The Magdalene Cipher (12 page)

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:

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
.

With the Fairfax County police in the living room, there was nothing (else) that the SRS could do, and no one to stop him from leaving. In all likelihood, Matta probably wasn't even told about Dunphy's escape until the next morning, by which time his car was sitting at the Newark Airport and Dunphy himself was on the Long Dog to Montreal
.

So he was home free. But for how long? It could be a day, or a week, or—

That's it, Dunphy thought. A day or a week. Anything else was a fantasy. In either case, he was going to need money, and a lot of money at that. Being on the run was expensive, and the cash that he had would soon be gone
.

He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the anger that he felt, and gazed out at the void beyond the wing. Darkness above, darkness below, and both of them stirred by his own black mood. There was nothing to be seen, but he knew that, somewhere out there, night and the ocean met to form an invisible horizon. And knew, also, that somewhere out there, men with string ties and dark suits were showing his picture to ticket agents and clerks in stores
.

There was a third thing that he knew, as well, and that was where to get the money that he needed. There was an envelope in his attaché case, stamped with Her Majesty's likeness. It had been there for months, since the day he'd left England, and it represented quite a lot of money, none of which was his
.