The Magdalene Cipher Read Free Page B

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    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:
    K. Thornley
    c/o F. Boylan
    The Broken Tiller
    Playa de las Americas
    Tenerife, Islas Canarias
    España
    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 .
    â€œJesse said you’d have something