He knew the reason: the chair had been crafted to fit him perfectly when he had ordered it. Now, three months and seven kilos later, the fit was no longer perfect.
Roman drew as deep a breath as his obesity-hypoventilation syndrome, which compelled him to sleep each night with an oxygen mask, allowed him to draw and switched on his four flat-screen monitors, which had been configured to offer a continuous display. A single window.
Roman loved this moment: immersion. He could disconnect from the mass of his body, from the mass of the world. Like a beached whale swept suddenly back out to sea and into a natural environment of grace, Roman became weightless, formless, in a world where his mind and his mind alone was all that mattered. Here he communicated with other beings without form. Here he could be anyone, anything. Here there were no noisy Albanian neighbours, no colic spasms, no disgust at what looked back at you from the mirror.
Roman would spend the next seven hours, late into the night, in the cybernetic world. He would chat, play, be someone else. He would spend most of that time in Virtual Dimension. He had been a member for nearly a year. In Virtual Dimension he was slim, attractive, successful. Officially, his job was as a private detective and he had a string of mistresses, a penthouse apartment that looked out over the lagoons of New Venice, and he drove a 1962 Ferrari 250 GT convertible. He had dozens of friends and attended e-drugs parties.
In Virtual Dimension he had no weight problem, no grubby Wilhelmsburg flat, no Albanian neighbours. He ached to be back there.
But first, Roman had work to do.
The truth was that although Roman hated living in Wilhelmsburg, he could have easily afforded to move out at any time. The only thing stopping him was the questions that would be asked about how he had managed to amass such a fortune. He had a powerful electromagnet, weighing five kilos, permanently plugged into the power supply, ready to be switched on with a flick of his thumb and swept across his hard drives, destroying the data inside. The evidence.
If they came.
He would play Virtual Dimension soon. But first, he had to attend to business. He sat before thousands of euros’ worth of technology which required constant updating, maintaining, expanding. And the way Roman paid for it all was to divert large sums of money from all around the world into accounts that he had all around the world.
But Roman was more than just a fraudster. He was an artist. No one was looking for him yet, because no one knew yet that the money was missing. Every institution, organisation and company that he had defrauded was hit immediately by a computer virus that erased data, destroyed records, wiped clean all traces of his visit. Each virus was different. Each was an individual, unique creation. A work of art.
And the greatest virus of them all — the Trojan of all Trojans — was the Klabautermann Virus. His masterpiece of destructive programming.
Because obese, reclusive, Roman Kraxner — twenty-eight, one hundred and eighty kilos, with no university degree but an IQ of 162 and an Abitur result of 1.0, living in a grubby three-room apartment in Wilhelmsburg — was one of the most successful internet hackers and fraudsters in the world.
And it was time for him to go to work.
Chapter Fourteen
Muller-Voigt came back into the lounge from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a coffee pot and two cups on it. Fabel noticed that the pot and cups were made from a very fine white china and were of an elegant, restrained modern design. He had seen exactly the same set in the Alsterhaus store down on Jungfernstieg and had wanted to buy it, but had decided he could not justify the expense. His East Frisian providence had triumphed over his Hamburg savoir faire.
While Muller-Voigt had been in the kitchen, Fabel had picked up the small piece of sculpture that had sat in the centre of the coffee table. It was a modernist piece. Some kind of stylised dragon. It had a beauty to it, but there was something about it that also disturbed Fabel. It was an inanimate lump of bronze but looked as if it was writhing as he watched. He put it back on the table when Muller-Voigt came back in.
‘Like it?’ asked Muller-Voigt as he set the coffee tray down. ‘I had it specially commissioned. It’s a representation of Rahab, the ancient Hebrew sea daemon. The creator of storms and the father of chaos.’
‘Strange choice,’ said Fabel, his eyes still on the bronze, still half-expecting to see it twist and writhe.
‘It represents my enemy, if you like,’ the politician said. ‘A monster we are creating out of Nature.’ Muller- Voigt paused to hand Fabel his coffee. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, I checked with the organisers of the conference I met Meliha at. I asked them to go through their records of delegates and attendees. It wasn’t open to the general public and everyone who attended did so by invitation and registration. They had no record of Meliha whatsoever. I saw her delegate badge, Fabel. We all had to have our photographs taken for those and we had to supply all kinds of information for security. As a foreign national, she would have had to show her passport as proof of identity. By the way, that was one of the reasons why, when you asked if she could have been an illegal, I said no. In today’s security climate they would not have let her into the Congress Center otherwise. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is absolutely no way Meliha could have been there if she hadn’t been registered for the event and her details checked.’
‘Administrative errors happen. Maybe her details have been accidentally wiped,’ said Fabel.
‘Mmm… just like her email to me has disappeared from my computer.’
‘That was because of a computer virus that we all know about.’
‘It’s a hell of a coincidence, though, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose it is,’ said Fabel. And if there was one thing Fabel didn’t believe in, it was coincidences.
‘And who’s to say that the Klabautermann Virus isn’t targeted? That it is a tool for deleting carefully selected information and hiding it in plain sight in a mass deletion?’
Fabel laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Senator, but I think we’re wandering into the area of conspiracy theories.’
‘You think?’ Muller-Voigt poured more coffee. Fabel accepted it but knew he would regret it later. He had a low tolerance for caffeine and he knew that a second cup would keep him awake that night. Susanne habitually teased him about it, saying it was because all he had ever drunk while growing up in East Frisia was tea. But somehow Fabel didn’t think the coffee would be the only thing to keep him from sleep.
It was now dark outside and Fabel noticed that the lighting in the lounge increased automatically to compensate.
‘Look, Herr Muller-Voigt,’ said Fabel. ‘I have to ask you this. Did you give any money or gifts or anything of any value to Meliha? Maybe even information that may have some value or be of use-’
‘I see,’ Muller-Voigt cut across him. ‘You think that I’ve been honeytrapped. No fool like an old fool, is that it?’
Fabel started to protest but the politician held up his hand.
‘I don’t blame you. I have to admit that the thought had gone through my head, but the answer is no. I can honestly say that nothing of any material, commercial or political advantage ever passed between us. We became lovers. It was as simple and as complicated as that. And now she’s gone and I’m struggling to convince you that she ever existed. I’m beginning to struggle to convince myself of that.’
‘People either exist or they don’t, Herr Senator. And if they do exist then they leave material traces.’
‘That’s what I believed, too. But when I’d run out of all other ideas I used a contact I have in the education department. I got her to run a check with her contact in the University of Istanbul and gave her the rough span of years during which I reckoned Meliha would have been a student.’
‘And she drew a blank as well.’ Fabel made it a statement rather than a question.
‘That’s why I said to you that Meliha wasn’t missing, but that she has disappeared. Not just physically but, as far as I can see, from any form of public record. It’s almost as if someone has hit a button and deleted Meliha from existence.’
A silence fell over the two men. Fabel studied his coffee cup and considered what Muller-Voigt had told him. Fabel had heard stories like this before. People deranged with anxiety over a missing person elaborating their
