The Magdalene Cipher by Jim Hougan Read Free Book Online Page A

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 .
    â€œ 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 .
    â€œIs today Wednesday?” the examiner asked, reading the question from a fanfolded computer printout .
    Dunphy thought. Sixteen times nine is . . . ninety plus fifty-four: 144.