by Jim Hougan
The Suit shrugged. “Well, maybe he just overdid things. I mean, the way I understand it, the closer you get to asphyxiation, the more you get your rocks off. But it’s a fine line.” He paused, and shrugged again. “That’s what I’m told.”
Dunphy shook his head. “He wouldn’t have done this,” he said. “He wouldn’t have known how! I mean, it’s not like he watched Oprah or something. This kinda thing was—beyond his ken! a”
The evidence technician shook his head. “You never know,” he said.
“I shared a house with this guy!” Dunphy replied, his voice rising. “After a while, you do know about people. And, anyway, someone who’s into this kinda crap—he doesn’t look for a roommate! Y’know what I mean?”
The Suit cleared his throat. “Maybe you could tell us where you’ve been—” At Dunphy’s glare, the man took a step backward. “Just over the last day or so.”
Dunphy ignored the question. “Who’s the guy out front?” he asked.
“What guy?”
“The one on my fucking lawn! In the car.”
“He means the crippled guy,” the photographer suggested.
The Suit glowered at the photographer, then turned back to Dunphy. “I’ll get back to you on that,” he said. “Let’s just say he’s helping us find out what happened here.” He paused for a moment, and then went on. “So,” he said in a helpful voice, “you were traveling?”
“Fuck you,” Dunphy said. “You’re no cop.”
The Suit bristled. “That’s right,” he shot back. “I’m with the same Agency you are.”
“Not anymore.” Turning on his heel, Dunphy stalked out of the house. The screen door slammed behind him.
“Hey!” the Suit shouted, “where you goin’? I’m not done with you. Hey! You live here!”
Not anymore, Dunphy thought. Jack Dunphy’s gone. Jack Dunphy has moved away.
A cigarette glowed in the gray sedan as Dunphy strode toward his car at the top of the driveway. He tossed Archaeus onto the seat—he’d forgotten the magazine was still in his hand—and got in. Five minutes later, he was on the Beltway, and ten minutes after that, he left it.
And so it went: on again, off again, on again. For an hour and a half, he went through the tedium of countersurveillance, leaving the Beltway in search of lonely roads on which to reverse direction in the dark. He went south, then east, north again, south again, on again, off again—until, finally, at one in the morning, he was satisfied that no one was following him.
Heading north on I-95, he realized for the first rime that, somewhere along the line, he’d started to hyperventilate. His palms were damp, and he felt light-headed, fogged-in one moment, focused the next. This was what it was like to be scared, like a fuse sizzling in your heart.
Meanwhile, he drove, going nowhere in particular, just getting away from the scene of the atrocity. Which was horrible, of course, and frightening, as well, because Dunphy was certain not only that Roscoe had been murdered, but that he, too, would have been killed if he hadn’t been in Kansas.
Two hours later, he pulled into a truck stop near the Delaware Memorial Bridge and placed a call to Murray Fremaux. The phone rang six or seven times, and then Murray’s voice came on the line, saturated with sleep and persecution. “Hulll-lo?”
“Murray—”
“Who is this?”
“Jack.”
“Jack? Jesus Christ—what time is it?!”
“I think it’s, like, three A.M. a”
“Well—”
“Don’t talk. Don’t say anything.”
Dunphy could hear Murray catch his breath. He could hear him focusing.
“I have to go away,” Dunphy said. He paused for a moment, and added, “Roscoe fell down.”
“What?”
“I said, my roommate fell down. a”
“Ohhh . . . ohhh, shit.”
“I just wanted to tell you to be careful. Really careful.”
Murray’s breath quivered on the line. The silence was perfect, digital, pealing.
“This is a really good line,” Dunphy remarked, seemingly apropos of nothing.
“I know,” Murray said. “It’s like you’re in the next room.”
Fuck! Dunphy thought, they’re already bugging him. He slammed the receiver down and jogged back to his car.
He couldn’t erase the Polaroids from his mind. He didn’t want to think about them, but there they were, pasted up on the back of his eyelids. And there was something about one of them, the one with the porno novel, that nagged at him. Man’s Best Friend. Dunphy had seen the book before, but he couldn’t remember where, and that was driving him crazy. It was right on the tip of his tongue, and it was important.
Crossing from Delaware into New Jersey, Dunphy tried not to think about the book. Sometimes, if you just let go, the memories would surface on their own. It was a kind of judo. So he pushed the Polaroid out of his mind and thought about something else that bothered him. What was it that the cop said?
Something about “the crippled guy.” He means the crippled guy. That’s what he’d said. And he’d meant the guy in the gray sedan, the one who’d been smoking.
Suddenly, Dunphy remembered where he’d seen the book before. It belonged to the polygraph examiner, the one with the clubfoot. That was the guy the cop was talking about. That was the guy in the gray sedan.
A couple of months before, the book had been used as a prop to heighten Dunphy’s anxiety, increase the tension in the room. That was the way polygraph examiners worked. They didn’t want a relaxed subject, because relaxation led to ambiguous results. Relaxed subjects made for mushy readouts, so the examiners did everything they could to jack up the tension, the better to highlight the lies.
And sex was always a reliable way to jack up the tension.
Fair enough, Dunphy thought. But now the book was being used for something else. It was being used as evidence of Roscoe’s supposed perversion, and as such, it fed the lie that his death had been a kind of suicide. Or, if not a suicide, a shameful accident that Roscoe’s friends and family would not be much inclined to investigate.
All of which suggested that his friend had been killed by the geeks with the bolos and string ties. Rhinegold and Esterhazy. The Suit. He held that thought for a hundred miles, turning it over and over in his mind, wondering what he was going to do about it. His eyes drifted to and from the rearview mirror, searching for a suspicious car, but there wasn’t anyone. It was just Dunphy and the open road, the passing HoJos, and the occasional billboard that called to him. Like the one outside Metuchen, the one that read:
DON’T GET HIJACKED!
GET LO-JACK!
(WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE!)
Oh, fuck me, he thought. How stupid can you get?
Chapter 15
No wonder there’s no one behind me. They’re sitting in the Communications Center, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee, with their feet on their desks and a map of the East Coast on the wall in front of them. They’re having a great time, watching the transponder’s signal slide north along the Jersey Turnpike, heading for New York. They must have been laughing like crazy a couple of hours ago when he’d tried to shake them, zigzagging on and off the Beltway, trying to lose a nonexistent tail.
Dunphy was furious with himself.
What the fuck was he thinking of? There wasn’t anything exotic about transponders. The FBI used them all the time. And not just against the Russians. There were probably a hundred dips in the city who had transponders hardwired into the rocker panels or some other part of their cars. And not just the dips. Dunphy had been parking his car in G lot, less than a hundred yards from headquarters, for months. During that time, he’d become the centerpiece of an investigation that was obviously being run by psychopaths. How likely was it that his car was wired? About as likely as finding gravity in a mineshaft.
Seeing the sign for Newark Airport, he left the turnpike, thinking: Once the signal becomes stationary—which it’s
about to do—they’ll look for the car. And find it in the airport’s parking lot. Then they’ll canvas each of the airlines, checking the outbound passenger lists on the early morning flights. At some point or other, they’ll start to follow my credit cards in real time, tracking me by the transactions that I make. Finally, whether this week or the next, everything will come together, and we’ll converge. And that will be that.
And that will be the end of that.
Or so, Dunphy thought, Matta and his friends would like to think.
Dunphy pulled into the short-term parking lot and got out, leaving the doors unlocked, the windows down, and the keys in the ignition. It was unlikely that anyone would steal the car, but he had nothing to lose by leaving it there in that way. If he got lucky and someone did steal it, the Agency would continue to follow the transponder’s signal—and Dunphy would have a few more hours, and maybe a few more days.
Grabbing his attaché case and the flight bag that he’d taken to Kansas, Dunphy walked to the bus stop outside the Arrivals terminal. There, he caught a bus into Manhattan, arriving at first light, and debarked at the Port Authority on Forty-second Street. Going inside, he bought a bus ticket for Montreal, paying cash, and then went into the men’s room. There, he stood for a moment at the sink, splashed his face with cold water, and dried his hands with a paper towel. Then he walked outside, tossing his Visa and Mastercard on the tiled floor. Someone would make good use of the plastic—and that would confuse Harry Matta no end. He’s doing what?! He’s buying a stereo?!
There were three hours to kill before the bus left, and Dunphy murdered them one by one in a small café on West Fifty-seventh Street, drinking coffee and reading the Times. At 9 A.M. a, he walked across town to the American Express office and, flashing his Platinum card, cashed a check for five thousand dollars. It was all the cash he had—he wasn’t much of a saver—and he was going to need every penny. Then he went back to the Port Authority and waited for the bus to Montreal.
For a moment, he didn’t know where he was, or what time it was. He lay in the dark with his eyes open, a windowless monad in the deep space of his hotel room, suspended in blackness, seeing nothing. He was blind. He was dead. He was groggy with exhaustion or a surfeit of sleep—one or the other, he couldn’t tell. Something like fear rose in his chest, and fighting against it, he sat up slowly, bringing his left wrist closer to his eyes.
The watch glowed. Eleven, Dunphy thought. It’s eleven o’clock, and I’m in bed. Somewhere. But not at home.
Then he remembered—Brading, Roscoe, Newark, the bus. He was in Montreal, in a small hotel that didn’t take credit cards. A few hours earlier, he’d closed the heavy drapes against the sunset, lay down on the bed, and . . .
Slowly, Dunphy got to his feet and, like Frankenstein, staggered through the dark with his arms in front of him, searching for the windows on the other side of the room. It was a small room, and it took him only three or four steps before he found the velvet curtains. Bunching them in his hands, he yawned and pulled them apart with a yank that, instantly, flooded his brain with sunlight. Reflexively, his eyes slammed shut and he recoiled, vampirelike, swearing at the sun.
It was eleven in the morning, not the night, and he had a lot to do.
With Roscoe’s death, everything had changed. It was as if they’d been kids playing by a stream bank and, seeing a hole, poked it with a stick. The thing that crawled out had not been a garden snake, but something terrible and unexpected—mysterious, deadly, and misshapen. It had put an end to Roscoe, there and then, and now it was slithering toward Dunphy.
Who wanted to kill it. Who had to kill it. But how? Dunphy didn’t know what it was—where it began, or where it ended. Neither did he know what it wanted (other than himself, dead).
What he did know was that there weren’t any answers to be found in Montreal. The answers were in London and Zug, with Schidlof and the Special Registry. But getting to Europe required a passport—and that’s where Canada came in.
His travel documents were in the top drawer of his dresser in McLean. He’d have to replace them. What he wanted, of course, was “a genuine phony,” a real passport with his own picture and someone else’s name. But he didn’t have the contacts for that—not in Canada, at least, and not in the States. The best that he could do on short notice was to get a new passport in his own name, use that document to reach Europe, and then ditch it for something specially made. This meant, of course, that he’d have to show up in person at the American consulate in Montreal, but Dunphy didn’t think that would cause a problem. His name wasn’t in the lookout books that State and Customs used, and it was unlikely that Matta had notified either agency of his sudden interest in a man named Dunphy. Matta would undoubtedly want to handle the situation on his own—in house—and would not involve other agencies unless, and until, the CIA’s own efforts had failed. Which meant that, at the moment, Matta was probably going through passenger lists at Newark Airport and chasing Visa transactions all over New York.
So Dunphy would go to the consulate, where getting a new passport might be more easily accomplished than in the States themselves. In his experience, consular officials abroad tended to be more helpful than their counterparts at home. And why not? An American who’d lost his passport in a foreign country was at least marginally more sympathetic than the same idiot who’d lost his documents in Boston or New York. Even so, if he was going to get a passport that same day, he would have to demonstrate an urgent need to travel—and it wouldn’t hurt if he could also show a certain amount of clout.
He satisfied the first requirement at a travel agency around the corner from his hotel. Paying cash, he bought a ticket to Prague on an Air France flight that left in six hours, connecting through Paris. This done, he crossed the street to Kinko’s Copies, where he sat for passport photos while another part of the shop made up a set of business cards. The cards read:
Jack Dunphy, Producer
CBS News—60 Minutes
555 W. 57th St.
New York, N.Y. 10019
He kept three of the cards in his wallet and tossed the rest in a trash can outside. Then he walked to the American consulate and, going inside, strode up to the Information counter, looking friendly and frantic at the same time.
“Big problem!” he said, eyes wide and out of breath.
“Excuse me?” The clerk was an elegant black woman, all cornrows and polite skepticism.
“This is terrible! I mean, this is a goddamned disaster!”
“What is?”
“My passport!”
“What about it?”
“I lost it!”
The clerk smiled. “We can get you a new one,” she said, pushing a form toward him. “Just fill this out, and—”
“I need it right away.”
The clerk shrugged. “We can expedite it.”
“Great,” Dunphy said. “That’s terrific.”
“But there’s a fifty-dollar fee.”
Dunphy shrugged—“No problem”—and reached for his wallet.
“And if you pick it up yourself,” she said, “you can have the new one in forty-eight hours.”
Dunphy’s smile faded to panic. His jaw sagged as he said, “You don’t understand. I mean, I’m on a flight to Paris in a couple of hours.” He pushed his ticket across the counter, but the clerk didn’t look at it.
“There’s no way,” she said.
“Ohhh, jeez—don’t do this,” Dunphy replied, “I got two camera crews flying in—”
“I’m sorry . . .”
Dunphy pushed his new business card across the counter. “Do you have a media liaison here? Someone I can talk to? Because, the truth is, I got Ed cooling his heels in a dump on Wenceslas Square, and if I don’t get there by morning—this could be a big problem for me.”
“Ed?”
“Ed Bradley.”
The woman glanced at the business card for the first time. Picked it up. Put it down. Looked at him. And back to the
card. Dunphy could see the question in her eyes: Is there a hidden camera? A hidden agenda?
“Let me see what I can do,” she said, sliding off her stool with a crackle of static and a smile as bright as a searchlight.
An hour later, Dunphy had a passport, and enough time on his hands to satisfy his curiosity about something that was nagging at him. Taking a cab to the public library, he went inside and searched the periodicals’ database for articles about the Jaciparaná Indians. It took him half an hour, but he found a reference to the tribe in a newsletter put out by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). The article, which was actually about diamond smuggling in Rondônia, said that the Jaciparaná had left their homeland in 1987, after a sudden and mysterious conversion to Christianity. Most of the Indians were now living in the city of Pôrto Vehlo, where they survived by selling rosary beads carved from teak.
Brading had been telling the truth.
The flight to Paris was uneventful, the plane uncrowded. Dunphy sat on the aisle next to an unoccupied window seat, thinking about what had happened, and about what he was going to do.
He was lucky to be alive, and that wasn’t good. Luck was a sailor who was here today and gone tomorrow. You could never be sure if it was coming or going, moving toward you or pulling away. In the end, it wasn’t a good idea to be lucky, because in the long run, people who were lucky always pressed their luck. Then their luck ran out, like sand in an hourglass—and the next thing you knew, they were unlucky.
Still, it was luck that had saved him—not tradecraft. When the SRS had come banging on the door with their exercise pulleys and porno novels, Dunphy had been out. But Roscoe had been in, and now Roscoe was dead. That was Roscoe’s luck. (To whom the adage unquestionably applied: If he didn’t have bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all.)
Not so with Dunphy. If the cleaning lady had taken the day off, he’d be dead. But she hadn’t. She’d come on time, as she always did, and finding Roscoe, she’d called the police. If it wasn’t for her, Dunphy would have returned to a still and darkened house, a suburban mousetrap crawling with men in black suits and string ties. Instead, he’d come home to squad cars and flashing lights.