Mortal Fear

by Greg Iles

  “Does it matter?”

  “You decide. He pretended to be Erin. He even sent me a picture of her. The one in which she offers a silver chalice to a shadowy figure in an arched doorway. She’s wearing a black gown. A highly provocative image.”

  Drewe turns and looks at me uneasily. “Why would he do that?”

  “He chose Erin because they shared a secret. A secret he thought powerful enough to draw me to her. A secret known only to them, and now only to him. Just as he planned.”

  New fear worms its way up through my chest.

  “What secret?” asks Drewe.

  “Before I tell you, you must promise to remain online after you learn the truth. Wait until you have heard me out before you try to speak to your husband. I’m telling you his secret for a reason, Drewe. Much more in your life is about to be clarified.”

  “Get out, Harper!” Drewe cries suddenly. “Go!”

  I’m not sure whether she’s acting or not, but I’m not about to leave.

  “He is with you?” Berkmann asks.

  “He’s gone now. What is this secret?”

  “You promise to remain online?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harper is the father of your sister’s child. Holly is her name, I believe?”

  Drewe doesn’t respond.

  “Are you there, Drewe?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No. Already your skin is cold with fear. That instinctive fear proves the truth of my words.”

  “No!”

  “Picture Holly’s face. I have seen that face. She’s paler than Erin was. Beautiful, yes, but her face is broader, her eyes not as large. She is bigger-boned. You know whose genes those are.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Never fight truth, Drewe. You must always embrace it, even if it burns.”

  “I’m not afraid of truth.”

  “Good. Good. For this is a difficult one.”

  “You haven’t given me any proof. You’re just trying to upset me. You want to get at Harper by hurting me.”

  “Listen to me, Drewe. Two minutes from now you will hope never to see that pathetic liar again.”

  “I’m listening.”

  She turns to me again. There is fear in her eyes now. As I signal her to press the space bar, she turns back to the screen and Berkmann goes on.

  “These word are your husband’s. Listen and judge. ‘She used her mouth for that, and her hands. She knew before I did where I was, you know? And when I started to finish, she didn’t pull away. She just . . . Afterward, she stood up and hugged me again. She didn’t speak, but I saw she somehow knew her sister didn’t complete that act in the way she just had. . . .’ ”

  I feel as though someone has caved in my stomach with a two-by-four. Lenz lied to me. He did tape our sessions, probably on the little Olympus recorder I saw later. And those tapes were part of the “case materials” Kali stole from his study the night she killed his wife.

  “ ‘I thought of Drewe then,’ ” Berkmann recites, “ ‘but she seemed removed from all this, wholly apart from it. It was as if Erin and I were meeting in some place where Drewe didn’t exist. . . .’ ”

  All I can see from where I am standing is the back of Drewe’s head, her damp hair falling over the white robe. She sits as motionless as if she were listening to a sermon. I pray she will think Berkmann is making all this up, but the rough blade of reality cuts through with every line. Consumed by impotent rage, I dial Miles’s cellular.

  “Are they going in yet?”

  “SWAT’s not even here, man. Take it easy.”

  “Take it easy! He’s tearing her up inside!”

  “I’m sorry. I know firsthand, remember? Help her through it. She’s got to keep him on. Unless you can do it.”

  I disconnect as Berkmann quotes me relentlessly: “ ‘She’d risen up and was mouthing “Is that Drewe?” while Drewe said something about a pulmonary embolism. I don’t remember what I said to get off the phone, but I knew I had failed Drewe in a time of emotional crisis. What I do remember clearly is what Erin said the moment I hung up. She said, “How are we going to tell her?” ’ ”

  As Berkmann spoke, I circled to my left, trying to see Drewe’s face. I wish I hadn’t. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, dropping onto the bosom of the robe. Unable to endure any more, I move forward and lay a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  She jerks away like I touched her with a cattle prod.

  “Are you there, Drewe?”

  “Yes,” she says in a cracked voice.

  I HATE this motherfucker.

  “Can you tell where and when this happened?”

  “Chicago.”

  “Yes. But it had been building for a long time. Because Erin worshiped you, and you loved Harper, how could she not do the same? She was a confused girl. Harper exploited her misguided affections. He used them to seduce her, to debase her, sodomize her, because only by so doing could he express his self-hatred. Yes, self-hatred. You loved him out of naïveté. You did not see his fear. But in his pygmy soul he always knew he was unworthy of you, that you would one day learn his true character. He has dreaded that day—today—for his entire life.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Drewe asks, her voice shaky. “Telling me all this?”

  “To free you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re on the verge of a great awakening, Drewe.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “But I do. I know you, Drewe. Better than you know yourself. You must be honest with me. Utterly without pretense.”

  “I’m always honest.”

  “That statement is itself dishonest. You must strip away ALL pretense. Our time is limited.”

  “Why is our time limited? You have to be somewhere?”

  “There are . . . external concerns.”

  I feel a sudden shiver. Is Berkmann aware of the approaching SWAT team? Suddenly, the phone rings in my hand.

  “New York SWAT just pulled up!” Miles says, his voice barely under control. “Two vans. We’re a block away from Berkmann’s building. Baxter’s touching down on the roof of a bank south of here. NYPD’s bringing him to the scene in an unmarked car.”

  “How long till he gets there?”

  “I don’t know. How’s Drewe doing?”

  “It’s not pleasant.”

  “Hang on just a little longer.”

  “Berkmann seems to be feeling some time pressure, Miles. Maybe you’d better warn those SWAT guys, just in case he knows something.”

  “Okay. Let’s keep the line open from now on.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’ve had to develop a sort of shell lately,” Drewe is saying, “to deal with certain things in my life.”

  “Just so,” says Berkmann. “But you can shed that as easily as a serpent sheds its skin. You will be reborn. Even now I am scratching away the husk. Tell me, why do you have no children, Drewe?”

  She doesn’t answer at first. Then, “We just haven’t had any yet.”

  “You’re thirty-three years old. How can you suppress that urge? That silent cramping pulse that beats within your womb like a voice murmuring, Time is passing, Time is passing?”

  “I feel that. But this is the real world. There are . . . external concerns, like you said.”

  “Your husband.”

  “He’s a factor.”

  “He’s more than that. He is afraid to have children with you. He ducks the question, changes the subject, pleads that it’s too much responsibility, asks you to wait until things are more stable.”

  “Yes.”

  “When could things be more stable? You earn a living in your own right. Your husband is a miser, isn’t he? Hoarding his gold like Midas?”

  I feel like a demon just breathed on the back of my neck. Was Berkmann in the tunnel that night after all?

  “Hiding in his office,” he goes on, “his sticky fingers glued to the keyboard, reading about other peop
le’s sex lives over their shoulders, fawning over brainless starlets, masturbating for relief because he can’t face himself squarely enough to have a real relationship with you. What kind of man lives like that?”

  “Didn’t he find you on EROS?” Drewe asks pointedly.

  “Yes. But I was there for an altogether different reason.”

  “Pineal glands?”

  “Yes, but we must take things in order. First you must sever your husband from your life. From your being. Can you do that?”

  “More easily than you know.”

  “You deceive yourself. It’s never that easy. That is why I must tell you the rest.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your husband. Harper lured me to your home because Erin was trying to make him tell you the truth about Holly. Trying to save her marriage. But Harper couldn’t bear the truth. That’s why he sent me Erin’s picture, why he made sure Erin would be alone in your house when my assistant and I arrived. He told Erin he was thinking of leaving you, that he wanted to be a father to Holly, that he needed desperately to make love with her again. That’s why she came when she did. I didn’t come to kill her but to bring her back to share my life. But of course she knew nothing about that. When I arrived, she panicked. She stabbed my assistant, and my assistant killed her in self-defense. Despite my best efforts to save them, they both died. Harper got his wish.”

  Drewe is staring at me again, her tearful eyes wide with horror. I shake my head violently and mouth “LIES!” but she has been shaken beyond reassurance.

  “I didn’t see any sign that you tried to save Erin,” she says.

  “You saw the wound. It was mortal.”

  “You could have called nine-one-one.”

  “No. The civil authorities are Philistines. They would chain Prometheus to a rock for stealing fire.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “As I speak, please remember one thing. There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena. Forget the arbitrary rules you learned as a child. Listen with your will, with your unfettered spirit. . . .”

  Berkmann begins telling the tale he told “Erin” days ago, but in a more condensed manner. If anything, the story is more powerful for its brevity. There’s no denying the poetry of his language as he speaks of Rudolf and Richard and Catherine—always Catherine—and Kali. Drewe interjects an occasional “yes” or “mmm,” but little else. As the minutes pass, I realize that Berkmann’s words are disturbing me on some fundamental level. What can they be doing to Drewe?

  Pressing the phone hard against my ear, I hear a flurry of voices from Miles’s end. Then Miles says, “Harper!”

  “I’m here.”

  “The SWAT teams are moving into position. Snipers on the rooftops, the whole deal. Everybody says tell you to keep Berkmann at his computer.”

  “He’s still talking to Drewe. Tell them to get the lead out. I don’t know how long she can take this.”

  “SWAT’s on the phone with Baxter right now. He’s en route by car. They’re going in as soon as he gets here.”

  “Okay.”

  Berkmann’s tale is accelerating. He weaves the central thread of his life—his hemophilia—into a tale of almost mythic proportion. The illegal liver transplant that cost a life but “healed his great wound” sounds like part of a heroic quest. And through it all, his family looms like a mystical trinity, his mother a shining figure in the distance, his father walking beside him, his grandfather a shadow pursuing from behind.

  “Harper!” Miles says in my ear.

  “Right here.”

  “Baxter just got out of a car. They’re escorting him like he’s General MacArthur. Hang on.”

  I try to listen to the action through the phone while Berkmann begins speaking of what Drewe means to him. She listens as though nothing in his depraved history has shocked her in the slightest.

  “Goddamn it!” Miles yells in my ear.

  “What is it?”

  “Baxter’s not letting me go in! The son of a bitch!”

  “You didn’t think he would, did you?”

  “He used me, man! The only reason I’m here is to make sure you keep Berkmann online.”

  “So what! Tell me what’s happening.”

  “Shit. It looks like a movie location. They don’t know where the computer is in the building, so they’re going to do both floors at once. The roof guys are going to crash through the windows on rappelling gear while guys on the ground blow the doors with plastique.”

  “What about the hostages?”

  “Baxter has paramedics standing—Wait. Here he comes.”

  Suddenly Daniel Baxter’s commanding voice comes through the phone. “Cole? Baxter.”

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t want another Dallas here. NYNEX shows computer data moving through one phone line at Berkmann’s warehouse. It looks like he’s online in there, but I don’t want him making an ass out of me and shooting cops from the windows. I want to hear you tell me Edward Berkmann is online right this second.”

  Tired of playing middleman, I carry the phone across the room and hold it up to one of the computer’s speakers.

  “Most women,” Berkmann is saying, “are water-engorged beings of stasis, eternally swelling and sloughing, draining men of life even as they produce more life. They are but corridors back to the grave. I have waited decades for a woman of fire and light—”

  “You hear that?” I ask Baxter.

  “That’s him?”

  “That’s a digital facsimile of his voice speaking live to my wife.”

  In a voice very like the one he used when directing the Dallas raid from Quantico, Baxter says, “Captain Riley, you are cleared to go.”

  “How do you like that guy?” Miles asks, back on the phone. “He—”

  Miles’s voice is terminated by four flat booms that can only be explosions.

  Chapter 48

  “SWAT just blew down the doors!” Miles shouts. “I’m in the command car with Baxter. I’ll tell you what’s happening as I hear it.”

  Drewe is still speaking into the headset, her tone almost conspiratorial.

  “SWAT’s moving through the building,” Miles says softly. “Drewe still talking to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He talking back?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know.”

  “If someone blew open the side of your house, wouldn’t you run like hell?”

  “I’m not him. He may be about to blast that whole SWAT team to hell. Remember Dallas.”

  “No shit. Keep him talking.”

  “Drewe’s got it.”

  “I checked your transcripts in the Tulane Medical School computer,” says Berkmann. “You scored mostly twelves on the MCAT. That put you in the top one percent of medical school applicants. You could have gone to Hopkins or Columbia or Harvard.”

  “So? What did you score?”

  “I am the measuring stick, Drewe.”

  “Ah.”

  “You could have been a surgeon.”

  “You have a point?”

  “I’m trying to show you how accident has limited you. Circumscribed your life. You attended university near your hometown. You married a man you’d known since childhood, settled in the place you were born. And there you remain. You spend your days delivering welfare babies doomed to wasted lives, your nights alone in bed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know you, Drewe. You’re a barely subcritical mass of potentialities. People realize that you’re special, but they don’t want you to realize it. Because if you did you would leave them forever. You are a higher being, yet you do the work of a midwife. My God, to think of you bent between the heaving thighs of mindless women spawning children like roe, soiling your hands with their eternal muck. You’re like a saint sentenced to an eternity of healing lepers. Do you understand the kind of
work you would be doing with me? Challenging the dominion of death itself—”

  “They found a hostage!” Miles cries in my ear.

  “What?”

  “Male hostage in a basement. Alive! It must be Peter Levy. Jesus, they got another one! A woman! Wait . . . It’s just like we thought. A SWAT guy says the basement is set up like a hospital operating room.”

  “What about Berkmann?”

  “Nothing yet. It’s confused in there.”

  “Female physicians,” Berkmann is saying, “driven beyond their abilities by their parents, hard little girls pushed into a male system. Slaves to technique, looking for father figures. I don’t need supplicants. Do you know the epigram of disappointment? I listened for an echo and heard nothing but praise—”

  “They found his computers! Second floor. They’re powered up, but no Berkmann. Damn it, anybody who knows anything always leaves their computers on!”

  “I know that!” I snap.

  “I was telling Baxter,” says Miles.

  “Berkmann must be in another part of the building,” I reason. “That’s why he didn’t split when they blew the doors. He’s safe in there somewhere. They have the exits covered?”

  “They say they do. Berkmann still talking to Drewe?”

  I tune in long enough to hear Drewe say, “Tell me more about Catherine, Edward. I’m sorry. May I call you Edward?”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s still on. He’s all sweetness and light. Miles, could Berkmann own the building next door? Sort of like the apartments in Dallas?”

  “NYPD’s covering the adjacent structures. Oh, man—”

  “What?”

  “Body parts in the basement. SWAT just found them. Bodies and body parts in a big freezer. Bodies in plastic bags, parts in biological specimen jars.”

  “To hell with that, where’s Berkmann?”

  “We’ve got to get in there!” Miles yells suddenly. “Wait, shit—I’ve got to see those computers! I’ll tell you where that son of a bitch is!”

  I hear Daniel Baxter’s deep voice, the chopped cadence of orders. “We’re going in,” says Miles, panting like a sprinter again. “Keep Drewe talking!”

  “She’s rolling, man. Go!”

  “My father took me deer hunting when I was young,” Drewe says. “With a rifle. I hated it. It seemed a senseless slaughter. But then I learned to shoot a bow. And I loved it. Creeping through the forest looking for scrapes, letting the does pass by. Drawing the bow, holding my breath, waiting for the buck to step clear of cover with his massive rack. My arms quivering from holding at full draw, and then the release, the arrow crashing through his heart in the moment he heard it fly. I felt like a goddess.”