The Magdalene Cipher (3 page)

One by one, he took out the flagged dossiers, making a stack, five or six inches high. This done, he took the pile to the fireplace and, squatting beneath the battered antique mantel, set the files on the floor. As he pulled the phony fire logs out of the way, the possibility occurred to him that no one had put a match to the grate in more than thirty years—not since the Clean Air Act had put an end to the city's pea-soupers
.

But what the hell. There was a distinct possibility that he would soon be indicted for wiretapping and, perhaps, as an accessory to murder. There was the espionage issue, as well—not to mention money laundering. If, then, he should also get nailed for air pollution, what the fuck?

Dunphy reached into the chimney, fumbled around until he found a handle, and, straining, yanked open the flue. Gathering the files together, he leaned the manila folders against one another on the grate, creating a sort of tepee, then lighted the structure at its corners. The room brightened. Fire, Dunphy thought, is nature's way of destroying evidence
.

He warmed his hands for a moment, then rose to his feet. Returning to the desk, he removed its top drawer and set it on the floor. Then he reached inside, felt around, and retrieved a kraft-colored envelope. Unfastening its closures, he extracted a microcassette of used recording tape
.

Tommy had given it to him the day before. It was the last of eleven voice-actuated tapes, the take from a five-week-long electronic surveillance. Dunphy had meant to give the tape to Curry at their next meeting, but now . . . what to do? He could melt the cassette in the fire, send it to Curry in the mail, or take it to Langley and let the Agency decide
.

The decision was a difficult one because the surveillance had been off the books, an out-of-channels operation of the chief of station's. Dunphy himself hadn't listened to the tapes, and so had no idea what might be on them, or what might be at stake. And he didn't want to know. To his way of thinking, he'd been a middleman and nothing more: he'd hired Tommy to wire the professor's flat, and he had taken the product to Curry twice a week. It was a favor for the chief of station, and that was all
.

Still . . . Jesse Curry did not strike Dunphy as a stand-up guy. Not exactly. In fact, not at all. Indeed, Dunphy thought, surrendering to his paranoia, Curry struck him as the sort of prick who felt most at ease in the company of fall guys
.

Which was not what Mother Dunphy had raised her son to be
.

So Dunphy shoved the tape recording into a Jet-Pak, stapled it closed, and addressed it to himself:

He slapped a two-pound stamp on the envelope and glanced around the room
.

What Curry didn't know wouldn't hurt him
.

Or so, at least, Dunphy theorized
.

Chapter 3

To reach the airport by train, Dunphy needed exactly one pound fifty. He found it in the bottom drawer of his desk where, for months, he'd been dumping one-, five-, and ten-pence coins. The drawer contained about twenty pounds in change, he figured, but anything more than the exact amount would be less than useless because, of course, his sweatpants didn't have pockets. For a moment, he considered dumping the coins into his attaché case, but . . . no. The idea was ludicrous
.

He took just what he needed, then, and walked quickly to the Underground station on Liverpool Street. Dressed as he was in battered Nikes and tattered sweats, he felt conspicuously American. And, under the circumstances, very jumpy
.

The train rumbled under and through the city for fifteen minutes and then surfaced with a clatter in the bleak suburbs to the west. A prisoner of his own distraction, he noticed nothing about the ride until, for reasons no one bothered to explain, the train rocked to an unscheduled stop near Hounslow—where it sat on the tracks for eight minutes, creaking and motionless in a soft rain
.

Dunphy felt like a jack-in-the-box, coiled in on himself, ready to go through the roof. Staring through the filthy glass windows at a sodden soccer field, he was half-convinced that the police were walking through the cars, one after another, looking for him. But then the train gave a lurch and started moving again. Minutes later, he was lost in the flux of the Arrivals lounge at Terminal 3
.

He saw the courier from twenty yards away. He was a tall, muscular young man in a cheap black suit and motorcycle boots—a Carnaby Street punk with a pitted complexion and jet-black hair cropped so short it seemed to be a shadow on his scalp. He stood without moving in a crowd of greeters and chauffeurs, just where Curry had said he would be. The way he stood, stock-still, with his eyes flicking from side to side, made Dunphy think of Wallace Stevens' “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” where

The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird
.

Dunphy came closer. The courier held a small, stenciled sign in front of his chest:
MR. TORBITT
.
a Holding the sign in the way that he did exposed the kid's wrists, and Dunphy saw that each was dotted with a crude blue line—the work of an amateur tattooist (probably the kid himself). He knew that if he looked closer he'd find the words
Cut Here
scratched into the skin on each wrist
.

Which is to say that the courier was perfect: London's Everyboy
.

And that made Dunphy smile. Where in the name of Christ does Curry find them? he wondered. Kids like this. So ordinary as to be invisible
.

“Jesse said you'd have something for me.”

The young man swung around with a smile, exposing a tangle of gray teeth. So much for the National Health
.

“Ah! The guv'nor himself,” he said. “That's your kit over there, and there's this lot, as well.” He handed him a large manila envelope that Dunphy knew contained money, tickets, and a passport
.

“Ta.”

The young man bounced on the balls of his feet and flashed his gray grin. “Have a nice fucking day,” he said. And then he was gone, his head bobbing through the crowd like an eight ball without spin
.

Opening the envelope, Dunphy checked the ticket for his flight number and glanced at the Departures board. With an hour to kill, he went looking for a newspaper and soon found one
.
CHELSEA CARNAGE! KING'S COLLEGE PROF SLAIN!

He could feel his stomach floating lazily up to his chest. The story was front-page, and it was dramatized by a four-column photograph of police and passersby gawking at a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance. The stretcher's burden was unusually small, about the size of a large dog, and covered by a stained white sheet
.

According to the article, Professor Leo Schidlof had been found at 4
A.M
.
a by a drunken law student in the Inns of Court. The man's torso—the word gave Dunphy pause—was lying on a patch of lawn near the Inner Temple
.

Dunphy looked up. He knew the Inner Temple. Indeed, he knew the patch of lawn. The temple was a small, round church in the heart of London's legal district, not far from Fleet Street. His own solicitor kept offices around the corner, in Middle Temple Lane. Dunphy went past the church once or twice a month on the way to see him
.

It was spooky looking, as most anachronisms are
.

Which should have been enough to set the scene, but Dunphy couldn't stop himself. He was in denial, and the more he thought about the Inner Temple, the longer he could keep his eyes off the newspaper article
.

The temple was thirteenth century, or thereabouts. They'd built it for the Knights Templar. And the Knights, of course, had had something to do with the Crusades. (Or maybe not.)

Dunphy paused and thought. That was it. He didn't know any more. And so he turned back to the article, hoping for another monument to divert him. Instead, he got police sources, “
unidentified
police sources,” who said that the King's College professor had been dismembered, apparently in vivo. A strip of skin, about three inches wide, had been flayed from the base of his spine to the nape of his neck. His genitals had then been removed, and his rectum “surgically excised.”

Dunphy's eyes skittered from the page. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he thought. What the fuck is
that?
And where are the poor man's legs and arms? The story made him woozy. But there wasn't much else. The police were unable to say how “the torso” had come to repose in the place that it had: the lawn was enclosed by a wrought-iron fence not far from the Thames Embankment
.

And that was that. The article ended with the information that Schidlof was a popular lecturer in the psychology department at King's College, and that he had been writing a biography of Carl Jung at the time of his death
.

Dunphy tossed the newspaper into a bin and went to join the long queue at the TWA counter. He didn't want to think about Leo Schidlof. Not yet—and maybe not ever. Schidlof's death wasn't his fault, and if Dunphy had anything to say about it, it wouldn't be any of his business. In any case, he had his own problems. Nudging the suitcase forward with his foot, he opened the manila envelope and took out the passport, intending to memorize its details
.

But to his immense unhappiness, no memorization would be necessary. The passport was in his own name—his
real
name—which meant that his cover was broken and the operation
,
his
operation, was ended. There was a single stamp on the passport's first page, admitting one John Edwards Dunphy—
Dunphy!
for chrissakes—to England for a period not to exceed six months. The stamp was a forgery, of course, and indicated that he'd entered the country only seven days earlier
.

Seeing his cover so casually broken took his breath away. For a little more than a year, he'd lived in London as an Irishman named Kerry Thornley. Other than Jesse Curry, the only person who knew enough to call him by his real first name was Tommy Davis. Tommy was too much a Kerryman to fool about Ireland. Within a week of working with one another, he'd sussed out the fact that his newfound friend and sometime employer, Merry Kerry, was in fact a dodgy American businessman named Jack
.

Meanwhile, Dunphy's business card identified Thornley as chairman of

This false identity had covered him like a second skin, keeping him high and dry in the immunity of its folds. Because Thornley was notional, a fiction generated by a computer in the basement of Langley headquarters, Dunphy could not be made to suffer the consequences of Thornley's actions—which meant that Dunphy, as Thornley, had been free in a way that Dunphy, as Dunphy, could never be
.

Losing his immunity so suddenly left him exposed at the very moment that he felt most in jeopardy. Unconsciously, he began to sag into himself, the wisecracking Irishman—Merry Kerry—giving way to the more restrained and worried-looking American, Jack Dunphy
.

It took another twenty minutes to reach the head of the line, and by the time that he did, his feet hurt and his head was pounding. It was just beginning to hit home that, in the space of a single morning, he'd lost nearly everything he cared about, including Clementine
.

Clementine!
Jesus Christ, he thought, what about Clem?

Chapter 4

Nine hours later, Dunphy signed into the Ambassadors Club on the second floor of the B concourse at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The club was nearly empty. Dropping his suitcase next to a worn leather couch, he grabbed a handful of pretzels, ordered a Bushmills from a wandering waitress, and went into a booth to call the hello-phone at the watch office in Langley
.

The phone rang twice, as it always did, and then a young man's voice came on the line
.

“Hello.”

Some things never changed. “This is . . .” He hesitated, as he always did when the rules called for him to use his crypto. It was embarrassing. Grown men, playing with code names. “Oboe,” he finished. “Do you have anything for me?”

There was silence at the other end, and then, “Yes, sir. I have you down for an eight
A.M
.
a at headquarters.”

“That's . . . Monday.”

“No, sir. This is for tomorrow.”

Dunphy groaned
.

“I guess someone's eager to see you.”

“I just got in,” Dunphy complained. “I don't have any clothes. I'm jet-lagged. I don't even have a place to stay.”

“I can recommend a couple of—”

“Tomorrow's Sunday, for Christ's sake. Nobody'll be at the office. They'll be—” Dunphy fumbled for the word. “They'll be
worshipping. I'll
be worshipping. I'll be worshipping all day.”

“It
says
Sunday, sir. Eight
A.M
.
a Maybe you could make a later service.”

“Don't fuck with me, kid.”

“I just relay the messages, sir.”

Dunphy hung up and dialed the 800 number for Marriott. He took a room for the weekend at the hotel near Tysons Corner and then called Hertz. That done, he got the international operator and gave her the number for Clementine's flat in Bolton Gardens
.

“Kerry?”

He was tongue-tied
.

“Kerry? Where are you?”

“Hey, Clem! I'm . . .”

“Where are you?”

“Traveling. Something came up. A last-minute sort of thing.”

“Oh, well . . . in that case, where are you?”

This was a highly focused girl. “I'm in the States. New York. JFK. The Ambassadors Club. Booth Two.”

“Testy, aren't we?”

“Yeah, well, it's been a long day.”

“Then . . . when will you be back?”

“That's just it. I don't know. It could be . . . a while.”

“Ohhh, noooo!”

“Yeah, but—listen, I can't stay on the phone—I have a connection to make. What I need to know is, did anyone come by the flat this morning?”

“Not when I was there. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, of course I am. Why?”

“You don't sound right.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one thing,” she said, laughing, “you've acquired an American accent.”

Dunphy rolled his eyes and slid back into a well-practiced brogue. “I can't help it, darlin'. I'm a natural mime. But this is the important part, now, and you must do what I ask, and I'll explain everything later.”

“Fuck!”

Dunphy was taken aback. “Why ‘fuck'? I haven't said anything yet.”

“Because ‘explain everything later' always means there's trouble.”

“Yes, well, what I'd like you to do is, uh, just . . . stay away from the flat.”

“What?!”

“Stay away from the flat until I can see you.”

“Why?!”

“Just stay away, Clem. It's important.”

“But I have things there! Why can't I go there? My makeup is there! Is there someone else, then?”

“Don't be stupid.”

“Then why do I have to stay away?”

“Well—for one thing—because
I
a won't be there. And, for another . . .”

“Yeah?
What
,
then?”

“Because it's dangerous.”

“It's ‘dangerous'?”

“Clem . . . trust me.”

When Dunphy hung up, he reentered the club room, found a chair, and sat back to count his losses and brood. He watched the planes take off. And other planes land. And when the waitress came by, he ordered the second of what became too many Irish whiskeys
.

No one had ever walked out on Clementine before. He was pretty sure of that. You'd have to be nuts
.