by Jim Hougan
“I see.” He’d been expecting this, but now that it was a fact, he suddenly felt worse. In fact, he suddenly felt like shit.
A girl brought sandwiches and coffee at eleven, rolling her eyes at the cigarette smoke. Esterhazy announced that “We’ll take a short break now,” and Dunphy nodded, grateful for the coffee.
He did his best to get a pastrami sandwich down, but the meat had a purple hue, and it made his stomach queasy. Pushing the sandwich away, he made a half-assed attempt to engage his interrogators in small talk (“How ’bout them Wizards?”), but neither of them was interested.
“I don’t follow sporting events,” Esterhazy said. Rhinegold shrugged.
“Sports are a waste of time,” Esterhazy added. Rhinegold grunted.
Maybe it was the acoustics.
As they lapsed into silence, Dunphy watched his companions take small plastic bags from their catalog cases, placing them on the table. Each of the Baggies contained at least a dozen tablets and half a dozen capsules, which they spread out in front of them in a sort of pharmacological phalanx.
“Vitamins,” Esterhazy remarked.
“This one’s a nicotine neutralizer,” Rhinegold explained, holding a fat pill between his thumb and index finger. One by one, they swallowed the tablets, pills, caplets, and tabs with tiny sips of coffee.
And then, apparently refreshed, they returned to the subject at hand.
Time did not fly.
“Can we assume that your cover was meticulously maintained?” Esterhazy paused, flipped a page of his legal pad, and looked up.
“Of course.”
“There wouldn’t be anything in your filing cabinets that would identify you as Jack Dunphy, or connect you with this Agency?”
“No. Nothing. The files supported the cover, that’s all.”
“A telephone bill or—”
“I never called home from the office. Not from my apartment, either. If I had to make a call to the States—as Jack Dunphy—I’d use a pay phone. Same with reaching Curry.”
“Did you use a computer?”
“Yeah. An Amstrad.”
“I’m embarrassed to ask this, but, you didn’t leave any sensitive files—memos, reports, anything like that—you didn’t leave anything on the disk?”
“No. To begin with, everything on the disk was encrypted. Strongly encrypted. I used a one-hundred-forty-bit algorithm—”
“PGP?”
Dunphy shook his head. “RSA. And when I left, I wiped it.”
Rhinegold leaned forward, wrinkling his brow. “When you left London, Jack—you didn’t take anything with you? I mean, everything was more or less left as it was?”
Jack a? “I took my attaché case,” Dunphy said. “I had my address book in it. Otherwise, I’m out a lot of clothes—”
“A disposal unit went through your apartment last night. It’s ‘broom-clean.’ You’ll have your clothes and your personal belongings by Friday at the latest.”
Dunphy held his breath, saying nothing.
“What we need to be certain of is that there is nothing in London, at the office or elsewhere, that would connect you to . . . well, to yourself. No—”
“Pas de cartes. Pas de photos. Pas de souvenirs.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rhinegold asked, his voice heavy with a mixture of suspicion and resentment.
“It’s a saying. It means I didn’t leave anything behind.”
“You said you wiped the disk on your computer. What would MI5 find if it examined that disk with the special utilities they have at their disposal?”
“It’s a reformatted disk. It’s a tabula rasa.”
“You can retrieve data from a reformatted disk—even if the data is encrypted,” Esterhazy said. “All the DOS function does is eliminate the addresses. The data are still there, if you know how to find them.”
Dunphy shook his head. “I ran a low-level format, using debug, and then I overwrote everything with DiskWipe. I might as well have passed a permanent magnet over the thing. There’s nothing left.”
For the first time, Esterhazy looked impressed.
“Brain-dead,” Dunphy added.
Rhinegold smiled.
“Why did Curry come to you for the surveillance on Professor Schidlof?”
“You’d have to ask Curry.”
“It wasn’t something you usually did.”
“It wasn’t something I ever did. I didn’t know the first thing about it.”
“And so you hired this man? . . .”
“Tommy Davis. Actually, we were working together already.”
“How so?”
“I used him as a courier. He had good connections in Beirut—which was useful, because I had a pretty lucrative clientele there. Tommy could get in and out, even during the bad old days, no problem. What’s important here, though, is that he had a reputation as a good wireman. And I could trust him. When Curry tasked me with the surveillance, I went to Tommy.”
“And he’s still in London?”
Dunphy shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t think so. I think he left town.”
Rhinegold and Esterhazy fixed him with a stare, but Dunphy was unmoved. If the Agency had taught him anything, it was how to sit quietly or, failing that, to
Deny everything.
Admit nothing.
Make counterallegations.
Finally, Esterhazy broke the silence between them. “Because it’s important,” he said, “that we find him before the Metropolitan Police do.”
Dunphy nodded. “I see,” he said.
Rhinegold’s brow furrowed, and he cleared his throat. “You see, Jack, a listening-device was found on the professor’s telephone line.”
“I know,” Dunphy said. “Jesse mentioned it.”
“And . . . well, the police think it had something to do with the, uhh, incident.”
“Right.”
“Which is absurd, of course.”
“Of course.”
Silence again. Rhinegold drummed a pencil on the table. Esterhazy frowned, stubbed out his cigarette, and shook his head.
“I should think you’d be more helpful,” he said. “Because—well, frankly, this is not such a great thing for you.”
Dunphy looked puzzled.
“Careerwise.”
“Nothing I could do,” Dunphy said. “Nothing I can do.”
“Still—”
“What’s done is done,” Rhinegold said. “The point is that the device connects Professor Schidlof to Mr. Davis, and Mr. Davis connects to you. And so on.”
“And so forth.”
“And so on. It’s hard to say just where it might stop.”
“It’s the kind of thing that could go right to the top,” Esterhazy added.
Dunphy nodded, then tilted his head to the side, raised his eyebrows, and let them fall. A soft and apologetic tsk fell from his mouth. “I see the problem,” he said, “but . . . I don’t know where Davis is. I just don’t. a”
The older man frowned. Shrugging, he changed the subject. “Tell us about the professor.”
Dunphy grunted.
“Why was he under surveillance?”
Dunphy shook his head. “I wasn’t told.”
“But you listened to his telephone conversations. You must have some idea.”
“Nope.”
“Surely—”
“I don’t. And you’re wrong about my listening to his telephone conversations. All I did was sample the tapes we made to make certain there was something on them before I passed them along to Curry. From what I was told, and from what I read, the guy taught at King’s College. I think the paper said he was in the psychology department. Something like that.”
Esterhazy leaned forward. “Tell us about that.”
“About what?”
“About Professor Schidlof’s interest in psychology.”
Dunphy looked from one interrogator to the other. Finally he said, “How the fuck would I know about
that?”
“Well—”
“I’m telling you, all I know about this guy is what I read in the paper.”
“You weren’t curious about the person you were bugging?”
“Curious? About what? A psychology teacher? I don’t think so. The only thing interesting about this guy, as far as I can tell, is, he was butchered.”
“Butchered?” Rhinegold asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why do you use that word?”
“As opposed to what?”
“Killed.”
“Because he wasn’t just ‘killed.’ He was torn apart. Arms, legs—they castrated him. You want my opinion? The cops oughta go down to the grocery store, and ask everyone in the meat department where they were the other night! Because this wasn’t just a killing. It was like . . . like a dissection. a”
Dunphy’s interrogators frowned. “Yes, well . . . I’m sure it was horrible,” Rhinegold said.
Esterhazy looked away, and the room fell silent for a long moment.
Finally, Dunphy asked, “So what’s the connection?”
“Connection?”
“Between the surveillance and the killing.”
“There was no connection,” Esterhazy answered. “Why should there have been a connection?”
“Well, it’s certainly an amazing coincidence, then. I mean, no one says anything sensitive on the telephone anymore! All the surveillance did was establish this guy’s domestic pattern. Did he have a dog, or did he have a cat? If he had a dog, when did he walk it—and where did he walk it? Did he visit the dentist, did he go to a chiropractor? Did he have a mistress?”
“This is not a productive tangent, Mr. Dunphy.” Rhinegold looked upset, but there was no stopping Dunphy, who was talking faster and faster.
“What did he do? Where did he do it? When did he do it? Because—let’s face it—somewhere along the line, somebody found a way to pick this guy up in the middle of London, where they operate a—surgically operate—until he’s a fucking torso a—which they leave a—”
“Mr. Dunphy—”
“—outside a church, for Christ’s sake—”
“Jack—”
“And I’m a a fucking suspect?! Whattaya mean there wasn’t any connection?!”
Dunphy looked wildly at his inquisitors. No one said anything. The seconds ticked by. Finally, Esterhazy cleared his throat, embarrassed.
“Actually,” he said, “you’re not.”
“Not what?”
“A suspect.”
“And how do you figure that?” Dunphy asked.
“Unless and until Mr. Davis is found, you aren’t under suspicion yourself. You’re more like a, uh, prospective point of contact. a”
“Which is why it’s important that we locate Mr. Davis,” Rhinegold explained.
“Exactly,” Esterhazy said. “He may need our help.”
The silence was huge. No one blinked.
Finally, Dunphy turned the palms of his hands toward the lights overhead and let them drop. “Sorry, man. I don’t know where he is.”
Chapter 6
The debriefing was still under way at 7 P.M. a when Rhinegold’s watch made a high, twittering noise, reminding him that he had to be somewhere else.
The debriefers put their notes away, snapped their attaché cases closed, and got to their feet. “I think you ought to eat in your hotel,” Rhinegold said.
“What a good idea!” Esterhazy interjected. “Room service! Talk about relaxing!”
“We’ll get back to this at oh-eight-hundred,” Rhinegold added.
“Do you think we could make it a little later?” Dunphy asked. “Noon would be good.”
Esterhazy and Rhinegold looked at him with empty eyes.
“I need some clothes,” he explained. “A change of socks. The stores don’t open till ten.”
Nothing. Not even a smile.
Dunphy sighed. “Okay. No problem. I’ll wash ’em in the fuckin’ bathtub.”
And he did. He bought a bottle of Woolite at the 7-Eleven, went back to his hotel room, and filled the tub with water. Undressing, he knelt on the bathroom floor and, swearing, washed his sweats and socks and underwear. He wrung out the water with his hands and draped the clothes over a chair in front of the radiator. Then he sat down to watch a movie on TV, ordered a hamburger from room service, and fell asleep wearing a towel.
The debriefing resumed in the morning, with Dunphy in a sweat suit that was still damp from the tub. It went on until dusk, when they broke for a second time, and continued again on Tuesday, covering the same ground.
It was exhausting, annoying, and in the end, it became perfunctory. With the exception of Tommy Davis’s whereabouts, which Dunphy was determined not to give up, he didn’t have any of the answers they wanted. On Tuesday afternoon, Esterhazy leaned back in his chair, raised his eyebrows, and said, “I think that’s about as far as we can go.”
Rhinegold nodded. “I agree. I’d say we’re finito. a”
Together, they got to their feet, putting away their pens and pads, matches and cigarettes. Esterhazy picked up his watch from the table, and strapped it to his wrist.
Relieved that the ordeal was finally over, Dunphy pushed his chair back with a smile and got to his feet.
Rhinegold looked at him blankly as he snapped the locks shut on his attaché case. “Where are you going?” he asked.
Dunphy made a gesture, as if to say, Out.
“You’re not done,” Rhinegold said. “We are.”
Nearly an hour dragged by before the door swung open, and a clubfooted man with oriented eyes walked in, carrying a pair of mismatched attaché cases. Nodding wordlessly to Dunphy, he laid the briefcases on the table, removed his sports jacket, and hung it carefully on the back of a chair. One of the attaché cases was slim, sleek, leather; the other was fat, indestructible, and slag-gray.
Almost ceremoniously, the visitor removed a pair of lurid objects from the American Tourister, placing them on the table in front of Dunphy. The first was a paperback with a primitive drawing on the cover. It showed a wet-looking blonde in shorts and a halter kneeling to scrub the kitchen floor while, a few feet away, a Great Dane leered. The book’s title, Dunphy noticed, was Man’s Best Friend.
The second artifact was a small, gilt-encrusted icon of Christ, eyes rolled toward Heaven from within a crown of blood and thorns. Dunphy looked from one to the other, cocked his head, and snorted at the cheap psychology.
The clubfooted man didn’t blink. He opened the plastic attaché case and pulled a length of wire from the machine inside. Turning toward Dunphy, he leaned on the table with both hands, nodded toward the icon, and whispered, “I know what you did, and I know what you know—you lie to me, motherfucker, and you lie to Him. Now roll up your sleeve.”
The rest of the day, and all of Wednesday, receded into a haze of questions that covered the entirety of Dunphy’s career. It was a pointless exercise, of course. Like every career officer, Dunphy had been trained in ways, if not to beat the polygraph, then at least to muddle its results. If the test was a long one, as this one turned out to be, beating it was an exhausting process, requiring the subject to sustain a rather high level of concentration for hours at a time. Difficult, but not impossible. And quite worthwhile if there was something important to conceal.
The trick was to take advantage of the interval between the question and the answer, an interval that the polygraph examiner deliberately prolonged, the better to measure galvanic responses. To beat the machine, you had to establish a phony baseline for the truth. And the way to do this was to infuse every truthful answer with a measure of stress, making those answers indistinguishable from lies.
Generating stress wasn’t difficult. All you had to do was a little math, something along the lines of fourteen times eleven before answering a question truthfully. And then, when the time came to lie, you lied without thinking, and the results came out more or less the same way. The polygraph examiner woul
d conclude that you’d lied about everything, or else that you’d told the truth. And since the answers to some of the questions were known, the logical conclusion would be that the subject was truthful.
“Is today Wednesday?” the examiner asked, reading the question from a fanfolded computer printout.
Dunphy thought. Sixteen times nine is . . . ninety plus fifty-four: 144. “Yes,” he said. His interrogator put a check next to the question.
“Have you ever been to London?”
Fourteen times twelve is, uhh . . . a hundred-and-forty plus twenty-eight: 168! “Yes.” Another check.
And so it went.
“Are you familiar with the cryptonym MK-IMAGE?”
Twenty-seven times eight: 216. “No,” Dunphy said, making a mental note. His arithmetic was getting better. (But what’s MK-IMAGE a?)
“Did Mr. Davis contact you on the day that he left London?”
Three hundred and forty-one divided by eight is . . . forty-two and—Dunphy’s mind went blank. Forty-two and something. Forty-two and . . . change a. “Yes,” he said. Check.
“And did he tell you where he was going?”
Dunphy let his mind go blank. “No,” he said. Just like that.
Another little check.
And he was home free.
Chapter 7
Dunphy’s old passport, wallet, and clothes were waiting for him in a suitcase at his hotel that evening. So was a small plastic bag that held his toothbrush and razor, a fistful of old receipts, pocket change that had been on his dresser, a Mason Pearson hairbrush, and other miscellany. A black laundry marker had been used to label the bag personal effects, which gave Dunphy a weird sense of déjà vu. This is what it’s like, he thought, this is what happens when you’re dead. They put your toothbrush and pocket change in a Baggie and send it to the next of kin. Exhausted, he sat down on the bed, lay back for a moment, and . . . drifted off.
The telephone’s insistent warble awakened him from a deep sleep, maybe ten hours later. The voice at the other end of the line told him to report immediately to the Central Cover Staff, and to “bring all your documentation with you.”
Dunphy did as he was told. A black officer with graying hair and a checklist asked him to “surrender” the passport in Kerry Thornley’s name, his Irish driver’s license, and any “pocket litter” that he had. After each item was checked off the list, it was dropped into a red metal basket marked burn.