The Magdalene Cipher (2 page)

Chapter 2

Dunphy knew exactly when his skin began to crawl
.

He was seated at his desk in front of the computer, writing the letter to Credit Suisse, when the phone began to ring: the short, sharp, angry bursts that tell you you're in England, not the States. Lifting the receiver to his ear, Dunphy heard Tommy Davis's voice quavering against a background of airline departure announcements
.

British Airways, flight 2702—

“Ja-ack?” Tommy asked
.

It was then, just then, that his skin began to move. Ever so slightly
.

—departing for Madrid
.

“Ja-aaa-ck?”

Christ, Dunphy thought. Three syllables, and his voice rising at the end. We're in for it
.

Syrian Arab Airlines—

It didn't take a genius. Even if Tommy had sounded normal, there was no good reason—no happy reason—that he should be calling. Their work was finished, and Tommy had been paid. That should have been the end of it
.

“Jack! For the love of Jay-sus! Talk to me! Are ya there, old son?”

“I am, Tommy. What's up?”

“There's a wee problem,” Tommy said, his voice a broad Irish brogue, flat with understatement. “I've only just heard about it myself. An hour ago.”

“I see,” Dunphy remarked, holding his breath. “And what would this small problem be that it's taken you to the airport?”

“You can hear for yourself,” Tommy replied. “They're talking about it on the Beeb.” Dunphy's skin stopped crawling, got to its feet, and walked quickly away, leaving his carcass behind, stripped to the nerves in the swivel chair from Harrod's
.

A deep breath. He blinked twice, sat up, and brought his lips close to the mouthpiece. His posture was suddenly perfect, his voice low and cold
.

“I don't happen to have a radio in the office, Tommy. So what are we talking about? What's the subject?”

“Our professor.”

“What about him?”

“Well, the poor man . . . I'm afraid he's been injured.”

“He's been injured.”

“Well—he's dead, then.”

“Was it an accident, Tommy?”

“An accident? No, it wouldn't be. Not under the circumstances. Not with his balls cut off—I shouldn't think so.”

“His
balls—
”

“I have a plane to catch. If you need me, I'll be drinkin' in Frankie Boylan's bar. You can reach me there.”

And then the line was dead, and Dunphy didn't feel well
.

Francis M. S. Boylan was a hard man who'd done a turn in the Maze for a string of bank robberies that he and Tommy had committed. Whether or not those robberies were politically motivated (the police described them as “fund-raisers for the IRA”), Boylan had taken the time to put aside enough of the loot to buy a small business. This was a bar on the south coast of Tenerife, overlooking the nude beach at Playa de las Americas. Tommy and his pals went to see him whenever their problems became unmanageable—which is to say, when they could not be solved by lawyers, guns, or money (or a combination of the three). Simply stated, the Broken Tiller was a hideout in the Atlantic, a hundred miles off the coast of Africa, two hundred miles south of the Rock, a hole in the twentieth century
.

Fuckin' hell, Dunphy thought. The
Canaries. Tenerife
.
His
balls
.

His stomach clenched, turned over, and clenched again. The Beeb was on it
.

He let his eyes have their way with the room. It was a third-floor walk-up, a seedy redoubt amid the grime of Millbank. He liked it. The view through the window, spotted with rain, was gloomy and depressing: a wall of brick, a patch of gray sky, a peeling and faded billboard
.
ROTHMANS CIGARET E
, it said
.

Dunphy had quit smoking nearly a year ago, but there was, he knew, a stale packet of Silk Cuts in his top desk drawer. Without thinking, he found one, lighted it, and inhaled. For a moment, nothing happened, and then he felt as if he was about to levitate. Then he coughed
.

There was no reason to panic, just because Tommy had. Looked at in an objective way, it was a matter of fact that Dunphy had paid Tommy to install an Infinity transmitter on the professor's telephone. This had been done, and it had worked for more than a month. Admittedly, or at least
seemingly
,
the professor had then been murdered, but there was no reason to believe that his death was in any way a consequence of Dunphy's eavesdropping activity. Obviously, he told himself, he was in the midst of a terrible coincidence
.

Awkward, yes, but . . 
.

These
.

Things
.

Happen
.

Except, as Dunphy well knew, they did not happen in England, or if they did, they did not happen in quite this way. If the professor had been done by professionals, by the SAS or some such outfit, there would have been two in the derby and one in the chest—and that would have been the end of it. But if Tommy was right, the poor bastard had been castrated—which meant that it was a sex crime, or something like it
.

He watched the soot stream down the windowpane until the phone rang for the second time, jolting him into focus. He didn't want to answer it. His stomach was a small balloon, filling slowly with air, wobbling toward his throat. The phone shrieked and shrieked again. Finally, he picked it up and held it in front of him, as if it were a snake
.

“Hullo?” He could hear the
beep-beep-beep-beep
of a public phone, the sound of coins dropping, and then, “Get out.”

It was Curry, Dunphy thought, though he barely recognized the voice, which came at him in a strangled continuum of real-time burst transmissions. “Go-home!/Do-it-now!/Do-you-understand-me?”

Jesus, Dunphy thought, he's at a pay phone, and he's got a handkerchief over the mouthpiece. “I think we need to talk,” Dunphy said
.

“Go home.”

“
Which
a home?”

“
All the way
home.”

“What?!”

“Flaps up. Do it now. Don't bother packing, and don't go to your flat. I'll have a housekeeping team there in half an hour. They'll ship your belongings in a couple of days.”

Dunphy was stunned. “It's Saturday,” he said. “I'm wearing sweats! I—I don't even have my passport. How am I supposed to—”

“You heard the news? I mean, you heard the fucking
News at Ten
a?!”

“Yeah . . . sort of. I mean . . . my Irish friend just called and—Jesse, I have a life! Fahchrissake! I can't just—”

“You were supposed to clean up!”

“We
did
clean up. I mean
,
he
did—my man did. I told him to go over there—when was it? The day before yesterday.”

“They found a device.”

“A
what
a?!”

“I said, the
police
found a
device
a.” There was a pause, and Dunphy could tell that Jesse Curry was hyperventilating. “Listen to me, my friend. There are people—policemen—who are trying—even as we speak—to find out whose
device
a it is. They're making ‘in-
kwy
a-ries,' and I think they have a name. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then, just how long do you think it will take MI5 to find that mick son of a bitch of yours, and then to get from him to you? One day? Two?”

“They won't find him. He's already out of the country.”

“Good. That's just where I want you to be. Don't go back to your flat. Just take the first flight out.”

“How the fuck—I told you, I don't even have my wallet! I
ran
to the office.”

“I'll have a courier in the Arrivals lounge. Terminal 3, just outside the Nothing-to-Declare. He'll be holding a cardboard sign.” Curry paused, and Dunphy could hear the wheels spinning in his head. “ ‘Mr. Torbitt.' Look for him.”

“Then what?”

“He'll have everything you need: passport—”

“Cash—”

“—ticket to the States, and a suitcase full of someone else's clothes. Probably his own.”

“Why do I want someone else's clothes?”

“When was the last time you saw someone cross the Atlantic without a suitcase?”

“Look, Jesse—”

Beep-beep-beep
.
The pay phone wanted another coin
.

“Go home!”

“Look, I don't think this is such a great idea!”

Beep-beep
.
a “Just do it.”

“But—”

Beep-beep
.
a “I'm outa change!”

There was a clatter on the other end of the line, a strangled curse, a distant harmonic, and that was it. Jesse Curry was gone
.

Dunphy sat back in his chair, dazed. He took in a lungful of smoke, held it for a long while, and exhaled. Leaning forward, he stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stared at the wall
.

Don't go to your flat. I've got a housekeeping team—

A
housekeeping
team
.
What about Clementine? Was she still asleep? Would they cart her out with the laundry?
Lunging for the phone, he tapped out his own number and waited. The ringing came in extended, noisome bursts punctuated by long intervals of crackling, dead air. After a minute that seemed like an hour, he hung up, figuring she'd gone to her own place. Should he call her there?

Dunphy shook his head, muttering to himself that Clementine was too important to handle on the fly. And, anyway, the operation was crashing and there were things that had to be done—now and by him. In the end, he would do his own housekeeping. He'd take care of his own “disposals.”

With a sigh, he touched the trackball next to the keyboard and clicked on
Start
.
Clicked again on
Shut down
,
and a third time on
Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode
.
Then he leaned over the keyboard and began to peck out the cybernetic equivalent of a lobotomy
.

CD/DOS

It gave him the same sickening thrill that a skydiver feels as he steps, for the first time, into the air. Here goes, here comes—nothing:

DEBUG
G=C800:5

The computer began to ask a series of questions, which Dunphy answered in a perfunctory way, tapping at the keyboard. After a while, the hard disk began to grind. An age passed as Dunphy smoked, until at long last, the grinding stopped, and the command line blinked:

FORMAT COMPLETE

The machine was brain-dead, its cursor blinking dully. Dunphy was perspiring. A year's work, lost in the ozone
.

And, then, to make certain that it stayed in the ozone, he ran a program called DiskWipe, overwriting every byte on the hard disk with the numeral 1
.

The computer was the main thing he had to deal with, but there were other details, including some letters that were waiting to be sent. Most of the correspondence was trivial, but at least one of the letters was not. Addressed to a client named Roger Blémont, it contained details of a newly opened bank account on Jersey in the Channel Islands. Without the letter, Blémont would not be able to get at the money—which, as it happened, was rather a lot
.

Dunphy thought about that. Making Blémont wait for his money would not be a bad thing. Not necessarily, and probably not at all. They were, after all, ill-gotten gains intended for a bad purpose
.
Still
,
he thought, they were
Blémont's
ill-gotten gains and—

He didn't have time to think about this shit. Not now. The world was falling apart all around him. So he tossed the letters into his attaché case with the vague idea of mailing them from the airport. Removing a battered Filofax from the top drawer of his desk, he dropped it into his attaché case and got to his feet. Then he crossed the room to a scuffed-up filing cabinet that held the detritus of his cover—business correspondence and corporate filings. For the most part, it was paper that he could safely leave behind
.

But there were a few files that Dunphy considered sensitive. One contained pages from the previous year's appointments book. Another held Tommy Davis's bills for “investigative services.” A third file was the repository of receipts for “business entertainment,” including his regular meetings with Curry, some lunches with the FBI's Legat and the DEA's mission coordinator for the U.K. Scattered among the four drawers of the filing cabinet, the sensitive files were easily and quickly retrievable because they were the only ones with blue labels
.