Soul Identity Read online

  I held back a grimace. “How about I just have the same juice that Val is drinking?” I asked.

  Sue beamed at me. “Excellent choice. One carrot and tangerine, with a hint of lime, coming up.” She went back through the door.

  I looked at Val. “How do you start the day without caffeine?”

  “I get coffee at work. You met Brian yesterday?”

  I nodded. “Archie’s assistant.”

  “He gets us great Seattle coffee. I drink my vitamins here and my caffeine at the office.” She stood up and stretched. “I have an eight forty-five design meeting, so I guess I’ll see you later on.”

  I remembered Ann invited me to dinner with Bob and Elizabeth that evening. “I have a dinner date this evening at Ann Blake’s house,” I told her.

  Val smiled. “Me too. Eight thirty, right?”

  I nodded. “This time you can ride with me and Bob. He’s going anyway, and he’s got this big limo.”

  “Okay, see you here by eight fifteen.” She flashed me one more smile and headed out.

  Sue came back and handed me the juice, then stood waiting for me to try it. It was refreshing, and I finished it off in a few quick swallows.

  I put the glass down and wiped my mouth. “That was much better than I expected.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “What did you expect?”

  I made a face. “After all that organic talk, I thought it would be full of brewer’s yeast and wheat germ.”

  She smiled.

  “Don’t tell me they were in there.”

  She nodded.

  “Anything else?”

  “Parsley and wheat grass. But don’t worry. It will do you good. George and I have drunk this every morning for the last fifteen years, and we feel great.”

  George walked in. “It’s incredible. Especially if you’re having the ladies over.” He gave me an exaggerated wink. “It gives you extra juice. EJ, we call it.”

  Sue smiled. “Let’s not scare Scott off with our stories, Georgie.” She rubbed his arm, picked up my empty glass, and the two left the room.

  I called Bob from my cell phone while walking to the headquarters. “Tonight we have that dinner date with Ann and Elizabeth,” I said.

  “Yes, sir, I remember. Eight thirty this evening.”

  “Val is also coming, so I said she could ride with us. We leave here at eight fifteen?”

  “Of course, sir.” Bob paused a second. “Would it be all right if Elizabeth comes along?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I hung up as I got to the porch stairs. I went in and saw Elizabeth at her desk. After we said hello, I pointed at the portraits. “You have only two overseers?”

  She nodded. “We were down to one, until Andre Feret came along almost ten years ago.”

  I pointed at his picture. “Feret seems pretty young. He should last a long time.”

  Elizabeth giggled. “I hope so. He’s only thirty. Just a couple years older than me.”

  I looked closer at the portrait. “So he was only twenty when he started?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Awfully young, I remember Mom saying.”

  “Can I see him today?”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “He works from Venice. He’s here every couple of months, though. Just a sec and I’ll tell you when.” She opened a calendar on her computer. “Oh, it’s soon. Mr. Feret will be in town next Thursday and Friday.”

  “Maybe I’ll still be here.” I headed toward the elevator.

  eleven

  James brought me up to the third floor. Brian stepped out of Archie’s office and into the hallway. “Good morning, Mr. Waverly,” he said. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Coffee would be great.” I held up my hind as he walked by. “Brian, how long have you been working here?”

  He stopped and turned to face me. “Ten years,” he said.

  “You came during the dot-com boom?”

  He nodded. “Seattle was getting way too busy for me. Sterling is more my speed.” He smiled. “Hey, how do you know when you’re addicted to coffee?”

  I shook my head.

  “You walk a mile on your treadmill before you notice it’s not plugged in.” He laughed.

  I gave him a polite smile. “Did you make that up?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I get these jokes off the coffee packages in the morning.”

  I patted his arm. “Well, there’s always tomorrow, then.”

  Archie looked up from his desk when I walked in.

  I pointed at the door. “Is Brian for real?”

  He frowned. “Did you just get a coffee joke?”

  I nodded.

  He sighed. “I have suffered through them every morning since I asked him to start showing a softer, less contemptuous side to his co-workers.”

  “Maybe he could work on his material.”

  “Maybe he could.” Archie smiled. “Did you find our guesthouse satisfactory?”

  “It was great,” I said. “A beautiful place.”

  “And did George show you the gadgets?”

  “He did. He said you make world-wide radio broadcasts.”

  He sighed. “I used to do it monthly. But not at all in the past decade.”

  Brian brought in my coffee, and I waited for him to leave the room and close the door. Then I said, “Lots of things seem to have changed in the last ten years.”

  “Nothing important has changed, Scott. We are the same organization that we have always been.”

  That couldn’t be true, or he wouldn’t have called me. “Did your troubles start ten years ago?” I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean by ‘troubles’?”

  “That’s the word George used.” I spent a minute arranging my thoughts. “Your chart yesterday showed your recruits starting dropping off ten years ago,” I said. “Then Brian told me he’s been here for ten years. You just said the broadcasts stopped ten years ago. And George mentioned this morning that it’s been ten years since Andre Feret became an overseer.”

  He closed his eyes for a minute, then looked up at me. “It is true that we went through a series of changes to our systems and policies right around the turn of the century,” he said. “This could be the troubles that George is referring to.”

  I thought I should keep pressing this point. “So you find no link between George’s troubles and your own fears of an attack?” I asked.

  He compressed his lips into a thin line. “Definitely not. George is focusing on appearances, not on substance. He lacks the perspective to understand what is truly happening.”

  I decided to let it go for now, so I nodded.

  Archie stared out the window for a minute, then gave a little shudder and sat down with me around the coffee table.

  “What did Val show you?” he asked.

  A lot more than I was going to admit to him. “Her new online depositary system,” I said. “I saw how members will be able to register, log in, check their accounts, and request withdrawals.”

  He leaned forward. “And what did you think?”

  “It’s good, but you’ve got a gaping hole in your member registration. She needs to fix it before you deploy.”

  He frowned. “What kind of hole?”

  On the face of it, the system was fine. Soul Identity planned to send each member an electronic reader, just like the little yellow one they sent me. The members would upload their iris images to a Web site. Once these images matched appropriate soul lines, they’d choose a password and access their depositary accounts.

  Convenient, yes. But not secure. “Yesterday I mentioned that your system seemed to be designed for honest people,” I said.

  Archie nodded.

  “Same thing here. The new service is convenient for your members. But you don’t really know if the guy at the other end of the Web browser owns the eyes that he’s presenting.”

  I could see he was still confused, so I tried again. “How will you know if the eyes really b
elong to him? Maybe he sent you his mom’s images. Or his neighbor’s. Or a pair he lifted from a model in a magazine. You won’t know—and you can’t know—if you don’t certify him.”

  Archie nodded slowly. “I see the problem—but what do we do about it?”

  “Tighten up the registration process. Have your members provide proof of identity at their local offices. Or, if you trust your delivery people, send them out to do onsite certifications.”

  “And that will close the hole?”

  I shook my head. “It’ll just make it manageable. You’ll still need controls to watch for fraud by the local offices and delivery people.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Our actions are making us appear as an incredibly naïve organization.”

  He was right—Soul Identity’s Internet project looked to me more like it came from a startup than from an ancient organization. Either Val’s team wasn’t working with the existing culture, or the existing culture had gotten lost.

  I looked closely at him. “I’m wondering if your naivety is the cause or the effect of your current problems.”

  He crossed his arms. “There is nothing to wonder. Indeed it is the effect of our problems. If it were the cause, could we have lasted for so many years?”

  No need for me to answer his defensive rhetoric. I waited for him to continue.

  Archie glanced at his watch. “I have another hour—do you have any other questions for me?”

  Usually attackers go after my client’s money, and if I was to catch them, I had to walk the money trail and search for holes. But first I needed to steer the conversation away from opinions and into facts, before Archie got too defensive.

  “Yesterday you told me about Darius introducing the overseers—thirty-five castrated men and bald women,” I said.

  He smiled. “Fortunately for me, we no longer follow those traditions.”

  I had wondered about that.

  “The overseers brought order and attracted many Persian noblemen,” he continued. “The mystics found additional matches, and the role of the soul seeker was established.”

  “Val explained that both recruiters and soul seekers get paid by commission,” I said.

  He nodded. “Paying commissions brings in new members and finds existing soul lines, year after year.”

  “Are all your recruiters mystics?”

  Archie shook his head. “Most members are referred by other satisfied members. Some come through the mystics, and others through doctors and priests.” He frowned. “And I must admit that a few members reach us through unsavory types lurking around nursing homes and hospitals, offering immortality to those about to die.”

  “And how effective are your soul seekers?” I asked.

  Archie pursed his lips. “How is this relevant?”

  Maybe it wasn’t. But I wanted to know—new members were great, but somewhere along the way Soul Identity needed to produce enough matches to keep the excitement going.

  “I’m looking for holes in your money trail,” I said.

  Fortunately he seemed satisfied with my lame explanation. “Recovering soul lines is quite an art,” he said. “Over the years we have gotten quite good at it.”

  “Can you project where a soul will end up in a future life?”

  “Some recruiters believe they can,” he said. “They claim that if they map out the exact time and location of where a soul has been in four carriers, they can plot the trajectory and speed of the soul’s orbit around earth, and even predict its next appearance.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  Archie shrugged. “I have read studies showing the successful prediction and recovery of some soul lines this way. Many of our seekers start their efforts with research into the activities of the soul line carriers.”

  “That’s gotta be tricky, nailing down the exact location of people that lived a long time ago.”

  He smiled. “Especially when you realize that if your time or location is off by just the tiniest bit, the predicted soul’s emergence could vary by hundreds of miles or years.”

  I thought about the reader I had used on the bluefish. “Is this why your electronic readers record the time and GPS coordinates?”

  Archie nodded. “We will have enough data to evaluate the theory in ninety more years.”

  I shook my head. “You guys sure think long term.”

  “We only think long term.” Archie steepled his fingers and rested them against his chin.

  “I suppose that in twenty-six hundred years you’ve accumulated lots of theories and methods of soul seeking,” I said.

  “We have many theories on recruiting.” A sly smile spread over his face. “But by far our most productive method of producing matches is our oldest and simplest.”

  Archie said yesterday that Darius used mystics to match his entire empire. I raised my eyebrows. “As effective as the Persians were?”

  He pointed at me. “Tell me who can get pictures of everybody’s eyes.”

  I shrugged. “Drivers license agencies?”

  “Their images are not detailed enough to match.” He smiled. “Try eye doctors.”

  “You’re in cahoots with the optometrists?”

  He chuckled. “That idea was my biggest contribution to the organization, over thirty years ago.”

  “It’s brilliant,” I said.

  “Thank you. We ended up doubling our membership and our recovery rates.”

  I could imagine. “What percentage of soul lines do you actually recover?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “Do you really need to know this?”

  Of course not. “I’d imagine you’d be advertising this figure,” I said.

  “Seventy-seven percent of all soul lines are recovered within the first three centuries, and ninety-three percent overall.”

  I took a minute to digest this. “You must have one hell of a large organization, Archie.”

  He nodded. “Over two million living members, and at a rough guess, one hundred thousand recruiters and soul seekers.”

  We sat silently for a few minutes while I tried to absorb the sheer size of Soul Identity. The organization probably controlled hundreds of billions of dollars, yet they had found a way to stay in the background of society.

  “Okay,” I said. “I want to know more about the original overseers. What else were they doing?”

  “Putting together our operational guidelines—the ones we still use today. They set up the systems of recruiters and seekers, the depositary, and the delivery organization. They established our annual fees on account balances. And they managed the depositary investments.”

  The depositary investments, whether or not Archie would admit it, must be the prize his attackers sought.

  “Where does the depositary invest?” I asked.

  “In those days we financed the Persian wars. Then when Darius stopped fighting, we purchased tax rights for some of the empire’s territories.”

  “And today?” I asked. “You’re not still financing wars, are you?”

  He stared at me. “That information is not relevant to this discussion.”

  I decided to veer back into history.

  “Empires don’t last forever,” I said. “What happened when Alexander the Great rolled through Persia and ripped it to shreds?”

  “Not a single loss,” he said. “By 321 BC we were already established in Persia and Greece, and we boasted over fifty thousand living members. When Alexander arrived in Babylon, he joined us as a member.”

  “A lucky break for Psychen Euporos.”

  He shrugged. “Not so lucky. By focusing only on tracking soul identities, our organization has remained appealing to both the conquerors and the conquered.”

  “Didn’t Alexander die in Babylon?”

  “He did. Just two years later, after returning from India. A month before he turned thirty-three.”

  “Good thing he had his soul identity captured.”

  “Yes,” he said, missing my sarcasm. “A
nd we know of at least two recoveries to his line since.”

  “Why wouldn’t you know of them all?”

  Archie shook his head. “Except for the overseers, members have always been granted total anonymity, unless they choose to share.”

  “So somebody shared.”

  He smiled. “If you were carrying the same identity as Alexander the Great, what would you do?”

  I saw his point. You may not admit it if your previous carrier was a loser, but who wouldn’t talk about a glamorous past? “What happened once Alexander died?” I asked. “Those must have been turbulent times.”

  He nodded. “One of his generals preserved his body in honey and hauled it, the depositary, and the overseers to Egypt. Alexander went into a crystal coffin and Psychen Euporos went into the Library of Alexandria. Our depositary fit right in.”

  “And the organization was back in Egypt, after three hundred years abroad.” I thought of something. “I remember learning that the library was one of the wonders of the world. But wasn’t it destroyed?”

  “It was, but we left a century before. Our executive overseer then was the Christian historian Origen, and he had run into trouble with the Bishop of Alexandria, so he moved us to Palestine in 231 AD. We remained in Caesarea until we moved to Constantinople in 605.

  “In 1453 the Ottomans reached Constantinople, and we moved to safer grounds in Pozsony, now known as Bratislava. Then in 1732 we came to America and settled in Sterling.” He spread his hands out. “This site has been our home for almost three hundred years.”

  I wanted to get back to the problems they were facing. I asked him, “Has the organization ever been in the situation you find yourselves now?”

  He looked at me for a minute before speaking. “You have to realize that some of these facts are pretty murky. But I will share what I have been told, and what I have pieced together from the archives.”

  I nodded and waited for him to continue.

  “The first overseers in Babylon worked in harmony,” he said. “There were no politics for sixty years—when the original overseers were gone and we had recovered five others.”

  “You had five baby overseers?”

  Archie shook his head. “To become a member or an overseer, you must be at least nineteen years old. This is an original rule.”