A fear of dark water jf-6

by Craig Russell

  ‘So you last heard from her two weeks ago?’ asked Fabel.

  ‘Yes… no…’ Muller-Voigt made an exasperated gesture. ‘It’s complicated. I got an email from her two days ago. Breaking it off with me. Or that’s what it seemed to be.’

  ‘Listen, Herr Muller-Voigt, I’m getting confused. You say this woman has been missing for two weeks, and now you’re telling me that you received an email from her two days ago.’ Fabel frowned. ‘One thing is for sure, she’s not the body washed up after the storm. That woman had been in the water for at least two weeks…’

  ‘Which is exactly how long Meliha has been missing. Listen, Fabel, I choose my words very carefully. When I say Meliha has disappeared, I mean exactly that. I know you think that I’m approaching you because I’m trying to pull strings to have this looked into discreetly and so avoid scandal. But that’s not it at all. Someone has, systematically, erased all trace of Meliha ever having existed. And I can’t report her missing if she doesn’t exist any more. And as for that email, I know it’s fake.’

  ‘Can I see it?’ asked Fabel.

  Muller-Voigt gave a bitter laugh. ‘No. It doesn’t exist any more, either. I didn’t print it out because I never print anything out unless it’s absolutely essential. Environmental grounds, obviously. You’ll have heard of the Klabautermann Virus, I dare say?’

  Fabel nodded. ‘Of course. I know the officer who’s been tasked with finding the people behind it.’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea what these people get out of destroying other people’s data,’ said Muller-Voigt. ‘Probably just the challenge of proving they’re even smarter nerds than the smart nerds who design the software… but, sadly, there are people out there who devote their time to developing ever more virulent, ever more destructive computer viruses. This latest one, the Klabautermann Virus, has been specifically targeted at official intranets and secure government email servers in the north of Germany. Now what is the point of that — other than to disrupt ordinary people’s lives? And the little bastards behind it may not even be anywhere near the north of Germany. They could be in San Jose or Mumbai or Beijing. Or just some spotty pubescent nobody in a back bedroom in Bonningstedt. Whoever they are and wherever they are, they infected the City and State government email. Because I’m logged into it, it got into my laptop and wiped all of my email folders — but not before sending itself to every contact in my address book. In short, thanks to the Klabautermann Virus, I don’t have the email any more.’

  ‘What makes you convinced it wasn’t her? asked Fabel.

  ‘I just knew it wasn’t her. You can tell. Everyone has a… I don’t know… a style when writing an email.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘And, I know this sounds mad, but it was too grammatical. Meliha is Turkish. I don’t mean Turkish-German, she’s a Turkish national. Her German was excellent but she made mistakes, like all non-natives. This email was… well, too perfect. And, in any case, email just wasn’t our medium.’

  ‘Mmm…’ said Fabel. He remembered what Kroeger had said at the briefing about identifying fakes on the internet. Maybe Muller-Voigt could have seen through a phoney email. ‘I have to say I don’t know what I can do, Herr Muller-Voigt. It doesn’t sound like a homicide to me. And, to be frank, not much of a missing-person case, either. But I can get in touch with the local police and get them to look into it.’

  Fabel stood up.

  ‘Listen, Fabel…’ Muller-Voigt stepped forward, as if to block his exit. ‘I don’t know what you think of me, but I do know that you don’t take me for the hysterical type. If anything I’m well known for being the opposite. I am telling you that I am absolutely convinced that a woman I was involved with has been abducted or murdered. I am also telling you that not only can I not offer objective evidence that this has happened, I can’t even offer objective evidence that Meliha existed in the first place.’ Muller-Voigt stood back and indicated the sofa. ‘Please, Fabel, I need your help.’

  ‘You must know where she lives,’ said Fabel, but he remained standing.

  ‘I was never there. I had an address for her, but when I called there the flat was empty. I don’t mean she wasn’t in, I mean the flat was unoccupied. I asked a neighbour about her and only succeeded in making the woman suspicious. I left before she called the police. But she did say that the apartment had been empty for more than a month.’

  ‘You say Meliha was a foreign national?’

  ‘Turkish, yes.’

  ‘And she was here in Germany legally?’

  ‘As far as I am aware.’

  ‘Then there will be a record of her entering the country. What is her full name?’ asked Fabel, taking his notebook and pen from his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Meliha Yazar. She was from somewhere just outside Istanbul. I think it was Silivri.’

  Fabel wrote it down.

  ‘Is there any reason she would lie to you about where she lived?’

  ‘None that I can think of. I know this sounds insane, but I don’t think she was lying. I think she lived in that apartment. You see, I met Meliha at an environmental conference. At the Hamburg Congress Center.’

  ‘She was involved with the environmental movement?’

  Muller-Voigt nodded. ‘She was a campaigner, an activist, or at least said she was. From what I could gather, she had some kind of Earth-sciences degree from Istanbul. She told me that she worked as a researcher for an environmental protection agency but she was always pretty evasive when I asked which one. The truth is, I suspected she might be some kind of investigative reporter and I was pretty guarded around her at first. I definitely believe that she was into stuff that placed her in danger.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  Muller-Voigt looked at his half-empty whisky glass and put it down on the table. ‘I’m going to make some coffee,’ he said decisively. ‘It’s a long story…’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Roman Kraxner stood behind the door of his flat, head tilted close, ear angled, his sweat-freckled brow furrowed in concentration. He tried to keep his breathing quiet and shallow so he could hear as much as possible of what transpired downstairs. It was a difficult task: Roman’s obesity squeezed each inhalation into a protracted snort through fat-compressed airways.

  A deep male voice resonated outside in the stairwell, one floor down. The voice was quiet, too quiet for Roman to make out exactly what was being said, but it was calm, controlled, strong. Authoritative.

  Another voice made Roman recoil slightly from the door. This voice was louder; angry and harsh. Accented.

  ‘I bet it was that fat pig of a paedophile upstairs!’ The voice was clear and Roman imagined the Albanian leaning into the stairwell, over the banister, shouting up in the direction of Roman’s flat.

  Of course it was me, thought Roman. I called them. And I’ll be sending an email to the landlord, you can be sure of that.

  ‘You should go up there,’ the Albanian shouted for Roman to hear. ‘I tell you. I tell you that what you should be doing. That what you should do… You should finding out what he got on all those computers. Little boys, little girls, I bet.’

  Roman felt something between fear and fury surge up from someone deep inside. How dare he? How dare those people say these things about him?

  The other voice: slightly louder now, but still calm and even more authoritative. A hint of warning in the tone. Leaning closer into the door, Roman still couldn’t make out what the policeman was saying. A few words. An injunction against bothering Roman. A warning to keep the music down. A mention of Hamburg city ordinances. All voices lower now. Calmer.

  The deeper voice laughed at something that the Albanian said. Laughing at what? Laughing at whom? Were they laughing at him? Why was the policeman laughing? He was supposed to be there to shut them up. Stop that stupid music. That was why Roman had called him here.

  Roman couldn’t hear the policeman’s voice any more. He heard the outer door at the bottom of the apar
tment block’s stairwell slam shut. Something muttered, loudly, in Albanian and then the slamming of a second door: the downstairs apartment.

  He stood at the door for a moment, straining to hear footsteps on the stairs; the Albanian coming up to confront him. Nothing. Roman turned and leaned his back against the door. He felt something high in his chest, almost in his throat. A fluttering. He knew he would feel it again, every time he had to pass the Albanian’s door. And, although Roman did everything he could to avoid leaving his flat, when he did go out it took him a breathless age to pass the Albanian’s apartment.

  God, how he hated living here. He was better than this. Better than the people around him. Better than this shitty little flat. Better than living in Wilhelmsburg.

  Most of all, he hated living above the Albanians. Their country of origin was immaterial to Roman: he hated living above anyone, because what he loathed most of all about this flat was the climb up the stairwell. Since he had lost his job in the computer store, it was an effort that Roman had to make less and less. His flat was only two floors up, but the climb was enough to completely rob him of his breath and leave him white-faced and sweating, his lungs screaming for oxygen. There were times, frequent times, when his meal would be cold by the time he had brought it up the stairs: Roman never cooked. Occasionally he would reheat food in the microwave but he had never so much as made a cup of coffee in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. Everything he ate or drank came from a can or a box or a styrene container.

  The flat itself comprised three rooms. Four, if you counted the bathroom. The apartment building was reasonably new and was well maintained by the landlord, and when Roman had moved in the decor had been fresh and clean. But now the inside of Roman’s flat was untidy and grubby. He found doing housework tiring; not tedious — literally exhausting, sapping every ounce of energy from him. Ten minutes of moving trash from one corner of a room to another drained him; made him sweat until he dripped and was wheezing for breath. And ten minutes would make no difference to the piles of magazines and books, the detritus of convenience meals, the empty soft-drink cans.

  Not that Roman cared that much about the look of his apartment. No one ever came here. No friends, no women, nobody. And it didn’t carry any great significance for him personally; he did not attach the concept of home to this place. If fact, Roman Kraxner didn’t really have much of a concept of home. Or at least, not in the physical world. He did have a sense of belonging, but it was not anchored in any tangible physical reality; for Roman, there was another universe of opportunity, of freedom from the constraints of his body, that was his true medium. That was where he truly belonged. Where he truly existed.

  After he was convinced the Albanian had in fact gone back into his apartment and was not coming up the stairs to challenge him, Roman shuffled across the messy living room, past the bank of monitors, speakers, hard disks and keyboards arrayed on the table against the far wall, and made his way to the toilet. His gut was aching as it always did when he was stressed — as it did most of the time — and he felt the urge to void his bowels become more than vague. Plugging his iPod earphones into his ears, he dropped his tracksuit bottoms and lowered the one hundred and eighty kilograms of his bulk onto the toilet. As he listened to music and played computer games, Roman strained until his breathing became even more laboured and his face even more livid than usual. Nothing.

  It was, as his doctor had explained, the inevitable result of Roman’s diet, devoid as it was of anything that looked remotely like it had grown in the ground. What Roman had not explained to his physician was that he despised anything that smacked of the natural world; he relished artificiality, the semblance of synthesis. The more processed, the more manufactured the look of the food, the more Roman liked it. He preferred his meat ground, pulped, extruded. Any fibre he consumed lay hidden as a paste for bulking his hamburgers and hot dogs, his meat patties and battered chicken pieces. The bread buns and subs that his meat came in had to be white and smooth with no hint of a cereal origin or texture. His preference for vivid unnatural colours in the desserts, the ice creams and the beverages he consumed allowed him to place a conceptual distance between himself and anything resembling a dairy. It was the main reason Roman favoured American fast-food outlets over local Schnellimbiss or Wurstchenbude snack stands: there was a science and an art to making food look as if it had little or nothing to do with the natural world; and it seemed only natural to Roman that it had been perfected by the same nation that had put a man on the moon.

  After twenty minutes the urge to defecate remained undimmed, but the spasms in Roman’s bowels had still failed to produce anything. It had been over a week since he had had a productive bowel movement. Sighing, he pulled up his tracksuit bottoms and made his way back through to the lounge-cum-diner and to the table where he had his computers set up. It was a gateway to that other universe, to those other identities. It purred at him: the soft whirring of internal cooling fans in the two 8-core MacPros, the massive HP, the five external drives that, between them, gave him seven terabytes of data storage, the blade server unit he had built himself. Thousands of euros’ worth of computer technology purred a soft invitation to another life.

  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