A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  This small area of shining technology was the only part of his apartment that was clean and tidy. Roman kept this part of his environment dust-free, ordered, illuminated in the otherwise darkened room. It was also where he had his most expensive pieces of furniture: the sturdy table on which he had his equipment arrayed, like the command desk of a space-programme mission-control room, and the chair that Roman had had specially made for himself. It was the most expensive thing he had ever purchased; more expensive even than any single piece of his computer hardware. The chair moulded itself into his body, or his body moulded into it; it swivelled, tilted, glided in response, it seemed to Roman, to his will. It was the ultimate computer chair, the brochure had assured him. But where the real expense had come had been in having it custom-built to support Roman’s mass. The manufacturers in Munich had sent someone all the way to Hamburg to visit Roman in his apartment. The technician had, at first, looked suspicious when he had seen the modesty and semi-squalor of Roman’s home, but the suspicion had evaporated when he had done a quick mental calculation of the value of the computer-related technology arrayed on the desk. It had almost been as if he had understood Roman; that he had met others like him.

  Roman remembered that when he had first sat in the chair the comfort had been sublime. It seemed to support every square centimetre of his body, making him feel, ironically, almost weightless. Now, as he eased himself into the chair, he still experienced some of that sense of relief, of sublime comfort, but less so than before. He knew the reason: the chair had been crafted to fit him perfectly when he had ordered it. Now, three months and seven kilos later, the fit was no longer perfect.

  Roman drew as deep a breath as his obesity-hypoventilation syndrome, which compelled him to sleep each night with an oxygen mask, allowed him to draw and switched on his four flat-screen monitors, which had been configured to offer a continuous display. A single window.

  Roman loved this moment: immersion. He could disconnect from the mass of his body, from the mass of the world. Like a beached whale swept suddenly back out to sea and into a natural environment of grace, Roman became weightless, formless, in a world where his mind and his mind alone was all that mattered. Here he communicated with other beings without form. Here he could be anyone, anything. Here there were no noisy Albanian neighbours, no colic spasms, no disgust at what looked back at you from the mirror.

  Roman would spend the next seven hours, late into the night, in the cybernetic world. He would chat, play, be someone else. He would spend most of that time in Virtual Dimension. He had been a member for nearly a year. In Virtual Dimension he was slim, attractive, successful. Officially, his job was as a private detective and he had a string of mistresses, a penthouse apartment that looked out over the lagoons of New Venice, and he drove a 1962 Ferrari 250 GT convertible. He had dozens of friends and attended e-drugs parties.

  In Virtual Dimension he had no weight problem, no grubby Wilhelmsburg flat, no Albanian neighbours. He ached to be back there.

  But first, Roman had work to do.

  The truth was that although Roman hated living in Wilhelmsburg, he could have easily afforded to move out at any time. The only thing stopping him was the questions that would be asked about how he had managed to amass such a fortune. He had a powerful electromagnet, weighing five kilos, permanently plugged into the power supply, ready to be switched on with a flick of his thumb and swept across his hard drives, destroying the data inside. The evidence.

  If they came.

  He would play Virtual Dimension soon. But first, he had to attend to business. He sat before thousands of euros’ worth of technology which required constant updating, maintaining, expanding. And the way Roman paid for it all was to divert large sums of money from all around the world into accounts that he had all around the world.

  But Roman was more than just a fraudster. He was an artist. No one was looking for him yet, because no one knew yet that the money was missing. Every institution, organisation and company that he had defrauded was hit immediately by a computer virus that erased data, destroyed records, wiped clean all traces of his visit. Each virus was different. Each was an individual, unique creation. A work of art.

  And the greatest virus of them all – the Trojan of all Trojans – was the Klabautermann Virus. His masterpiece of destructive programming.

  Because obese, reclusive, Roman Kraxner – twenty-eight, one hundred and eighty kilos, with no university degree but an IQ of 162 and an Abitur result of 1.0, living in a grubby three-room apartment in Wilhelmsburg – was one of the most successful internet hackers and fraudsters in the world.

  And it was time for him to go to work.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Müller-Voigt came back into the lounge from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a coffee pot and two cups on it. Fabel noticed that the pot and cups were made from a very fine white china and were of an elegant, restrained modern design. He had seen exactly the same set in the Alsterhaus store down on Jungfernstieg and had wanted to buy it, but had decided he could not justify the expense. His East Frisian providence had triumphed over his Hamburg savoir faire.

  While Müller-Voigt had been in the kitchen, Fabel had picked up the small piece of sculpture that had sat in the centre of the coffee table. It was a modernist piece. Some kind of stylised dragon. It had a beauty to it, but there was something about it that also disturbed Fabel. It was an inanimate lump of bronze but looked as if it was writhing as he watched. He put it back on the table when Müller-Voigt came back in.

  ‘Like it?’ asked Müller-Voigt as he set the coffee tray down. ‘I had it specially commissioned. It’s a representation of Rahab, the ancient Hebrew sea daemon. The creator of storms and the father of chaos.’

  ‘Strange choice,’ said Fabel, his eyes still on the bronze, still half-expecting to see it twist and writhe.

  ‘It represents my enemy, if you like,’ the politician said. ‘A monster we are creating out of Nature.’ Müller-Voigt paused to hand Fabel his coffee. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, I checked with the organisers of the conference I met Meliha at. I asked them to go through their records of delegates and attendees. It wasn’t open to the general public and everyone who attended did so by invitation and registration. They had no record of Meliha whatsoever. I saw her delegate badge, Fabel. We all had to have our photographs taken for those and we had to supply all kinds of information for security. As a foreign national, she would have had to show her passport as proof of identity. By the way, that was one of the reasons why, when you asked if she could have been an illegal, I said no. In today’s security climate they would not have let her into the Congress Center otherwise. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is absolutely no way Meliha could have been there if she hadn’t been registered for the event and her details checked.’

  ‘Administrative errors happen. Maybe her details have been accidentally wiped,’ said Fabel.

  ‘Mmm … just like her email to me has disappeared from my computer.’

  ‘That was because of a computer virus that we all know about.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a coincidence, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Fabel. And if there was one thing Fabel didn’t believe in, it was coincidences.

  ‘And who’s to say that the Klabautermann Virus isn’t targeted? That it is a tool for deleting carefully selected information and hiding it in plain sight in a mass deletion?’

  Fabel laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Senator, but I think we’re wandering into the area of conspiracy theories.’

  ‘You think?’ Müller-Voigt poured more coffee. Fabel accepted it but knew he would regret it later. He had a low tolerance for caffeine and he knew that a second cup would keep him awake that night. Susanne habitually teased him about it, saying it was because all he had ever drunk while growing up in East Frisia was tea. But somehow Fabel didn’t think the coffee would be the only thing to keep him from sleep.

  It was now dark outside and Fabel no
ticed that the lighting in the lounge increased automatically to compensate.

  ‘Look, Herr Müller-Voigt,’ said Fabel. ‘I have to ask you this. Did you give any money or gifts or anything of any value to Meliha? Maybe even information that may have some value or be of use—’

  ‘I see,’ Müller-Voigt cut across him. ‘You think that I’ve been honeytrapped. No fool like an old fool, is that it?’

  Fabel started to protest but the politician held up his hand.

  ‘I don’t blame you. I have to admit that the thought had gone through my head, but the answer is no. I can honestly say that nothing of any material, commercial or political advantage ever passed between us. We became lovers. It was as simple and as complicated as that. And now she’s gone and I’m struggling to convince you that she ever existed. I’m beginning to struggle to convince myself of that.’

  ‘People either exist or they don’t, Herr Senator. And if they do exist then they leave material traces.’

  ‘That’s what I believed, too. But when I’d run out of all other ideas I used a contact I have in the education department. I got her to run a check with her contact in the University of Istanbul and gave her the rough span of years during which I reckoned Meliha would have been a student.’

  ‘And she drew a blank as well.’ Fabel made it a statement rather than a question.

  ‘That’s why I said to you that Meliha wasn’t missing, but that she has disappeared. Not just physically but, as far as I can see, from any form of public record. It’s almost as if someone has hit a button and deleted Meliha from existence.’

  A silence fell over the two men. Fabel studied his coffee cup and considered what Müller-Voigt had told him. Fabel had heard stories like this before. People deranged with anxiety over a missing person elaborating their disappearance into some huge conspiracy, just to make sense of it. But Fabel knew this was not one of those cases. What Müller-Voigt was telling him made absolutely no sense at all, and Fabel believed every word of it.

  ‘If what you say is true … No, let me put that better: if what you suspect is true, then it would take massive resources and organisation. Are you saying the government, or a government is behind this? You said that you thought Meliha was into something that might have placed her in danger. What, exactly?’

  Müller-Voigt regarded Fabel for a moment, as if assessing him.

  ‘Do you remember what I said about how we used to be more connected to Nature?’ he said. ‘That we could interpret our environment?’

  Fabel nodded.

  ‘I need you to keep that in mind for a while. Have you heard of the Pharos Project?’

  Fabel remembered the poster he had passed when running Susanne to the airport: the overdone symbolism of the lighthouse in the storm.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Heard of it but I don’t know anything much about it.’

  ‘The Pharos Project is purportedly an environmental organisation. It has a massive corporate conglomerate, headed by its founder, behind it. The European headquarters of the Pharos Project is, believe it or not, just a few kilometres from here. There’s an old disused lighthouse out on the coast, just to the north of Hörne: they’ve renovated the original lighthouse and added this massive building beside it. They call the building itself the Europa Pharos. You should see it – it is actually a beautiful piece of architecture and, of course, environmentally self-sustaining. It projects out on stilts over the water. There’s another one, apparently, on the coast of Maine, called the Americas Pharos. Anyway, the Pharos Project uses its status as an environmental research and pressure group to avoid being classed as a religious or philosophical movement, or an out-and-out political organisation.’

  ‘You’re saying they’re covering up being a cult?’

  ‘You met Fabian Menke from the BfV earlier today,’ said Müller-Voigt. ‘I’ve been talking to him about the Pharos Project and he admitted to me that it is a group that his people are monitoring. Closely.’

  ‘Doesn’t that, well, concern you? That the BfV is investigating an environmental organisation? After all, you are Hamburg’s most outspoken environmentalist.’

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight: the Pharos Project has nothing to do with anything I believe in. The Pharos Project is a cult. But more than that, it is a dangerous, malignant cult. You should talk to Menke about it.’

  ‘So what was Meliha’s connection to it?’

  ‘She was very guarded about her work but, like I said, I got the impression that she was some kind of investigator for whatever organisation she worked for. Or maybe an investigative journalist. But, again, I’ve searched for her on the internet and can find no trace of her ever having contributed to any journal, press or TV. In any case, I know she was gathering as much information as she could about the Pharos Project. She even asked me what I knew about it, which turned out to be a lot less than she did.’

  ‘And what do you know?’

  ‘Well, I’ve done quite a bit of research since Meliha disappeared. And I was able to get a fair bit from Menke. None of it is good. The Pharos Project meets all the criteria for a dangerous cult. It is highly dictatorial and its leaders, particularly Dominik Korn, are venerated as demigods; it demands that all its members donate all their wealth to it; it has some kind of doomsday agenda; it exerts total control over its members and has an incredibly hostile and aggressive attitude towards any critics.’

  ‘And you think that aggression has been directed towards Meliha?’

  ‘Remember what I said about us not engaging with our environment any more? Well, that kind of disengagement is exactly what the Pharos Project, specifically its leader, Dominik Korn, positively encourages. He believes that the best way to save the environment is for humankind to be removed from it.’

  ‘And how do they propose that is achieved?’ asked Fabel.

  Müller-Voigt shrugged. ‘Most cults believe in some epiphanic moment. A Judgement Day, or Ragnarok, or Apocalypse. The Pharos Project is no different. They believe in an event they call the Consolidation. I don’t know any more than that. But I suspect that Menke will be able to give you more details. There was a limit to how much he was willing to share with me, but you’re not a politician, you’re a policeman.’

  ‘And you think that Meliha’s disappearance is connected to the Pharos cult?’

  ‘They don’t like people investigating or criticising them. And Meliha did seem to be looking into their activities before she disappeared.’ Müller-Voigt paused. ‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this, Fabel. I’ll do it without your help if I have to. It will make it difficult, but I’ll do it. The question remains, Herr Fabel: will you help me?’

  ‘As you’ve said yourself, there’s no evidence of a murder. There’s not even evidence that Meliha ever existed, from what you’ve told me. I simply can’t launch an official Murder Commission inquiry based on what you’ve given me.’

  ‘So you’re saying that you won’t help me?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I’ll look into it. God knows I’ve got enough on my plate with this Network Killer case. But I’ll see what I can find out. But there’s no point in you looking at the washed-up body we found. It was a torso: no head, legs or arms.’

  Fabel saw the colour drain dramatically from behind the politician’s tan. For a moment he thought Müller-Voigt was going to throw up.

  ‘Listen, Herr Senator, I think it’s unlikely that it’s Meliha. We believe the body was dismembered to avoid identification. According to everything you’ve told me tonight, Meliha doesn’t seem to have any kind of recorded identity. Give me a few days and I’ll see what I can find out.’

  ‘Thank you, Fabel. I appreciate it. Can I ask you one more thing? Can we keep this between ourselves … for the meantime at least.’

  ‘Okay, Herr Senator,’ said Fabel. It wasn’t an official investigation after all. Yet.

  ‘You have to admit, though,’ said Fabel, ‘that you haven’t really given me much to go on. Is there anything you
can tell me about Meliha that might help me?’

  Müller-Voigt’s small laugh was both bitter and sad. ‘After Meliha disappeared, I thought about how little I really knew her. Every time I thought about talking to you – or someone like you – about her disappearance I realised how little I really had to tell you about her. But I did know her. I knew her as well as if we’d spent our whole lives together. If you like, I knew the essence of her.’ He thought for a moment. ‘She was a Kemalist. You know, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey. Atatürk is a massive figure for a lot of Turks because he created something so totally, radically different to everything that went before. He simply rethought the concept of Turkey and shaped a secular, progressive republic. He convinced an entire nation to put the past behind them and embrace a future that they had never considered. I can understand why he is so inspirational to Turks. As I said, Meliha was also deeply passionate about the environment. And that was her big thing: she believed that the world needed an “environmental Atatürk”. Someone who was capable of rethinking our entire way of life. She used to accuse me and others like me of being “pop-environmentalists”. Dilettantes.’

  ‘I don’t see how …’

  ‘“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”,’ said Müller-Voigt in English. ‘Do you know your Shakespeare, Herr Fabel?’

  ‘Congreve,’ said Fabel. ‘“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” is from a play by William Congreve, not Shakespeare.’

  Müller-Voigt grinned. ‘Of course, I was forgetting you’re a very learned policeman, aren’t you, Herr Fabel? Anyway, I think Meliha felt a little of that fury. Not that she had been scorned romantically, more philosophically. She was a great admirer of Dominik Korn, of his environmental views. At least when he set out his original vision for the Pharos Project. I think she saw him as the great hope for the future of the environment.’

  ‘Her “Atatürk of the Environment”?’