The Magdalene Cipher

by Jim Hougan

  “So?”

  “So we sent a Pentecostal preacher in, and he told ’em, ‘Jeeeee-sussss says ya gotta move.’ ”

  “And did they?”

  “ ’Course not—they weren’t Christians. They was savages.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Optical Magick sets up shop down the road, and the next thing ya know, the Paciparaná Indians are lookin’ at a forty-foot-high BVM—”

  “BVM?”

  “Blessed Virgin Mary. I’m talkin’ about a hologram. Like I said, forty-foot-high, hangin’ in the air right over the village—just like that, three nights running. And the moon over her shoulder! Beautiful sight—make ya weep! All blue light and—”

  “So the Indians left.”

  “They walked away on their knees. They’re probably still walkin’.”

  “Optical Magick,” Dunphy muttered.

  “Right. They did Medjugorje, too. Roswell. Tremonton. Gulf Breeze. Hell, they did all the big ones.”

  Dunphy shook his head, as if to clear it.

  “I know,” Brading said. “It’s wild. Not that they’re perfect. No one’s perfect.” He hesitated a moment. “You want to see something?”

  Dunphy shrugged, dazed. “Sure.”

  Brading chuckled. “Be right back,” he said, and wheeled out of the room, obviously excited. A minute later, he rolled back in with a tape cassette in his lap. Crossing to the TV, he popped the cassette in the VCR and slapped a couple of buttons. “Watch this.”

  A test pattern flickered, snapped, and counted backward from ten to one. Suddenly, the pattern gave way to a grainy, black-and-white image of a man in a space suit. Or . . . no. Not a space suit. A surgeon, or someone like a surgeon, wearing a biohazard suit and leaning over an operating table.

  “What’s he doing?” Dunphy asked.

  Brading shook his head. “Just watch,” he said.

  Dunphy could tell the film was old, probably an eight-millimeter transfer to video. The camera was shaky and obviously handheld. The image on the screen went in and out of focus as the cameraman moved around the room, searching for close-ups and a better angle. When it finally found one, Dunphy gasped.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Don’t swear,” Brading said, causing Dunphy to do a double take: he hadn’t heard that since he was twelve.

  Dunphy stared at the television screen. The . . . object a . . . on the table was naked and not quite human. Or maybe it was mostly human, or just badly deformed. Whatever it was, it was dead. And a good thing, too: the guy in the biohazard suit was doing an autopsy.

  Dunphy took a deep breath. The creature on the table was genderless, or so, at least, it seemed. It had two legs, one of which was badly mangled in the region of the right knee, and two arms. Dunphy saw that its left hand was missing, as if it had been torn off in an accident, and that the fingers on the right hand were one too many. Raising his eyes to the creature’s face, he saw that the ears were much too small and that the eyes, black and bottomless, were impossibly large. The mouth, on the other hand, was about the size of a bullet hole and just as round. It did not have lips.

  Slowly, the camera closed in on the surgeon’s hands, the focus sharpening as he extracted a gray mass from the creature’s chest, depositing it in a stainless steel tray. Dunphy didn’t know what the mass was supposed to be—an organ of some kind, but what? No matter. There was something even more interesting to wonder about, something that was missing.

  “Where’s his navel?” Dunphy asked. Brading shook his head, impatient with the question. “He doesn’t have a navel,” Dunphy repeated. “Or breasts.”

  Brading nodded disinterestedly, then punched the air with his finger, gesturing toward the television set. “There,” he said, suddenly excited, “you see it?” He pointed the remote control at the television and froze the frame.

  Dunphy was in a fog. “See what?”

  “What? Hello! What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Dunphy didn’t know what he was talking about. “What’s wrong with it? Everything’s wrong with it! The guy doesn’t have a navel. He doesn’t have tits. He’s got six fingers—”

  Brading laughed. “No, no, no,” he said. “I’m not talking about that! All that’s well and good.” He jabbed a finger at the TV. “I mean the telephone cord—in the background. Look at that.”

  Dunphy did. There was a wall phone in the background, hanging above a tray of surgical instruments and . . . “So what?”

  Brading giggled. “So AT&T didn’t make coiled telephone cords until the early fifties—’51, ’52. And this is supposed to have been shot in ’47. Which is why the whole thing’s just an outtake. Cost a million-five to make it, and then they had to throw it out. All because of a telephone cord! Can you believe it?” Brading laughed, and Dunphy heard himself chuckle in agreement.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  Brading shrugged. “Off the record?” Dunphy nodded. “One of the boys sent it to me.”

  “From Optical Magick?”

  Brading nodded. “Talk about a blooper! There were some noses out of joint like you’d never believe. Important noses, too! Washington noses. And you can see why. I mean, do you have any idea how hard it is to come by Kodak film stock, viable film stock, that could have been used in ’47?”

  “No,” Dunphy said.

  “Well, it’s hard. To say the least.” Brading shut off the TV and looked up at Dunphy. “What were we talking about?”

  It took Dunphy a moment to reply. Finally, he said, “Snippy. I mean, cattle.”

  “Right! I was about to say, the one thing no one believed was the official explanation.”

  Dunphy was momentarily nonplussed, having difficulty shifting from cattle mutilations to the autopsy hoax, and back again. “What explanation?” Dunphy asked. “Explanation for what?”

  “For the mutes, a” Brading explained. “Because natural predators—which is what they tried to call it—just don’t work that way. And besides that, a couple of people saw the helicopters, and that got reported in the papers.”

  Dunphy thought for a moment and asked, “What’d you do with the organs?”

  “Took ’em. I mean, we had surgical technicians. Not doctors, actually—the boys we had were more like vets. Or medics, maybe. I guess animal medics would be the closest to what they were.”

  “But what happened to them?”

  “To what?”

  “To the organs.”

  “I told you, the organs weren’t the point. They were just a by-product a—collateral damage, like the cows. But if you have to know, we incinerated ’em.”

  “So it wasn’t like they were being studied, or anything.”

  “No,” Brading replied. “Of course not. They weren’t being studied. We just took the damn things and burned ’em.” Brading paused. “Except . . .”

  “Except?”

  “A coupla times—we took the sweetbreads and cooked ’em.”

  “Sweetbreads.”

  “Brains. Thymus, actually. I’m a pretty good chef.”

  Dunphy nodded.

  “And they figure that’s how I got CJD—from the sweetbreads. Because brains’re a vector.”

  Dunphy nodded, sitting there in silence, pen poised above his notebook. He wasn’t sure what to write. Finally, he put the pen away, closed the notebook, and said, “I don’t get it.”

  “You mean? . . .”

  “What was the point a?”

  Brading raised his hands in mock surrender. “How do I know? As near as I could tell, the point was to create an effect. Get people thinking. Talking. Scare ’em, maybe. That’s what happened, anyway, and I guess it was pretty successful or I wouldn’t have been doing it for twenty years. I don’t know if you followed it, but cattle mutilations were a big story for a long time.”

  Dunphy nodded. “And that was it? The whole assignment?”

  “When I was with it, that’s what we did. Later, near the end of my hitch, we starte
d making these—I don’t know what you’d call ’em—designs a—in the wheat fields.”

  “What kind of designs?”

  “Geometric. We did some circles, and then we made a few that were—I don’t know—kind of artistic. The Agency called ’em agriglyphs. By then, I was gettin’ pretty sick. Had to retire. But the principle was still the same. We never left any footprints there, either.”

  Dunphy sat in silence for a while, his mind turning like a compass at the South Pole. Finally, he got to his feet. “Well,” he said, “that was very good lemonade.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be any problem with the pension.”

  “Good. I was worried.”

  “It was all—”

  “In the line of duty.”

  “Exactly. I’ll call the GAO in the morning and straighten things out. I don’t think they’ll even contact you.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “But . . .”

  “What?”

  Dunphy nodded toward the black cloth. “Do you mind if I . . .”

  Brading followed Dunphy’s glance and started to object, but shrugged instead. “I don’t see why not. Go ahead.”

  Dunphy walked over to the cloth and lifted it.

  “It’s all classified,” Brading told him, rolling across the room to Dunphy’s side. “The Purple Heart was for my illness—you can read the citation underneath. And the intelligence medal, that was a career award. And—”

  “I’m sorry I had to see this.”

  Brading looked baffled. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “You can’t keep this,” Dunphy said.

  “The hell I can’t!” Brading shot back. “They’re my medals!”

  “I don’t mean the medals. You can keep those. I mean this!” Dunphy removed a small picture frame from the wall, letting the black cloth drop back across the medals. The frame contained a laminated security pass, about two and a half by four inches, replete with a beaded chain for wearing around the neck. In the upper left-hand corner of the pass was a smudgy hologram and, in the lower right, a thumbprint. A head shot of Brading was in the center of the pass and, under it, the words:

  MK-IMAGE

  Special Access Program

  E. Brading

  *ANDROMEDA*

  “I’m sorry,” Dunphy said, “but—”

  “Oh, jeez—”

  “I’m gonna have to take the ID back to Washington.”

  Brading looked stricken. “It’s a souvenir!”

  “I know,” Dunphy sighed, his voice larded with sympathy and regret. “But . . . that’s the point, isn’t it? We can’t have souvenirs like this hanging around. I mean, think about it. What if there were a burglary? What if it fell into the Wrong Hands?”

  Brading snorted.

  Dunphy put the ID in his attaché case, frame and all, and snapped it shut. “Well,” he said, putting on a happy face, “thanks for the lemonade.” He clapped Brading on the shoulder. “Now, I think it’s time for me to get outa Dodge.”

  The two men chuckled for a moment, then Brading turned serious as Dunphy started toward the door.

  “Shouldn’t we pray first?”

  Dunphy thought he’d misheard. “What?”

  “I asked if you wanted to pray first.”

  Dunphy gazed at the older man for what seemed a long while, waiting for him to smile. Finally, he said, “No . . . thanks. I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  Brading looked disappointed—and not just disappointed. There was something else: puzzlement, maybe, or suspicion. Something like that.

  Chapter 14

  Dunphy’s mood followed the same trajectory as the 727 he was flying in. It rose precipitously on takeoff (Optical Magick! Bim-bam-boom!), leveled off somewhere over Indiana (Near the end of my hitch, we started making these designs . . .), and then began its descent into Washington. (They did Medjugorje, too.) By the time he landed, Dunphy was in a very black mood.

  That was the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard, he thought. (Tremonton. Gulf Breeze. All the big ones.) And he’d fallen for it! Sitting there in the middle of Kansas, listening to Brading, Jack Dunphy had believed every word the man had spoken. And now, as he walked out of the terminal, he mocked his credulousness: a forty-foot Madonna, floating above the jungle canopy—well, why not? Sounds reasonable to me!

  Dunphy walked toward the short-term parking lot, muttering to himself about how stupid he’d been. There wasn’t anything left for him to do. The Brading business was dead in the water—a hoax. Obviously, the Security Research Staff had seen through his little scam, organized a surveillance, and fed him a barium meal to find out who was helping him. Somehow, they’d known that he and Murray had talked, and knowing that, they’d seeded the Pentagon’s records with a single reference to the 143rd, guessing (correctly) that Fremaux would find it and tell Dunphy, and that Dunphy would then catch the first plane to Kansas. Where the SRS would have an actor waiting for him with a cock-and-bull story so crazy that, if Dunphy should ever try to check it out, he’d look like a lunatic. Chasing UFOs and cattle mutilations.

  That was it, of course, Dunphy thought, taking the elevator to the top floor of the parking garage. Matta wanted to put him in a crazy suit so that, if he stumbled onto anything that actually had to do with Schidlof’s murder, no one would listen to him. They’d think he was nuts. Well, Dunphy told himself, that’s not going to happen. I’m not nuts. I’m—what?

  Paranoid. Completely, and totally, paranoid.

  He found his car in the space where he’d left it, got in and started the engine. You’ve gotta stop this shit, he told himself. This shit is trouble. And nothin’ else.

  Anyway, Dunphy thought, the whole thing was out of his hands. He and Roscoe were persona non grata at the Agency, and their access to classified information was nil. The whole scheme had blown up in their faces, and it was just a matter of time until each of them were fired—if, in fact, they had not already been.

  So that was that. In effect, Dunphy’s curiosity had been mooted by events. While he still wondered why his life had come unhinged, the reality was that it had, and there was nothing that he could do about it. Not anymore. It was time to get on with things. It was time to roll with it.

  Still, he thought, maneuvering the car out of the parking garage and into the airport’s traffic, it couldn’t have been a barium meal—not really. Because the only people Dunphy could count on were Roscoe and Murray, and if the Agency already knew about them, why would it send him to Kansas?

  And Brading was convincing. It wasn’t as if he’d stumbled around, looking for answers. That stuff about the helicopters making snow—Brading hadn’t made that up. Not on the spot, anyway. And what about the props? If Brading was put up to it, where’d they get the props? The picture of Rhinegold and Brading in the wheat field (Ha Ha Ha!!!), and the MK-IMAGE ID. Harry Matta wouldn’t have let him walk away with something like that—even if it was a phony. And it had to be a phony, because otherwise . . .

  Otherwise, it was too weird.

  Twenty minutes later, Dunphy turned off the G. W. Parkway onto Dolley Madison Boulevard. He cruised past the entrance to CIA headquarters and wound his way through McLean to Belleview Lane. That’s when he saw the lights flickering in the trees, and his stomach tightened. Red lights, blue lights—police lights.

  Trouble lights.

  And then, as he drew closer to the house, he heard the crackle of radios, and something sank in his chest. There were a pair of squad cars in the driveway, and an ambulance near the back door. On the front lawn, a man sat in the front seat of a gray sedan, smoking, his features obscured by the night. Dunphy killed the engine at the top of the driveway, slammed the gear shift into Park, got out, and ran toward the house, ignoring a policeman’s shout.

  He nearly tore the screen door off its hinges as he burst into the living room, where an evidence technician was comparing notes with a police photographer. “Where’s Roscoe? Where the fuck—
”

  A tall man in a cheap black suit came out of the kitchen, looking like Ichabod Crane. He looked about six foot four and 150, white shirt and string tie, with bags like bruises under his eyes. A laminated ID hung from his neck by a beaded chain. Dunphy stepped toward him, trying to read the ID.

  “Who are you?” the Suit asked.

  “I live here,” Dunphy said. “Now where the fuck is Roscoe?” Dunphy saw the words Special Access, and then the Suit tucked the ID inside his jacket.

  The police looked at each other, embarrassed. One of them coughed, and as Dunphy turned toward him, he saw the technician’s eyes drift toward the coffee table. A half-dozen Polaroids were spread out to dry next to Archaeus. Dunphy walked over to the pictures, picked one up, and stared.

  “The cleaning lady found him,” said the cop.

  The Suit nodded. “They took him out an hour ago,” he said. And then, with what sounded like genuine regret, he added, “You must be Dunphy.”

  Dunphy didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. Because the photo took his breath away. It showed a nude man in a pair of fishnet stockings, hanging by the neck from a set of exercise pulleys in what was definitely Roscoe’s closet. The man’s head—Roscoe’s head—was covered with a clear plastic bag, fastened by what looked like a bungee cord. His eyes bulged. His tongue lolled. A thread of spittle hung from his chin. On the floor beneath his feet were an overturned stepstool, a paperback, and a scattering of magazines.

  “What the fuck!” Dunphy whispered, and dropped the picture. He picked up another. It was a close-up of one of the magazines, a porno rag called Blue Boy, lying beneath Roscoe’s dangling feet. Beside it was a paperback: Man’s Best Friend.

  “Autocratic suicide.” This, from the Suit.

  Dunphy didn’t know what to do. He put the snapshot back on the table and picked up Archaeus. He opened it. He closed it. He sat down. He got up. He took three steps this way, and three steps that. Finally, he said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “Roscoe didn’t commit suicide. Not like that.”