A Fear of Dark Water

by Craig Russell

  Roman would not hit that account again. He took a little, often, from many. Unconnected frauds that could only be linked to him if an investigator had full details of all of the unconnected accounts into which he deposited the money. And, of course, because he was working across national boundaries, it was often more than one agency, each with limited jurisdictions, that did the investigating.

  Occasionally he would get a bad feeling; he would intuit that his pilfering was perhaps being seen as part of a larger-scale operation. So, every now and then, Roman would steal a second sum from the same account; a slightly larger sum to suggest a thief growing in confidence. Then, hacking into the bank or corporation’s personnel files, he would deposit the graft into the account of some hapless accounting clerk. Roman never gave any thought to the personal suffering, the human injustice created by his actions. To Roman, these were not real people. They were pieces of information. An employee number and a bank account. Data floating like plankton in a cybernetic ocean.

  Not real people. Not the real world.

  He realised that a thread he had been following had unintentionally led him into the San Francisco headquarters of an environmental technology company. He withdrew as quickly as he could, covering his tracks as he did so. Roman never hit companies in the United States or in Russia. It was not that he had any affection for these nations, it was just that the American FBI was notoriously sophisticated – and tenacious – when it came to tracking down hackers and fraudsters. If you accidentally hacked into a company which supplied anything to the massive US military complex, then the FBI would come after you wherever you were in the world.

  And the Russians … well, with the Russians you never knew who you were really stealing from and they had the best hacker talent of any country. Between them, the Americans and the Russians had the best cybercops and cybercrooks on the planet. It was best to stay well away from them.

  He pulled out of the American company. After another fifteen minutes he had enriched himself by another six thousand. Euros this time, and from a British airline’s pension fund.

  Roman always moved his funds about, sometimes for months, redistributing them, consolidating them, then redistributing them again, before eventually placing small amounts into the various German bank accounts to which he had direct access. He was planning to build a new computer that would be faster than anything he had at present; probably faster and more powerful than anything any cybercop would have. He needed to transfer enough to his credit-card account to cover the purchase of two SATA-interface HyperDrive Fives. It was a much larger sum than he usually liked to transfer at any one time, but he needed the drives.

  After he was finished he shut down his equipment, which took some time and was not something he always did. There was more risk of system problems on restart and, of course, it stopped him taking immediate action if one of the many possible law-enforcement agencies came knocking on his door. But he liked to let the hardware cool every now and then. And he always kept the electromagnet ready for use whenever needed.

  He half shuffled, half waddled through to the kitchen and took a family-sized bag of snacks back through to the lounge, settling himself into the permanent depression his body had made on the sofa. He switched on the TV and watched an item where a woman wanting to go back to work had to get some old granny from Bavaria to teach the husband how to do the housework and keep their flat clean using environmentally friendly but traditional materials. Lemon juice, vinegar, that kind of stuff.

  ‘Why?’ snorted Roman contemptuously at the TV before muting the sound and picking up the cellphone from the coffee table.

  He examined the phone. A good one. A Nokia 5800. Web-enabled, integrated satnav.

  Roman didn’t know why he had stolen it. He had been sitting in the café having lunch when she had come in and sat at the table next to him. He tried not to stare at her, but he couldn’t help noticing how beautiful she was: dark hair, large dark eyes. Tall, slim, elegant. She was the kind of woman who would never give someone like Roman a second glance, unless it was a look of disgust. Yet she was exactly the kind of woman he desired; the only kind of woman he desired. The opposite of Elena.

  But it wasn’t her beauty that he remembered most. There had been something about the woman in the café – about the way she moved her eyes and the way she sat – that had disturbed him. He could have sworn she had been afraid. She had kept looking at the door of the café as if she was expecting someone to follow her in. Above all, it had been the way she had put the phone down on the table, placed her paper napkin over it and walked out, forgetting the phone was there. That was why he had taken the phone: not because she had forgotten it and he could return it to her, but because everything about her leaving it behind was fake. She hadn’t forgotten it: she was leaving it somewhere she knew it would be stolen if found.

  It was intriguing. She was intriguing. And, for a moment after she had left the café, Roman Kraxner, the obese, balding computer geek turned fraudster became his online persona of Rick334, private detective out of New Venice. After paying his bill he had squeezed his bulk past the table she’d been sitting at. He had pretended to drop the hand-held PDA he had been working on onto the table and, when he had picked it up, he had palmed the Nokia.

  It was a subterfuge that had been totally unnecessary. No one had been looking in his direction. It was one of the consolations for the fat or ugly: it was not just that people did not notice you; they made a real effort not to notice you.

  Roman’s curiosity had been stirred even more when he had got home and flicked through the contents of the phone. There were no contacts in the address lists and Roman got the idea that the phone had been purged shortly before being dumped. All previous destinations in the satnav had also been cleared. The text messages, too.

  But one thing had been left untouched: the ringtone. And it was set for everything: incoming calls, text messages, alerts. ‘Message in a Bottle’ by The Police. When Roman had seen that he had known instantly that all his instincts about the woman in the café had been right. She had deliberately left the phone for him to find. Like a castaway tossing a bottle into the ocean, she had put something inside this phone. A message. All Roman had to do was find it.

  Not that that would present a problem to Roman: the great thing about cellphones was that they were a convergent technology – a phone was a camera, an organiser, a web browser, an mp3 player. Unlike earlier models, this generation of mobile was more computer than phone and Roman had the software to retrieve the data that had been dumped.

  It was then that things had become very interesting.

  Chapter Twenty

  Anna Wolff stood by the window of Fabel’s office, looking out across the dark shapes of the trees in Winterhude Stadtpark. Outside, the light was fading but the sky, now clear of clouds, was a sheet of dark blue silk.

  ‘That was a long coffee break …’ She turned when Fabel came into the office.

  ‘What’s this? You our new time-and-motion monitor?’ He sat down behind his desk. ‘I’ve just had a very interesting chat with Fabian Menke of the BfV. About the Pharos Project.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That and what Technical Section have retrieved from the computers we seized this afternoon.’ Anna tapped a document folder on Fabel’s desk. ‘Interim stuff. As we speak, geeks are burrowing deeper and deeper into silicon.’ She imitated a small crawling animal, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Anything hopeful?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ she sighed. ‘It looks like these guys are clean. Weird, but clean. Of course, we did come up one computer short.’

  ‘I couldn’t take it away from him, Anna. If you had been there …’ Fabel frowned. ‘Actually, no … if you’d been there you would have taken it. And probably confiscated his wheelchair, too.’

  ‘We really do need to check it out,’ said Anna. ‘Even if he is physically unlikely to be a suspect, there may be something in his interactions with the v
ictims that could give us something.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, Anna. I’ve arranged to send one of Kroeger’s people around to Reisch’s home to check the computer.’ Fabel picked up the folder and flicked through the report inside. ‘I guess we just have to keep plugging away. Hit the next bunch of IP addresses.’

  ‘We could be at that for ever,’ said Anna.

  ‘It’s all we’ve got,’ said Fabel. He nodded to the chair opposite. ‘Sit down, Anna.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said absently. ‘I’d rather stand. I’ve been sitting all day and my leg stiffens up a bit.’

  For a split second, Fabel found himself lost for words. Anna picked up on it.

  ‘Jan,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. I wish we could stop dancing around this. It wasn’t your fault.’

  He stared at the report in front of him, more to avoid making eye contact with Anna than to study the file’s contents.

  ‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘I was in command. Just like I was the night Paul was killed.’

  ‘This is a dangerous business, Jan. I know that and Paul knew that. You can’t legislate for every eventuality.’

  ‘I dream about him all the time,’ Fabel said in a flat, quiet voice. ‘Nearly every week or couple of weeks. Always the same dream. We’re always in my father’s study, up in my parents’ house in Norddeich, and Paul talks to me. Not about anything important or significant. He just sits there and chats to me. But I know he’s dead. He has the wound in his head and sometimes he explains that it’s difficult for him to have an opinion or perspective on whatever it is we’re talking about, because he’s dead.’

  ‘I thought all the dreams had stopped,’ said Anna.

  ‘That’s what I tell Susanne. The official line. It’s tough living with a psychologist. I don’t know if she believes me, but that’s what I tell her. The point is, I know that if I had done things differently Paul would be alive, Maria Klee wouldn’t be in a mental hospital and you wouldn’t have got shot.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry – can we drop it?’

  ‘You’re the boss.’ Anna smiled at him. ‘About the Pharos Project, if I show you mine will you show me yours?’

  ‘Go ahead …’ Fabel leaned back in his chair.

  ‘I don’t know why you wanted me to look into this for you, but I’ve been hearing some very dodgy things about Pharos. And – how you knew I won’t ask – but there is a connection with the murders.’

  Fabel looked stunned.

  ‘You did ask me to look at this because there’s some kind of connection?’ asked Anna.

  ‘No … no, not at all – like I told you, it’s something unrelated.’

  ‘Then it’s quite some coincidence,’ said Anna. ‘It took a bit of unravelling, but Dominik Korn, who heads the Pharos Project, also heads the consortium that owns and operates Virtual Dimension, the simulated-reality game that all the victims were logged into. So why were you interested in Pharos?’

  ‘A long shot … I thought there might be a link to the other body we found. The wash-up.’ Fabel sighed. ‘There’s a woman who seems to have gone missing: Meliha Yazar. I think there may be a link to the Pharos Project. She might have been investigating them.’

  ‘What have you got yourself into, Jan?’ Anna left the window, came over to Fabel’s desk and leaned on it, the concern in her expression genuine.

  ‘Something I maybe shouldn’t have,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I got talked into it by Berthold Müller-Voigt. This is strictly between us, Anna …’

  She nodded.

  ‘Müller-Voigt is involved with this woman …’ began Fabel.

  ‘And half the female population of Hamburg, from what I’ve heard,’ said Anna.

  ‘It’s not like that. Müller-Voigt is nuts about this woman. And he is really concerned about her disappearance.’ Fabel sketched out some of what had passed between him and the Environment Senator.

  ‘You know,’ said Anna when he was finished, ‘I think I’d better sit down after all. You have no idea what I found out about Pharos. If Müller-Voigt’s latest squeeze really was investigating them, then she could well have got out of her depth. The Pharos Project is the brainchild of Dominik Korn. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘Not until Müller-Voigt mentioned him to me,’ said Fabel.

  ‘That’s hardly surprising. Dominik Korn is one of the world’s richest men – worth billions, as is his deputy, Peter Wiegand – but he’s also one of the world’s most reclusive men. No one outside Wiegand and his circle of closest advisers has had contact with him for years. Occasionally he will take part in video conferences with other key people in his business empire. He lives on a massive yacht. And I mean massive. It would make the average Russian oligarch feel inadequate.’

  ‘Why is he so reclusive?’

  ‘Apparently he had a diving accident that caused him to have some kind of cataclysmic stroke brought on by severe decompression sickness and other complications. He shouldn’t be alive; it was a miracle that he survived it, but it’s left him in the same kind of condition as the guy you interviewed earlier today. Since then he’s needed round-the-clock care.’

  ‘And he’s also head of this cult?’

  ‘Guru number one, apparently. He may sound like a nut-job, but he’s said to be as rich in brains as he is in cash. His IQ is said to be off the scale. He studied …’ Anna referred to her notebook ‘… oceanography, hydrology and environmental science in the United States – he has dual German and US citizenship, by the way – then did a doctoral thesis in hydrology, and then went on to become a hydrometeorologist.’ She looked at her notes again. ‘Studying the interaction between large bodies of water and the climate. Korn became the world’s leading expert on ecohydrology. That’s what he was doing when he had his accident. He had designed this unique submersible for research work and was taking it on its maiden dive when it all went tits-up.’

  ‘His accident?’

  ‘And his epiphany, apparently.’

  ‘Yes …’ said Fabel. ‘Müller-Voigt made mention of some kind of revelation at the bottom of the sea.’

  ‘Right up until the accident, the Pharos Project had been an oceanographic research study. Korn had poured millions of his own money into it. It was examining the environmental impact of various human activities at the deepest ocean levels. Then, after his accident and the damage it did to him, Korn changed the nature of the Pharos Project. To start with it became a lobbying body, campaigning against oil exploration in deeper waters. It gained a lot of credibility after the BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico. Then Korn approved members of Pharos getting involved in protests and direct action. After that, about nine months after his accident, Korn started to talk about his epiphany and what it meant.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘All his adult life, Dominik Korn had positioned himself as a disciple of deep ecology – apparently that means he believed that human beings shouldn’t see themselves as distinct from the ecosystem and that they should work to shape the environment sympathetically while preserving biodiversity, all that sort of stuff. But after his accident he totally rejected the concept of deep ecology and started spouting his theories of disengagement. He claimed his experience five thousand metres down had revealed some kind of universal truth to him.’

  ‘Don’t they all,’ said Fabel. ‘Going by the number of cults there are, there must be a hell of a lot of universal truths.’

  ‘Well, Korn’s particular revelation was that he had been damaged because he had been a human in an environment humans had no place being. The philosophy of the Pharos Project is that mankind should remove itself from the environment.’ Anna shrugged. ‘This disengagement he talks about.’

  ‘Where did you get all this stuff?’

  ‘The federal boys,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve got a contact there. An ex-boyfriend, actually. He was pretty cagey. He said this was a big thing for the BfV. The French security services and the American FBI are all over the Pharos Project too, apparently. He doesn’t
know exactly what it is about it that’s flipped their switches, but the Pharos Project is on all kinds of hot lists.’

  ‘So I gather. Your sniffing around on my behalf was noticed.’

  ‘Menke?’

  ‘Yep. He knew all about your enquiries. Your ex-boyfriend was obviously so cagey that he felt he needed to cover his back.’

  ‘So what did Menke tell you?’ asked Anna.

  ‘Less than you’ve told me, but enough for me to see that if Meliha Yazar had been snooping around Pharos, then Müller-Voigt might be right about her being in danger. Menke’s promised to send me some information over later.’

  ‘But?’ Anna raised an eyebrow.

  ‘But I think our interest is unwelcome. To be fair, I haven’t confided in Menke about Müller-Voigt or his concerns about Meliha Yazar. Menke did tell me that the Pharos Project meets all the criteria of a destructive cult. Particularly its dictatorial control over its members. Menke wasn’t too specific, but it seems it’s the same old thing: conversion becomes indoctrination becomes brainwashing. He did say that Korn has added his own twists here and there. The other thing that distinguishes Pharos is its financial clout. The inner chamber of the Project are all board members of the various companies in the Korn business empire. And from what you’ve said, that includes the developers of Virtual Dimension.’