Mortal Fear

ask me about it.”

“Sure. You’ve got a name in mind?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Erin.”

He blinks.

“No questions?”

“I don’t get it. You’re picking that name out of the blue, or you’re talking about our Erin?”

“My wife’s sister.”

He lets out a low whistle.

“If this is going to work, Miles, it’s got to be authentic. That over-the-top stuff Lenz is doing won’t fool Brahma long. I mean, I think that gang rape stuff really happened to somebody, but not to Lenz. You know? Probably one of his patients. Brahma feeds on the pathos of real human beings. And Erin’s the one. I know things about her… things that could help me play her very well.”

“Whatever you want,” Miles says quietly. “I trust your instincts.”

“Lenz thinks Brahma is targeting older women now. That’s why he made ‘Lilith’ forty-eight. But I can’t play a forty-eight-year-old woman convincingly. We’ll just have to hope he’s still interested in donors as well as recipients.”

He opens his hands. “Whatever you say. But I’ve got to ask. Are you saying you want ‘Erin’ as your on-line alias, or the real name behind the alias?”

“On-line alias. You can make her legal name anything you want.”

Miles digests this slowly. “I’m not even going to ask where this is coming from. You’re playing the role, you pick the costume. But aren’t you worried that using Erin might somehow lead Brahma to her?”

“No. Because it won’t really be Erin. It’s going to be a blend of Erin’s personality and mine. A hybrid. And the fact that the alias is ‘Erin’ should make Brahma think her real name is anything but Erin.”

“You’re right,” he says, looking impressed for once.

“It’s your job to create a fake identity that’s untraceable. And the address worries me. I know you can do a lot by hacking, but you can’t change where we are. What if Brahma can actually trace the phone connections?”

“I don’t think he can. Not easily, anyway. But even if he tries, I’ll have it covered.”

“How?”

“I’m going to hack into AT amp;T’s Jackson switching station, change around some number and address data. Then I’ll make that data match the ‘Erin’ stuff I put into the DMV computer and everywhere else.”

“I thought telephone switching stations had gotten practically impenetrable.”

“Some have. But I’ll bet Mississippi’s had the fewest attempted penetrations of any state in the U.S.” He smiles. “And they definitely aren’t ready for me, Grasshopper.”

“I’m asking for one promise, Miles.”

“What?”

“Drewe knows nothing about what we’re trying to do. Nothing. I don’t care what we tell her, but it’s not going to be this.”

He holds up his hands. “You think I’m nuts?”

“This is illegal and we both know it.”

“Yeah. But we’ve got to do it.” Wicked blue light flashes in his eyes. “And it’s going to be the mother-fucking rush of all time. Wow.”

A surge of adrenaline pushes me over to the left front window. I have to fight the urge to peek around the blinds to see whether there are any deputies standing in the dark yard.

“Can I ask you one thing?” Miles says. “One thing, then I shut up for good.”

“One thing,” I say to the window blind.

“This Erin thing. We’re talking about something in the past, right? You and her.”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

I turn from the window to ask how far back in time his suspicions began, but he is already hunched over the keyboard at my desk. By tomorrow morning a digital human being that backs up my “Erin” will exist in the bureaucratic agar that forms the basis of legal existence in America. Miles’s groundwork will accomplish Brahma’s initial suspension of disbelief. But far more important than a Social Security number or address will be the woman I carry in my mind and heart. A carnal phantom called Erin still wanders unbidden through my dreams, and though I am not sure how or why, I know that through me, she can haunt the ruthless killer we have christened Brahma to his grave.

CHAPTER 28

My chief fascination in the days following Miles’s appearance was listening to the baroque mating ritual between “Maxwell” and “Lilith.” From the worldly wise but bitter woman who endured a college gang bang, Lenz quickly expanded his creation into a multidimensional character worthy of a Christmas appearance on Oprah. Sometimes “Lilith” taunted “Maxwell,” other times she passively answered whatever questions he put to her, however personal. I decided Lenz must be drawing his emotional raw material from actual case histories; much of it had the outrageous ring of truth that only reality can provide, incidents that would get any decent fiction writer drummed out of his profession. Through it all, “Maxwell” probed “Lilith’s” past with lapidary precision, a twist here, a light tap there, gradually forming a picture of the “woman” who lay behind the alias.

Miles spent most of the first day building the digital skeleton that would support my fictional “Erin.” We chose the “legal” name Cynthia Griffin and decided to place her address in Vicksburg, which lies forty miles southwest of Rain. We discussed the chance that a Mississippi address might give Brahma’s intuition a tickle, but word-of-mouth among my old friends had brought the number of Mississippi EROS clients to more than thirty. Miles thought that was more than enough to make one new addition quite natural.

Once “Cynthia’s”personal information had been hacked into the proper government computers-and an EROS account opened in her name-Miles began coding away at his Trojan Horse program, consuming massive amounts of Mountain Dew and granola bars ferried by Drewe from the Yazoo City K-Mart. He rarely sat in front of his computer to do his coding. After Drewe left for work each morning, he would commandeer an easy chair in the darkened den and, fortified by junk food, sit glassy-eyed through three or four old movies on the satellite channels. His favorites seemed to be disaster movies from the nineteen-seventies, a la Airport and The Towering Inferno, melodramatic extravaganzas featuring faded Hollywood legends. Now and then he would jump up and hurry into my office, sit down before his laptop, and punch in a few keystrokes, cocking his head at odd angles and murmuring to himself.

Drewe worked every day, but she called frequently to see how the check on the female blind-draft account holders was going. About midnight on the second night, Jan Krislov e-mailed us, saying that the fifty-two blind-draft women showing low account activity in the past months had all been verified as alive and well. So had more than three hundred of the remaining blind-draft women. This punched a gaping hole in Drewe’s theory of another missing woman, and by extension her pineal transplant theory. Or so we thought.

When we told Drewe about Jan’s message, she was standing at my office door, about to leave for work. She looked blank for about thirty seconds; then her eyes flickered with knowledge.

“I was so stupid, ” she said. “The missing woman couldn’t be an EROS client. The EROS population isn’t large enough to allow selection of tissue-matched donors. You see? The killer could do all the surgical practice he wanted on EROS women, but when it came time to match a donor to a recipient, he had to search a much larger population.”

“Why?” asked Miles.

“Probability. Donor networks require pools of thousands- tensof thousands-of