Mortal Fear

buthe will too. Then what happens? A week or a month or a year from now he snatches me out of some parking lot? Or cuts your throat while you’re sleeping?”

Drewe has gone from blind panic to rigid control in less than a minute. “What do you want to do?” I ask.

“You called for help, right? Even if he killed the cops outside, somebody’s got to get here in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“He could kill us twenty times in twenty minutes!”

“But does hewant to? Listen! He’s still talking to me.”

She’s right. Berkmann’s digital voice is still droning up the hall. Somewhere outside our house, he is crouched over a notebook computer and cellular phone, too afraid or unsure to make his move.

“He doesn’t want to kill me,” Drewe says, clutching my upper arm. “He wants to take me with him. That’s why he hasn’t broken into the house! I can control him, Harper.I’ve got the power right now. I can keep him on a string for twenty minutes. You just be ready to shoot him if he tries to break in.”

Suddenly I see a great irony. By declaring his desire to possess my wife-and by believing he has destroyed me in her eyes-Berkmann has given me the upper hand. He has made Drewemy hostage.

“We can do it!” she insists, handing the.38 back to me. “Twenty minutes.”

An image of Michael Mayeux comes into my mind. That hardheaded Cajun could be stalking Berkmann right now.

“Okay,” I tell her. “Move! Get back to the computer!”

Drewe races into the hall and toward the office. I veer into the bedroom for her Charter Arms.25, then follow. When I reach the office door, I remember Wes Killen’s advice and switch on the hall light. Then I lock the office door behind me.

Drewe is already speaking into the EROS headset.

“What was that gunshot?” she asks.

“Time is running out,”Berkmann replies.“We must act quickly.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you.”

“But… how? What do you want me to do?”

“Walk outside with your car keys. I have a plane nearby. We can be airborne in three minutes.”

My chest constricts with panic. Drewe whirls to face me, stunned. I can scarcely speak. “The strip Miles used,” I whisper. “He must have stolen a plane.”

“I thought your plane crashed,” Drewe stammers.

“Of course you did. But I never meant to leave without you, Drewe. I knew that as soon as I saw your picture. Fate used Harper’s sins to bring me to you. And to stay near you, I had to appear to die. I would have come to you sooner, but you moved into your father’s house. There were guards. I had no way to contact you safely.”

Drewe is shaking her head. “Were you at my sister’s burial?”

“Yes.”

“Did you leave sunglasses in her grave?”

“I dropped them. I couldn’t risk retrieving them.”

“But… where have you been staying for the last two days?”

“In a cotton gin. I had electricity and water… all the necessities except food.”

“My God.”

“Time is short, Drewe. You were going to leave Harper anyway. Now you know how right that instinct was. Now you have a place to go. I am taking you to a future you cannot even imagine.”

“But….”

“I know Harper is there. You must convince him that to obstruct us means death.”

“It’s not that simple. He has a gun, and it’s pointed at me. He’s not about to let me go anywhere.”

Silence.

“Then I shall kill him.”

“Let me talk to him, Edward,” Drewe implores. “I’ll make him understand how it is.”

This time Berkmann does not respond. Drewe reaches out and grips my left hand in hers. I clench the.38 in my right, looking back over my shoulder at the window blinds.

“Five minutes,”Berkmann says finally.“In five minutes you walk out the front door alone, or I set the house on fire.”

CHAPTER 49

“He’s bluffing,” I say, trying to believe it myself.

Drewe throws down the headset and hits the space bar. “We’ve got to run! We’ve got to use the tunnel now!”

I lay the.25 in her lap and shake my head. “We can’t run. We lost our chance. We don’t know where he is now.”

“He’s going to set the house on fire!”

“He won’t do it with you inside.”

“He might!”

Something is working at the edge of my consciousness, like a comet too distant to see but hurtling toward me at great speed.

“Harper!”

“We can’t run. And he knows it. We already made our choice.”

“What if we tell him I’m coming out, then just sit here in the dark? He’d have to come in for me. Then we could shoot him. It’s two against one.”

“Berkmann knows about killing, Drewe. It’s our house, but he’s been here before. If we end up in the same room with him, we’re going to die.”

She is near to hyperventilating, and she knows it. She clutches the.25 to her chest and shakes her head as if to shake off her terror. “What about-?”

“Pleasebe quiet, Drewe.”

She groans and closes her eyes.

I turn away and gaze around the office. Somehow, I have to kill Edward Berkmann. But the gun in my hand is not the answer. Facing him down like John Wayne would be suicide. As I turn slowly, I am suddenly and keenly aware of Miles as he was on the morning he completed his Trojan Horse program while Buckner’s men hammered on my front door. Desperate for time and needing to run, he looked around this room and realized that everything he needed to fool the police was right in front of him, if only he could see it in the proper light.

A minute has passed, but for me time is dilating with possibility. The seconds pass like cars on a distant train. Berkmann is smart. That is his talent. But talents are double-edged swords. I learned that the hard way. Maybe Berkmann is too smart for his own good. As the air conditioner kicks on, something trips in my brain-an echo of my own voice just minutes ago.Remember Dallas ….

Dallas. A jerky video image of an apartment. Men in black. A harmless-looking white computer on a floor, suddenly blooming into black nothingness….

My nerve endings thrumming, I turn faster, drinking in the contents of the room. The coat sculpture. My surviving guitars. The computers. The rack for my great grandfather’s sword, which now lies in some evidence room in Yazoo City-

Smaller,says a voice in my head. I tighten my focus from macro to micro. Floppy disk case, stapler, VCR. Halogen desk lamp, flashlight, canned air for cleaning electronic gear. Air freshener Drewe