The Magdalene Cipher (10 page)

“Really!”

“Oh, yeah! What I hear, it's a Tier III reconnaissance jet that'll do mach six with a radar profile the size of your hand.”

“Wow,” Dunphy said
.

“Wow's right. It was all very impressive, and it was actually good cover for what we were doing. Though, if you wanta know the truth, the choppers
we
had were more advanced than the planes.”

Dunphy blinked, uncertain that he'd heard correctly. He wanted to ask Brading to repeat what he'd said, the part about cover. Instead, he asked, “What kind of helicopters?”

Brading's eyes lighted up. “MJ-12 Micro Pave Lows! Best in the world. We're talking about a twin-turbo, tilt-rotor aircraft with the most advanced terrain-following/terrain-avoidance avionics anywhere. Totally Stealthed, low-light/no-light mission-capable with a twelve-hundred-mile range. I get all üggy inside, just thinkin' about it. I mean, this is a machine that's got four million lines of software in the computers, and an external cargo hook that can lift five thousand pounds. You could fly 'em low and slow, or tilt the rotors—wham, bam! you're in a turboprop. Absolutely revolutionary! We
cruised
at three hundred knots, and—here's the best part—here's the revolutionary part—the only sound we made was collateral! The wind kicked up, and sometimes things got blown around.”

Dunphy must have looked skeptical because Brading became even more animated
.

“I'm not exaggerating, y'know. That was
it
.
Them things were dead silent.”

“Jesus!”

“Hallelujah!”

The response took Dunphy by surprise, but he plunged on with the interview. “So you were in Dreamland until? . . .”

“ 'Seventy-nine.”

“And then you retired.”

“No,” Brading corrected. “I didn't retire until '84. By then, Dreamland was lookin' a little iffy.”

“What do you mean?”

“The handwritin' was on the wall. You couldn't have that many people flyin' in and outa Vegas all day without somebody blowin' the whistle.”

“So they moved you.”

“I'll say.”

“Where to?”

“Vaca Base.” When he saw that this meant nothing to Dunphy, he elaborated. “It's a hanging canyon in the Sawtooth Mountains. Over Idaho way. Only way in and out is with a chopper. It was
real
peaceful.”

“I'll bet.”

Brading cocked an eye at Dunphy. “I thought you were interested in my illness.”

“I am,” Dunphy said. “Tell me about it.”

“I don't know what's to tell. I'm in remission, but . . . there isn't any cure, really. I got CJD—ever heard of it?”

“Yeah,” Dunphy said. “It's, uhh . . .” He couldn't think of the technical name. Finally he said, “Mad cow disease.”

Brading looked surprised
.

“I lived in England,” Dunphy explained
.

“Oh, well, of course—it's bad there. I guess everybody's heard about it over there . . . but not here.”

“How did you—”

“—get it?” Brading threw up his hands. “I got it on the Census—how else?”

“The Census . . .” Dunphy said
.

“The
Bovine
Census. Whattaya think we're talking about? Whattaya think I was doing?” Dunphy must have looked blank, because Brading wouldn't let it go. “You're Andromeda-cleared, and you ain't never heard of the Bovine Census?!”

Dunphy did his best to look impassive but, inside, he was wincing. He didn't say anything for a few moments, and then he leaned forward. “A mansion has many rooms, Mr. Brading.” Saying it in the way that he did, in a voice no louder than a whisper, made the platitude seem like a warning
.

Dunphy could hear the wheels turning behind Brading's forehead
.
What does
that
mean? A mansion has . . . whut?
Finally, the older man grunted. “Well, anyway—what it was—maybe you know—we took off at night and—well, we went after the cows. On ranches.”

“You went after the cows.”

“Killed 'em. Not a lot on any one ranch—not a lot on any one night. But some.”

Dunphy was stunned. He didn't know what to ask. “ ‘Some,' ” he repeated. “How many would that be?”

“Well, let's see. Starting in '72 . . . I guess we slaughtered a couple thousand, all told. The newspapers said there were four or five times that many, but . . . after a while, you had copycats. Once these things get started, they sorta take on a life of their own. In fact, that was kinda the point—I mean, the way I understood it, that was the whole idea. Give it a life of its own.”

“A couple thousand,” Dunphy repeated
.

“And some horses.”

Dunphy nodded. Horses, too
.

“In fact,” Brading said, “one of the
first
animals we killed was a horse. Belonged to the King Ranch. Stripped the flesh from her neck up. Which was a big deal in the papers. Snippy the Horse. You probably saw the stories. It was front-page, ever'where. Poor thing.”

Dunphy shook his head and thought, This is what they mean by
cognitive dissonance
.
This is what they mean by
gob-smacked
.

“You can see her today,” Brading added
.

“Who?”

“Snippy! They got her skeleton in a museum. The Luther Bean Museum. Over in Alamosa.”

Dunphy blinked. “But . . .”

“We tranquilized 'em first, of course.”

Dunphy shook his head. “But . . 
.
why
a?”

“
Why?!
Because it was painful!”

“No, that's not—”

“Oh, why'd we—well, for the organs. Supposedly, it was for the organs.”

“
What
organs?”

Brading giggled. Nervously. “Genitals, mostly. And your tongues. Your rectum. We had one of the first portable lasers—portable, my ass, damn thing was about the size of a refrigerator—but, I'm telling you, it could core the rectum out of a cow in less than thirty seconds. Made a perfect circle. Now, I
admit
,
it cooked the hemoglobin at the edge of the wound, but otherwise—just a perfect circle. Real
round
.
a”

Dunphy's palms were suddenly quite damp, and the room seemed stuffier than before. He was thinking of Leo Schidlof's body and didn't know what to say. But that didn't matter: Brading was on a roll, and the information poured from him
.

“The whole idea, of course, was the
effect
.
Farmer walks into his field, and what's he see but ole Bossy, layin' on the ground with her hide turned inside out and folded next to her backbone. No rib bones, tissues, or internal organs—just the hide and the skull, laying in the snow, like a pile of laundry. No blood anywhere
,
and no footprints
a.” Brading smiled at the recollection. “I can tell you this. It was a startling sight, if you weren't expecting it.”

“How did you . . .” Dunphy's voice trailed off
.

“Do it without footprints? Well, it depended on the time of year. If it was cold, and there was snow on the ground, we just landed and did what we had to do. And when we were done, we'd get back up in the air and
make
snow—just like the ski resorts do. We had a pretty big tank of water, pressure hoses, and ever'thing. So we covered our tracks that way. And if it was dry, we just lifted the cow with a hoist, did what we had to do, and dropped her half a mile from where we picked her up. So there weren't any tracks that way, either.”

Dunphy's question came slowly. “And the farmers. They were supposed to think—what?”

Brading shrugged. “Oh, I dunno. Different things. There were stories about satanic cults . . . aliens . . . UFOs. Basically, they thought whatever Optical Magick wanted 'em to.”

“Optical Magick?”

“Talk about ahead of the curve! Those boys were like a scaled-down version of the Skunk Works, only it wasn't airplanes, it was special effects
.
Eff! Ecks!
Blow your mind!”

“Good, huh?”

“I kid you not! They had technology . . . special lights . . . projectors . . . holograms. . . . You couldn't tell the difference between what they was doin' and magic. In fact, I think some of it
was
magic!”

“No kiddin'.”

“I'm tellin' ya'! Those boys'd make you
believe
.
a”

“
Would
a they? In what? Give me an example.”

Without hesitating, Brading said, “Paciparaná.”

“What's a pocky? . . .”

“Paraná! It's a chickenshit little village in west Rondônia. Used to be, anyway.”

“Where's Rondônia?”

“Brazil,” Brading said. “They had a fungus there that Technical Services was interested in. Some kinda hallucinogen. Anyway, it don't grow anywhere else, and the Agency wanted it. Locals said no. Indian tribe. Sacred land. That kinda shit.”

“So?”

“So we sent a Pentecostal preacher in, and he told 'em, ‘
Jeeeee-sussss
says ya gotta move.' ”

“And did they?”

“ 'Course not—they weren't Christians. They was savages.”

“So what happened?”

“Optical Magick sets up shop down the road, and the next thing ya know, the Paciparaná Indians are lookin' at a forty-foot-high BVM—”

“BVM?”

“Blessed Virgin Mary. I'm talkin' about a hologram. Like I said, forty-foot-high, hangin' in the air right over the village—just like that, three nights running. And the moon over her shoulder! Beautiful sight—make ya weep! All blue light and—”

“So the Indians left.”

“They walked away
on their knees
.
They're probably still walkin'.”

“Optical Magick,” Dunphy muttered
.

“Right. They did Medjugorje, too. Roswell. Tremonton. Gulf Breeze. Hell, they did all the big ones.”

Dunphy shook his head, as if to clear it
.

“I know,” Brading said. “It's wild. Not that they're perfect. No one's perfect.” He hesitated a moment. “You want to see something?”

Dunphy shrugged, dazed. “Sure.”

Brading chuckled. “Be right back,” he said, and wheeled out of the room, obviously excited. A minute later, he rolled back in with a tape cassette in his lap. Crossing to the TV, he popped the cassette in the VCR and slapped a couple of buttons. “Watch this.”

A test pattern flickered, snapped, and counted backward from ten to one. Suddenly, the pattern gave way to a grainy, black-and-white image of a man in a space suit. Or . . . no. Not a space suit. A surgeon, or someone like a surgeon, wearing a biohazard suit and leaning over an operating table
.

“What's he doing?” Dunphy asked
.

Brading shook his head. “Just watch,” he said
.

Dunphy could tell the film was old, probably an eight-millimeter transfer to video. The camera was shaky and obviously handheld. The image on the screen went in and out of focus as the cameraman moved around the room, searching for close-ups and a better angle. When it finally found one, Dunphy gasped
.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Don't swear,” Brading said, causing Dunphy to do a double take: he hadn't heard that since he was twelve
.

Dunphy stared at the television screen. The . . 
.
object
a . . . on the table was naked and not quite human. Or maybe it was
mostly
human, or just badly deformed. Whatever it was, it was dead. And a good thing, too: the guy in the biohazard suit was doing an autopsy
.

Dunphy took a deep breath. The creature on the table was genderless, or so, at least, it seemed. It had two legs, one of which was badly mangled in the region of the right knee, and two arms. Dunphy saw that its left hand was missing, as if it had been torn off in an accident, and that the fingers on the right hand were one too many. Raising his eyes to the creature's face, he saw that the ears were much too small and that the eyes, black and bottomless, were impossibly large. The mouth, on the other hand, was about the size of a bullet hole and just as round. It did not have lips
.

Slowly, the camera closed in on the surgeon's hands, the focus sharpening as he extracted a gray mass from the creature's chest, depositing it in a stainless steel tray. Dunphy didn't know what the mass was supposed to be—an organ of some kind, but what? No matter. There was something even more interesting to wonder about, something that was missing
.