Mortal Fear

“Yeah, where are you?”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Goddamn it, Miles.”

“I’m in Brahma’s house.”

My heart thudded in my chest. “What?”

“I’m in his house. In his bedroom.”

“What the hell’s happening?”

“Remember the serial number from Brahma’s Microsoft program? The beta version? The FBI was talking to Microsoft, but it’s the weekend and they were going through channels. I have a friend in Redmond who was on the development team. He bypassed the red tape. Turns out this particular disk was given to the Columbia University School of Medicine in 1992 for beta testing.”

I heard only my own breathing as my mind made the connection. “Drewe’s theory again. Columbia and neurosurgeons.”

“As soon as I got that,” he went on, “I hacked into the med school computers and got a list of departments that participated in the beta test. I narrowed that to specialties dealing with the brain. That gave me twenty-three doctors. On the chance that the family history Brahma gave you was true, I selected the obvious German surnames. There were eight, and five of those were Jewish. I culled those because Brahma’s German uncle definitely didn’t sound Jewish. That left three names. Dorner, Thiele, and Berkmann. Before I checked their personnel files, I took a chance that the Christian names Brahma gave you might be real. Rudolf, remember? Son Richard? A psychiatrist?” Miles waited a beat. “Well, it hit.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Rudolf Edward Berkmann, age forty-seven. Neurobiologist and neurosurgeon. Father Richard, a psychiatrist and another Columbia alum. Berkmann’s on the faculty, Harper. His curriculum vitae even noted that his grandfather was Rudolf Berkmann, a distinguished New York surgeon.”

“Good God.”

“He goes by Edward. You want to guess what Edward’s subspecialty is?”

“The pineal gland?”

“No. Berkmann is world renowned for building a 3-D computer model of the brain. He’s been working on it since the seventies. I accessed the Columbia library and found dozens of articles and abstracts from medical journals. In the last twenty years this guy has sliced up over four hundred human brains, all to establish the base values for his model. Fifteen hundred slices per brain, frozen like chicken livers. Now Berkmann collates all brain research around the world and integrates it into the model, which is constantly updated. The thing can be used to map neurochemical reactions, project the progress of tumors, practice surgery, train medical students. They’re even using it with prototype telesurgery systems.”

Miles was speaking almost too fast for me to absorb his words.

“Don’t you see? Berkmann would have been one of the first to learn about the foreign pineal research Drewe told us about. Melatonin, the transplants affecting aging, all that. Think of the deal he could do with those doctors. In exchange for early access to their findings, he could offer to integrate them into his model, thus giving the work legitimacy in the U.S. Of course, once he got hold of their data, he simply initiated his own transplant program, using humans instead of animals.”

“Miles, tell me Daniel Baxter knows all this.”

“He’s upstairs right now, going through Berkmann’s stuff.”

A gasp of relief escaped my lips. I’d had visions of Miles sitting alone with a flashlight in the chamber of horrors that must be Brahma’s house.

“I found the place myself,” Miles explained. “But Brahma wasn’t here. You should see this house, Harper. It’s the brownstone from the story he told you, but it’s a palace now. It’s not four blocks from Lutece. I’ve seen some stunning New York homes, but this place… the art alone is worth a fortune. Most of it’s Indian, sculpture he and his father must have smuggled out of the country. Anyway, it was a choice between physically breaking in or getting Baxter’s help. I was worried they had agents tailing me anyway, so I called him.”

“I can’t believe he let you in the house.”

“I made him promise to let me see the computers before I’d tell him anything.”

“What did you find?”

“This isn’t Berkmann’s main base. I know that, because there’s no voice-recognition stuff here.” There was a brief, pregnant silence. Then Miles said, “But I found the answers, Harper. The very bottom of the thing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The reason for the murders. Why they were committed the way they were. Drewe was right about pineal transplants being the object of the killings. But she was completely wrong about the resources it would take to perform one. The way Berkmann has it laid out, it’s practically a one-man procedure. I think he only used those Indian doctors for anesthesiology and tissue typing.”

“How do you know that?”

“There’s a Sun SparcStation here in the study. There’s a version of his brain model in it. The graphics are some of the best I’ve ever seen-”

“Get to it, Miles.”

“There’s a series of surgical procedures modeled here. I’m still learning the program, but the harvesting procedure is based around that instrument I told you about, the neuroendoscope. In some ways it’s pretty much like Drewe guessed. Berkmann’s mapped out four different approaches to the pineal gland. One is based on spinal fluid pathways. He makes one small incision in the back of the neck, then passes the scope through the cisterna magna, the foramen magnum, the fourth ventricle, the Aqueduct of Sylvius, and right into the third ventricle, home of the pineal gland. He can do the whole harvest in fifteen minutes.”

“Jesus.”

“Hang with me now. Another route is the sublabialtranssphenoidal approach, which Drewe told us about. Another is through the soft palate in the roof of the mouth, then along the brain stem. The last is-”

“Through the optic foramen,” I finish. “After removing the eyeball.”

“Exactly. Drewe was right about that part. Berkmann used a different surgical route with each victim, and the only evidence he was ever there was the track of his scope. It was easy to mask it. The back-of-the-neck route was Nashville. He fired a nine-millimeter bullet right along his track. Sublabial route was New York, shotgun blast to the face. The optic foramen route was San Francisco-”

“Stakes driven through the empty eye sockets.”

“Right.”

“But San Francisco and L.A. were linked by pathologists. They found pineal tissue in both cases. Did Brahma screw up those procedures?”

“No! This is the beautiful part of it, Harper, the part Drewe missed. The pineal gland is endocrine tissue. It has what they call constant anatomy. That means you don’t need the whole gland for it to function. And once it’s inside the recipient, it doesn’t even need a direct blood supply!”

“What?”

“Once the scope was in the donor-who was already dead-Brahma used a biopsy forceps to pull out part of the pineal. It’s just grainy wet stuff. He calls it ‘pineal homogenate.’ To transplant it into the recipient, he anesthetizes the patient, then drills a small hole in the upper part of the breastbone, called the manubrium, which gives him access to the thymus-”

“Just like the mouse transplants?”

“Exactly. After he locates the thymus, he injects the pineal homogenate into it with a large-bore needle. The thymus has access to the circulatory system. So as long as the pineal tissue isn’t rejected, it begins to function normally. You see what I mean about simplicity?”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Drewe was wrong about tissue viability too. Berkmann has projections here about the viability of frozen homogenate. It’s patterned after the way they bank bone marrow for transplants.”

Miles sounded almost out of breath. We both sat in silence, trying to integrate the new information with what we had theorized up to that point. In some ways his discoveries changed everything. But in others, nothing.