Mortal Fear (39 page)

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 doesnt. Maybe hes 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. Ill give Miles another half hour before I close it.

As I sit drinking, I ponder the mornings riddles. Why didnt the police confiscate my computers? I can think of two answers. One: the FBI ordered the raid on my house,
but instructed the sheriffs department not to touch my computers. That would mean Baxter still wants me working as sysop, which suggests he might try a repeat of Lenzs ill-advised EROS strategy. Two: last nights 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 doesnt mind thumbing his nose at federal authority, he wont 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 Gods 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

Ill hide the disk where you can find it
.

I stand suddenly. As though sleepwalking, I move up the hallway to my office. I cant 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 fathers coatmounted on long bolts driven into wall studsremains 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 fathers 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 pocketthanks to the sculptors painstaking techniqueis there, somehow cut into the black silk lining. With a steady-handed certainty unlike any Ive 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.jpgthe .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:

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 doesnt 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 fileand I have no idea what destructive function it is designed to carry outI have no intention of disabling either of my computers by trying to view it.

Since Miles didnt 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 Erins personalityat least parts of itto seduce Brahma, and Miles hasnt 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 wouldnt have to use the real Erin. Miless latest project was expanding EROSs 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. Its 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 couldnt have put it here; she doesnt even put
herself
in my office. That leaves Buckners 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 Ive 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. Its a portfolio from Erins 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 monthssince Erin told me the truth about HollyI 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 anothers 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
,
Harpers 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. Its 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 Erins 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 imageone frame of itonto 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 codeas deadly as any Greek armyis 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 Brahmas next log-on wouldnt pass unnoticed. As if impelled by Miless 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 onto EROS as SYSOP. From my birds-eye view of the system, I scan the block of private rooms that contains the Blue Room.

Brahma is there.

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 Miless 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 Lenzs 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: