Mortal Fear

  “My wife was mending it,” I tell him. “It’s old. Nothing but mending thread keeping it together.”

  A quick examination of the coat confirms my answer. “You can’t buy nothing like this around here,” he says doggedly.

  “My dad bought it overseas. When he was in the army.”

  Someone behind me grunts as though serving in the army constituted some kind of subversive activity.

  “What about the disk?”

  I shrug. “I’ve got a million of them. For all I know, that one’s been in that coat since last year.”

  “Says you, bud.” The beagle eyes do not waver. “We’ll find out soon enough what’s on it.”

  “We can find out right now,” says the lanky deputy I met in the den. “He’s got computers out the ass in his bedroom.”

  “Leave ’em be,” says the detective, his drooping eyes still on me. “Sure you don’t want to change your story?”

  The truth is, I’d like nothing better. But right now Miles is either crouched in the dark tunnel beneath our house or snaking through the cotton fields on his belly, dragging his briefcase and computer bag behind him. He needs time. “I suggest you be careful with that coat,” I say mildly. “It has a lot of sentimental value.”

  The detective blinks, then folds the coat over his arm and hands the disk to a deputy, who slips it into a transparent plastic bag. “Don’t you worry, sonny. We’ll take plenty good care of it.”

  He turns and walks through the laundry room and pulls open the back door. I see more brown uniforms in the sunlight beyond him.

  “Anybody make a break for it?” he calls.

  “Nossir,” answers a chorus of voices. “Windows or doors.”

  He sighs interminably. “Le’s go, boys.”

  He shoves roughly past me and plows through the deputies toward the hall. My eyes track the cashmere coat until it disappears through the kitchen door.

  When the front door finally bangs shut, I take a slow walk through the house. Every closet door is open, with shoes and boots and clothing strewn across the floors. The attic door hangs down on sprung hinges. Heavy Detroit engines rumble out front as I make my way back to the kitchen. After checking to be sure the back door is shut and its curtain pulled, I open the trapdoor in the pantry floor. The odor of mildew and insecticide hits me in a wave.

  “Miles?”

  No answer.

  “Miles! You down there?”

  Nothing.

  Leaving the trapdoor raised, I return to the back door and open it. Across our backyard stands the long open toolshed where my grandfather kept his tractor and plow and disc and hand tools. The rusted brick-and-tin structure has fallen into ruin and now serves mostly as a picturesque prop for the huge fig trees that surround it. Miles could be hiding there, but I doubt it. The exterior entrance of the bomb shelter opens twenty feet beyond the shed, in the field. If Miles came out there, he would have crawled deeper into the enveloping cotton.

  My gaze wanders across the dusty white sea, already shimmering with heat at eight in the morning. I half expect to see Miles rise up like a scarecrow from the middle of the field, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s still hunched over his briefcase in a corner of the bomb shelter. But at some level I know he is not. He promised Drewe that if the police came for him, he would leave and not come back. And Miles keeps his word.

  A movement at the far edge of the field catches my eye, but when I try to focus it disappears. Miles? It could just as easily have been a deer.

  After locking the door, I pour a cup of scorched coffee and sit at the kitchen table. I can just see the propped-up trapdoor in the open pantry closet. I’ll give Miles another half hour before I close it.

  As I sit drinking, I ponder the morning’s riddles. Why didn’t the police confiscate my computers? I can think of two answers. One: the FBI ordered the raid on my house, but instructed the sheriff’s department not to touch my computers. That would mean Baxter still wants me working as sysop, which suggests he might try a repeat of Lenz’s ill-advised EROS strategy. Two: last night’s debacle in Virginia convinced the nonfederal police agencies involved in the case that the FBI has lost control of the investigation. They told Sheriff Buckner to find out once and for all whether Miles was here or not. Leaving my computers alone suggests that while Buckner doesn’t mind thumbing his nose at federal authority, he won’t risk screwing up an FBI investigation by interrupting the running of EROS.

  This leaves me with the enigma of the cashmere jacket and the disk. Why in God’s name would Miles take my coat, hide the Trojan Horse disk in it, then leave both behind? Did he run to the back door thinking he could break for the fields and avoid the claustrophobic tunnel altogether? Did he nearly run smack into the deputies who must have been waiting in the backyard even as Drewe and I ate breakfast? Would that have frightened him enough to make him drop the jacket and dart down the tunnel without it? No. Would he take one of my treasured possessions without asking? I remember him admiring the coat sculpture in my office, but—

  I’ll hide the disk where you can find it.

  I stand suddenly. As though sleepwalking, I move up the hallway to my office. I can’t believe the deputies did so much damage in so little time. They dragged furniture away from the walls, pulled guitar cases out from under my bed, and generally trashed anything large enough to conceal a hamster.

  But the sculpture of my father’s coat—mounted on long bolts driven into wall studs—remains pristine and untouched, just as Miles must have guessed it would. I stand before it like a votary before an icon, wondering whether this inanimate object that has so long preserved my father’s memory could have provided the spark Miles sought during a desperate moment. The coat sculpture looks impossibly real, the wine-colored “cashmere” slightly wrinkled, as though the coat had just been slipped off after a night of music-making in a smoky club. Even the fine stitching is rendered in the wood. The outer pockets have flaps, but they do not open. One of the deputies probably bruised his knuckles trying to check them.

  But the inside breast pocket—thanks to the sculptor’s painstaking technique—is there, somehow cut into the black “silk” lining. With a steady-handed certainty unlike any I’ve ever known, I reach between the wooden lapels and slip two fingers down into that pocket. A thin edge of plastic slides perfectly between my fingertips. When I withdraw my hand, it holds a 3.5-inch floppy disk labeled “TROJAN HORSE.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I whisper.

  Without hesitation I take the disk over to my Gateway, push it into the floppy drive, and scan the contents of the disk. It contains only two files. One is a WordPerfect file of 10,432 bytes called “Harper.” The other is labeled “E.jpg”—the “.jpg” signifying a graphic file encoded by the standards of the Joint Photographic Experts Group. This must be the Trojan Horse. Hoping for an explanation, I boot up WordPerfect, hit SHIFT, F-10 and retrieve “Harper.” The page-long letter begins:Harpe , Thabk God i type the upload instructionsbeofr the cops giot here. Jsut get Brahma to downolad this JPEG and we;ve got him. You candoiit TIA!

  “Thanks in advance,” I mutter. “Thanks but no thanks.”

  The rest of the letter gives detailed instructions for transmitting the JPEG file via EROS. There are almost no typos in that section; Miles must have typed it as soon as he finished the Trojan Horse. Though he doesn’t explain exactly what the Trojan Horse is designed to do, he does say that he based his plan around the likelihood that Brahma would use the new EROS UUEncoder-Decoder program to decode the image file. The Trojan Horse code will probably be visible as a small black line somewhere in the photo when Brahma views it, which I am to explain ahead of time by saying that the picture was digitized with an inexpensive hand scanner.

  The problem is that Miles omitted the most crucial fact from his letter: a description of the image contained in the JPEG file. My EROS program will decode JPEG images, but since the Trojan Horse is buried inside this particular file—and I have no idea what destructive functi
on it is designed to carry out—I have no intention of disabling either of my computers by trying to view it.

  Since Miles didn’t tell me what the image was, he must have thought the answer would be self-evident. What image could Brahma want badly enough to download into his computer?

  E.jpg.

  A chill races across my shoulders. Would Miles really suggest that I send a photo of my sister-in-law to Brahma? He would. I was willing to use Erin’s personality—at least parts of it—to seduce Brahma, and Miles hasn’t half my moral scruples. But even if he wanted to use her photo, how could he? There are no digital photographs of Erin in this house.

  Then it hits me. He wouldn’t have to use the real Erin. Miles’s latest project was expanding EROS’s software interface to facilitate transmission of graphic images between subscribers. He probably had dozens of digital photos on his hard drive or on disks in his computer bag. As long as one showed a beautiful woman who looked something like I described “Erin,” he would have been set.

  Despite my assertions to Miles that our game with Brahma is through, I feel a quickening in my blood. It’s 8:50. Brahma will be checking the Blue Room for “Erin” in ten minutes. I shove my chair away from the Gateway and stand up. The closed-in feeling is on me again, and the disordered room only adds to my anxiety. The closets are the worst. Worthless guitar pedal effects and expensive rack-mount units have been spilled out with equal disregard. Even my video camera lies on the floor beneath a pile of old shoes and boots.

  As I pick up the camera, I wonder what it was doing in my closet. We usually keep it on the top shelf in the hall closet, within easy reach if we want to tape Holly during a visit. Drewe couldn’t have put it here; she doesn’t even put herself in my office. That leaves Buckner’s deputies.

  And Miles.

  With a hollow feeling in my chest, I pan my eyes across the room. The scattered junk looks indigenous to my office, much of it stuff I’ve sworn a dozen times to throw out, then kept for no defensible reason. But something must not fit this picture.

  There. On the right side of the EROS computer table lies a photo album that belongs in the den with all the other albums Drewe meticulously maintains. But this is no ordinary family album. It’s a portfolio from Erin’s modeling days.

  I cross the room and open the portfolio with a familiar twinge of guilty knowledge and discovery. A few nights over the past three months—since Erin told me the truth about Holly—I have slipped quietly into the den and brought this album back to my office, where I pored over its pages in a state of time dislocation. It is a strange and terrible thing to know your genes have blended with another’s in the person of a beautiful child that can never be acknowledged.

  I know every photograph in the portfolio intimately. The first pages are magazine covers: Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue. Then comes a full-page ad that ran in the French edition of Elle. “Miles,” I murmur, lingering over the seminude lingerie shot. Erin stares up from the page with startling prepossession. How many models have I seen in my lifetime? They stare out from behind glaring type, straining for aloofness, stretching for sincerity and never quite making it. Look at me, they implore. I am a special creature, one of the chosen. Yet with most, a look that lingers longer than the time it takes to check your groceries pierces their transparent glamour.

  Not so with Erin.

  Miles was right, the bastard. The feeling never goes away. It never goes away because Erin is life lived too close to the cycle of birth and sex and death that we in the West have tried to deny for too many centuries. A woman who walks among repressed twentieth-century males projecting the tidal power of the moon and the sexual energy of the harvest is like a human low pressure zone. An eye waiting for a hurricane. And I, like so many others, was sucked into it as inexorably as a palm uprooted from an island shore.

  Paging quickly through the portfolio, I come to an empty plastic sleeve. I know what belongs here, and I find it at the back of the portfolio, torn by a hasty reinsertion. It’s an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph. In it, Erin stands in quarter profile on wet stone steps before an arched doorway. She wears a diaphanous black gown, a silver necklace, and silver earrings. Her hair is gathered upon her head, revealing her graceful neck, bare shoulders, and seemingly virginal bosom. Both arms are extended toward the door, offering a silver chalice to a shadowy figure standing just inside the arch. One pale hand is visible in the blackness, waiting to receive the chalice. The great stones forming the arch suggest a castle or cathedral, and they seem to suck the very light from the air, so that even Erin’s dark skin, hair, and eyes appear translucent, as though limned by some inner radiance. The image is a study in contradiction: the gaze of a saint on the face of a harlot, a black gown on a bridal body, warm light flowing from darkness in a scene of carnal communion. The image projects a timeless power that Miles must have recognized the instant he saw it.

  I let the album fall shut with a sigh.

  My video camera is lying out because Miles used it to reproduce this photograph in digital form. Then he somehow transferred that video image—one frame of it—onto the floppy disk I found in the sculpted coat. He probably had some kind of video-capture device in his computer bag. Miles said his Trojan Horse would be true to its name, and he meant it. The image of Erin is his horse, and hidden inside its seemingly harmless code—as deadly as any Greek army—is whatever program he designed to destroy Brahma.

  A raucous buzzing suddenly fills the office. I drop into a crouch, trying frantically to locate the source of the sound.

  My alarm clock. In the past year I might have set it twice, so its sound is now as unfamiliar as an air raid siren.

  The clock reads 8:59.

  Miles obviously set it so that Brahma’s next log-on wouldn’t pass unnoticed. As if impelled by Miles’s will, I shut off the alarm, then move to the EROS computer and stare at its screen saver, the bust of Nefertiti turning hypnotically in the field of black. The urge to touch the keyboard, to move forward on the path to knowledge, no matter how dangerous, is nearly irresistible.

  “Damn you, Miles.”

  Flexing my fingers like a violinist warming up for a concert, I tap a few keys, killing the screen saver and logging on to EROS as SYSOP. From my bird’s-eye view of the system, I scan the block of private rooms that contains the Blue Room.

  Brahma is there.

  MAXWELL> Erin? The dry earth awaits the rain.

  The nerves in my arms dance needle points on my skin. I feel like I just opened my bathroom door and found a stranger waiting behind the shower curtain. With a quick click of the mouse I log off and sit staring at the black screen.

  Nefertiti soon reappears. She is beautiful but cold. Somehow, across the ages, she whispers to me how trivial is all this, my concern with who lives and who dies. She is another face of the man who awaits me in the Blue Room, and a reckless humour in my blood stirs me to challenge. I stand and walk to the Gateway, pick up Miles’s Trojan Horse disk, set it beside the EROS keyboard, and sit back down.

  “Okay, shithead,” I whisper, pulling on the headset. “Come to papa.”

  With savage pleasure I stab the keys that transform me into “Erin” and take me to the Blue Room, where “Maxwell’s” prompt still glows softly. I feel a sudden consciousness of the conditioned chill in the house, the dead heat outside, the burning cotton in the fields and Miles crashing through its leaves somewhere, the violated bodies of women lying headless in dry crypts beneath the ground, and Lenz’s pathetic shell of a wife, also dead now, and Rosalind May, who might still be alive and worse off for it. With all this and more coursing through me, I activate the voice-recognition program, speak softly into the microphone, and watch my words appear on-screen:

  ERIN> I am the rain.

  Chapter 32

  MAXWELL> I’m so glad you came back.

  Brahma’s digital voice floats from the speakers with chilling familiarity. His previous communications have imprinted it in my memory as indelib
ly as that of Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m tempted to assign a different frequency to Brahma, but I don’t. The familiarity will help me to visualize him as a man, which of course he is. Somewhere he sits just as I do, facing a glowing screen, preparing to speak his inmost thoughts into a machine. When he does, I follow the letters across the monitor to be sure I do not mistake his meaning.

  MAXWELL> But it’s you who are the dry earth, Erin. _I_ am the rain.

  ERIN> I think the opposite. But I’m not ashamed of need. You may be right.

  MAXWELL> Perhaps I am. Ashamed of need, I mean. I have been lonely for so long. Not alone, but lonely.

  ERIN> The lot of most people, I’m afraid.

  MAXWELL> I am not like most people.

  ERIN> No one ever thinks they are.

  MAXWELL> Soon you will know that I am not.

  ERIN> How?

  MAXWELL> Today I’m going to do something I have never done.

  ERIN> What?

  MAXWELL> Tell my story. And then you will know.

  ERIN> Why do you want to tell me? Because I told you I was beautiful and you believed me?

  MAXWELL> Beauty is important, but it is not enough. Look at the actors and actresses on EROS. Their pathetic fantasies are encyclopedias of insecurity. You said things yesterday that intrigued me. The way you spoke of sin and fate. To find beauty married with character and intelligence is very rare. I possess all these, so I know. Many seek to know me, but I reveal nothing. I live within myself. I believe you do the same. Thus I long to know you. I sense something deep in you. But I shall not ask you to reveal it without also revealing myself. I ask only one favor of you. If the things I tell you shock you too much, tell me. In this way shall we know we were meant to go no further.

  ERIN> All right.

  MAXWELL> And please forgive me if I take liberties with specifics such as places or names.