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.”
“Is that because your irises change throughout your life?”
“They change through adolescence, but interestingly enough, the soul identity remains the same.” He reached up and straightened his bowtie. “I believe the rule was to prevent the organization from being run by guardians of children overseers.”
That made sense. “So sixty years in, Psychen Euporos had five recovered overseers and no original ones left. What happens next?”
“Problems,” he said. “We recovered no new overseers for the next forty years.”
“What happened to the brute force method of mystics scouring the empire?”
“The method failed,” he said. “For the next forty years, the only matches made were for non-overseer members.”
“That sounds like now,” I said. “What caused the gap?”
“Our historians believe that one overseer bribed the match committee to reject any overseer match,” he said. “The bad overseer eventually met with a bad accident, and the overseer matches resumed.”
My bet was that Soul Identity’s overseers had as much corruption running through their ranks as medieval Catholic bishops.
“Your overseers sound like politicians,” I said.
“But so much worse.” He ran his fingers through his white hair. “The soul line collections compound our problems. Carriers bring grudges forward far into the future. Battles thought to have ended hundreds of years ago can be re-launched after a new recovery opens old wounds.”
Archie’s voice rose in volume. “Scott, we are down to two overseers. Someone or something is stopping overseer matches. Somehow they are diverting new members and convincing existing members to withdraw their money. We must find them and stop them before it is too late.” He got up and went back to the window and stood staring outside, his forehead resting against the glass.
He turned and looked at me. “I am getting old, Scott,” he said. “I do not want to pass on and leave only Mr. Feret in charge. We need at least two overseers to function properly.”
Archie seemed to be acting like a Supreme Court Justice trying to stay alive until a new administration took over the government. Maybe that explained Brian’s bran muffins and skim milk.
“Don’t you trust Andre Feret?” I asked.
He stared at me for a minute before answering. “I do not,” he said firmly. “We overseers have spent too many centuries making and breaking alliances with each other.” Then he looked at the floor. “But I need to be fair. Mr. Feret is not the problem. As an overseer, whether we politically agree or not, he is loyal to the organization, and he is as concerned as I am with this threat against us.”
I wondered what Andre Feret thought about running Soul Identity alone. I also wondered what could possibly be driving Soul Identity to put its business online, right in the middle of all this turmoil and uncertainty. “What’s the big push to get on the Internet?” I asked. “Don’t you have enough going on?”
He came back and sat down on the couch. “I would prefer to avoid an online presence, as it is a distraction, and it will bring us unnecessary scrutiny,” he said. “But we must compete to stay solvent.”
There was more than one organization like this? “Don’t tell me you have competitors,” I said.
Archie shrugged. “Every century or so, one group or another tries to take away some of our business. They are a nuisance, really. They create a stir, but they fade away after a few years. It is hard for them to beat our depositary.”
I thought about that. The true value of the depositary extended beyond its money: only Soul Identity could connect you to an existing soul line. Competitors could only offer futures.
I thought about how proud Bob was of his soul line’s delivery heritage. “That makes sense,” I said. “You offer your members a past, which puts your way ahead of anybody else.”
“One would think so.” He scowled. “WorldWideSouls seems different. They are seven years old now, yet still they grow.” He leaned forward. “They do everything online, Scott. They tell our members we are out of date and out of touch. We need to get online before more members withdraw their entire collections and shift to them.”
Archie sighed. “At first I ignored WorldWideSouls, but Mr. Feret has since convinced me that they are a real threat and we must have an online presence.”
“But you don’t trust Andre Feret,” I said.
Archie shrugged. “In this case I do. It is in Mr. Feret’s interest, just as it is in mine, to preserve Soul Identity and its assets. When it comes to competitors, we overseers have always stood united.”
I doubted that was true.
Archie and I wrapped
up at noon, and Val and I went out for sushi. I wanted to know more about the match committee. “Can their decisions be disputed?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “The decisions are final.”
“Are they ever made public?”
“No—except for the overseer matches, all decisions are private.”
I told her about the second generation of overseers and how one had corrupted the match committee to prevent new overseers from joining.
“But without access to their decisions, we can’t know if that’s happening now,” she said.
“Maybe there’s an indirect way to infer their actions,” I said. “What kinds of information do you store in your database?”
“We have membership lists, soul line recovery counts, lost soul lists, complaints, and investment balances,” she said.
“Lost soul lists? What are they?”
“When a soul line hasn’t been recovered for a thousand years, it goes onto our lost soul list, and the finder’s fee doubles. We want to recover everybody,” she said.
I nodded. “And the complaints?”
“We store member, employee, recruiter, and soul seeker complaints.”
I thought about Madame Flora and how she was upset about missing out on my neighbor
Berry
’s commission. “I’m guessing the soul seeker complains are mostly about match committee rejections.”
“That’s most of them,” she said. “Are you thinking of trying to correlate their complaints against periods where no overseers matched?”
I nodded.
“I’m not sure if our sample size is large enough,” she said. “We recover overseers only every ten to fifteen years. Finding a correlation is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Or like finding a matching soul identity.” Just a bit of sarcasm from a non-believer.
Val ignored it. “A simple program could do the hard work.” She dipped her chopstick into the soy sauce and drew on her napkin. “We could target the times when the gaps between finding overseers were the biggest, then analyze the anomalous complaints.” She glanced up. “What would make them anomalous?”
“Making a complaint and then withdrawing it, or making a complaint and then disappearing,” I said.
She nodded. A few more scribbles, and she held up the napkin. “Here’s what I’ll do,” she said.
Drops of soy sauce left brown trails down the napkin. “I hope you’ve got a backup,” I said.
Val looked at the napkin. “Oops.” She crumpled it up and tapped her temple. “Don’t worry, it’s all up here.”
Val and I walked from the parking garage toward the elevator. “Which overseer is helping you the most?” I asked.
“Andre—I mean Mr. Feret,” she said. “He’s been just great.”
“Not Archie?”
She stopped and turned to face me. She spoke in a harsh whisper. “Mr. Morgan does everything he can to stop us. It’s been frustrating trying to get anything done when he’s involved.”
“He blocks you?”
“No, it’s more that he slows us down. He sits in our design sessions and makes silly comments about the way things used to be.” She shook her head. “My whole team is frustrated. We’ve been working around him whenever we can.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want you online,” I said.
She shrugged. “He needs to get with the times. Andre says he’s doing what he can to keep him under control, but it’s been difficult to say the least.”
I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy at Val’s first name basis with the mysterious overseer.
I returned to Archie’s office. “Do you have time for a couple more questions?” I asked him.
He was just finishing his own lunch. He wiped his mouth with a napkin, then carefully folded his sandwich wrapper and threw it away. “Of course.”
I sat down in front of him. “Can you make a match from a photograph?”
“Yes, you can. Many soul seekers scour yearbooks and magazines. The match committee requires reader-certified images and identities, though, before they grant membership.”
“What do you do in the case of an injury to the eyes? Will non-certified photographs suffice?”
“Only if there was sufficient proof that the images were truly of the person’s eyes.”
So maybe my neighbor did have a chance to get in.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now can you tell me what the dinner at Ann Blake’s is all about?”
He got up and shut his office door. He bent down and whispered in my ear. “A special meeting with George, Sue, Bob, Elizabeth, Val, you, me, and Ann.” Then he straightened up and said in a normal voice, “Ann always has a dinner on Thursdays for the visiting members. There could be many people there.” He shook his head and negated his last comment.
Archie looked pretty funny doing the espionage thing. “I guess I’ll see you there tonight,” I said. “It would be good to meet some more members.”
I checked the time. Val probably hadn’t gotten any results from her correlation program yet. “I’d like to learn how soul identities are read and matched,” I said. “Can you set me up with somebody this afternoon?”
“I can.” He smiled. “Ann Blake was a recruiter before she moved to the depositary.” He picked up his yellow phone. “I will check on her availability,” he said.
Brian walked me down the hall to Ann’s office. “Are all the bigwigs located here on the third floor?” I asked him.
He nodded. “The depositary chief, the executive overseer, and the three members of the match committee all have offices here on this side. You already know the depositary is on the other side.”
“I heard Andre Feret is coming to town next week. Where is his office?”
“The second floor,” he said. “Mr. Feret isn’t happy about it, though.”
“Is the coffee not as good?” I asked.
It took him a second to realize I was kidding. “The coffee is fine, Mr. Waverly,” he said. “The second floor is the overseer floor, but since Mr. Feret is the only other overseer, he’s alone down there.”
Alone enough to plot against Archie? Or alone enough to get on a first name basis with Val?
We had walked around to the front of the building. Brian knocked on a door and opened it. Ann Blake sat behind her desk, wearing a lime green blouse and green scarf. She stared at her yellow computer monitor and typed on her yellow keyboard.
Brian cleared his throat.
“Yes?” She kept her eyes on her screen.
“Mr. Waverly is here to see you, Ms. Blake.”
“Just a sec, hon.” She clicked her mouse and said, “There—sent.”
“Email?” I asked.
“It’s the bane of my existence.” She extended her hand to me. “Afternoon, Scott.”
Again the strength of her handshake surprised me.
She let go of my hand and pointed to two couches in the corner. “Let’s sit and chat. Brian, can you rustle up some coffee?”
“I’ll ask your assistant to bring it,” Brian said.
“Shucks, Brian, it’s just some coffee.” Ann smiled. “Maybe I should go get it myself?”
Brian held up his hand. “No, no, Ms. Blake. I can do it.”
“Get a move on now,” Ann called. After he left and shut the door, she looked at me. “That boy’s been getting too big for his britches.”
We sat down on the couches and talked about the weather until Brian brought the coffee. Then he left and shut the door.
Ann tilted her head to one side. “So what can I do for you?”
I wanted to get my neighbor
Berry
into the system. But before digging into that, I thought she could expand on the crisis Archie thought Soul Identity was facing.
“Do you know why I’m here?” I asked.
“You’re to evaluate the security of our new online system.”
I nodded. “Anything else?”
Her eyes crinkled as she smiled at me. “I’m sure there’s more. It wouldn’t be Archibald if there wasn’t a hidden agenda.”
I grinned. “Then tell me why I’m really here.”
Her smile faded and her eyes went wide. “Because we’re less than a month from going broke,” she said.
So Archie was telling the truth. I nodded somberly. “But I don’t understand how that can be,” I said.
“You would think that we’d be safe.” She sighed. “We’re not like public banks—we have no complex derivatives, and we do no over-leveraging. We refuse to reduce risk by bundling good and bad assets together. The majority of our investments are safe and conservative.”
“Then why are you threatened with insolvency?” I asked.
“Withdrawals,” she said. “Too many members are emptying their collections—more than we budgeted for.”
“Somehow I thought you operated like a mutual fund,” I said. “Paying people off shouldn’t hurt you that much.”
“There’s two things you’ve gotta understand.” She held up her fingers. “One—we’re on a gold standard, and two—we lock account values at the end of the year.”
“What’s the gold standard?” I asked.
“Since way back in the beginning, members’ account balances have been measured in gold. We live on commission, so we invest the funds to earn enough to cover our administrative costs.”
“That drives you to invest as much as possible.”
“You’re darn tooting it does—otherwise we don’t get any money for ourselves.” She pointed at me. “But that leads me to my second point—the annual account settlement.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“Let’s say you’re an average Soul Identity member,” she said. “You’re in your fifties, married with children in university. You’re over-exposed in the stock market, and you carry a depositary balance of three hundred or so ounces of gold.”
That much gold was worth over a quarter million bucks. “That’s the average account size?” I asked.
“That’s right. Remember, it’s an average,” she said. “Now let’s say you got creamed in this latest economic crisis, so to cover your debts, you decide to cash in your depositary account.”
I nodded. “Sounds good to me. Gold’s gone up since January, hasn’t it?”
“Bingo.” She sighed. “It’s up more than thirty percent. You withdraw your money, and we have to bail out of losing investments to come up with the cash to pay you off.”
“So again, why would that drive you to go broke?”
“Ninety percent of our investments are super long term,” she said. “We can’t touch them for decades. And the rest are down at least fifty percent. Every time a member cashes in their account we’re losing over eighty percent.”
“But surely this has happened before,” I said.
“It has,” she said. “We weathered the gold spike and recession combination in 1980. And even though we underestimated our current economy and have gotten caught with our pants down, it’s really another factor that’s killing us—a competitor is stealing away our members.” She held up her hands and let them fall to her lap. “The money’s almost gone, Scott.”
Now I understood why Archie was panicking, and why he agreed to go online—WorldWideSouls was about to put him out of business.
I nodded. “What can you tell me about WorldWideSouls?”
She sighed. “They’ve got an appeal that we can’t match. Our members are flocking to them, and if we don’t get our butts in gear and get ourselves online, we’re dead.”
I nodded. “I’ll keep digging.”
“Let me know how I can help,” she said.
Time to bring up
Berry
. “I have a different set of questions,” I said. “They’re about reading identities. Archie said you used to be a recruiter.”
“That’s a more pleasant topic.” She smiled. “What do you want to know?”
“I think I understand the basics,” I said. “You take pictures of the irises, calculate the difference, and that’s the identity.”
She nodded. “Today it’s all computer-driven, but when I was actively reading, it was a mighty tiring process.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “How long does it take to learn to read identities?”
“Back in my day, it was a four year apprenticeship.” She shook her head. “Now kids take a two week course. It’s a darn shame.”
“Why is that so bad?”
“You can’t learn how to treat a match candidate with respect in two weeks. We can’t figure out if you’re ethical in two weeks. And nobody sure as heck builds any organizational loyalty in two weeks.”
So Soul Identity was feeling the same technology growing pains as many other industries, where an old guard mentality persists among the experienced workers. They complain that the newer generation barges in without learning the trade, and as the company saves on labor, it loses on quality, customer service, and employee loyalty.
But technology brought more than cost savings. “The accuracy of the readings must have increased,” I said.
She frowned. “How would you measure it? The match committee uses the same computer programs to do their validations.”
“Doesn’t that make them sort of redundant?”
“You wouldn’t know it by talking to them.” She paused for a minute. “I supposed they do serve as a check on the readers.”