Mortal Fear

THIRTEEN

Dear Father,

The procedure failed.

That is not wholly accurate. I was prevented from finishing by an unrelated accident. As Kali brought out the patient, she showed signs of hysteria. Unlike the Navy girl, Jenny, who adapted quickly, this one seemed not to have settled her nerves since we took her. Kali told me privately that Jenny had attempted to calm and reassure May during the night (quite ironic, considering the respective fates that awaited them) but the older woman would not be comforted. I’d had to sedate her at gunpoint the first night to get her to sleep at all.

I took the precaution of using curare prior to Jenny’s euthanization, to prevent her screaming or making any other sounds that might alarm May. But it was no use. As Bhagat and Kali struggled to get May onto the table, she spied a few drops of blood that had resulted from Jenny’s procedure. She began to shriek and flail, using her bound hands like a club. Even Kali could not frighten her into submission.

It was then that I made my mistake. I imagined that if I explained the simplicity of the procedure, and the remarkable benefits that would likely accrue to her because of it, May would calm down. But my speech had the opposite effect. When she heard me explain the necessity of opening the sternum, her face went white and she gripped her left arm. Needless to say, I attempted to save her, but it was useless. In four minutes she was dead.

She died of a massive myocardial infarction, and no one could have been more surprised than I. There were no relevant risk factors in her history. As unscientific as it may sound, I believe the woman died of pure terror. When she flatlined, doubt assailed me like a shadow. Should I stop? Should I go on?

Then I thought of Ponce de Leon, thrashing through the bug-infested jungles of Florida, fighting the mosquitoes and the mud and the alligators and the natives and disease, searching, ever searching for the mystical mythical Fountain of Youth. How the image of it must have burned inside his brain, gushing with pure shining water, liquid with restorative power, holding out its promise to mankind, the possibility of revoking God’s harshest decree. And all the time that poor Spaniard was carrying the true fountain with him, inside his head, millimeters from the very space where his seductive vision burned.

We know that now.

Soon I shall stand alone at the pinnacle of the species, the only man with the courage to reach into the fountain.

Soon I shall spit in the face of God.

FOURTEEN

It’s 10.30 A.M. and I am tired of talking to cops. Houston cops. L.A. cops. Oregon cops. San Francisco cops. Mill Creek, Michigan, cops. I’ve repeated the same story I told the New Orleans police and the FBI so many times that I know it like the Lord’s Prayer, and to detectives who seemed to be writing each word with the slowness of fourth graders practicing penmanship.

“Stupid sons of bitches!” I shout to my empty office. “You never heard of tape recorders?”

I feel a little better. Some of the cops I talked to want to arrest me, I could tell. Me, Miles, and the other seven people who have access to the master client list. All of them asked why we haven’t shut down EROS, and some yelled while they asked me. The Michigan cops were the worst, probably because they’re dealing with a kidnapping rather than a murder. I referred them all to Daniel Baxter of the FBI. Let them take their complaints to the Great Stone Face.

When the phone rings again, I grab it as if to smash it against my desk, but I restrain myself and put it to my ear.

“Harper, it’s me.” Drewe’s voice is tight with pent-up emotion.

“What is it? What happened?”

“A lot of things.”

A wave of heat rolls up my back and neck as an image of Erin flashes in my mind. “Where are you?”

“Woman’s Hospital.”

“Can you talk? What is it?”

“The FBI,” she says quietly.

“What? They called you?”

“No. They called my bosses. They called my friends.”

“What?”

“And not just the FBI. A detective from New Orleans called the hospital administrator and asked permission to question colleagues about me.”

Mayeux. “What kind of questions are they asking?”

“Embarrassing ones. Do I drink heavily. Do I ever bring you around the hospital, or even to Jackson. How you and I get along. Why don’t we have any kids.” Her voice cracks slightly at that. “Harper, this is not acceptable.”

“I know, babe. Goddamn it. I’ll try to see if I can do something about it.”

“You’ve got to do something about it. My world isn’t isolated like yours. The good opinion of these people is a prerequisite for keeping my privileges.”

“I get the message, Drewe. Let me make some phone calls.”

“Please do that. I’m being paged.”

And she is gone.

Let me make some phone calls. I said it with such confidence. Who the hell was I kidding? Am I going to call a New Orleans homicide detective and say, “Listen, shrimphead, leave my wife alone or take the fucking consequences!”

No.

Am I going to call Bob Anderson and say, “Dr. Anderson, it turns out I actually can’t take care of your little girl so could you please call the governor and ask him to get the FBI off our backs?”

Hell no.

Am I going to call the FBI and say, “Could you please stop questioning my wife about this murder case? She doesn’t like it.”

Maybe.

I take Baxter’s card from my wallet, punch in the number of Quantico, and ask for Agent Baxter.

“Special Agent Baxter is in the field at this time,” says a robotic female voice. “Would you like to leave voice mail?”

I decide to wake her up. “My name is Harper Cole,” I say too loudly. “I met with Baxter and Dr. Lenz about the Karin Wheat murder, and they told me to call immediately if I remembered anything vital to the case. Well, I have.”

“Where are you, Mr. Cole?” says a slightly less controlled voice.

“Home. And I don’t have much time.”

The voice finally becomes human. “Could you give me your number, please? Mr. Cole?”

“Baxter has it,” I snap, and hang up the phone. That ought to light a fire under somebody.

I sit down at the EROS computer, log in as SYSOP, and begin scanning the Level Two messages as they are posted. EROS traffic is basically unmoderated, which means we sysops do not screen or censor the communications of clients. This freedom is what allows Miles and me to run the busy service without much help. Certain types of communication are prohibited on EROS, and they are filtered by a simple but efficient program designed by Miles: he calls it “Ward Cleaver.” As messages are posted to the various areas of our servers, “Ward” automatically searches out all binary graphic files and references to children and deposits them in a special file called the Dumpster. (Actually, “Ward” lost his graphic filter three weeks ago.) At his leisure, Miles then attempts—usually with success—to track down the originators of these forbidden files. He doesn’t turn them over to the cops or anything. He just likes letting them know he can find them.

Theoretically, I’m supposed to be monitoring the various areas of EROS on a round-robin basis, doing what I can to assist new clients and helping to foster a sense of online community. But in the past few weeks I have become rather casual about that duty. More than a few of this morning’s messages are about Karin Wheat’s death. The themes are consistent: shock, denial, anger. Of course, none of the authors of these messages has any idea that Karin was an EROS client. They knew her only through her novels, which would interest most EROS clients, as they dealt with the darker side of the human psyche.

When my phone rings, I pick it up prepared to give Daniel Baxter a piece of my mind, but instead I find myself listening to the flat vowels of Dr. Arthur Lenz.

“You’ve remembered something of value, Mr. Cole?” he says.

“Where’s Baxter?”

“He’s not available just now.”

“Where are you, Doctor?”

“Is that relevant?”

“Did you go to Minnesota to see Strobekker’s body exhumed?”

“Do you doubt that I did?”

“I think you went straight to New York to try to crack Jan Krislov. Didn’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I personally observed the postmortem on David Strobekker.”

“Was he missing his pineal gland?”

“Oddly enough, no. Now, what was the purpose of your call?”

“Am I a prime suspect in these murders, Doctor?”

Lenz pauses. “You’re a suspect, yes.”

“Why?”

“You have access to EROS’s master client list. That makes you a member of a very exclusive group.”

“Have you got access to the list yet?”

“No.”

“Maybe I can help you.”

“How?”

“Maybe I have a copy of the list.”

“Do you or don’t you?”

It’s my turn to play coy.

“What do you want?” Lenz asks.

“I want the FBI to stop hassling my wife.”

“Ah. Daniel’s agents can be clumsy on occasion. They are causing you problems?”

“They’re bothering my wife at work.”

“I see.”

“And anybody who bothers my wife de facto pisses me off.”

“Yes.”

“What can you do about that?”

Lenz says nothing for a while.

“You realize I could go public with all this at any time,” I tell him.

“That would only aggravate the very situation you seek to alleviate. The disruption of your wife’s life would increase exponentially.”

He’s right, of course.

“But perhaps I can be of assistance,” he says. “It’s true that the various police departments involved in the case—particularly the Michigan department—are ready to have both you and Mr. Turner arrested. I, however, do not share their enthusiasm.”

“Get to it, Doctor.”

“I think perhaps we can help each other, Mr. Cole. If you will agree to help me in a limited capacity, I think I could have both Bureau and police pressure removed from your life.”

“What kind of capacity?”

“I want the master client list, of course. Can you get it?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Damn this guy. “Why take that as a no?”

“If you had a copy of your own, you would have destroyed it by now. And you no longer have access to the accounting database, which you would need to get a new copy.”

How does he know that?

“However, you still have something I want.”

“What’s that?”

“Your thoughts.”

“What?”

And then he tells me. How long he has been planning this, I don’t know. Maybe this was the whole point of putting pressure on Drewe. Of not throwing me to the Michigan police. Because Lenz wants exactly what they want. To fly me up to Washington so he can question me with no one else around. He says something about “an informal version of his standard criminal-profiling technique,” but I don’t really listen. We both know the bottom line. If I want the pressure taken off, I’ve got to play his game.

“How soon do you want to do this?”

“I’ll have a ticket for you waiting in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s 10.50. Can you get to the airport by noon?”

“Noon today?”

“Of course.”

If I drop everything and walk out the front door without a toothbrush. Then I remember Drewe’s voice, tight with anxiety. “Yeah, I can get there. You think there’s a flight?”

“If there isn’t a direct flight, you’ll find a connecting ticket. Ask for messages at the American Airlines desk.”

“Okay. I’d better get going.”

“Just a moment. At the meeting in New Orleans, you mentioned that EROS is patronized by many celebrities.”

“I can’t tell you any names.”

“Fine, fine. But what level of celebrities are we talking about?”

“Well … Karin Wheat was pretty famous.”

“Yes, but authors don’t get the kind of adulation that Hollywood stars or sports figures do.”

“Not many sports figures on EROS, Doctor. The IQ level tends to run a little higher than that.”

“So what level of star are we talking about?”

“The top of the business. And not just actors. Directors, producers, agents, the works.”

He digests this in silence.

“Aren’t you any different from the paparazzi, Doctor? I thought you were trying to solve these murders, not root up juicy tidbits about Hollywood.”

“In all honesty, I find the whole concept of EROS fascinating. However, there is a point to my questions. Jan Krislov refuses to reveal anything about her clients. Thanks to you, I realize she is not grandstanding but prudently shielding people who have a great vested interest in protecting their public images. People who would not hesitate to sue Ms Krislov and have the funds to pursue such a lawsuit to its bitter end.”

“No doubt about it. Hell, there are celebrity lawyers on that master client list. Jan Krislov is a lot of things, but she’s no fool.”

“Do you have any more EROS session printouts?” Lenz asks.

“No more of the murder victims or Strobekker.”

“I’ll take anything you have. I’m following a rather twisted trail, and I’d like all the signposts I can get.”

“I’ll bring you what I have.”

“Excellent.” Lenz says he’ll fax me directions to his office in case I miss the FBI agents he plans to have waiting at the Washington airport. Then he says, “May I give you some unsolicited advice, Mr. Cole?”

“People do it all the time.”

“You’re an experienced futures trader. However, if I were you, I’d clear my current positions. Dump all contracts until this mess is resolved.”

“You’re not me.”

“Quite. Well … I’ll see you this afternoon.”

While Lenz’s fax comes through, I call Drewe in Jackson and explain what I’m about to do and why. She warns me to be careful, then goes back to her patients.

I pack a briefcase with a toothbrush, five hundred dollars in cash, and a few EROS folders from my file cabinet. Before I leave the office, I almost pick up the phone and follow Lenz’s advice. Getting out of the market now would cost me money, but that’s not what keeps me from doing it. The truth is, I feel a simple bullheaded resistance to letting Arthur Lenz tell me what to do. If I lose a few thousand bucks because I’m in a daze, so be it. It’s happened before.

I am almost to the Explorer when I remember Lenz’s fax. Running back inside to get it, I hear the phone. It’s my office line. I debate whether or not to answer, then pick up.

“Hello?”

“Moneypenny? This is Bond. James Bond.”

“What is it, Miles? I’m in a hurry.”

“Brahma went back online five minutes ago.”

“Have they traced the call?”

“Yes and no. They took a chance and started at the second Jersey line they wound up at last time. AT&T long line. Anyway, the connection twisted all around the country, but they finally tracked it to Wyoming.”

“Wyoming?”

“Yeah. Place called Lake Champion. It’s a tiny little nothing of a town.”

I feel my heart pumping. “So? Are they going to arrest him or what?”

“Not that easy, I’m afraid. You’re not going to believe this. Lake Champion, Wyoming, is one of the last towns in America with electro-mechanical phone switching. It’s like the Dark Ages. They actually have these complicated metal gizmos that spin around making physical connections, and there are rows and rows of them stacked on top of each other, from floor to ceiling.”

“What does that mean as far as tracing Brahma?”

Miles chuckles softly. “It means it takes an actual human being running up and down the aisles between those switches to trace the connections. With digital tracing, you can move through twenty states in a couple of minutes without getting permission from anybody. But to authorize an actual human being to chase down mechanical connections in one of these little towns, you have to have a court order.”

“What?”

Miles is laughing harder. “Here’s the brilliant part. To get that court order, you have to prove that a crime is being committed in the state where that town is. It’s one hell of a buffer system, and Brahma knows it. Rather than going higher and higher tech—which is what most hackers do and which is ultimately a no-win game—he goes to the simplest possible solution. He goes analog. It’s exactly what I’d do, man.”

Exactly what I’d do … “So what happens now?”

“Baxter is strong-arming a Wyoming judge as we speak, trying to get permission for a local yokel phone guy to do the trace.”

“How long will that take?”

“Hel-lo.” Miles sighs with almost sexual satisfaction. “Your question just became academic. The Strobekker account just went dead. Brahma’s history.” Miles’s voice rises to the exaggerated bellow of a game show announcer: “The switches in Wyoming are no longer connec-ted!”

I picture blue-suited FBI agents in the EROS office staring at Miles with murder in their eyes. “What alias was he using?”

“Kali this time. I haven’t seen that one before.”

“C-A-L-I?”

“No. K-A-L-I.”

“Who’s Kali?”

“The Hindu mother goddess, consort of Shiva, which is one of his other aliases. Kali’s an ugly black bitch. Wears a belt of skulls, carries a severed head and a knife, has six arms. She’s the betrayer, the terrible one of many names. Weird that he’d log on with a female alias.”

“Severed head? Christ. Are you an expert in this Eastern stuff or what?”

“I’ve dabbled. Read the Vedas, the Upanishads, some other things. They make a lot more sense than the chickenshit dualism of Christianity. You know, you really should—”

“I don’t have time for it, Miles.”

“Neither do I. Someone just told me the Wise and Wonderful Oz wants me on another line.”

“Oz?”

“Arthur Lenz. He’s the man behind the curtain on this thing, isn’t he?”

“I guess. I’ve got to run, Miles. Keep me posted. But use my answering machine, not email.”

“Don’t sweat it. Nobody reads my email if I don’t want them to. Not even God.”

I tear off Lenz’s fax and run for the Explorer. I believe nobody reads Miles’s email if he doesn’t want them to, but what I’m thinking as I crank the engine is this:

Maybe somebody should.

FIFTEEN

I am crossing the Washington Beltway in a yellow taxi driven by a black lay preacher. Lenz told me I would be met at Dulles Airport by FBI agents, but none showed, so I took the cab. The driver tries to make conversation—he still knows a lot of people from “down home,” meaning the South—but I am too absorbed in the object of my journey to keep up my end of the exchange.

Lenz’s private office is supposed to be in McLean, Virginia. All I know is that my lay preacher is leading me deep into upscale suburbia. Old money suburbia. Colonial homes, Mercedeses, Beemers (700 series), matched Lexi, tasteful retail and office space. The driver pulls into the redbrick courtyard of a three-story building and stops. You could probably buy five acres of Delta farmland for the monthly rent on Lenz’s office.

The first floor of the building is deserted but for ferns, its walls covered with abstract paintings that look purchased by the square yard. A bronze-lettered notice board directs me to the third floor. When the elevator door opens on three, I am facing a short corridor with a door at the end. No letters on the door.

Beyond the door I find a small, well-appointed waiting room. There’s a lot of indirect light, but the only window faces the billing office. A dark-skinned receptionist sits behind the window. I am not looking at her. I’m looking at a pale, gangly, longhaired young man folded oddly across a wing chair and ottoman. He is snoring.

“Miles?” I say softly.

He does not stir. A Hewlett-Packard notebook computer and a cellular telephone lie on the floor beside him. The computer screen swirls with a psychedelic screen-saver program.

“Miles.”

The snoring stops. Miles Turner flips the hair out of his eyes and looks up at me without surprise. His eyes are the same distant blue they have always been.

“Hello, snitch,” he says. “What’s in the briefcase? The names of everybody who works at EROS?”

“Fresh underwear. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Same as you, I guess. The mad doctor wants to pry open my skull, see what he can find. I hope he’s in the mood for drama. I certainly am.”

“I can’t believe you agreed to come.”

A fleeting smile touches his lips. “Didn’t have any choice, did I? I’ve got an old drug charge hanging over my head. All Lenz has to do is tell his sidekick—Baxter—to push the button, and I go to jail. Do not pass GO, et cetera.”

“Jesus.”

Miles leans his angular head back with a theatrical flourish and tries to catch the eye of the receptionist. I take the opportunity to study him more closely. It’s been four years since I saw him in the flesh. Miles long ago vowed never to set foot in Mississippi again. When I saw him last, in New Orleans, he had short hair and wore fairly conservative clothes. No Polo or khakis, of course, but your basic Gap in basic black. He’s wearing black again today, but his hair hangs over his shoulders, his sweater is not only torn but looks cheap, and he is dirty. I don’t smell him—yet—but he plainly hasn’t bathed for at least a couple of days.

“Staring is rude,” he says, his eyes still on the window to my left. “Don’t you read your Amy Vanderbilt? Or is it Gloria Vanderbilt?”

“Miles, what the hell is going on? You look terrible. What’s happening with the case?”

He smiles conspiratorially and brings a warning finger to his lips. His eyebrows shimmy up and down as he says in a stage whisper: “Shhhh. The walls have ears.”