The Magdalene Cipher (5 page)

“I was tasked—indirectly, of course—by half a dozen agencies.”

“Such as?”

“DEA, IRS, Customs—” Dunphy paused for breath and continued. “—ISA—”

Esterhazy waved him off. “And how did that work?”

“I kept my eyes open. If something hot came in, I was supposed to keep the station apprised. Jesse—the station chief—would pass it along to the appropriate agency. Or not. It was up to him.”

“When you say ‘hot'—what would be hot?”

Dunphy mused. “Well, for example, it would be hot if Alan Greenspan walked in off the street to set up a company on Jersey with Saddam Hussein, using the Moscow Narodny Bank as the registered agent.”

Rhinegold's eyes dilated
.

“That would be very hot,” Dunphy added
.

“That happened?” Rhinegold was on the verge of levitation
.

Dunphy shook his head. “No. That was just an example. A hypothetical example. I never had anything
that
obvious.”

“Who did you report to at the Embassy?” Esterhazy asked. “Who did the tasking?”

“Jesse Curry.”

“And these other agencies were privy to your cover?”

“They didn't know me at all, or if they did, they thought I was a foreign asset: Merry Kerry—that sorta thing. In practical terms, all they really knew was that, every so often, the Agency came up with something interesting from Anglo-Erin. And passed it along.”

“Was it profitable?” Rhinegold asked
.

“In what sense?”

“Did Anglo-Erin make a financial profit?”

“It was starting to when I was pulled out.”

Dunphy wished that he had a cup of coffee. And a pair of goggles: the room was thick with cigarette smoke, and totally unventilated. His head felt as if it were encased within the nucleus of a positive ion. A large, beige one
.

“—and you would set up these corporations for? . . .”

“Whoever paid the freight. I had American clients. Some Mexicans, a few Italians. Coupla Turks, a Franco-Lebanese. One guy from Buenos Aires set up thirty-five entities in eight jurisdictions. God knows what he was up to. Guns, coke, or emeralds. All three, probably.”

“And you'd provide the Agency—and, through it, other agencies—with copies of the incorporating documents?”

“That, and the bank data, and anything interesting that I might pick up over lunch or a pint of bitter. And if a company was owned by bearer shares—which it usually was—and if I knew who held them—which I usually didn't—I'd put that in the pouch, too.”

“Clients came to you—out of the blue?”

“Sort of. Some of it was word-of-mouth—my fees were unbelievably reasonable. And I advertised.”

“Where?”

“
Herald Tribune. Economist. Sunday Times
.
A lot of places. The receipts are at the office.”

“Well,” Esterhazy said, “I'm afraid the contents of that office are no longer available to us. We're told they're in custody of the Metropolitan Police. And, I suspect, MI5.”

“I see.” He'd been expecting this, but now that it was a fact, he suddenly felt worse. In fact, he suddenly felt like shit
.

A girl brought sandwiches and coffee at eleven, rolling her eyes at the cigarette smoke. Esterhazy announced that “We'll take a short break now,” and Dunphy nodded, grateful for the coffee
.

He did his best to get a pastrami sandwich down, but the meat had a purple hue, and it made his stomach queasy. Pushing the sandwich away, he made a half-assed attempt to engage his interrogators in small talk (“How 'bout them Wizards?”), but neither of them was interested
.

“I don't follow sporting events,” Esterhazy said. Rhinegold shrugged
.

“Sports are a waste of time,” Esterhazy added. Rhinegold grunted
.

Maybe it was the acoustics
.

As they lapsed into silence, Dunphy watched his companions take small plastic bags from their catalog cases, placing them on the table. Each of the Baggies contained at least a dozen tablets and half a dozen capsules, which they spread out in front of them in a sort of pharmacological phalanx
.

“Vitamins,” Esterhazy remarked
.

“This one's a nicotine neutralizer,” Rhinegold explained, holding a fat pill between his thumb and index finger. One by one, they swallowed the tablets, pills, caplets, and tabs with tiny sips of coffee
.

And then, apparently refreshed, they returned to the subject at hand
.

Time did not fly
.

“Can we assume that your cover was meticulously maintained?” Esterhazy paused, flipped a page of his legal pad, and looked up
.

“Of course.”

“There wouldn't be anything in your filing cabinets that would identify you as Jack Dunphy, or connect you with this Agency?”

“No. Nothing. The files supported the cover, that's all.”

“A telephone bill or—”

“I never called home from the office. Not from my apartment, either. If I had to make a call to the States—as Jack Dunphy—I'd use a pay phone. Same with reaching Curry.”

“Did you use a computer?”

“Yeah. An Amstrad.”

“I'm embarrassed to ask this, but, you didn't leave any sensitive files—memos, reports, anything like that—you didn't leave anything on the disk?”

“No. To begin with, everything on the disk was encrypted. Strongly encrypted. I used a one-hundred-forty-bit algorithm—”

“PGP?”

Dunphy shook his head. “RSA. And when I left, I wiped it.”

Rhinegold leaned forward, wrinkling his brow. “When you left London, Jack—you didn't take anything with you? I mean, everything was more or less left as it was?”

Jack
a? “I took my attaché case,” Dunphy said. “I had my address book in it. Otherwise, I'm out a lot of clothes—”

“A disposal unit went through your apartment last night. It's ‘broom-clean.' You'll have your clothes and your personal belongings by Friday at the latest.”

Dunphy held his breath, saying nothing
.

“What we need to be certain of is that there is nothing in London, at the office or elsewhere, that would connect you to . . . well, to yourself. No—”

“Pas de cartes. Pas de photos. Pas de souvenirs.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Rhinegold asked, his voice heavy with a mixture of suspicion and resentment
.

“It's a saying. It means I didn't leave anything behind.”

“You said you wiped the disk on your computer. What would MI5 find if it examined that disk with the special utilities they have at their disposal?”

“It's a reformatted disk. It's a tabula rasa.”

“You can retrieve data from a reformatted disk—even if the data is encrypted,” Esterhazy said. “All the DOS function does is eliminate the addresses. The data are still there, if you know how to find them.”

Dunphy shook his head. “I ran a low-level format, using debug, and then I overwrote everything with DiskWipe. I might as well have passed a permanent magnet over the thing. There's nothing left.”

For the first time, Esterhazy looked impressed
.

“Brain-dead,” Dunphy added
.

Rhinegold smiled
.

“Why did Curry come to you for the surveillance on Professor Schidlof?”

“You'd have to ask Curry.”

“It wasn't something you usually did.”

“It wasn't something I
ever
did. I didn't know the first thing about it.”

“And so you hired this man? . . .”

“Tommy Davis. Actually, we were working together already.”

“How so?”

“I used him as a courier. He had good connections in Beirut—which was useful, because I had a pretty lucrative clientele there. Tommy could get in and out, even during the bad old days, no problem. What's important here, though, is that he had a reputation as a good wireman. And I could trust him. When Curry tasked me with the surveillance, I went to Tommy.”

“And he's still in London?”

Dunphy shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. “I don't think so. I think he left town.”

Rhinegold and Esterhazy fixed him with a stare, but Dunphy was unmoved. If the Agency had taught him anything, it was how to sit quietly or, failing that, to

Deny everything
.

Admit nothing
.

Make counterallegations
.

Finally, Esterhazy broke the silence between them. “Because it's important,” he said, “that we find him before the Metropolitan Police do.”

Dunphy nodded. “I see,” he said
.

Rhinegold's brow furrowed, and he cleared his throat. “You see, Jack, a listening-device was found on the professor's telephone line.”

“I know,” Dunphy said. “Jesse mentioned it.”

“And . . . well, the police think it had something to do with the, uhh, incident.”

“Right.”

“Which is absurd, of course.”

“Of course.”

Silence again. Rhinegold drummed a pencil on the table. Esterhazy frowned, stubbed out his cigarette, and shook his head
.

“I should think you'd be more helpful,” he said. “Because—well, frankly, this is not such a great thing for you.”

Dunphy looked puzzled
.

“Careerwise.”

“Nothing I could do,” Dunphy said. “Nothing I
can
do.”

“Still—”

“What's done is done,” Rhinegold said. “The point is that the device connects Professor Schidlof to Mr. Davis, and Mr. Davis connects to you. And so on.”

“And so forth.”

“And so on. It's hard to say just where it might stop.”

“It's the kind of thing that could go right to the top,” Esterhazy added
.

Dunphy nodded, then tilted his head to the side, raised his eyebrows, and let them fall. A soft and apologetic
tsk
fell from his mouth. “I see the problem,” he said, “but . . . I don't know where Davis is. I just
don't
.
a”

The older man frowned. Shrugging, he changed the subject. “Tell us about the professor.”

Dunphy grunted
.

“Why was he under surveillance?”

Dunphy shook his head. “I wasn't told.”

“But you listened to his telephone conversations. You must have some idea.”

“Nope.”

“Surely—”

“I don't. And you're wrong about my listening to his telephone conversations. All I did was sample the tapes we made to make certain there was something on them before I passed them along to Curry. From what I was told, and from what I read, the guy taught at King's College. I think the paper said he was in the psychology department. Something like that.”

Esterhazy leaned forward. “Tell us about that.”

“About what?”

“About Professor Schidlof's interest in psychology.”

Dunphy looked from one interrogator to the other. Finally he said, “How the fuck would I know about that?”

“Well—”

“I'm telling you, all I know about this guy is what I read in the paper.”

“You weren't curious about the person you were bugging?”

“Curious? About what? A psychology teacher? I don't think so. The only thing interesting about this guy, as far as I can tell, is, he was butchered.”

“Butchered?”
Rhinegold asked
.

“Yeah.”

“Why do you use that word?”

“As opposed to what?”

“Killed.”

“Because he wasn't just ‘killed.' He was torn apart. Arms, legs—they castrated him. You want
my
opinion? The cops oughta go down to the grocery store, and ask everyone in the meat department where they were the other night! Because this wasn't just a killing. It was like . . . like a
dissection
.
a”

Dunphy's interrogators frowned. “Yes, well . . . I'm sure it was horrible,” Rhinegold said
.

Esterhazy looked away, and the room fell silent for a long moment
.

Finally, Dunphy asked, “So what's the connection?”

“Connection?”

“Between the surveillance and the killing.”

“There
was
no connection,” Esterhazy answered. “Why should there have been a connection?”