The Magdalene Cipher Read Free Page A

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 .
    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