Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  I am eyeing one of the cold pizza slices when Lenz shouts, “What?” As I look up, he snaps, “Do it,” and hangs up.

  “What is it?”

  “Strobekker again.”

  Suddenly the pizza I ate two hours ago burns upward toward the center of my chest. “He hasn’t killed Phoebe Tyler. He couldn’t have!”

  Lenz stands up and leans over the fax machine with his hands on the table. “No. He sent Daniel another message.”

  I close my eyes in relief. “When?”

  “Thirty seconds after the conversation between Levon and Sarah ended.”

  “Man, does this guy have our number. What did the message say?”

  “Daniel’s faxing it to us now. This is clearly a reaction to the Bureau’s attempts to trace his phone connection, yes?”

  “Got to be.”

  “Could Strobekker have known we were watching his Levon-Sarah exchange?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, if he were in the system as a sysop, or had root access, Miles would know about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. A lot of people know a hell of a lot more about computers than I do.”

  The fax machine rings. Lenz picks up the receiver and hits the SEND/RECEIVE key. “Daniel is considering arresting Turner,” he says without looking up.

  “What?”

  His eyes stay on the fax machine. “There’s a great deal of pressure from the police departments involved to arrest you both.”

  “Goddamn it! I’m sick of this intimidation!”

  “Don’t worry, no one’s going to arrest you. But arresting Turner might keep the local gendarmes at bay for a while. Multijurisdictional investigations are always difficult. And this one is worse than most.”

  I read the new message as it curls out of the fax machine:YOU HAVE NOT STOPPED HUNTING US. I ASKED NICELY. IF YOU DO NOT CEASE, I SHALL BE FORCED TO ENTER YOUR GAME, AND AT YOUR LEVEL. I DO NOT THINK YOU WILL LIKE THE RESULT.

  REMEMBER DALLAS.

  “Now the threat,” says Lenz.

  “If he’s so confident we’ll never find him,” I ask, “why is he worried about us hunting him?”

  “Good point. Notice the pronoun change? The ‘I’ creeps in now. Note the proper use of ‘shall.’ And no contractions. I think this man has considerable education.”

  My eyes glance over the fax paper, all but unseeing. “You know what I think? I think that whole Levon-Sarah thread was bait.”

  “Mmmm?” Lenz murmurs. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the whole thing was done just to see whether we’d be able to localize him to a chat room or isolate a phone line at EROS, et cetera. To see how far we could get.”

  “And we did localize him to a room.”

  “It was luck.”

  “But he doesn’t know that,” Lenz points out.

  “No, but I don’t think you realize what his use of a new alias means. Either he has gained sysop privileges, or he has access to at least one—and possibly hundreds—of other legitimate accounts.”

  “Wouldn’t a legitimate client quickly complain about an unauthorized person using his or her account?”

  “No. That’s the beauty of EROS. For Strobekker, I mean. We’re expensive, but we charge a flat fee. Someone who knows my user name and password could log on for hours as me without me being the wiser or even giving a damn if I was.”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean if Strobekker knows the names and passwords of legitimate account holders—if he really has a copy of the master client list and the clients’ passwords—you may never be able to trace him. Because the only way we’ll know what to trace is by searching room to room for his goddamn prose style. You saw how long it took us tonight, and we were lucky.”

  Lenz grunts and turns away from me. He stands in silence, like a man in defeat. But then I see a tensing of his posture.

  “What is it?” I ask softly.

  His right arm rises and points to the Dell’s softly glowing monitor. “Levon’s back. In a lobby.” The psychiatrist drops into his chair and pulls up to the Dell. “How do I approach him?”

  “Don’t. Just watch him.”

  “You said yourself we’d be lucky to find him.”

  “And I don’t believe in luck.”

  Lenz clicks his mouse and types something into the Dell.

  “Don’t bite, Doctor. He’s in control right now. I don’t see any advantage until we can turn the tables—”

  It’s no use. Lenz—under the alias “Lilith”—has already invited “Levon” to join him in a private room. My fingers tremble as I wait for Brahma’s response. The words appear in a flash without a single error:

  LEVON> I don’t believe we’ve met before.

  “Got him!” Lenz cries, his fingers flying across the keyboard.

  LILITH> I just joined the network. I’m trying to get a feel for what’s out here in cyberspace. So far, I must confess I’m a bit disappointed.

  LEVON> How so?

  LILITH> Most of the talk is conventional. Even the “racy” stuff is fairly pedestrian. I was hoping for more sophisticated fare.

  LEVON> You have to know where to look. I’m intrigued by your name, Lilith. Do you know its origin?

  LILITH> Do you? LEVON> Rest assured that I do.

  Lenz pauses, then types:LILITH> Consider it a test.

  LEVON> I’ve always tested very well, Lilith.

  LILITH> Amaze me.

  LEVON> “Lilith” is a Hebrew word for “demon of the night.” It was mistranslated in the Book of Isaiah as “screech owl,” which is probably where your parents picked up the name. “Lilith” derives from the Babylonian _lilitu_, which itself derives from the Semitic word for “night.” Later rabbis took this “night demon” and from her created “Lilith”—a beautiful woman who became Adam’s wife before Eve was created. Perhaps your father was learned in the rabbinical tradition?

  Lenz’s stunned expression tells me Brahma’s information is dead on. I’m still in shock when Lenz’s shaking fingers type:LILITH> I _am_ amazed. I now consider this month’s EROS fee well spent.

  LEVON> You didn’t answer the question about your father.

  LILITH> I value my privacy.

  LEVON> A sentiment I share. Good luck tonight, and all other nights. I must away.

  LILITH> But we only just met.

  “Stop!” I hiss at Lenz. “Type B-Y-E.”

  “But he’s right here—”

  Before Lenz can type another word, I shove his chair away from the Dell and type:LILITH> Until we meet again.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Lenz says in a quavering voice. “I lost control for a moment. I felt my fingers on his sleeve.”

  “You caught buck fever is what you did.”

  Suddenly Lenz is grinning like a hyena. “By God, it was exhilarating, wasn’t it? I think I finally understand the expression ‘thrill of the hunt.’ ”

  “Don’t mistake what you’re doing with hunting, Doctor.”

  “What am I doing, then?”

  “Trapping.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “If you don’t know that, you’ll never get this guy.” Lenz looks at me like I just kicked his dog. “Explain yourself.”

  “Well . . . in hunting, the first thing you do is go into the quarry’s environment.”

  “I’m doing that.”

  “No, you’re not. Not really. Because the digital environment is an illusion. It’s a virtual world in every sense. You can’t reach through that screen and touch him. Remember, somewhere out there this killer actually exists—in the corporeal world. That’s where he lives, not in this box.”

  “Keep going.”

  “When you hunt, you follow an animal’s tracks.”

  “I’m not doing that?”

  “No. That’s what Baxter’s technicians are trying to do. And so far they’re failing. You personally don’t have even the beginnings of the skill required to track Strobekker’s digital footprints. And if he real
ly knows what he’s doing, there won’t be any footprints.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  “Didn’t you ever visit the country when you were a kid? Shoot sparrows with a BB gun or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus. Look, hunting is an aggressive activity. Basically, you take yourself to the quarry’s territory, conceal yourself, wait a while, or maybe have dogs or beaters drive the game to you. And when your quarry happens up within range of your gun or your bow, you pop him. Wham—he’s dead. Trapping is completely different. It’s all preparation. It’s all about bait. Using the right bait, placing it in your quarry’s path, and waiting.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Lilith is the bait.”

  “I know that.”

  “And what is the job of the bait, Doctor?”

  “The job of the bait? To lure the quarry, of course.”

  “Fundamentally, what is the bait’s job?”

  Lenz sighs in exasperation. “I guess I don’t know.”

  “To be what it is. That’s all, Doctor. To sit there and do nothing but be what it is. You get it? Bait doesn’t walk out to the quarry and say, ‘Come and get me!’ If it’s raw meat, it just sits there and looks dead and appetizing. If it’s a rabbit tied to a stake, it goes berserk for a while, then freezes in terror. If—”

  “This situation is more complex than that.”

  “No. It’s exactly the same. Everything must happen in the quarry’s head. Your UNSUB is biologically programmed to want to kill the bait. Your job—your only job—is to be what the killer wants. Forget about Baxter and his geeks, forget about trying to manipulate the killer into doing anything. He knows what to do. You just sit here and be that woman. Talk to other users, not him. Build your personality. And then he’ll come. In his own time maybe, but he’ll come. And you’d better be ready.”

  Lenz stands up from the chair and stretches with nonchalance so elaborate that it must be feigned. He tears off the stream of paper where it meets the printer and lets it fall to the floor. “I’m sure you’re ready to get back home, Cole. If we hurry, you’ll just have time to make the Quantico plane. Unless you want to spend the night at a hotel and fly commercial in the morning.”

  He frowns at me like a flight attendant who’s decided he made a mistake by inviting me to sit in the first-class cabin. “Which is it, Cole? A hotel or Ms. Krislov’s jet?”

  Part of me hates to walk out of this room, to withdraw from a game with stakes so high. Even at the most rarefied level, trading futures risks only money, not human lives.

  “The plane,” I say, standing up from the Toshiba and walking past him without another look.

  He follows me down the stairs. Near the bottom, I ask, “Why did you decide to use a young decoy? I thought you’d decided that Strobekker changed his pattern. That he wanted older women like Karin Wheat.”

  “That’s correct.”

  I pause at the floor. “But Margie Ressler’s only, what, twenty-eight?”

  “You should have more faith in me, Cole.”

  As we move across the den toward the kitchen, I look over the Corian counter and see a full head of brunette hair. Sherry, I presume. She’s looking at something through the top window of an electric range. “Pretty soft setup,” I say to Lenz. “Cook and everything.”

  Then the cook turns around and I am looking into the green eyes of Special Agent Margie Ressler. Her eyes are all I recognize. In the past two hours she has aged twenty years. Lines around her eyes and mouth, gray in her hair, a suddenly sagging bosom, and dowdy hips.

  “It really works, doesn’t it?” she says, her eyes sparkling. “I can tell by your face. Sherry’s a wizard at this stuff. She told me some of the actors she’s worked on, and now I believe her.”

  “Say farewell to Mr. Cole, Agent Ressler,” Lenz says.

  “Oh. Hey, I really enjoyed meeting you.”

  “You too, Margie. Thanks for the pizza. Be careful.”

  “No sweat. I warmed up some pizza for you, Doctor.” Lenz takes my arm and leads me out to the garage. The Acura Margie mentioned earlier has appeared. Special Agent Schmidt, the ever chipper factotum, steps silently from the door behind us. I turn back as he walks past me and climbs into Lenz’s Mercedes.

  “I’m going to say it one more time, Doctor. Don’t push this guy. If you spook him, you’ll never get him. Or worse—he might get you.”

  “I heard you the first time, Cole.” He leads me around to the passenger door and opens it. “The Quantico airstrip, Schmidt. You might have to put some lead in your foot.”

  I climb into the car, lean back in the seat, and address Lenz through the window. “I don’t think Agent Ressler understands how much danger she’s in.”

  He smiles. “Your Southern sexism is creeping in. Ressler is a trained agent.”

  “How do you train for something like this?”

  The psychiatrist straightens up and walks away. He is edging through the narrow margin between the Mercedes’s hood and the front wall when a thought hits me. I reach over and beep the horn, startling him into the air like a cartoon character.

  “What is it?” he shouts.

  I lean out of the passenger window. “Remember the smiling young lady from Niger, Doctor.”

  He stares at me as if I’m insane.

  “She went for a ride on a tiger. After the ride, she wound up inside, with the smile on the face of the tiger.”

  I tap Special Agent Schmidt on the arm, and he obediently backs the Mercedes out of the garage, leaving Dr. Lenz staring at us from the blue-white glare of the headlights. He does not squint into the beams, as most people would, but simply watches us pull away, the halogen light on his retinas giving him the burning red eyes of a night creature.

  Chapter 23

  The jet I boarded at Quantico touched down in Jackson, Mississippi, at three a.m. Central Standard Time. Jan Krislov would have broken into a nervous sweat had she seen her precious Gulfstream filled to its porthole windows with angry FBI Hostage Rescue commandos. I sweated a little myself. Three hours cooped up with those guys was like riding a bus full of Southern Baptist ministers on their way to picket a Bourbon Street strip club. Most were trying so hard to be professional that their grim frowns seemed on the verge of splitting into fierce grins of anticipation. I still don’t know whether anyone had told them of my status as a suspect, but I didn’t volunteer the information. Two agents watched me throughout the flight, their hostile eyes tracking me like those of snipers, which is exactly what they were. I was never told their destination, but by the time the pilot set me down I was damned glad it wasn’t my farmhouse.

  Two minutes after the jet taxied to a stop, I was standing at a pay phone calling Miles at EROS headquarters to warn him that he might soon be arrested. I feared that he might have been taken while I was airborne, but nighthawk Miles—awakened from a cat nap at his monitor—finally picked up the phone and began joking as if nothing more were happening than the usual bitflow of nocturnal erotica.

  He didn’t sound surprised by my warning, but he did thank me for it. He thinks he’s safe until EROS’s timelocked file vault opens at one p.m. tomorrow. Daniel Baxter apparently believes that Brahma might be a legitimate EROS client. If that’s true, the master client list now locked in the vault would allow the FBI to put “brute force” methods into the hunt, making the resolution of the case only a matter of time and manpower. Miles told me at least two agents have been guarding the vault since it slammed shut two days ago, but he seems to think they’re in for a big surprise.

  After we hung up, I tried again to warn Eleanor Rigby, but all I got was her answering machine. Knowing that her clingy paraplegic sister is the reason she keeps a blind-draft account, I felt I couldn’t leave a detailed message without screwing up her personal life. I resigned myself to warning her by snail mail and jogged for my truck.

  All that happened an hour ago, but I am still twenty minutes from home, driving a steady sixt
y-five miles per hour. It feels better than good to be rolling through the dark Delta cotton fields with at least the illusion that I am free from the clutches of Arthur Lenz and Daniel Baxter. Though it’s dead hot outside, I roll down the Explorer’s windows and let the air whip through the truck. Four-thirty in the morning is about as cool as it ever gets in August in Mississippi. The windshield fogs from the sudden temperature change, but the road is straight as a plumb line here, and I don’t even wipe the glass.

  There is enough moonlight to turn the cotton into a pale purple sea stretching away from the highway in all directions. I’m glad I won’t be picking that cotton. Glad no one will be, except a handful of people on the poorest farms. Twelve hours in the burning sun with bleeding hands and a hundred pounds of itchy sack dragging behind you isn’t fit work for man or beast. In the cotton field, if nowhere else, the machine has fulfilled its nineteenth-century billing as the savior of mankind.

  At last my headlights illuminate the battered green road sign that announces “RAIN, MS, Home of the 1963 State Basketball Champions” to an indifferent world. Dinged by flung beer bottles, pierced by bullets fired in boredom, drunkenness, or anger, rusted by the heaven-sent water the town was named for, the old double-sided sign still stirs a strange soup of emotions in my chest when I roar past it in either direction. It takes less than a minute to sight the first hints of human habitation, blow past the tiny post office and tinier Laundromat, and sweep back into the long, still fields on the other side of Rain. Somewhere out there children are sleeping. But the men and women are not. They are waking to fry eggs and boil grits and pull on overalls and boots to face the hottest sun in the United States with no more protection than a faded John Deere cap.

  I look out to my left and try to sight the crumbling superstructure of the old Edinburgh plantation. At one time this antebellum monolith dominated the land like a feudal castle. All activity for miles around was subordinate to its workings, its long shadow falling across slave and master, mammy and overseer, then sharecropper and bossman, and finally the not-so-slow decay of the gene line. In a burning dry year in the 1890s—a year not unlike this one—a sober gambler won the entire plantation from a dissolute heir in a midnight poker game. The way the story’s most often told, the gambler raised the stakes beyond the heir’s liquid resources, the heir used the plantation deed to call the bet, and signed a marker in front of a dozen witnesses. When the gambler laid down a flush, the heir fainted. By the time he staggered out of the old slave quarters, the divine deliverance of rain was beating dust devils on the drive, and the tin roof roared as though a hail of Yankee grapeshot had been loosed against the building. The heir went home, tried twice to shoot himself in the head, missed both times, and passed out. He woke up in time to see the gambler nail a board sign to a horse post out front. Painted on the sign was the word “RAIN,” which from that day forward became the new name of the plantation and of the indolent crossroads of commerce that passed for a town.