The Magdalene Cipher

by Jim Hougan

“I said, the police found a device a.” There was a pause, and Dunphy could tell that Jesse Curry was hyperventilating. “Listen to me, my friend. There are people—policemen—who are trying—even as we speak—to find out whose device a it is. They’re making ‘in-kwy a-ries,’ and I think they have a name. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, just how long do you think it will take MI5 to find that mick son of a bitch of yours, and then to get from him to you? One day? Two?”

  “They won’t find him. He’s already out of the country.”

  “Good. That’s just where I want you to be. Don’t go back to your flat. Just take the first flight out.”

  “How the fuck—I told you, I don’t even have my wallet! I ran to the office.”

  “I’ll have a courier in the Arrivals lounge. Terminal 3, just outside the Nothing-to-Declare. He’ll be holding a cardboard sign.” Curry paused, and Dunphy could hear the wheels spinning in his head. “ ‘Mr. Torbitt.’ Look for him.”

  “Then what?”

  “He’ll have everything you need: passport—”

  “Cash—”

  “—ticket to the States, and a suitcase full of someone else’s clothes. Probably his own.”

  “Why do I want someone else’s clothes?”

  “When was the last time you saw someone cross the Atlantic without a suitcase?”

  “Look, Jesse—”

  Beep-beep-beep. The pay phone wanted another coin.

  “Go home!”

  “Look, I don’t think this is such a great idea!”

  Beep-beep. a “Just do it.”

  “But—”

  Beep-beep. a “I’m outa change!”

  There was a clatter on the other end of the line, a strangled curse, a distant harmonic, and that was it. Jesse Curry was gone.

  Dunphy sat back in his chair, dazed. He took in a lungful of smoke, held it for a long while, and exhaled. Leaning forward, he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stared at the wall.

  Don’t go to your flat. I’ve got a housekeeping team—

  A housekeeping team. What about Clementine? Was she still asleep? Would they cart her out with the laundry? Lunging for the phone, he tapped out his own number and waited. The ringing came in extended, noisome bursts punctuated by long intervals of crackling, dead air. After a minute that seemed like an hour, he hung up, figuring she’d gone to her own place. Should he call her there?

  Dunphy shook his head, muttering to himself that Clementine was too important to handle on the fly. And, anyway, the operation was crashing and there were things that had to be done—now and by him. In the end, he would do his own housekeeping. He’d take care of his own “disposals.”

  With a sigh, he touched the trackball next to the keyboard and clicked on Start. Clicked again on Shut down, and a third time on Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode. Then he leaned over the keyboard and began to peck out the cybernetic equivalent of a lobotomy.

  CD/DOS

  It gave him the same sickening thrill that a skydiver feels as he steps, for the first time, into the air. Here goes, here comes—nothing:

  DEBUG

  G=C800:5

  The computer began to ask a series of questions, which Dunphy answered in a perfunctory way, tapping at the keyboard. After a while, the hard disk began to grind. An age passed as Dunphy smoked, until at long last, the grinding stopped, and the command line blinked:

  FORMAT COMPLETE

  The machine was brain-dead, its cursor blinking dully. Dunphy was perspiring. A year’s work, lost in the ozone.

  And, then, to make certain that it stayed in the ozone, he ran a program called DiskWipe, overwriting every byte on the hard disk with the numeral 1.

  The computer was the main thing he had to deal with, but there were other details, including some letters that were waiting to be sent. Most of the correspondence was trivial, but at least one of the letters was not. Addressed to a client named Roger Blémont, it contained details of a newly opened bank account on Jersey in the Channel Islands. Without the letter, Blémont would not be able to get at the money—which, as it happened, was rather a lot.

  Dunphy thought about that. Making Blémont wait for his money would not be a bad thing. Not necessarily, and probably not at all. They were, after all, ill-gotten gains intended for a bad purpose. Still, he thought, they were Blémont’s ill-gotten gains and—

  He didn’t have time to think about this shit. Not now. The world was falling apart all around him. So he tossed the letters into his attaché case with the vague idea of mailing them from the airport. Removing a battered Filofax from the top drawer of his desk, he dropped it into his attaché case and got to his feet. Then he crossed the room to a scuffed-up filing cabinet that held the detritus of his cover—business correspondence and corporate filings. For the most part, it was paper that he could safely leave behind.

  But there were a few files that Dunphy considered sensitive. One contained pages from the previous year’s appointments book. Another held Tommy Davis’s bills for “investigative services.” A third file was the repository of receipts for “business entertainment,” including his regular meetings with Curry, some lunches with the FBI’s Legat and the DEA’s mission coordinator for the U.K. Scattered among the four drawers of the filing cabinet, the sensitive files were easily and quickly retrievable because they were the only ones with blue labels.

  One by one, he took out the flagged dossiers, making a stack, five or six inches high. This done, he took the pile to the fireplace and, squatting beneath the battered antique mantel, set the files on the floor. As he pulled the phony fire logs out of the way, the possibility occurred to him that no one had put a match to the grate in more than thirty years—not since the Clean Air Act had put an end to the city’s pea-soupers.

  But what the hell. There was a distinct possibility that he would soon be indicted for wiretapping and, perhaps, as an accessory to murder. There was the espionage issue, as well—not to mention money laundering. If, then, he should also get nailed for air pollution, what the fuck?

  Dunphy reached into the chimney, fumbled around until he found a handle, and, straining, yanked open the flue. Gathering the files together, he leaned the manila folders against one another on the grate, creating a sort of tepee, then lighted the structure at its corners. The room brightened. Fire, Dunphy thought, is nature’s way of destroying evidence.

  He warmed his hands for a moment, then rose to his feet. Returning to the desk, he removed its top drawer and set it on the floor. Then he reached inside, felt around, and retrieved a kraft-colored envelope. Unfastening its closures, he extracted a microcassette of used recording tape.

  Tommy had given it to him the day before. It was the last of eleven voice-actuated tapes, the take from a five-week-long electronic surveillance. Dunphy had meant to give the tape to Curry at their next meeting, but now . . . what to do? He could melt the cassette in the fire, send it to Curry in the mail, or take it to Langley and let the Agency decide.

  The decision was a difficult one because the surveillance had been off the books, an out-of-channels operation of the chief of station’s. Dunphy himself hadn’t listened to the tapes, and so had no idea what might be on them, or what might be at stake. And he didn’t want to know. To his way of thinking, he’d been a middleman and nothing more: he’d hired Tommy to wire the professor’s flat, and he had taken the product to Curry twice a week. It was a favor for the chief of station, and that was all.

  Still . . . Jesse Curry did not strike Dunphy as a stand-up guy. Not exactly. In fact, not at all. Indeed, Dunphy thought, surrendering to his paranoia, Curry struck him as the sort of prick who felt most at ease in the company of fall guys.

  Which was not what Mother Dunphy had raised her son to be.

  So Dunphy shoved the tape recording into a Jet-Pak, stapled it closed, and addressed it to himself:

  K. Thornley

  c/o F. Boylan


  The Broken Tiller

  Playa de las Americas

  Tenerife, Islas Canarias

  España

  He slapped a two-pound stamp on the envelope and glanced around the room.

  What Curry didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  Or so, at least, Dunphy theorized.

  Chapter 3

  To reach the airport by train, Dunphy needed exactly one pound fifty. He found it in the bottom drawer of his desk where, for months, he’d been dumping one-, five-, and ten-pence coins. The drawer contained about twenty pounds in change, he figured, but anything more than the exact amount would be less than useless because, of course, his sweatpants didn’t have pockets. For a moment, he considered dumping the coins into his attaché case, but . . . no. The idea was ludicrous.

  He took just what he needed, then, and walked quickly to the Underground station on Liverpool Street. Dressed as he was in battered Nikes and tattered sweats, he felt conspicuously American. And, under the circumstances, very jumpy.

  The train rumbled under and through the city for fifteen minutes and then surfaced with a clatter in the bleak suburbs to the west. A prisoner of his own distraction, he noticed nothing about the ride until, for reasons no one bothered to explain, the train rocked to an unscheduled stop near Hounslow—where it sat on the tracks for eight minutes, creaking and motionless in a soft rain.

  Dunphy felt like a jack-in-the-box, coiled in on himself, ready to go through the roof. Staring through the filthy glass windows at a sodden soccer field, he was half-convinced that the police were walking through the cars, one after another, looking for him. But then the train gave a lurch and started moving again. Minutes later, he was lost in the flux of the Arrivals lounge at Terminal 3.

  He saw the courier from twenty yards away. He was a tall, muscular young man in a cheap black suit and motorcycle boots—a Carnaby Street punk with a pitted complexion and jet-black hair cropped so short it seemed to be a shadow on his scalp. He stood without moving in a crowd of greeters and chauffeurs, just where Curry had said he would be. The way he stood, stock-still, with his eyes flicking from side to side, made Dunphy think of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” where

  The only moving thing

  Was the eye of the blackbird.

  Dunphy came closer. The courier held a small, stenciled sign in front of his chest: MR. TORBITT. a Holding the sign in the way that he did exposed the kid’s wrists, and Dunphy saw that each was dotted with a crude blue line—the work of an amateur tattooist (probably the kid himself). He knew that if he looked closer he’d find the words Cut Here scratched into the skin on each wrist.

  Which is to say that the courier was perfect: London’s Everyboy.

  And that made Dunphy smile. Where in the name of Christ does Curry find them? he wondered. Kids like this. So ordinary as to be invisible.

  “Jesse said you’d have something for me.”

  The young man swung around with a smile, exposing a tangle of gray teeth. So much for the National Health.

  “Ah! The guv’nor himself,” he said. “That’s your kit over there, and there’s this lot, as well.” He handed him a large manila envelope that Dunphy knew contained money, tickets, and a passport.

  “Ta.”

  The young man bounced on the balls of his feet and flashed his gray grin. “Have a nice fucking day,” he said. And then he was gone, his head bobbing through the crowd like an eight ball without spin.

  Opening the envelope, Dunphy checked the ticket for his flight number and glanced at the Departures board. With an hour to kill, he went looking for a newspaper and soon found one. CHELSEA CARNAGE! KING’S COLLEGE PROF SLAIN!

  He could feel his stomach floating lazily up to his chest. The story was front-page, and it was dramatized by a four-column photograph of police and passersby gawking at a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance. The stretcher’s burden was unusually small, about the size of a large dog, and covered by a stained white sheet.

  According to the article, Professor Leo Schidlof had been found at 4 A.M. a by a drunken law student in the Inns of Court. The man’s torso—the word gave Dunphy pause—was lying on a patch of lawn near the Inner Temple.

  Dunphy looked up. He knew the Inner Temple. Indeed, he knew the patch of lawn. The temple was a small, round church in the heart of London’s legal district, not far from Fleet Street. His own solicitor kept offices around the corner, in Middle Temple Lane. Dunphy went past the church once or twice a month on the way to see him.

  It was spooky looking, as most anachronisms are.

  Which should have been enough to set the scene, but Dunphy couldn’t stop himself. He was in denial, and the more he thought about the Inner Temple, the longer he could keep his eyes off the newspaper article.

  The temple was thirteenth century, or thereabouts. They’d built it for the Knights Templar. And the Knights, of course, had had something to do with the Crusades. (Or maybe not.)

  Dunphy paused and thought. That was it. He didn’t know any more. And so he turned back to the article, hoping for another monument to divert him. Instead, he got police sources, “unidentified police sources,” who said that the King’s College professor had been dismembered, apparently in vivo. A strip of skin, about three inches wide, had been flayed from the base of his spine to the nape of his neck. His genitals had then been removed, and his rectum “surgically excised.”

  Dunphy’s eyes skittered from the page. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he thought. What the fuck is that? And where are the poor man’s legs and arms? The story made him woozy. But there wasn’t much else. The police were unable to say how “the torso” had come to repose in the place that it had: the lawn was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence not far from the Thames Embankment.

  And that was that. The article ended with the information that Schidlof was a popular lecturer in the psychology department at King’s College, and that he had been writing a biography of Carl Jung at the time of his death.

  Dunphy tossed the newspaper into a bin and went to join the long queue at the TWA counter. He didn’t want to think about Leo Schidlof. Not yet—and maybe not ever. Schidlof’s death wasn’t his fault, and if Dunphy had anything to say about it, it wouldn’t be any of his business. In any case, he had his own problems. Nudging the suitcase forward with his foot, he opened the manila envelope and took out the passport, intending to memorize its details.

  But to his immense unhappiness, no memorization would be necessary. The passport was in his own name—his real name—which meant that his cover was broken and the operation, his operation, was ended. There was a single stamp on the passport’s first page, admitting one John Edwards Dunphy—Dunphy! for chrissakes—to England for a period not to exceed six months. The stamp was a forgery, of course, and indicated that he’d entered the country only seven days earlier.

  Seeing his cover so casually broken took his breath away. For a little more than a year, he’d lived in London as an Irishman named Kerry Thornley. Other than Jesse Curry, the only person who knew enough to call him by his real first name was Tommy Davis. Tommy was too much a Kerryman to fool about Ireland. Within a week of working with one another, he’d sussed out the fact that his newfound friend and sometime employer, Merry Kerry, was in fact a dodgy American businessman named Jack.

  Meanwhile, Dunphy’s business card identified Thornley as chairman of

  Anglo-Erin Business Services PLC

  Gun House

  Millbank

  London SW 1

  This false identity had covered him like a second skin, keeping him high and dry in the immunity of its folds. Because Thornley was notional, a fiction generated by a computer in the basement of Langley headquarters, Dunphy could not be made to suffer the consequences of Thornley’s actions—which meant that Dunphy, as Thornley, had been free in a way that Dunphy, as Dunphy, could never be.

  Losing his immunity so suddenly left him exposed at the very moment that he felt most in jeopardy. Uncon
sciously, he began to sag into himself, the wisecracking Irishman—Merry Kerry—giving way to the more restrained and worried-looking American, Jack Dunphy.

  It took another twenty minutes to reach the head of the line, and by the time that he did, his feet hurt and his head was pounding. It was just beginning to hit home that, in the space of a single morning, he’d lost nearly everything he cared about, including Clementine.

  Clementine! Jesus Christ, he thought, what about Clem?

  Chapter 4

  Nine hours later, Dunphy signed into the Ambassadors Club on the second floor of the B concourse at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The club was nearly empty. Dropping his suitcase next to a worn leather couch, he grabbed a handful of pretzels, ordered a Bushmills from a wandering waitress, and went into a booth to call the hello-phone at the watch office in Langley.

  The phone rang twice, as it always did, and then a young man’s voice came on the line.

  “Hello.”

  Some things never changed. “This is . . .” He hesitated, as he always did when the rules called for him to use his crypto. It was embarrassing. Grown men, playing with code names. “Oboe,” he finished. “Do you have anything for me?”

  There was silence at the other end, and then, “Yes, sir. I have you down for an eight A.M. a at headquarters.”

  “That’s . . . Monday.”

  “No, sir. This is for tomorrow.”

  Dunphy groaned.

  “I guess someone’s eager to see you.”

  “I just got in,” Dunphy complained. “I don’t have any clothes. I’m jet-lagged. I don’t even have a place to stay.”

  “I can recommend a couple of—”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. Nobody’ll be at the office. They’ll be—” Dunphy fumbled for the word. “They’ll be worshipping. I’ll be worshipping. I’ll be worshipping all day.”

  “It says Sunday, sir. Eight A.M. a Maybe you could make a later service.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, kid.”

  “I just relay the messages, sir.”