Mortal Fear

He nods distractedly and raises a sheaf of paper toward his camera lens.

“What’s that?”

“The contents of Brahma’s hard drive. The one he downloaded the Trojan Horse onto.”

A remnant of cold reason revives somewhere in my brain. “Does it tell you who he is?”

“No name. No ‘I’m Ted Bundy’ or anything like that.” In a curiously childlike gesture, Miles wipes his nose on his sleeve. “I got his EROS software serial number, but it’s registered under David Strobekker.”

“Damn.”

“But there are definite leads. He’s got to be working out of New York. He started out killing homeless women here. The first three victims were infected with HIV, so he stopped. That must be when he hit on the EROS idea. He killed Strobekker in Minneapolis for his EROS account-”

“Where are you getting all this?”

“I think he used this computer primarily as an interface for EROS. It’s mostly Windows-based applications. He must have his main stuff on a UNIX workstation somewhere. Jesus, I can’t believe this. God — ”

“What else do you have?” I ask, forcing my voice under control.

“The explosive stuff is the WordPerfect files. He actually kept a record of most of the murders. They’re like descriptive letters. ‘Dear Father, We landed in New Orleans yesterday evening. A humid city, blah, blah.’ ” He shuffles pages. “ ‘Dear Father, We landed in Michigan in the afternoon.’ ‘Dear Father, We landed in Virginia Beach-’ ”

“Brahma told me his father died in India.”

Miles shrugs. “So he writes to his dead father. It’s like Psycho maybe. The problem is that the only names mentioned in the letters are those of the victims, or this woman Kali. According to the letters, she did the actual killings. Although Brahma helped with the staging. The mutilations and stuff. Kali must be that girl he picked up in India. The Thuggee girl.”

“She’s dead too.”

“She is? How do you know?”

“Erin killed her. Right here in my office. Ran her through the stomach with the sword off my wall.”

Miles is thunderstruck.

“Come on, there must be something in the letters we can use.”

“Drewe was right about the pineal transplant thing,” he says. “Brahma definitely kidnapped Peter Levy, the man the FBI got off the DonorNet list. Know why?”

“Come on, Miles.”

“Levy was a perfect tissue match with Brahma.”

“Jesus. You mean… you think he could already have found a way to have this transplant done to himself?”

“No. I think Levy’s on permanent standby. For when the procedure’s perfected. I’ll bet when Brahma turned up an exact match for himself, he decided he wasn’t going to take any chances that the guy would get run over by a truck. I guarantee you Levy is being held prisoner somewhere right now.”

“Good God.”

“The DonorNet woman’s dead, though. The navy chick from Virginia Beach. She died on the operating table. Rosalind May did too. Heart attack. For some reason Brahma was going to open her chest-don’t ask me why-and he actually told her about it. The letter said he was trying to make it easier on her. She died of plain terror. It’s pretty sick stuff. But there’s one thing that doesn’t add up in it all.”

“What?”

“Why Brahma was fooling with Erin. I mean with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think he saw you as a potential donor. So why was he wasting time with you?”

“I’m listening.”

“Everything was going fine for him until Karin Wheat’s death. She was meant to be the first live recipient. I think he thought she might voluntarily allow him to perform the transplant. Of course, when he and Kali showed up at her mansion, she freaked, and they had to kill her. After that he went to his backup plan, which was straight kidnapping. Rosalind May. And he got the navy girl easily enough, the donor. But just before the big operation, his help got greedy on him. He was using unlicensed Indian doctors as assistants, probably recruited by Kali. They tried to extort more money, and Kali killed one of them.”

“That’s a lead right there! The FBI can start checking Indian physicians who’ve been turned down for U.S. medical licenses. They can concentrate on New York.”

“Listen to me, Harper. That same night, May died on the operating table. The next day the FBI breached his perimeter in Dallas. Notice a pattern here?”

“Brahma’s having big problems.”

“Exactly. But does he lie low and regroup? No. He decides to teach the FBI a lesson. He plays Lenz’s little game, then kills Lenz’s wife. Meanwhile, he’s playing kissy-kissy with you too.”

“Maybe I was meant to be the next donor.”

“For who? Who would the recipient have been?”

“Kali, maybe?”

This stops Miles. “I hadn’t thought of that. But I don’t think so. Too early. She’d want to know the procedure worked before she risked it.”

“So why was he talking to me?”

“Brahma wants immortality, Harper. Physical immortality. Listen to this: ‘Soon I shall stand alone at the pinnacle of the species, the only man with the courage to reach into the fountain. Soon I shall spit in the face of God.’ ”

“The fountain of youth?”

“Hell yes. He even talks about Ponce de Leon. Brahma’s fountain is the pineal transplant. Except just as he gets close, fate starts working against him. And the worse it gets, the more he tells you about himself. He gives you his whole life story, something we know he’s never done before. Why?”

“Do you know?”

“There’s another kind of immortality, Harper.”

“Just tell me, damn it!”

“Kids.”

The word detonates in my subconscious like a bomb. Even with the jerky video image, I can see the excitement on Miles’s face.

“In the transcripts you faxed, Brahma says he sterilized Kali, remember?”

“Yes. He said he couldn’t have children by her, so she allowed him to sterilize her.”

“If he couldn’t have children by her, he wouldn’t need to sterilize her. I think he wouldn’t have children by her.”

“Because she was Indian,” I say distantly. “Because she had dark skin.”

“Exactly! All those early questions about skin color! All his life, Brahma’s been looking for someone like his mother for a mate.”

“But my ‘Erin’ wasn’t that much like Catherine.”

“Not so much physically, maybe. Although you did change her in that direction a little. Good instinct.”

“Yeah, obviously.”

“No, listen, Harper. The answer lies in the story you were telling him. That’s where ‘Erin’ was like his mother, and that’s what attracted him.”

“What do you mean?”

“You blacked out most of what you told Brahma,” Miles says, looking straight into the camera, “but now isn’t the time to be shy. It was all stuff about you and Erin, right? The real Erin.”

I hesitate only a moment. “Yes.”

“The big thing in Brahma’s past is incest. He’s a child of incest; he always longed for the sister he never had; Kali was a poor substitute. Right?”

“Uh-huh.”