Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

“It was. Perfect.”

  Miles picked up the printouts and scanned them. “What’s this? You’re ripping off hair color ads now?” In a terrible French accent he cooed, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

  “Think about Erin. One thing overrides everything else. Her beauty. It’s the central fact of her life. It shaped her whole character. But to her—inside—it must be nothing, you know? I mean, nothing and yet everything. At the same time. Just like you being smart.”

  Miles ran a hand over his flattop. “I was right about one thing, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “You can do this. You’ve got him going.”

  “One conversation is nothing, and you know it.”

  “Oh, it’s something. He likes you.”

  “You mean he likes Erin.”

  He gave me a sidelong glance. “If you say so.” “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can think what you want, but Erin Anderson—I mean Graham—couldn’t have written that conversation if her life depended on it. I mean, she might feel those things, but she could never express them. Just like you said. She couldn’t step outside herself and analyze her own feelings.”

  “You don’t know her that well, Miles. She’s a lot brighter than anyone ever gave her credit for.”

  “I know her better than you think.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He put down the printouts and looked away. “Nothing. I’m talking out of my ass.”

  I grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t try to crawfish on that line. You said you saw her in New York. Is this something to do with that?”

  He studied the floor for several moments. Then he looked up, his blue eyes flat with defiance. “Look, I fucked her, okay?”

  My train of thought momentarily derailed. I knew Erin had been promiscuous, but this was a shock. “When was this? In New York?”

  “Yeah. Let go of my arm.”

  He tried to pull away, but I squeezed tighter, at the same time recalling what Lenz said about Miles battering some guy outside a gay bar with martial arts. But the rigidity went out of him, and he broke eye contact again.

  “It was just one time, okay? Erin showed up at this party I was at in the Village. She was with this singer, a real asshole. She was high, but he was almost comatose. She said hello to me, then walked away. About an hour later she came back and asked if I could give her a ride. She didn’t want to go back to their hotel. We ended up at my place.”

  “And?”

  “And what, man? You want gory details?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath, then blew it out in one hard rush. “We talked for a long time. She told me she’d always thought I was gay.”

  I was sorry I’d asked the question, but too late. Miles was reliving the moment.

  “If anyone else from home had suggested that, I’d have flipped out, brained them. But not her. She was so frank about it. She wasn’t judgmental at all, just interested. We talked about it for a while, and then . . . she made love to me. It was unbelievable. Harper, she was everything I’d ever longed for in a woman and had never found.”

  “Miles—”

  “No, let me finish. I think . . . she sensed the pain I was in at that time, and she was trying to heal me. Isn’t that funny? Because she was twice as screwed up as I was. Her whole life has been a tragedy, if you ask me. But that was her nature, I could tell. She was whatever people needed. As if through her, they could move to some better place. You know what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “God knows what kind of degrading crap she put up with from assholes like that singer.”

  “And she just left you after that?”

  “The next morning she woke up looking like an angel that had crash-landed in my apartment by mistake. She called a cab, kissed me on the forehead, and disappeared from my life forever.”

  I shook my head in wonder.

  “That’s why I knew that female soul stuff was right on. That’s her, man. That’s what she needs.”

  “She told you that?”

  “Not in those words. Like I said, she was . . . I don’t know, emotionally farsighted, maybe. She could see other people’s problems clearly but couldn’t focus on her own.”

  “That’s her, all right.”

  He smiled with compassion. “I won’t ask where you got your insights.”

  “It was different with us, but not too different. It’s like a dream sequence in the middle of my life.”

  “And it never goes away.”

  “Not completely, no.”

  “That’s why you picked her, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because she’s haunting. Tragic. She has this unresolvable tension. She pulls men like a force of gravity.”

  After this strange moment of communion, Miles picked up the transcripts and shuffled through them. “Printer’s low on toner,” he said, holding up a sheet with letters so faint I could barely read them. “Got another cartridge?”

  “No.”

  “We can take the cartridge from the printer on your Gateway. Good thing they’re both LaserJets.”

  “We don’t have to,” I told him, glad to be able to hide my awkwardness in a mechanical task. I walked to a shelf and took down a tall white plastic bottle.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “Toner?”

  “Yep.”

  “You refill your own cartridges?”

  “Out here in the boonies, it’s the only way to fly.”

  “Isn’t it a pain?”

  I shook my head. With Miles staring in rapt attention, I removed and partially disassembled the wedge-shaped toner cartridge from the Hewlett-Packard printer with a tool called a screw starter. Then, so as not to end up looking like a coal miner after a cave-in, I very carefully removed the plug from the toner reservoir and refilled the empty space with the ultrafine black powder that constitutes the “ink” of a laser printer.

  “That’s it?” Miles asked.

  I replugged the reservoir and replaced the cartridge cover. “Ready to go.”

  As I reloaded the cartridge into the printer, he pretended to write a note on his palm and said, “A new job for my assistants.”

  But the fallout from his earlier revelation still hung in the air, like ozone after a lightning strike. I walked over to my minifridge and took out a Tab.

  “Why don’t you scan for Brahma?” he suggested.

  “I doubt he’s still on.”

  “You’re the one who broke contact. No reason to think he’s closed up shop.”

  Using Miles’s search program, it took less than a minute to locate “Maxwell” in another private room.

  There, true to his habits of the past three days, he was conversing with “Lilith.” Again the voices confirmed my suspicion: there was a lot more information flowing from Dr. Lenz to Brahma than the other way around.

  “Lenz’s plan isn’t working,” I said over my shoulder.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he’s not learning a damn thing about Brahma.”

  “He’s not supposed to, is he? He’s just laying out bait, hoping to provoke Brahma to come after him.”

  “But he is trying to find out things. In between his neo-Gothic revelations, anyway. Listen to him. The stuff he spews out makes Deliverance look like a Disney film.”

  Miles shrugged as if to say, “What can I do about it?” I half listened to “Lilith” for a minute, but my mind was elsewhere. “How’s your Trojan Horse coming?”

  “It’s got tendinitis,” Miles said sullenly.

  “What?”

  “I’ll get there.”

  “You going to tell me how it works?”

  “Until you get Brahma heated up, it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  I was about to tell him to kiss off when he sighed an apology. “Look, it’ll work or it won’t, okay? Let’s take a break.”

  I held up my hands for a truce. In the backgro
und, Lilith’s voice droned on, dredging up dark sexual secrets from “her” past and clumsily—to my ear, at least—pressing “Maxwell” to respond in kind. Brahma tolerated the probes with uncharacteristic docility, but he refused to be drawn out. As the conversation progressed, I could not escape the feeling that Dr. Lenz was greedily reeling in not valuable information but rope.

  Just enough to hang himself.

  Chapter 29

  Last night I dreamed of Erin making love to Miles. My memory is a traitor that way. The images I’d most like to wipe away cling to life with the tenacity of weeds, while those I want to treasure fade like the blush on a rose.

  This morning Drewe left before I woke up. I fought to stay asleep while Miles fixed himself an omelette and commandeered the television in the den, but it was no use. He had me checking windows and trolling EROS before I could even get a bowl of cereal.

  Brahma logged on as “Maxwell” early, but when “Lilith” started into one of her long monologues, he cut the conversation short and logged off. Miles wandered in and did some coding at his laptop, then drifted back to the TV. After watching CNN for a while, I walked into the backyard to verify that the tomatoes in our garden were as scorched as they’d been last week. They were. Then I walked around front and stared up the highway long enough to make sure Deputy Billy was at his post. He was.

  About ten-thirty, I logged back onto EROS as SYSOP. I didn’t expect much. Morning traffic is mostly Level One stuff, medical questions or lonely hearts looking for a shoulder to cry on. A quick cruise through Level Two also showed what I expected: soft-core exchanges involving roguish dukes and hard-won ladies (which I knew from long experience were frequently two women taking opposite sides of a romantic fantasy).

  Then I clicked into Level Three. The lobbies were mostly empty. Out of curiosity, I peeked into some private rooms. Most of it was gay action—men in some rooms, women in others—plus a few dominance sessions. Then, in a gossip lobby I rarely visited, I found some people discussing the murder of Karin Wheat. They were obviously fans, and speculation about who had killed the author ranged from her jealous and grossly overweight ex-husband to a crazed fan who lost sight of the line between fact and fiction. Meaning to join the conversation, I logged in as “Erin.” Ten seconds later a window appeared in the center of my screen. In it was a prompt followed by single line of text, which EROS’s voice duly read:PROMETHEUS> Would you like to join me in the Blue Room?

  My skin went cold. I sat paralyzed for a moment. Then I looked at the window on the left of my screen, which listed the code names of everyone in the lobby. Sure enough, “Prometheus” was there. I had got so used to looking at “Maxwell” that this older alias of Brahma’s had slipped right by me.

  Yanking off the headset, I sealed its mike shut with my thumb and shouted, “Miles! Get your ass in here!” Then I put the headset back on, said “yes” into the mike, and clicked into the Blue Room. Instantaneously, these words appeared:MAXWELL> I’ve been waiting for you.

  Even as I heard Miles’s feet pounding the floor, I answered into the mike and watched my words appear on-screen: ERIN> I think we’re about to be interrupted by someone who calls himself Prometheus.

  Miles was standing beside me by then. “Hit the space bar if you want to tell me something,” he whispered in my ear. “It mutes the mike.”

  MAXWELL> I am Prometheus, Erin. I use many names. But Prometheus fits me in many ways.

  ERIN> Why use Maxwell if you like Prometheus so much?

  MAXWELL> “Maxwell” has its own significance.

  I was tempted to ask him about the Beatles reference, but instead I pressed the space bar and said, “Miles, this guy—”

  “Say something to him!” Miles snapped, popping me on the shoulder.

  I fired an elbow into his leg and held down the space bar. “Listen, goddamn it! I just figured something out.”

  “What?”

  “I logged on first as SYSOP, not Erin, and he didn’t see me spying on the lobby he was in. It was only when I switched to Erin that he noticed me.”

  MAXWELL> Are you there, Erin?

  “He wasn’t aware you were lurking as SYSOP?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That means he probably doesn’t have SYSOP access himself!”

  “I know. Now get out of here. I need quiet.”

  “Remember the Trojan Horse,” Miles said, walking backward. “Make him want you.” Then he stepped out of the office and closed the door behind him.

  Brahma’s voice pulled my attention back to the screen.

  MAXWELL> Erin?

  ERIN> Sorry. The newspaper man came to my door.

  MAXWELL> Ah. You follow current events?

  ERIN> No, the obituaries.

  This was true. Twice during our interlude in Chicago, Erin sat in bed reading the Tribune obits aloud and making up outrageous stories that supposedly lay behind the sanitized life summaries of the rich and prominent.

  MAXWELL> The obituaries?

  ERIN> I’m eccentric.

  MAXWELL> You are interested in the death of Karin Wheat?

  ERIN> I barely even saw what they were talking about before you invited me here. It does seem interesting, though. Her death sounded so gory.

  MAXWELL> I’m sure that was exaggerated. The press makes its money pandering the prurient and the morbid. I was hoping we could continue last night’s conversation.

  ERIN> I’m tired of the mental sparring on this network. It’s all so juvenile.

  MAXWELL> What do you want from EROS?

  ERIN> I told you, I’m looking for someone.

  MAXWELL> The man with the soul of a woman?

  ERIN> That’s what I called it last night. It’s nothing that definite. It’s just a yearning I have.

  MAXWELL> Do you mean you wish to find this person and then meet him in real life?

  ERIN> Why not?

  MAXWELL> Most are afraid to transmit real information about themselves over the Net. It may be a wise precaution. The world is full of disturbed individuals.

  ERIN> I’m pragmatic about that kind of thing. I figure when my time’s up, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. Until then, enjoy.

  MAXWELL> You believe in predestination?

  ERIN> No. Fate.

  MAXWELL> What’s the difference?

  ERIN> Not sure. Maybe it’s one of degree. With predestination, everything’s laid out from square one. With fate, those ladies are up there weaving, but you have a certain amount of power to tangle the threads.

  MAXWELL> Yes? And death?

  ERIN> Well, I mean, you have some power to tangle, but the _length_ of the thread is predetermined from the start.

  MAXWELL> How interesting. You know mythology?

  ERIN> A nodding acquaintance. You?

  MAXWELL> All life is myth, when viewed from the proper perspective.

  ERIN> Whatever you say. You’re supposed to be the genius.

  MAXWELL> Please forget that. A little fillip of ego. In our last conversation you spoke of having no inhibitions. As though you have no shame.

  ERIN> I have shame.

  MAXWELL> Of what act in your life are you most ashamed?

  Déjà vu prickled across my neck and arms. For a moment I saw Arthur Lenz sitting at his computer in Virginia, pretending to be “Maxwell” as easily as he pretended to be “Lilith.” Then I remembered that Lenz had used the same shrink routine on Brahma. Brahma could merely be echoing the psychiatrist’s questions with me, consciously or not. Maybe Lenz provoked more of a response in him than I thought.

  ERIN> Would you answer the same question coming from me?

  MAXWELL> Yes. I have never committed an act for which I felt regret. All life is exploration, thus all acts are justified.

  ERIN> I don’t agree with that.

  MAXWELL> Ah. You believe in sin?

  ERIN> I don’t know about that. But there are certainly wrong choices.

  MAXWELL> No, only poor choices. And only from a given
perspective.

  ERIN> But isn’t the idea of sin one of the oldest creations of mankind? It was there in Greek mythology just as much as in the Bible.

  MAXWELL> You answered your own question! Sin is a creation of man’s intellect. A Herculean effort to explain the eternal condition of sorrow in which he has found himself from the dawn of time. Look at Oedipus. The poor lad did all he could to avoid sin, yet ended up killing his father and sleeping with his mother. Murder and incest, all to illustrate the inevitability of man’s fate. The same with Job. Nothing was his fault. It was God having a wager with Satan.

  ERIN> No mortal act deserves punishment?

  MAXWELL> That’s a different question. Sin occurs in relation to God, not man. Look at Prometheus. He ridiculed the gods and their power, and he acted accordingly. He stole divine fire and gave it to man as a gift. He sinned against the gods, but blessed man forever.

  ERIN> And look what happened to him. Chained to a rock with his liver eaten by eagles for thirty years. And the liver grew back each night.

  MAXWELL> A nodding acquaintance, indeed! But remember, after paying that price, Prometheus was taken up to Olympus, where he resided forever among the gods.

  ERIN> Does that have something to do with why you use the name Prometheus?

  MAXWELL> Just so. Heroic men must often endure a period of suffering or darkness before their work is recognized.

  ERIN> You sound bitter.

  MAXWELL> I’m tired of dealing with squalid little souls. I yearn for a society of Ahabs but inhabit a world of Walter Mittys.

  ERIN> Now you sound like some kind of superrace nut.

  MAXWELL> I have my moments. Do you know Nietzsche’s quote about society? A people is a detour of Nature to get six or seven great men.

  ERIN> Yes, but that’s not the whole quote. The rest is, Yes, and then to get around them. Or something like that.

  MAXWELL> You amaze me.

  ERIN> Sometimes I amaze myself. I suppose you’re one of the six or seven?

  MAXWELL> Only time will tell.

  ERIN> I suppose women don’t fit into that equation of greatness?

  MAXWELL> Of course they do. Women are the gateway of the Absolute. From an evolutionary perspective, as critical as the male. They provide half the genetic code.