Mortal Fear

CHAPTER 26

Sitting in a half-lotus position on a stool before the EROS computer, his hands flying across the keyboard, Miles says, “I’d forgotten how quick Drewe is.”

“You really think there’s another blind-draft woman missing?” I ask, staring over his shoulder. The cover is off the computer, and its electronic guts look very different than they did thirty minutes ago.

“We’ll know soon,” he says.

Typical Miles. He’s already e-mailed his techs and instructed them to begin a discreet check on the safety of all female blind-draft account holders; thus, predictions are pointless.

He stares at the monitor, his hands suspended over the keys. “I can’t believe you never installed this card, man. I sent it to you two months ago.”

He’s referring to a large rectangular circuit board designed for voice synthesis and recognition. The voice-rec/synth card is the most densely packed PC card I’ve ever seen.

“I don’t use the voice much,” I tell him.

“That’s because the one you have sucks. The new one has unbelievable inflection control. It really sounds human.”

“Let’s hear it.”

He drops his hands to his sides. “Put the cover on, Bwana. You just entered the twenty-first century.”

With a hard shove, I press the metal cover back onto the chassis. “You got a demo for it?”

Miles shakes his head. “Call up a file. An EROS file. These cards only work properly with the EROS format.”

I lean over his shoulder, click the mouse, and retrieve the top file in my electronic filing cabinet. The text of a typical exchange between myself and Eleanor Rigby fills the screen. Miles hits ALT-V-a key combination called a macro that simultaneously carries out several functions-and a rectangular window appears in the lower left corner of the screen.

MALE FEMALE

VOICE ONE: Hz

VOICE TWO: Hz

Using the mouse, Miles clicks on the first HARPER› prompt, drags the mouse over to VOICE ONE, and clicks again. Then he selects a frequency under the male range. He does the same with ELEANOR RIGBY› but selects a frequency in the female range. Beneath the frequency range display is a group of controls much like those on a tape recorder. Miles uses the mouse to select PLAY.

“Your turn tonight,”says a voice not so different from mine, but without any accent. The voice came from my computer’s multimedia speakers, but it sounded as natural as a third person in the room. I squeeze Miles’s shoulder in disbelief. He just laughs.

“I’m ready,”answers a female voice, its timbre not exactly sensual, but definitely feminine. “We are standing naked on cool black rock, volcanic rock, staring across a vast expanse of primeval ocean. An orange explosion of sunset burns itself out beneath a purple horizon, leaving us stranded beneath white points of stars. Our blood pulses in sidereal time as our eyes dilate to adapt to the newly dark world, pupils expanding to expose underused receptors, until the very glow of our skins massages the nerve pathways leading to our brains, the first touch not a touch, and yet as real as any language in this-”

“Unbelievable,” I say over the hypnotic canticle. “All the subscribers will get this?”

“Not for a while.” Miles chuckles with the affection of a proud father. “This part of the package isn’t that complicated or expensive. It’s the other half that puts it out of reach.”

“What? Video?”

“No, quality voice recognition. It’s much more complex than real-time video. Which you should know, since you’ve had video by satellite uplink for six months.”

“Which I hardly use either.”

“Krislov thanks you. It’s too fucking expensive.”

He stands up from the stool and hands me a black plastic headset exactly like those worn by telephone operators and receptionists. “I guess this will count as the first field test. The earphones don’t work. I picked up the wrong set when I split the office. The mike works fine, though.”

“Just talk into it?”

“Hang on.” He clicks RECORD/CHAT with the mouse, and the Harper-Eleanor Rigby file vanishes.

“Okay. The real test is whether the program will recognize your voice. If it won’t, this thing is useless to you until we train it with your voice.”

“How do you train it?”

“By reading many long and boring passages into it, Grasshopper. I’ve modified the program to be as tolerant as I can make it. Out of six techs at EROS, it accepts four as me.”

I sit before the computer and, rather tentatively, say, “Hello?”

On the screen appears:

MILES› Hello.

“I’ll be damned!”

“Hello is easy,” says Miles. “It displayed the ‘Miles’ prompt because I logged on as me. I’ll set it to read whatever screen name you’re using at the time. Try a sentence.”

“Okay.” As clearly as I can, I recite, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

On the screen we see:

MILES› Okay. Now is the time four all good men to come two the aid of there country.

“Shit,” says Miles, his voice weary. “Actually that’s not bad, considering you never trained with it. If you’ll consciously avoid your Southern accent, you’ll probably get better results.”

“ Ihave an accent?” I ask, laughing.

Now that he’s neutralized the stress he felt at being around a computer that was not quite state-of-the-art, Miles walks away from the EROS table and examines various objects around the room with distracted interest. My guitars, the Civil War sword, the sculpture of my father’s coat.

“You glossed right over Lenz’s plan to lure Brahma by pretending to be a woman,” he says, leaning across the twin bed and rubbing the side pocket of the coat. “I let it slide because you sounded like you didn’t want to go into detail about EROS in front of Drewe.”

“Good instinct.”

“I can’t believe this is made of wood,” he says, running his fingertips over the sculpture. “I thought Drewe was into EROS.”

“She was until about three months ago. Now she can’t stand it. She hasn’t stepped into this room in six weeks.”

He sits down on the bed and peers at me with open curiosity. “Why the change? She find out about Eleanor Rigby?”

“No. She’s ready to have kids, Miles. But that’s only part of it. I’d rather not go into it right now.”

“And Erin? Problems with her husband?”

“Same story. Skip it.” I get up from the stool and roll my swivel chair opposite him.

“The last time I saw her was in New York,” he says as I sit down.

“You saw Erin?”

“Yeah. This was years ago. She looked seriously medicated.”

“She finally kicked that.”

He raises a skeptical eyebrow. “She got kids now?”

“One.”

His gaze is too direct for me to dissemble on that subject, so I push him straight to our mutual problem. “What do you think about Lenz’s plan?”

“I think it might work.”

“Really?”

“The logic is sound. There wasn’t a word about it in any of the FBI or police computers. Not even on Baxter’s personal e-mail. If they’re keeping it that secret, Baxter must think Lenz is devious enough to pull it off.”

“He may, but I don’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not that easy to pretend to be a sex other than the one you are. Especially for a man to pretend to be a woman. I see people try it all the time, and I can always tell. Can’t you?”

Miles runs a finger down his aquiline nose. “Sometimes. But if I couldn’t tell-and I couldn’t peek at the master client list-how would I know I was being fooled?”

“Granted. But what about the trip-up questions like ‘What does a speculum look like?’ Or ‘What brand of feminine protection do you use and why?’ ”

“Lenz is a doctor. He can handle that stuff.”

“Maybe. But when someone starts writing their innermost thoughts to you-live, on computer-you begin to form an emotional picture of who they are. And when something rings false, you get a little twinge somewhere, like hearing a dissonant voice in a choir.”

Miles laughs softly. “Harper, you’re more perceptive than almost anyone I know. But even you can be fooled.”

His tone stops me; he is not speaking in theoretical terms. “What do you mean?”

“People are fooled about sexual identity every day on EROS, and I can prove it to you.”

“How?”

“You won’t like it.”

Spider legs of apprehension creep along my shoulders. “Why?”

“It involves someone you care about.”

“What are you telling me, Miles?”

“Eleanor Rigby.”

I am utterly still. “No way she’s a man. I know who she is. She’s Eleanor Caine Markham, a mystery writer.”

An odd smile narrows his lips. “Who also works as a body double in Hollywood? And has a crippled sister in a wheelchair who resents her personal life?”

I am too stunned to respond immediately. Miles’s invasion of my privacy is momentarily forgotten as I try to guess what shocking revelation he is about to drop on me.

“Harper,” he says, his tone like that of a teacher urging a child toward the answer to a simple question. “Eleanor Rigby is the sister in the wheelchair.”

This statement hits me with physical force, as though my parents had sat me down and told me I was adopted.

“You never considered that?” he asks gently. “A woman with the brains to be a successful mystery writer also has a body that major directors pay to put on film? Possible, but not likely.”

It seems so obvious now. But sixty seconds ago I had no clue. “It just-everything she said seemed so heartfelt.”

“It was. Each part of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is based in objective and emotional truth. She just shuffled the parts on you, mixed the roles. She lives vicariously, through her novels and through talking to people like you on EROS. You’re her sex life, Harper. You truly are her lover, maybe the greatest of her life. Sad, isn’t it?”

A shapeless flood of anger courses through me, and for lack of a better target I direct it at Miles. “Who gave you the right to go prowling through my life, goddamn it? You’re the one who doesn’t have a life.”

“We’re all voyeurs,” he says in a neutral tone. “It’s the new American pastime. Pretty pathetic, I guess, but that’s where we are.”

“That’s a cop-out, Miles.”

“Maybe. If you want to know the truth, I checked out Eleanor because I saw you getting tight with her. Maybe even risking your marriage, if Drewe happened to see the stuff you two were writing. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t some basket case. You know, the kind that shows up and starts boiling rabbits on your stove.”

“How can I ever thank you.” Though I am spitting sarcasm, my inner voice tells me that Miles does care what happens to me. But still I feel the urge to strike back. Before I know it, I am asking him the one question I have spared him up until now.

“Miles,” I say in my father’s voice, “are you involved in these murders in any way?”

He blinks in surprise.

“In any way.”

He looks away, then back at me. “Anything else you want to ask while you’re at it? Am I queer? You’ve been wondering that too, haven’t you?”

“You’re avoiding my question. That scares me.”

“Fuck no! I am not now nor have I ever been a corpse-fucking killer, okay? Good enough?”

I watch him impassively.

“I can’t believe you asked me that.”

I feel the peculiarly human satisfaction of knowing I have made him as angry as I am. “You’d better get used to it. I’m on your side, and I had to ask. What do you think the FBI will think?”

“Hey, I know what they think. That’s why I have to catch this asshole.”

I slowly roll my chair forward and back with my feet. “I agree. Do you have a plan?”

“You think I came back to this cultural wasteland for the sights? Of course I have a plan.”

My pulse quickens. “What is it? You’ve got a way to trace his phone connections?”

He shakes his head. “I might be able to, if I had the help of AT amp;T and the major cellular companies. But I don’t, do I?”

“So?”

He slides off the bed and stands, his uncovered crewcut a mere shadow against his scalp. He runs a hand through it like a man feeling the stump of an amputated limb, then begins pacing out invisible patterns on the floor.

“This is what will happen,” he says. “For a while, Brahma will communicate just as he has, in live-chat mode. How long depends on the telephone tricks he has up his sleeve. It’s not easy to avoid being traced these days. Once they get close to him, he can keep using live-chat mode by switching between authorized accounts to which he has the passwords. According to you, he’s already done this once, talking to Lenz. But if the FBI techs are smart-and that’s open to question-there’s a way to track those legitimate accounts.”

Miles has paused, so I oblige him with a “How?”

“You gave Lenz some transcripts of some of Brahma’s dialogues with his victims, right? Using those, the FBI should be able to build a search engine that will sift through EROS for his most common prose patterns. It will take less and less time for them to begin their traces.”

“And?”

“Eventually Brahma will switch from live chat to e-mail.”

“Does that help us?”

“Think, Harper. What’s the essential difference between chat mode and e-mail?”

“Well… I don’t know.”

“Sure you do. Think real estate. Location, location, location.”

Suddenly I have it. “In chat mode, each person is sending his side of the conversation to one of our servers in New York. In essence, each is viewing the conversation by long distance.”

“Whereas e-mail?”

“Is an actual file that the user downloads from our computer into his own. Usually, anyway.”

He grants me a smile patronizing enough to make me feel I’m back in the third grade. “That’s how I’m going to get him.”

I try to see farther down the logical track. “How? You’re going to give his computer a virus? Destroy all his files? What will that accomplish?”

“I’m not going to do either.”

“What, then?”

“A Trojan Horse.”

I sit back and ponder this. A Trojan Horse is a program that a hacker plants inside someone else’s computer, usually to facilitate the burglary of passwords. It resides in some neutral area of the host computer’s memory, waiting patiently until a legitimate user logs on and enters his or her password. When that happens, the Trojan Horse copies the user’s password into a secret file before allowing him access to the computer. After a day or a week or a month, the hacker dials back into the computer, opens his Trojan Horse program, and removes a hefty new file filled with legitimate passwords. Then he deletes his Trojan Horse so that no one will ever know it was there. After that, he can gain illegal access to that system whenever he wishes by using the legitimate passwords. The Trojan Horse, true to its name, has opened the gates to the city.

“I don’t see your reasoning,” I tell Miles. “You’re not trying to break into Brahma’s computer.”

“This isn’t going to be a traditional Trojan Horse. If I can build it. This will be a real Trojan Horse.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remember how the Trojan Horse got inside the walls of Troy?”

“Sure. The Greeks built it, pulled it up to the gates of Troy, and pretended to sail away. The Trojans thought the horse was a gift and pulled it inside their walls.”

Miles nods. “Which is exactly what Brahma is going to do.”

“Why should he do that?”

“Trust me. He will. What happened after the Trojans pulled the horse into the city?”

“The Greek soldiers hidden inside climbed out that night and killed them all.”

Miles chuckles softly. “My plan is slightly different from that. But the result will be the same.”

“But you can’t even roll your Trojan Horse up to the city walls. You don’t know where it is.”

“I’m not going to,” he says calmly. “You are.”

And then I see it. Miles has arrived at the same conclusion I did at the Indian mound this afternoon, only he probably did it three days ago. “You want me to do what Lenz is doing. Pretend to be a woman. Engage Brahma on-line.”

He smiles. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. And I know you can do it, Harper. Much better than Lenz. You’re a songwriter, for God sake. A fucking pied piper with words.”

“Not exactly a successful one.”

“For reasons wholly unrelated to your talent. And you have more empathy with women than anyone I know. Every girl we ever knew confessed her darkest secrets to you at some time in her life. Am I wrong?”

He’s right, but I’m in no mood to admit it. “I’m not saying I haven’t thought about it. But Lenz has some advantages we don’t. Like a SWAT team to take Brahma out if he shows up.”

“We don’t need that! We’re not trying to lure him here. We have three simple goals, all based around the Trojan Horse. One, get Brahma to believe in you. Two, keep up the relationship until he switches from live chat to e-mail. Three, get him excited enough that he doesn’t examine every bit of information flowing down the pipe from you to him.”

“You’re going to bury your Trojan Horse program in my e-mail and hope he downloads it into his computer?”

“That’s one possibility.”

“But won’t he see the program? An executable file piggybacked with e-mail?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I can do what I want to do with e-mail. But I have an advantage. I designed EROS’s e-mail system. We want a situation where the two of you are exchanging long letters, sexual fantasies, anything that requires a lot of bits. If I can’t do it with e-mail, you’ll have to convince him to download some program you say you’re wild about. Some sexual thing I could kluge up fast. Maybe with a video file or something.”

“What if Brahma doesn’t switch to e-mail?”

“Then you make the switch. Tell him you get nervous live. You like to compose your letters in romantic contemplation, or some such bullshit.”

I consider the plan, searching for faults. “Exactly what kind of special Trojan Horse is this going to be?”

The serene smile of a Zen master smooths Miles’s face. “A masterpiece. Almost invisible, but deadly in its own way. A study in elegance.”

I want to press him, but I know it would be useless. “How long will it take?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I never know that. Bumming code isn’t linear work. I mean, I might hack through it line by line, but more likely I’ll stare at the TV for two days, then cop to the right thing when I’m not thinking about it.”

Reaching across the twin bed, he pulls down one of my old Martins. He studies the guitar’s scarred face, then cradles it under his arm and puts his fingers to the strings. A halting rendition of Neil Young’s “The Needle and the Damage Done” tinkles from the sound hole. I taught him to pick that tune sometime around 1974. At fourteen Miles was growing his own marijuana, and he drove me crazy to teach him the song. As far as I know, it’s the only thing he can play.

“How long since you played that?” I ask.

“I’ve picked it out on every guitar I ever found leaning against a wall in someone’s apartment.”

I laugh with him. The bonds of friendship are strange, and the moment emboldens me to be painfully honest. “Miles, what we’re talking about could take a while. You know as well as I do that one of those sheriff’s cars could pull up outside with a search warrant any time. And we’d both be arrested.”

He nods soberly. “If that happens, I’ll go back out through the tunnel, just like I came in. And I won’t come back.”

“Drewe isn’t going to like this.”

“I know. But I don’t think she wants me in jail, either.”

“She’d rather it be you than me.”

He hangs the guitar back on its pegs and unfolds his long frame on the bed. Sighing deeply, he turns his head to face me. Exhaustion clouds his eyes like smudges on a camera lens.

“We could go two different ways,” he says, as if I’ve already agreed to his scheme. “Use the identity of a real EROS client, a woman with a blind-draft account. Or we can create a fictional woman, totally from scratch.”

After a useless moment of internal resistance, I ask, “Which is better?”

“A real woman is easier from a technical standpoint. But there are disadvantages. You won’t know much about her. Brahma might discover real information that conflicted with what you were telling him. Also, if Brahma’s selection criteria are medical, we don’t know what they are. A real woman has real medical records, and if he got access to them, he might disqualify her on that basis alone. Plus, we’d be putting her life at risk. Without her consent. Unless someone like Eleanor Rigby would let us-”

“No,” I say, cutting him off. Miles’s manipulative tendencies are never far from the surface. As I consider his words, an image of Agent Margie Ressler’s gamin face comes into my mind. “What about a fictional woman?”

“The plus is that she can be whatever you want. The negative is that she won’t really exist. Which means I’ll have to create her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bureaucracy. Social Security card, driver’s license, motor vehicle records, address. I’m sure the FBI faked credit cards and everything else for Lenz’s decoy.”

“They did,” I confirm, recalling Lenz’s boasts in his car. “Can you do that?”

Miles yawns heroically. “Sure. Only I don’t have the help they do. If we go that way, I’ll keep it simple. No medical records at all. That way, Brahma has to go with whatever you tell him.”

Despite anxiety about the risks, I’m fascinated by Miles’s proposal. Rather than trying to lure a predator toward us in the hopes of trapping him-which is basically Lenz’s plan-Miles means to trick him into swallowing a hand grenade. As his eyes close, I say, “Those goals you mentioned? Contacting Brahma, keeping the relationship going long enough for him to switch to e-mail, all that?”

“Yeah?” He opens one eye.

“You forgot one.”

Both eyes are open now. “What?”

“Catching the son of a bitch before he decides to kill me.”

He smiles, then both eyes close.

Miles is snoring softly-with three cups of coffee in him, no less-while I sit at my desk with the contents of his briefcase spread in front of me. Drewe is still on the phone with her mother. Occasionally her voice rises above the hum of air conditioner and computer.

There’s enough stolen information on my desk to fill twelve hours with steady reading. Not merely Nexis newspaper stories, but lab results and detectives’ case notes, things that would put Miles under a jail were they ever entered as evidence in a court of law. Yet all of it pales into insignificance beside the photographs of the victims.

Confucius was right about pictures and words. All the words on the paper in this pile add up to mere statistics, but the faces are real. The faces are people. A more analytical man might look at those statistics and see gold, see his destiny, might feel certain that after enough solitary study of those lines and squiggles, a new relationship would emerge like a hologram from the chaos and point him toward the killer. But my analytical gift ends at murder. I feel too much empathy with the women in these searing images to place myself at the appropriate remove for objective study. Perhaps this is the reason I first strayed out of my father’s footsteps.

Drewe has that capacity for distance. It may well be what allowed her to make logical leaps about Brahma while Miles and I plodded along like boys following bread crumbs. Strange that emotional distance would be a requirement for those who heal, whereas I, who feel others’ pain more keenly than most, have hurt far more people than I have helped.

What can I do for these poor women? What do they need? Someone to avenge them? They’re certainly past hurting now. As this thought dies, I realize what holds my gaze to their haunted faces. They are eternally unattainable. Like Keats’s Grecian figures, they will possess their mystery, and thus their beauty, forever. I can never touch them. And if I can never touch them, I can never hurt them. Granting myself that reprieve, I am able to admit that I do know what they need. They need justice.

But justice cannot be served until their killer has been hounded to his lair, chained, and brought to a place of judgment. It may be that Miles and I can assist with the first task. Yet my logic remains sound enough to comprehend the scale of the problem. For almost a year Brahma has gone about his business without hindrance. In all the world, I alone-because of a few ripples in the EROS net-perceived the foul wake of his passing. I reacted late, but I reacted, and by so doing created a window of opportunity. And then in Dallas the FBI squandered forever the only advantage it would ever have-surprise.

Now Brahma is hiding. And he has an infinite matrix in which to conceal himself. I once thought the vastness of America was geographic, that miles of space or denseness of wood made massive measure. Then, on an icy Chicago street, I met a man and woman searching for their stolen child. After a single conversation, a couple of long looks into their hollow eyes, I saw that every mountain Lewis and Clark traversed, every steaming swamp De Soto pushed through, every plain the pioneers crossed has been transected by the compass, riven by the surveyor’s level, scarred by roads, photographed by satellites, and reduced to a thing you can fold into your glove compartment. But those lost parents stared across an uncharted sea of people, praying in vain for the phosphorous glow of a long-vanished trail, each town an eddy, each city a whirlpool that could swallow a hundred children without trace. And across that sea float the millions of milk cartons carrying photographs of the missing like messages in bottles, bound for garbage cans as surely as the ruins of last night’s dinner.

Looking at Miles’s stolen photographs, I know that somewhere in that same sea moves a man who saw final agony twist the faces of these women, who heard the last word or plea or wail that passed their lips. He moves comfortably, in the knowledge that maps do not exist to lead men to him. That he can do his grisly work in peace. That he can taunt his hunters. That only an accident will raise his head above the mob and mark him as a son of Cain.