Mortal Fear m-1

by Greg Iles

  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 on-line.”

  “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 on-line 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 on-line 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 home town. 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. “Waitshit — 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 ar
ms 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.”

  “That was but a taste of your true nature.”

  “Edward? I want to share something with you. Something I’ve never told my husband. Something he’s never even asked me.”

  “What is it?”

  “A dream.”

  “Yes.”

  “It started during college, long after I’d stopped hunting.”

  “This is a recurring dream?”

  “Yes. I’m walking through a forest in winter. Snow on the ground, ice in the trees. I’m not wearing enough clothing to keep warm, just an old dress. No coat. I see many deer, but they’re starving. I pass them by. Then, through the bare black trees, I see a flash of pure white against the bluish snow. It’s a great buck, with fur like ermine from antlers to tail, his antlers black like wet branches, the underside of the tail like sable. Not an albino, because his eyes are bottomless rings of blue. Deeper and deeper into the forest I chase him. My throat burns from the cold. Once I catch a longer glimpse, and I see that he is wounded, a splash of blood on his white belly, as though he has taken an arrow yet runs on. Only a heart shot can bring him down. As dusk falls, I track him to a cave. He stands just inside the mouth, as though safe in shadow. I draw the bow. Then, just as he sees me, I release, burying the shaft in his heart.”

  There is absolute silence in the room.

  “Do you dress the carcass in the cave?”

  “The buck doesn’t die. As he lies shuddering in the cave mouth, he is transformed into a man. A young man, with skin like alabaster. But the old wound in his belly remains. Then I come to him in the cave, and he goes down on all fours before me, facing away. And though I cannot see anything at my waist, it is I who penetrate him. Some part of me passes into him, and when he rises his wound is healed, he is made whole. But when I rise, I see thatI now have the wound. And I’m no longer a girl, but a woman, and it’s me running now, running with him chasing me. He gets closer and closer and then… then I wake up. I always wake up before he catches me.”

  Berkmann says nothing.

  I cannot imagine Drewe fabricating this story on the spot. The detail is too vivid. How little we really know about the people we live with.

  “You still have this dream?”Berkmann asks finally.

  “Yes. And it… it arouses me. Sometimes I have an orgasm when I’m in the cave. Sometimes not. Sometimes I feel only fear. Raw terror.”

  “It’s so simple. So clear. Don’t you see? You are a huntress who needs to be caught. A healer who needs to be healed. I am the wounded beast, Drewe. I-”

  “Berkmann’s not in the building,” Miles says in my ear. “We’re on the second floor. SWAT confirms it.”

  My pulse is racing. “He’s still talking, Miles.”

  “Maybe he was telling the truth about being out of the country. Maybe he really has another base, another voice-rec unit somewhere. He probably has the money for it.”

  “The phone company has a busy signal on the warehouse phone?”

  “Yep. Christ, look at this.”

  “What?”

  “I’m at the computers. It’s serious stuff. Sun, Digital Equipment. Massive power here.”

  “So where’s Berkmann?”

  “Man, some of these boxes I don’t even recognize.”

  I kneel beside Drewe and whisper in the shell of her ear. “They’re in the building. Keep talking.”

  Her head bobs slightly. “Catherine played the piano?”

  “Yes,”Berkmann replies. “She had a gift.”

  “I play as well,” she says. This is a lie.

  “You play Beethoven?”

  “I prefer Chopin. Tell me something, Edward. Did Catherine breast-feed you?”

  “Of course. There was no cow’s milk in the basements of Berlin.”

  “Are you circumcised, Edward? Is that how they discovered your hemophilia?”

  “No. That was for Jews. My uncle noticed it first, through abnormal bruising.”

  Over Drewe’s shoulder, I watch Berkmann’s words materialize on-screen as flawlessly as film credits. He’s definitely using a voice-recognition system. But where is it? I turn away and walk back toward the desk that holds my Gateway computer. It sits purring like a faithful dog. Where could-

  “Harper!”

  Drewe’s yell shocks me out of myself. I whirl, afraid that my name has gone out over the data line, but she has her hand on the space bar.

  “What is it?” I ask, moving to her side.

  “I’m getting errors in Berkmann’s side of the conversation.”

  A ball of ice forms in my chest. “What do you mean? Like typos?”

  “More like dropouts. Wrong words. Nonwords.”

  “Okay… I’ll check on it. Just keep talking to him.”

  She releases the space bar and resumes the conversation, though in a less controlled voice.

  “Miles?” I say into the phone.

  Nothing.

  I walk as far from Drewe as I can get and snarl, “Miles!”

  “What?”

  “Drewe’s getting errors from Berkmann!”

  “You mean typos? All of a sudden?”

  “Yes! But more like dropouts, she said.”

  “There’s a lot of gear in this room, Harper, including a home-engineered phone system. I just picked up a receiver and heard a data stream.”

  “Then Berkmann must be there. There must be a room in the building SWAT hasn’t found.”

  “But where?”

  Drewe’s voice control is degrading by the second. “Miles, what if he’sremotely using the system in front of you? You picking up that receiver could have caused the dropouts Drewe saw. Especially with a cellular data connection.”

  “He’s never used it remotely before. I’m sure of it.”

  “So that means he can’t?”

  Miles clucks his tongue. “If he could have, why didn’t he? It’s a lot easier to talk than it is to type, especially when you’re flying a plane or hiding outside somebody’s house in the dark.”

  “Maybe it’s technically possible, but not that reliable. So he just never messed with it.”

  “Until now, you mean?”

  A hot wave of fear rolls up my spine. “Miles, what if he knew all along we were using his error rate to predict his movements? Or that we could use it? When he killed Lenz’s wife, hewanted the FBI to know he was on the move, so he stuck to his old pattern and didn’t use voice recognition. He wanted them to see the errors.”

  “And with Erin?”

  “He just stayed off-line until he got here. That way there were no errors to see, even though he was moving.”

  There is a sudden, awful silence.

  “He’s known all along,” Miles says quietly. “It’s just like his back door into EROS. He saved it until he needed it.”

  I feel like I’m riding an elevator whose cable just snapped.

  “I’m going to pick up the receiver again,” Miles says. “Tell me what happens.”

  Almost instantly Drewe throws up her right hand, then spins in her chair, an anxious look on her face.

  “More errors?” I whisper.

  She nods violently.

  “We got errors, Miles. Would Berkmann have seen that?”

  “Probably. He might think it was just line noise, though.”

  “He’s not in New York, Miles.” I hesitate to voice the certainty that has crystallized in my brain. “I guess we know where he is.”

  “Harper-”

  “Tell Baxter to get somebody out here as fast as humanly possible. I’m hanging up now.”

  “Wait!”

  “Ciao, pal. Good knowing you.”

  With an eerie sense of resignation, I hang up the phone, then walk to the office door and lock it. The heavy window blinds make it virtually impossible for someone outside to see into the room. From my desk I pick up a legal pad and a pen an
d scrawl,Berkmann may be here. Stay calm. I’m calling for help. Keep talking. Then I carry it over to Drewe and hold it where she can see it.

  Her composure melts like ice thrown into a fire. My immediate concern is her voice. Berkmann can’t hear the fear crackling through it like electricity, but if she loses enough control, the voice-rec program may stop functioning. As she struggles to continue the conversation, I dial her father’s house. There are two other options-Sheriff Buckner and Wes Killen-but Bob will come faster. Besides, I made him a promise.

  While the phone rings, I walk to one of the two front windows, slide the blind to the side and peek out into the blue dusk. The deputy’s car is still at the end of our drive, nose angled toward the highway. Because of the fading light and the car’s position, I can’t see whether he’s in it or not.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Anderson, it’s Harper. I need to talk to Dr. Anderson right now.”

  “They’re not here.” Margaret’s voice is cold. “I’m here with Holly.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Bob and Patrick. They went out to the cemetery to visit Erin.”

  “At night?”

  “That’s what they wanted to do. They’re grown men.”

  “Do they have a cellular phone?”

  “No. They took Bob’s old truck. You sound funny. What’s-”

  I disconnect and dig Wes Killen’s cellular phone number out of my back pocket. My thumb is touching the keypad of the cordless when Berkmann’s voice shocks me into stillness.

  “What’s the matter, Drewe?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “Your voice-recognition program is missing words, sending errors. As though you’re under great stress.”

  Drewe looks back at me, her face pale. I motion for her to keep winging it while I dial Killen’s number.

  “I shouldn’t be stressed?” she says. “After all you’ve told me about my husband?”

  “What is Harper doing?”