The Magdalene Cipher (23 page)

“You must've seen it in a file or something, because I haven't been here in years.”

She looked doubtful. “Perhaps.”

“Anyway, when does the
Direktor
get in?” Dunphy asked, eager to change the subject
.

“Usually, not until eight. Today, not at all.”

The reply caught Dunphy by surprise, and for a moment, he was off balance. He'd been counting on the guy being at work. “Not at all?” he asked
.

“No.”

“Well, why not? Where is he?”

“In Washington—there's been a flap. Now, if you don't mind—”

Dunphy made a guess. “You mean, the Schidlof business.”

The woman's demeanor softened with surprise. “Yes,” she said, settling back in her seat. “There was a shooting—”

Dunphy nodded impatiently, as if he'd heard it all before. “In London,” he said. Run with it, he told himself. This could be good
.

She gave a little nod, but was obviously impressed by how much he knew
.

“That's why I'm here,” Dunphy told her. “Poor Jesse.”

“They say he'll be all right.”

“All right, maybe. Good as new, I doubt.” He gave her a thoughtful look. “I'm going to need some office space,” he said, “for a couple of days—maybe a week. And an open line to Harry Matta's office in Langley.”

Her eyes rounded at the mention of Matta's name. “Well,” she said, looking uncertain
.

“Well what?”

“Well, I don't know.”

“About what?”

“This!”

“You're the
Direktor
a's secretary, aren't you?”

“Actually,” she corrected, “I'm his executive assistant.”

“Even better.” He peered at the nameplate on her desk. “It's Hilda, right?”

She gave him the tiniest of nods, suspicious of his familiarity
.

“Okay, Hilda, so what I'm suggesting is—we ought to get started.”

“But I can't give you an office. For this, I would need permission. Perhaps the deputy
Direktor
a . . .” She reached for the phone
.

Dunphy rolled his eyes, then cocked his head, and asked, “Do I look like the town crier? Do I look like someone's advance man?”

The questions confused her for a moment. Then she shook her head. “No”

“Good. Because if it comes down to it, let's just call the Man.”

“Who?”

“The
Direktor
.
You know where he's staying, right?”

“Of course, but—”

“What's the number?” He reached for the phone, but she covered the receiver with her hand
.

“We can't call him now. It's one-thirty there.”

“Well, if you don't want to wake up your boss, call Langley,” Dunphy insisted. “Tell them to patch you through to Matta. Let's get
him
outa bed!”

“But what would I say?” she asked, her eyes widening with panic
.

“Tell him you want to know if I can have an office. At two in the morning, I'm sure he'll be very impressed.”

She looked puzzled. “With what?”

“Your sense of initiative.”

“Oh,” she said, “
now
we have sarcasm.”

Dunphy smiled apologetically. “Sorry . . . I'm under a lot of pressure.” He paused and leaned toward her with a sympathetic and confidential air. “Look,” he said, “if you'll hook me up with an office, we can talk to them this afternoon—first thing. Your boss, my boss, whoever you want. And they'll confirm what I've said. You've seen my pass. I wouldn't be here if I didn't belong.” He could see the wheels turning in her mind. Matta . . . Curry . . . the pass
.

“Okay!” she said, raising her hand to shut him up. “There's a room on the fourth floor—”

“The fourth floor will be fine.”

“I'll call the
Direktor
at one o'clock—he's an early riser. Then, if he thinks it is necessary, we can contact
Herr
Matta.”

“Fine,” Dunphy said. “If you'll just point the way, I'll get started.”

She picked up the phone. “Security will show you where to go.”

“One other thing.”

“Yes?”

“I'm gonna need someone to hump files for me.”

She looked blank. “Files?
Hump
a?”

“Absolutely. Why do you think I need the office?”

“I don't know. Why
do
you?”

“For damage control.”

“What?”

“Damage control.” He peered at her closely. “You know what happened to Curry, right?”

“Of course. There was a cable.”

“I know,” he said. “I wrote it. Anyway, the guy who shot him—”

“Dunphy.”

He looked impressed. He
was
impressed. “Right
.
Jack
Dunphy—who, incidentally, is one mean son of a bitch. Pardon my French.”

She shrugged. “I live among men,” she said. “I'm used to it.”

“Understood. Anyway, Dunphy worked for the Agency—you knew that, right?”

“Of course.”

“And you know what he did—what his job was?”

“No.”

Dunphy frowned. “I thought I put it in the cable . . .”

“I don't think so.”

“Well, anyway, he was an FOIA guy.” Seeing her puzzled look, he elaborated. “Part of the Freedom of Information staff.”

“Oh, yes?” She looked bemused—and relieved. “Is
that
all?”

“Yes. That's all. And that's why I'm doing damage control.” She looked at him in a way that told him she didn't understand
.

“Harry thinks there's been a breach,” he explained
.

“A breach?”

“In the Andromeda files. The son of a bitch went through 'em like he was surfin' the Net.”

The information didn't seem to register. And then, after a moment or two, she swayed, ever so slightly in her chair. For a second, Dunphy thought she was about to lose her balance. But she didn't. She just sat there, getting whiter and whiter until, in the end, she lurched to her feet and said, “Let's get you set up right away, shall we?”

Chapter 22

The first of the files didn't arrive for almost an hour, by which time Dunphy was nearly paralyzed with paranoia. Though he knew they wouldn't call Matta at two in the morning, it occurred to him for the first time that the Special Registry might have a copy of Brading's personnel file. After all, it was they who'd issued the pass. If they did, then the woman he'd spoken to, Hilda, might be suspicious enough to pull it—in which case, she'd see in an instant that Dunphy was impersonating a much older man. And then they'd come for him
.

The room he'd been given resembled a cell without windows. It measured three strides by three and was barely large enough to contain the desk and chair in which Dunphy now sat. His overcoat hung from a coatrack next to the door—and that was that. There was a telephone, but no books, so that he had nothing to do until his “assistant”—a bull-necked security guard named Dieter—barged in with half a dozen kraft-colored folders marked
Schidlof
.
Dunphy checked his watch. It was 8:25
A.M
.

“You must sign for them,” Dieter said, handing Dunphy a clipboard
.

“While I'm reading these,” Dunphy said, scrawling Braden's name on the Document Control List, “I'd like you to pull whatever you've got on a guy named Dunphy—D-U-N-P-H-Y—first name, Jack. Got it?”

“Sure.”

“And I'll want to see the Optical Magick files, too, and anything you can get me on the . . . uhhh . . . Bovine Census.”

Dieter frowned
.

“What's wrong?” Dunphy asked
.

“We have pushcarts,” Dieter said, “but the Census—this is impossible. I'd need a truck.”

Dunphy tried to conceal his mistake. “Just the last two months. New Mexico and Arizona.”

This seemed to satisfy his new assistant. When the door closed, Dunphy sat back with a sigh of relief, then turned to the files with the relish and alarm of a twelve-year-old boy who's just stumbled upon his parents' pornography stash
.

His first impression was that the file was atypical of other dossiers that he'd seen at the Agency. Usually, if a person was of “operational interest” to the CIA, a 201 file would be opened and interviews laid on. But there were no interviews in Schidlof's dossier—just data. His telephone records and credit-card receipts were in separate folders, as were copies of the pages in his passport, showing most of the places he'd traveled during the past ten years. There were some black-and-white contact sheets whose images seemed to have been taken from a car with the help of a telephoto lens. Looking at the pictures, Dunphy recognized the professor's house (he'd helped Tommy Davis case the place) and Schidlof, too. There were pictures of the professor—leaving for work, getting his mail, coming home, and so on. Looks healthy enough, Dunphy thought, for someone who's about to become a torso
.

And that was the point, really. The Schidlof dossier was not an investigative file. Whoever put it together hadn't been interested in Schidlof, the man, as much as they were in Schidlof, the Problem. So it didn't matter, really, who the professor's friends were, or what his neighbors thought of him. All that was needed was the old boy's address and a good likeness
.

So that, when the time came, they'd whack the right guy
.

Which meant that Schidlof had pissed somebody off (Curry or Matta). Or worse—he'd scared them. And when he'd done that, the question had gone out, “Who
is
this son of a bitch?” And bang! the answer came back in the form of the dossier at hand: He's this guy, it said. This is what he looks like. This is where he lives
.

Most of the information seemed to have been collected in a single sweep. And while Dunphy couldn't be sure when the sweep had been initiated, it looked as if it was last September. Riffling through a folder that bulged with copies of credit-card receipts, and a second folder that held Schidlof's telephone toll records, Dunphy could see that there were no entries after September 9. Which meant that Schidlof had come to Matta's attention at about that time, some six or seven months ago. And this is what Dunphy learned:

Leon Aaron Schidlof, (M.A., Oxon.; Dip. Anal. Psy., Zürich) was a British citizen, born October 14, 1942, in the city of Hull. He was a graduate of Oxford's New College (1963), and trained as an analyst at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich (1964–7). A contributor to numerous anthologies and professional journals, Schidlof was the author of two books:
A Dictionary of Symbols
(New York, 1979), and a book on Jungian psychology
,
Die Weiblichen in der Jungian Psychologie
(Heidelberg, 1986). After twenty years as an analyst in London, he had taken on the responsibility of teaching a seminar at King's College in the Strand. Never married, his nearest relative was an older sister, a resident of Tunbridge Wells. Schidlof's own address (which Dunphy knew by heart) followed
.

Pretty innocuous, Dunphy thought. You wouldn't think a guy like him would hit the fan
.

The second folder held Schidlof's credit-card receipts and telephone records. Dunphy didn't know what to make of them, really, and wondered if Matta really cared. In all likelihood, the data were collected because it was easy to get them, and doing so made the gumshoes look as if they knew what they were doing. Still, a couple of things stood out. Like the fact that there were rather a lot of trips on Swissair. Two in June, then one each in July, August, and September. What was
that
all about?

The Swissair charges didn't say where he'd flown to, but they didn't have to: the credit-card receipts included hotel charges for the same months. And the charges were always the same: Hotel Florida, Seefeldstrasse 63, Zürich
.

Dunphy knew the place. It was a clean, midrange hotel, a few blocks east of Bellevueplatz, which was a mixing bowl for the city's trams. It was a decent enough place, if you were on a budget, and exactly the kind of hotel where you'd expect an academic to stay while doing research in a country as expensive as Switzerland
.

But Swissair wasn't the only airline Schidlof flew. His Visa bill listed a £371 expenditure with British Airways, incurred September 5. Other charges documented Schidlof's visit to New York on the sixth and seventh of that same month. He'd stayed at the Washington Square Hotel and eaten at a couple of Indian joints on Third Avenue
.

So what
a?

Dunphy reexamined the earlier charges. The professor's last visit to Zürich had occurred on September 3. The New York trip followed about three days later—and soon after that, the old boy was put under telephone surveillance. Which suggested (but certainly didn't prove) that the three events were related: the trip to Zürich, the visit to New York, and the bugged phones
.

What was he doing in New York? Dunphy asked himself. And the reply came back: What was he doing in Zürich? And then, in frustration: What was he doing anywhere?

The third folder contained Schidlof's bank statements, canceled checks, and . . . pay dirt. On September 4, while in Zürich, the professor had written a check for two thousand pounds to someone named Margaritha Vogelei. Three days later, while visiting New York, he'd written a smaller check to an enterprise known as Gil Beckley Associates
.

The name was familiar. Dunphy had seen it before, or heard it somewhere—on television, or in the movies. Beckley was an actor, or something. No. Not an actor. But . . 
.

Dunphy looked at the check. It was in the amount of five hundred pounds and had taken almost two months to clear from Schidlof's account at the National Westminster, in London, to Beckley's account at Citibank, New York. At the bottom of the check, on a line labeled
Memo
,
was a notation in Schidlof's handwriting:
Retainer
,
it said—but not for what
.

Then Dunphy remembered
.

Handwriting
.
Beckley wasn't an actor, but he'd been on television a lot. The guy was a graphologist—or as he liked to say, a “documents examiner.” He'd put in his time at the FBI, retired, and gone into private practice. He was an expert witness, and as Dunphy recalled, he had a keen sense of his own importance. Dunphy had seen him on an A&E show—
Investigative Reports
.
He'd been hired to authenticate love letters purportedly written by J. Edgar Hoover to an agent named Purvis. As Dunphy recalled, Beckley had trashed the letters, calling them “clumsy forgeries.”

It was beginning to get interesting. Schidlof goes to Zürich and pays this Vogelei woman a couple of grand—
for something
.
Then he flies to New York and shells out another five hundred pounds to retain a graphologist. After that, his phones are bugged—and then he's dead. So what happened? Dunphy asked himself
.

Well, duh . . . he found some
documents
in Zürich
.

Okay . . . but why authenticate them in the States? Why not in London?

Because they're American documents, Dunphy supposed, or the writer was. But who?

Dunphy sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. He was trying to remember when Curry had called, saying he needed a favor. Sometime in the fall. September. October. Something like that. He didn't remember, really. But around the time that Schidlof had come back from New York
.

There was a folder with copies of Schidlof's
Who's Who
entries, his lease and medical records—none of which were of interest to Dunphy. Finally, there was a slim folder that contained two cables. The first read:

REF: ANDROMEDA

The reply came back from Jesse Curry the following afternoon. Stripped of its headers, it read:

There were no other cables, though there must have been other communications. If Matta hadn't told him to do it, Curry wouldn't have collected the information that he had, and he wouldn't have tasked Dunphy to organize coverage of the professor's phones. Which meant . . . what? Just that Matta was minimizing the paper trail—which was prudent. And so was the decision to use someone like Dunphy, working under nonofficial cover, as a cutout to someone like Tommy Davis. Matta
could
have requested coverage from MI5, but this way, deniability was absolute. In the event of unwanted publicity, it would appear that Schidlof had been bugged by an Irish criminal, who was in turn working for a man who didn't exist
.

The next-to-last folder sent a surge through his heart. It contained a small manila envelope with a circular tab on the flap. A length of very thin string was stapled to the envelope itself and wrapped around the tab, keeping the contents locked inside. Unwinding the string, Dunphy upended the envelope and a dozen microcassettes spilled out on the desk
.
Hel-lo!

He recognized the tapes. Each of them was numbered and dated in his own handwriting. Number one bore the notation
,
9/14–9/19
a—which answered his earlier question: when was the coverage initiated? About a week after Schidlof returned to England from New York. In other words, almost immediately after Matta's cable to Curry, asking
Who's Schidlof
a?

Which was nice to know, but now he had a decision to make: he could ask the security guard to find him a tape recorder so that he could listen to the tapes, or he could continue to read from the files. The tapes were tempting. If nothing else, it would be interesting to hear Schidlof's voice again. On the other hand, he didn't have a lot of time to spend in the Special Registry, and he could cover more ground going through files than he could listening to tapes. Better, then, to read
.

The last folder contained a packet of letters, folded in thirds and bundled together by a length of jute twine. Dunphy undid the knot and unfolded the first page. It was, he saw, a congratulatory note addressed to C. G. Jung, Küsnacht, Switzerland. Dated February 23, 1931, the page was written by hand in green ink on the letterhead of a New York law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell:

Dear Dr. Jung
,

Please accept my profound thanks for your unrelenting efforts on behalf of my election to the Magdalene Society. From this moment forward, it will always be the beacon that guides my life. In our mutual pursuit of the New Jerusalem, I want you to know that I will always be your ally. (My brother, John, writes separately, but I have spoken with him, and his feelings are a mirror of my own.) With
deep
respect, and all my gratitude
,