Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  I nod like a robot.

  “Harper . . .”

  Jesus.

  “I want to ask you something.”

  I am looking straight into the most vulnerable expression I have ever seen on my wife’s face.

  “Are you sleeping with Erin?”

  The directness of the question almost breaks my composure. For three years I have prayed this suspicion would never be voiced; now it cleaves the air between us like the blade of a guillotine.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says quickly. “You don’t have to deny it.”

  “You think I am having an affair with her? How can you even ask that?”

  Drewe’s face is pale. “It’s the only thing I can see making Patrick mad enough to hit Erin! Once the thought got into my head, I couldn’t make it go away. And you and I haven’t been making love because of . . . of me getting off the pill.”

  “Jesus, Drewe! I’m not sleeping with your sister.”

  “I know she’s attractive. Sexually, I mean—”

  “Drewe!”

  “Don’t lie to me, Harper.” Her lower lip is quivering.

  “That’s all I ask. Just don’t lie.”

  Just don’t lie. How many times have I heard that phrase, and from how many women? Drewe is poised like a teacup on the edge of a table. The slightest touch will shatter her into irrecoverable fragments. When I answer, I enunciate each word, my voice filled with the conviction of an apostle.

  “I’m not sleeping with Erin, Drewe. I wouldn’t screw her if she climbed naked into my bed at three in the morning.”

  Like sunlight burning through fog, belief lights Drewe’s eyes. She bows her head again and wipes away new tears. “God, I don’t know what I’m saying. I think seeing those bruises just about did me in.”

  I hesitate, then lean forward and hug her as tightly as I can. “It’s going to be all right,” I murmur, rocking her gently. “They’ll get it straightened out.”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is, it may have gone too far.”

  Please, God, no. “You can’t do anything about it tonight. Why don’t you take a Valium or something from your bag? Just climb under the covers and blank your mind.”

  “You know I never take sedatives.”

  “Maybe today rates an exception.”

  She shakes her head and pulls back enough to look into my eyes. “You know what would make me feel better?”

  “What?”

  “If you’d sleep with me. Forget about those damned murders and just curl up with me.”

  I feel about as sleepy as a strung-out addict, but I am not stupid. “That’s the best suggestion I’ve heard in a month. Go on and wash your face. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Shouldn’t we eat something?”

  “I’ll make some sandwiches and bring them to the bedroom.”

  She smiles.

  As she walks down the hall, I sag back against the counter. For the first time, calling the police after Karin’s death feels like a mistake. Though I see no connection, it seems that my involvement in the hunt for Brahma somehow accelerated the implosion of Erin and Patrick’s marriage—to the point that I stand here now in fear that my own will not survive the week.

  Just don’t lie to me. That line should be added to the Three Biggest Lies in the World. All women say it, but none of them mean it. They think they mean it. But what they really mean is that they want there to be nothing for you to have to lie about. More sobering still, this plea forms the rationale for a very dangerous act. Just come clean, says your conscience, confess now, and everything will finally be all right. The way it used to be.

  But it won’t.

  Women are human beings, and it’s not human nature to forget any more than it is to forgive. Once the soft circuits of human memory are inflamed with carnal images, they can never be erased. More often they grow and metastasize until they take on more passion than mortal bodies could ever experience, and flay the soul of the betrayed with pain as unbearable as any physical torture.

  Of course, keeping back a guilty secret has its own consequences, as I know too well. It is a slow poison, and thorough. Yet it does its work primarily on the betrayer. If one bears up under the strain, almost everything can be salvaged.

  My reasoning is simple. Every time in my life I ever confessed anything, no good came of it. The truth was known, hallelujah, and everybody was miserable. The lesson was plain: deny, deny, deny. And two minutes ago, when put to the test I’ve feared so long, I held true to my belief. I did the best thing for everybody.

  So why do I feel like shit?

  Drewe and I never finished our sandwiches. We never even started them. When I climbed onto the bed with the plate, she pushed aside the covers and without words pulled me under them with her. She was naked, she quickly made me that way, and for the first time in months I had not the slightest suspicion that her desire had anything to do with her quest to become pregnant. All I sensed was a desperate flight from everything conscious, a willful narrowing of the external world, a plunge into the only fire that can truly expunge grief and pain.

  Drewe was not Drewe. She was a woman who looked like Drewe, yet moved and urged and cried out without any of the baggage Drewe carries through everyday life—duty and self-reproach and second-guessing and obligation to family—only wide green eyes and pale smooth skin and the unruly auburn hair she was born with. All through it, I knew that this intensity so long withheld, this energy repressed, was what I had always been drawn to in her, had believed that I could bring out in time. But I never did. It took the shattering of routine to do it. An eruption of violence and fear into her rigidly defined existence. A shock sufficient to cut her moorings and force her into uncharted water.

  And it will not last. For all the power of her latent passion, Drewe is a creature of equilibrium. Even now, her regular breathing fills the room like the sound of an organic clock measuring the half-life of dreams.

  I’ve rested fitfully, in desultory lapses of consciousness that never quite dissolve into sleep. A while ago, I had an absurd dream. I was a young whale thrashing in the shallows near a volcanic beach, kicking and rolling toward deeper water, yet unable to reach the ledge of the great rock shelf and drop into the blue-black haven of peace and forgetfulness. I’m only thankful the air conditioner is holding its own against the night heat.

  The ring of the phone stuns me like a klaxon, and I grab for it, hoping to keep it from waking Drewe.

  “Cole?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “Daniel Baxter.”

  “What is it? You got Brahma?”

  “Brahma?”

  “The killer. The UNSUB.”

  “No. We didn’t.”

  I sit up on the edge of the bed, a strange buzzing in the back of my head. Drewe’s clock reads two a.m. “You missed him?”

  “No, we got the guy we were watching. He was the wrong guy.”

  “But you said you traced the plane.”

  “We did. And it was owned by this doctor. Right identification numbers, everything. Only this plane hasn’t been off the ground for six months. This guy’s a classic doctor. Takes up a new hobby every six months, buys all the best equipment, then gets bored and moves on to the next one. Right now he’s into high-tech scuba diving.”

  “You’re sure it’s the wrong guy?”

  “Absolutely. We nailed him as he was walking up to a house. Turns out he was best man at a wedding inside. His brother’s wedding. He had alibis for every single murder. He’s also got one of the best lawyers in New York, and he’s already said publicly that he’ll sue for wrongful arrest.”

  “I don’t get it. What explains the plane?”

  “Here’s what I think. The UNSUB has his own plane. He wants to use it to get to his killing sites, but he doesn’t want it traceable to him. He could try using fake registration number decals, but in real life that kind of stuff never works. So he asks ar
ound, and eventually he finds a guy who has the same model plane he does, but doesn’t fly much. Like a doctor. Then he finds an out-of-the-way airstrip to house his plane. The first time he takes it there, it’s already painted with the numbers of this doctor’s plane. Not only that, he’s dummied up a license in the doctor’s name as well. See? Once the original scene is played, he doesn’t have to fake anything. Whenever he goes to that strip, he’s Doctor So-and-So, not himself. You there, Cole?”

  Fully awake now, I speak softly so as not to wake Drewe. “I can see that working. But can’t you just search airports until you find another Beechcraft with those numbers? Or trace every sale of that model for the past twenty years?”

  “We’re trying now. I’m calling because my people say you never faxed us the printouts of your sessions with the killer.”

  I feel a wave of confusion like the one I felt when Drewe startled me awake in the living room. “Jesus, I’m sorry. When you told me you practically had the guy, it just knocked out all the tension of the past week. I crashed.”

  “I know how you feel. But I need everything you have. Right now.”

  Glancing back at Drewe, I memorize the fax number Baxter reads off. “If the stuff he told me is true, you might have enough to ID him just from the printouts.”

  “I hope so. One other thing, Cole.”

  “What?”

  “Where’s Miles Turner?”

  I sigh angrily. “I don’t know and I’m tired of being asked.”

  “Don’t make it worse on yourself. You hid him out. You aided and abetted.”

  “You’re right. I aided and abetted a friend who has nothing to do with these murders. He was trying to solve the goddamn things for you, and he still may do it.”

  “What does that mean? What’s he doing?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s over my head.”

  “Is he the one who came up with the tissue donor network angle?”

  Actually that was my wife, I think, looking at Drewe bundled under the covers. But I’m not about to put her on the FBI’s agenda. “Yes,” I say evenly. “Anything else?”

  “Not for now. Just fax that stuff through.”

  “You’ll get it. What about EROS? You going to leave it shut down?”

  “We’re discussing that right now.”

  “I’m out of it now, Mr. Baxter. Just remember that.” As lightly as I can, I get up from the bed and go to my office. It’s still a wreck. I remove the Brahma printouts from the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, where I’d hidden them in case Drewe broke her own rule and entered the office. Walking to the fax machine, I notice that I forgot to edit out the details of Erin’s liaison with “her sister’s husband.” Baxter may not recognize the truth behind that story, but eventually someone in the Unit will put it together, even without Lenz’s help. With a black Magic Marker, I blot out the lines that contain my personal revelations, then gather up the mess and begin loading pages into the fax machine.

  It takes a while to feed them all through, long enough to develop a cramp in my back from bending over the machine. When I’m done, I realize I promised to fax copies to Miles as well. I stretch my back and repeat the process. As the last group of pages starts to go through, my office telephone rings. Normally I’d let the machine get it, but it’s late enough now that the possible callers are pretty limited.

  “It me,” says Miles when I pick up the cordless.

  “You safe?”

  “Going with the flow.”

  “What’s up?”

  “The Trojan Horse didn’t work.” He says this as though his best friend just died.

  “Design flaw?”

  “Hell no. A timing thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “I’m hanging up now.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “Cut the bullshit, then.”

  “Your phone could be tapped, man.”

  “I no longer care. The FBI missed Brahma, by the way. They arrested the wrong guy.”

  Miles hesitates. “I’m aware.”

  I say nothing.

  “You never faxed me the Brahma stuff,” he says.

  “I just put it through to EROS. Now tell me about the Trojan Horse.”

  After a long silence, he begins to speak in the Mister Rogers tone he uses to explain technical matters to people like me. “The code I wrote is hidden in the compressed data of Erin’s JPEG photo, right? When Brahma downloaded the JPEG to his computer, he pulled the horse into his city. When he tried to view it, Erin’s photo went up onto the screen just fine. But right before it did, my program slipped away and made a nest in another part of his computer. Once every twenty-four hours—at one-thirty a.m.—that program will wake up and use Brahma’s EROS interface to dial my EROS mailbox. Once the connection is made, it’ll download a copy of whatever it finds on Brahma’s hard drive. And I’d be very surprised if his name wasn’t in there somewhere.”

  I feel a sudden rush of hope. “That’s actually possible?”

  “Unless Brahma got suspicious of the single black line in the image and detected the hidden code, it’s going to happen. The only question is how soon.”

  “How obvious is this black line?”

  “It’s practically invisible. I fixed it so it’s hidden by the dark stone at the bottom of the photo.”

  I’m marching around the office with the cordless. “You’re a genius, man! You’re going to get him!”

  “We’ll see,” Miles says with uncharacteristic modesty.

  “How did you come up with one-thirty a.m.?”

  “Analyzed Brahma’s recent traffic patterns. That was one of his least active times.”

  “Does his computer have to be on for this to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he’s at his computer when it happens, will he see it?”

  “No. If there’s another program running, the Trojan Horse won’t activate.”

  “But if his computer’s off, it can’t activate?”

  “Right. But I figure he leaves all his computers on, just like me and anybody else who knows anything about computers. Unless it’s a notebook.”

  “So tonight he was working at his computer at one-thirty?”

  “Bet on it.”

  “Damn. You’re going to crack this thing. You’re going to—” I stop in the center of the room, staring at the EROS computer screen.

  “Harper?”

  “I’ve got e-mail. EROS mail.”

  “Who from?”

  I walk to the computer and click the mouse on the e-mail icon. “It’s Brahma. He’s using ‘Maxwell.’ I thought EROS was shut down.”

  “What’s the time stamp on the message?”

  “Thirty minutes ago.”

  “Damn!”

  “How can he be in the system if it’s shut down?”

  “Shut down doesn’t mean switched off. It just means the servers are closed to subscribers. They’re still running.”

  “So he’s in the system?”

  “He obviously got an e-mail message through. I’ll start checking. What does the message say?”

  I read it aloud into the phone: “Erin, I know you told me not to send e-mail, but I had to. I cannot express what I feel at this moment. I received the photograph, and it was astounding. Everything you said was true. I stored the image in a program that allows me to view it from any angle, to modify it as I wish, even create a moving montage. Yet every modification, every turn or inversion, is a desecration of the original. I can only imagine what it must be to behold you in three dimensions. Reflect on all I told you. Imagine what I withheld. Be assured that I am your deliverance. Your Dark Prince.”

  “That’s it!” Miles yells. “We’ve got him going and coming, and he has no idea.”

  “Maybe,” I allow, strangely sobered by Brahma’s reappearance in my life. “What about the master client list? Did Jan remember dating anybody who seemed suspicious?”

  �
��She’s been out with a couple of doctors, but they’re not likely candidates. She’s hired private investigators to check them out, though. How are you going to answer Brahma’s message?”

  “I’m not.”

  He sighs unhappily. “Any typos in the message?”

  “No. It’s pretty short, though. Why do you keep asking me that?”

  “If he’s using voice-rec, he’s back at his home base. And I think that’s New York.”

  “Why?”

  “The false airplane registration, for one thing. The way that was set up.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  He ignores the question. “Brahma had to know about this anesthesiologist to pick his plane for a front. Other things point to New York, though. I also happen to like the idea. Know what I mean?”

  I make an affirmative noise, not wanting to state the obvious. If Miles is glad Brahma’s home base is New York, it’s not because innocent women are unlikely to die in the next couple of days but because Miles has managed to get back there himself. And if his Trojan Horse works as planned tomorrow night, he can be there for the endgame. I am about to ring off when he speaks again, unable to resist letting me know how deeply this hunt has worked itself into his blood.

  “You know what English fox hunters used to say, don’t you?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “In at the death.”

  I grunt neutrally. “Just remember something. Brahma’s no fox.”

  He laughs. “And I’m no Englishman. Ciao.”

  After putting down the phone, I save Brahma’s message, then sit down on the bed. It’s a mistake. In seconds I am lying on my back, half conscious and fading fast. As sleep washes over me, I see red-coated men riding horses through misty fields of dying cotton, their horses’ legs thrashing and crackling through the dried brown stalks. Far out in front dogs howl madly as the horses close the gap and then gather in a ring around a tiny hole in a grass-covered hill. Someone lights a bundle of straw, then sets it by the hole while the dogs guard the back entrance to the den. The men on horses swig Scotch and congratulate each other, saying, In at the death, old man. In at the death. Then someone says they’ve made a mistake, the den is empty, and the dogs tear off across the fields again and I sit there on my horse like the others, drinking Scotch with the sun on my back, watching a shadow grow longer and broader on the ground in front of us. I want to turn around to see what is making that shadow, but I can’t seem to move. I can hear, though. And what I hear is a wild black animal voice making human sounds for the first time, mangling the simple syllables, trying again and again until they become distinct and form the sound their maker intended.