of him. “It won’t be pleasant if that needs to happen,” she added. She turned on her heels and headed back to Tellier’s den, where she proceeded to thoroughly search through his papers.
“You surprised me by giving that cutthroat twenty minutes,” I said. “After everything he’s done, no one could’ve blamed you if you got rough with him, but I’m glad you’re trying it a different way.”
“It’s a psychological tactic,” she whispered under her breath. “His worrying over these next twenty minutes should soften him up and make him more willing to talk if it comes to that. Hopefully it won’t. I’m assuming you have a recording of everything Tellier has said since we’ve entered his house?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
As she went through Tellier’s papers, I called Julius and gave him a rundown as to what had been happening while making sure to filter out anything that was classified.
“It’s easy to connect most of the dots,” I said. “The book dealer who was killed, Daniel B., called several book collectors looking for this supposedly rare copy, including our bad guy, Mr. T., who ends up having Daniel B. abducted so he can find out who’s looking for the book, which is how he got Julia’s cover identity. I don’t believe he was trying to have your sister killed — at least not at first — but was instead trying to abduct her also, probably so he could find out who she was trying to get the book for. I don’t get it. Why all this hullabaloo over a book that he already had in his possession, and that he knows is worthless?”
“Archie, one of the many detective novels used to build your knowledge base was The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you reexamine this book you’ll find your answer, as well as the reason why your Mr. T. wanted to abduct Julia.”
I saw it immediately then and told Julius what had become obvious to me.
“Very good, Archie.” Julius hesitated briefly before asking about his sister. “No harm has come to her?”
“She’s good. In fact, I think she’s been having fun kicking ass. As you can probably guess, I’ve got some serious code-breaking to do. I’ll call you again when this is all wrapped up.”
I had eighteen minutes and thirty-four seconds before Julia’s twenty-minute deadline with Tellier would be expiring, and while I can do billions of calculations per second, that still wasn’t a lot of time given all the permutations I was going to have to try. As it was, I went at it fast and furiously, so much so that I imagined my central processing heating up enough that steam would’ve poured out of my ears if I’d had them. Still, I might never have solved the code if it weren’t for several esoteric mathematical theorems that allowed me to more efficiently zero in on the answer. With only nine seconds left in the deadline, I told Julia how the inscription in the book was a cipher.
“And a damned hard one to crack, more than hard enough to stymie someone like Tellier, but I’ve cracked it. I’m guessing there’s another book out there with the key for decoding the cipher, and that must be why Tellier went after you — hoping he could get the key from you. It’s pretty easy to guess that Laffont is in possession of the cipher key.”
Softly enough so that Tellier wouldn’t be able to hear her, Julia asked, “Would you be able to encode a message I gave you?”
“Yeah, easy as cake.”
From where Julia was standing, I caught her reflection in a mirror across the room, and she was grinning a Cheshire Cat grin.
“Archie, if you had lips, I’d kiss you.”
An image came immediately to my neuron network of myself as that familiar heavyset man, but this time with Julia kissing me. All at once I felt this dizzying heat within my central processing unit, and I quickly made several adjustments to my programming so I wouldn’t imagine something like that again. After all, she’s my boss’s sister!
I was too distracted to pay close attention when Julia went back to Tellier. I know she told him it was over, and that she’d be providing the police with ample evidence to convict him of Daniel Bouchard’s murder, including a recording of him admitting to the deed. I think she also said something about how he would have to wait until morning before the police would be arriving to arrest him, and that in the meantime he would need to stay tied up. I can’t say for sure. Again I was distracted, and it wasn’t until she left Tellier’s home that I had finished making the necessary changes to my programming and things settled back to normal, although for the rest of the evening I continued to feel an excess heat. I do remember, though, that Julia gagged Tellier and his three hired thugs before she left.
The next morning she brought Jean-Pierre Laffont a copy of Our Mutual Friend inscribed to Marcel Bretel. Late that same night Laffont broke into a building in the heart of the Marais neighborhood of Paris. Shortly afterwards he found Julia waiting for him in the building’s basement. Laffont was a small, soft-looking man, and with his pale complexion, thinning blond hair, and nearly translucent blue eyes, he reminded me of a dour Pillsbury Doughboy, at least if the Doughboy were dressed head-to-toe in black like a cat burglar. For a long moment Laffont stared at Julia in bewilderment. Finally he caught on to what must’ve happened — that Julia was able to break the book’s cipher, even without the key.
“So you already have it,” he said. “That’s fine. You could have saved us both some trouble by bringing it to me earlier, because I will not work for your people unless it is given to me.”
What the it was, neither Julia nor I knew. Breaking the cipher provided directions to what we assumed was an object of some sort, and when Julia had a new forgery done, the encrypted message I came up with was directions that would lead Laffont to this basement. But Julia didn’t bother explaining any of this to him.
“That’s not how this is going to work,” Julia told Laffont. “Let me explain to you about this building. The people you’ve been working for know that this building is used by my agency, although they don’t realize that we know they know. They also know that we watch this building closely, and that we would not allow someone to enter it unless we wanted that person to do so. You were recorded sneaking into this building. If your old bosses were to see that recording, there is nothing you’d be able to tell them to convince them that you haven’t been secretly working for us, and I’m afraid things would not go well for you after that. Do we have an understanding?”