The Magdalene Cipher (6 page)

“Well, it's certainly an amazing coincidence, then. I mean, no one says anything sensitive on the telephone anymore! All the surveillance did was establish this guy's domestic pattern. Did he have a dog, or did he have a cat? If he had a dog, when did he walk it—and
where
did he walk it? Did he visit the dentist, did he go to a chiropractor? Did he have a mistress?”

“This is not a productive tangent, Mr. Dunphy.” Rhinegold looked upset, but there was no stopping Dunphy, who was talking faster and faster
.

“What did he do? Where did he do it? When did he do it? Because—let's face it—somewhere along the line, somebody found a way to pick this guy up in the middle of London, where they
operate
a—surgically operate—until he's a fucking
torso
a—which they
leave
a—”

“Mr. Dunphy—”

“—outside a
church
,
for Christ's sake—”

“Jack—”

“And
I'm
a a fucking suspect?! Whattaya mean there wasn't any connection?!”

Dunphy looked wildly at his inquisitors. No one said anything. The seconds ticked by. Finally, Esterhazy cleared his throat, embarrassed
.

“Actually,” he said, “you're not.”

“Not what?”

“A suspect.”

“And how do you figure that?” Dunphy asked
.

“Unless and until Mr. Davis is found, you aren't under suspicion yourself. You're more like a, uh, prospective
point of contact
.
a”

“Which is why it's important that we locate Mr. Davis,” Rhinegold explained
.

“Exactly,” Esterhazy said. “He may need our help.”

The silence was huge. No one blinked
.

Finally, Dunphy turned the palms of his hands toward the lights overhead and let them drop. “Sorry, man. I don't know where he is.”

Chapter 6

The debriefing was still under way at 7
P.M
.
a when Rhinegold's watch made a high, twittering noise, reminding him that he had to be somewhere else
.

The debriefers put their notes away, snapped their attaché cases closed, and got to their feet. “I think you ought to eat in your hotel,” Rhinegold said
.

“What a good idea!” Esterhazy interjected. “Room service! Talk about relaxing!”

“We'll get back to this at oh-eight-hundred,” Rhinegold added
.

“Do you think we could make it a little later?” Dunphy asked. “Noon would be good.”

Esterhazy and Rhinegold looked at him with empty eyes
.

“I need some clothes,” he explained. “A change of socks. The stores don't open till ten.”

Nothing. Not even a smile
.

Dunphy sighed. “Okay. No problem. I'll wash 'em in the fuckin' bathtub.”

And he did. He bought a bottle of Woolite at the 7-Eleven, went back to his hotel room, and filled the tub with water. Undressing, he knelt on the bathroom floor and, swearing, washed his sweats and socks and underwear. He wrung out the water with his hands and draped the clothes over a chair in front of the radiator. Then he sat down to watch a movie on TV, ordered a hamburger from room service, and fell asleep wearing a towel
.

The debriefing resumed in the morning, with Dunphy in a sweat suit that was still damp from the tub. It went on until dusk, when they broke for a second time, and continued again on Tuesday, covering the same ground
.

It was exhausting, annoying, and in the end, it became perfunctory. With the exception of Tommy Davis's whereabouts, which Dunphy was determined not to give up, he didn't have any of the answers they wanted. On Tuesday afternoon, Esterhazy leaned back in his chair, raised his eyebrows, and said, “I think that's about as far as we can go.”

Rhinegold nodded. “I agree. I'd say we're
finito
.
a”

Together, they got to their feet, putting away their pens and pads, matches and cigarettes. Esterhazy picked up his watch from the table, and strapped it to his wrist
.

Relieved that the ordeal was finally over, Dunphy pushed his chair back with a smile and got to his feet
.

Rhinegold looked at him blankly as he snapped the locks shut on his attaché case. “Where are you going?” he asked
.

Dunphy made a gesture, as if to say
,
Out
.

“
You're
not done,” Rhinegold said. “We are.”

Nearly an hour dragged by before the door swung open, and a clubfooted man with oriented eyes walked in, carrying a pair of mismatched attaché cases. Nodding wordlessly to Dunphy, he laid the briefcases on the table, removed his sports jacket, and hung it carefully on the back of a chair. One of the attaché cases was slim, sleek, leather; the other was fat, indestructible, and slag-gray
.

Almost ceremoniously, the visitor removed a pair of lurid objects from the American Tourister, placing them on the table in front of Dunphy. The first was a paperback with a primitive drawing on the cover. It showed a wet-looking blonde in shorts and a halter kneeling to scrub the kitchen floor while, a few feet away, a Great Dane leered. The book's title, Dunphy noticed, was
Man's Best Friend
.

The second artifact was a small, gilt-encrusted icon of Christ, eyes rolled toward Heaven from within a crown of blood and thorns. Dunphy looked from one to the other, cocked his head, and snorted at the cheap psychology
.

The clubfooted man didn't blink. He opened the plastic attaché case and pulled a length of wire from the machine inside. Turning toward Dunphy, he leaned on the table with both hands, nodded toward the icon, and whispered, “I know what you did, and I know what you know—you lie to me, motherfucker, and you lie to Him. Now roll up your sleeve.”

The rest of the day, and all of Wednesday, receded into a haze of questions that covered the entirety of Dunphy's career. It was a pointless exercise, of course. Like every career officer, Dunphy had been trained in ways, if not to beat the polygraph, then at least to muddle its results. If the test was a long one, as this one turned out to be, beating it was an exhausting process, requiring the subject to sustain a rather high level of concentration for hours at a time. Difficult, but not impossible. And quite worthwhile if there was something important to conceal
.

The trick was to take advantage of the interval between the question and the answer, an interval that the polygraph examiner deliberately prolonged, the better to measure galvanic responses. To beat the machine, you had to establish a phony baseline for the truth. And the way to do this was to infuse every truthful answer with a measure of stress, making those answers indistinguishable from lies
.

Generating stress wasn't difficult. All you had to do was a little math, something along the lines of fourteen times eleven before answering a question truthfully. And then, when the time came to lie, you lied without thinking, and the results came out more or less the same way. The polygraph examiner would conclude that you'd lied about everything, or else that you'd told the truth. And since the answers to some of the questions were known, the logical conclusion would be that the subject was truthful
.

“Is today Wednesday?” the examiner asked, reading the question from a fanfolded computer printout
.

Dunphy thought. Sixteen times nine is . . . ninety plus fifty-four: 144. “Yes,” he said. His interrogator put a check next to the question
.

“Have you ever been to London?”

Fourteen times twelve is, uhh . . . a hundred-and-forty plus twenty-eight: 168! “Yes.” Another check
.

And so it went
.

“Are you familiar with the cryptonym MK-IMAGE?”

Twenty-seven times eight: 216. “No,” Dunphy said, making a mental note. His arithmetic was getting better. (But what's
MK-IMAGE
a?)

“Did Mr. Davis contact you on the day that he left London?”

Three hundred and forty-one divided by eight is . . . forty-two and—Dunphy's mind went blank. Forty-two and something. Forty-two and . . 
.
change
a. “Yes,” he said. Check
.

“And did he tell you where he was going?”

Dunphy let his mind go blank. “No,” he said. Just like that
.

Another little check
.

And he was home free
.

Chapter 7

Dunphy's old passport, wallet, and clothes were waiting for him in a suitcase at his hotel that evening. So was a small plastic bag that held his toothbrush and razor, a fistful of old receipts, pocket change that had been on his dresser, a Mason Pearson hairbrush, and other miscellany. A black laundry marker had been used to label the bag
personal effects
,
which gave Dunphy a weird sense of déjà vu. This is what it's like, he thought, this is what happens when you're dead. They put your toothbrush and pocket change in a Baggie and send it to the next of kin. Exhausted, he sat down on the bed, lay back for a moment, and . . . drifted off
.

The telephone's insistent warble awakened him from a deep sleep, maybe ten hours later. The voice at the other end of the line told him to report immediately to the Central Cover Staff, and to “bring all your documentation with you.”

Dunphy did as he was told. A black officer with graying hair and a checklist asked him to “surrender” the passport in Kerry Thornley's name, his Irish driver's license, and any “pocket litter” that he had. After each item was checked off the list, it was dropped into a red metal basket marked burn
.

For the first time, he knew for a certainty that he wasn't going back to England for the Agency
.

In a daze, he took the elevator down to the Personnel Management Office, where he sat for an hour in a lime-green waiting room, leafing through a worn copy of
The Economist
.
Finally, a small gray woman in a print dress appeared and told him that B-209 would be his office “for now.”

Dunphy knew headquarters as well as anyone, but . . . “Where's that?”

“I'm not sure,” she said, genuinely puzzled. “You'll have to ask security.”

In fact, B-209 was in the basement of the North Building, on a wide corridor between two loading docks. The corridor doubled as a sort of storage area for new computer equipment, office supplies, and (as Dunphy soon realized) Agency fuckups and paramilitaries attachéd to the International Activities Division (IAD)
.

Forklifts rumbled down the corridor from one dock to another, slamming into each other and the walls. Because of the noise, people spoke louder here than elsewhere at headquarters, and there was a certain amount of “manly horseplay” (which is to say, juvenile clowning around) ongoing at all times. Indeed, it seemed to Dunphy as if a cloud of testosterone hung in the corridor like will-o'-the-wisp on a back road in Maine. It would have been impossible to think in such a place—if there had been anything to think about. But there was nothing. He was on hold
.

His office was a buff-colored cubicle with tremulous partitions that served as sliding walls. It was furnished with a beige swivel chair, a hat rack, and an off-white bookcase. An empty filing cabinet sat in the corner next to a brand-new burn basket. There was a telephone on the floor and a copy of
Roget's Thesaurus
,
but there was no carpeting, and even more to the point:
there was no desk
.

Dunphy picked up the phone to call housekeeping, but it didn't have a dial tone. Furious, he stormed out of the cubicle (you couldn't call it a
room
,
really) and headed toward personnel—only to lose himself in a maze of corridors. After suffering the humiliation of having to ask directions in his own headquarters, he arrived at personnel only to see his rage wilt before the sympathetic shrugs of the small gray lady in the print dress. “Be patient,” she said. “They're sorting things out.”

Dunphy commandeered a telephone and told the switchboard to connect him with his section chief, Fred Crisman, in the Directorate of Plans. If anyone could tell him what was going on, Fred could; Dunphy had been reporting to him through Jesse Curry for nearly a year
.

“Sorry, guy,” said a voice at the other end. “You missed him. Fred's been TDY in East Africa since last week.”

Dunphy tried other numbers, but the people he wanted were all unavailable: in conference, away from their desks, traveling, in meetings all afternoon. Housekeeping said they'd “check into the problem,” as if his job were a hotel, and promised to get back to him in a few minutes. “How ya gonna do that?” Dunphy asked. “I just told ya: the phone doesn't work!”

Adrift and smoldering, he embarked on what eventually became a routine, meandering from his “office” to personnel, from personnel to the cafeteria, from the cafeteria to the gym. He jumped rope, lifted weights, and boxed every other day. A week went by. Two. Three. He was getting into shape, but he felt like a technocrat's version of the Flying Dutchman, wandering anonymously through the broad halls of a clandestine bureaucracy. In the afternoons, he visited the Agency's library where newspapers from every country in the world were available. Settling into the same easy chair each day, Dunphy scanned the British press in vain for news of Professor Schidlof. After the first wave of headlines, reports of the investigation had disappeared, leading Dunphy to suspect that Her Majesty's government had issued a D-notice, killing the story. His stomach floated and churned, acid with anger and anxiety. Eventually, the other shoe
had to
drop. But when? And where? And on whose head?

Dunphy was tired of the hotel at Tysons Corner. He missed his apartment in Chelsea and the habits that, taken together, added up to a Life. He missed Clementine most of all, but there was nothing that he could say to her, really. Except, “I'm on the lam. I'll be in touch. G'bye.” It wasn't much of a basis for a relationship. And the idea that he might never get back to England, much less to Clementine, appalled him
.

As, in fact, did the postwar CIA. The Agency was adrift in the aftermath of the Cold War, demoralized by the enemy's surrender, its mission obsolete, its raison d'être obscure. For years, it had gotten by without “a symmetrical enemy,” making do with the likes of Noriega and Hussein, some cataract-encrusted terrorists, and Colombian
pistoleros
on the run. Now, Congress was stirring. There was talk about downsizing the intelligence community and “reallocating precious resources.” Among the most expensive of those resources were agents under nonofficial cover, or NOCs, like Dunphy. Gradually, they were being withdrawn from the field and replaced by spooks from the Pentagon's Defense Human Intelligence Services. For the first time in its existence, the CIA's budget was seriously threatened—and Langley was an unhappy place to be
.

If there was an inner sanctum to the malaise that permeated headquarters, it was the cafeteria. This was an elephant's graveyard of burnt-out cases, drunks, neurotics and loose cannons, whistle-blowers, and “damaged goods” that (for one reason or another) the Agency couldn't or wouldn't fire
.

There were a score of such “disposal cases” hanging out at any given time. Most had no responsibilities at all, while a few, like Roscoe White, were simply underemployed
.

White's case was a classic. A Princeton graduate with a master's degree in oriental languages (he was fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Korean), he'd joined the Agency in 1975. Posted to Seoul under military cover, he'd been grabbed inside the DMZ on what must have been his first mission. For nearly a year thereafter, he suffered a succession of brutal interrogations and mock executions until, in the end, his captors wearied of the routine. White was transferred to a prison farm in the far north, and seemingly forgotten. Finally, in 1991, as a sort of Cold War afterthought, he was taken to the DMZ and released without ceremony at the very spot where he'd been arrested more than fifteen years earlier. The gesture, or joke, or whatever it was, nearly unhinged him. He'd stood there, up to his ankles in mud, rooted to the place where his life had disappeared, spellbound with the thought (or the hope) that the past sixteen years had been a hallucination. Eventually, he was grabbed by an ROK soldier in camouflage fatigues and dragged to safety
.

On returning to America, he found that he'd been declared legally dead ten years earlier
.

White's own retirement was only three years away. Until then, he served as liaison officer between the Directorate of Operations and the Coordinator of Information and Privacy. In practice, this meant that it was his job to parcel out Freedom of Information requests to “reference analysts” in the Directorate of Operations—a task that seldom consumed more than an hour of his time each day, leaving him free to read in the cafeteria until it was time to go home
.

It was a terrible waste of talent, but there was nothing to be done about it. After meticulous preparation at the best schools, White had missed almost the entirety of his working life. Now he sat in the cafeteria with a distracted smile, reading Marlowe's
Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus
.

Dunphy was fascinated by him
.

“I tried to catch up on things,” White explained one day, “but there was just too much missing. I mean—
Glasnost
,
the Wall, AIDS, and the Internet. It was like that Billy Joel song except—none of it meant anything to me. All I'd heard were whispers. But Teflon and Saran Wrap, Krazy Glue and compact discs . . . Jesus H. Christ, now
that
stuff was something. Anyway, I realized after a while that reading the back issues of
Time
wasn't going to be enough. I could memorize every stat for every player who'd ever been with the Orioles, but I hadn't seen them play. I mean, who the hell is Cal Ripken, and whatever happened to Juan Pizarro? Anyway,” White said, gesturing at the book that he was holding, “I find it less . . . stressful to read history, the classics—books that are
timeless
.
You know what I mean?”

Dunphy nodded. Because there were so many lacunas in White's life, even the most casual conversations could turn into adventures. Dunphy liked him a lot, and so, when Roscoe White asked him if he was “looking for a place,” Dunphy didn't hesitate
.

“Yeah. You know of one?”

“Well,” Roscoe said, “if you don't mind sharing, I've got a farmhouse and five acres on Belleview Place. The rent's not bad. You interested?”

“Yeah,” Dunphy replied, “but—I gotta tell ya, I may not be around too long.”

“Why's that?”

“I've got a girlfriend in London, and—don't tell anyone—but I'm not all that crazy about my job. Also, I'm not the neatest person, y'know?”

Roscoe chuckled. “That's why I have a cleaning lady. Once a week—couldn't do it without her.”

“In that case . . . you make wake-up calls?”