The 3.5-inch disk that contains it lies just to the right of my keyboard. Inside that black plastic, painstakingly woven into a graphic file that can be decompressed into the stunning photograph of Erin holding the chalice, are a few lines of code that Miles designed to stop Brahma as surely as a stake through the heart. I don’t know exactly
The risk of sending Brahma that photo of Erin-though theoretically almost nil-inflates a large and corrosive bubble beneath my diaphragm. But my choices are few. And the stakes have been life and death for a long time now.
ERIN› Are you there, Max? Jesus, I didn’t realize the time. This is my husband’s afternoon off. He could get home any minute. I had a gift for you, something I thought you’d like. But I guess it will have to wait.
MAXWELL› What is this gift you speak of?
ERIN› A photograph of myself. For you. I told you I’d been looking for someone here. And I wanted to be ready if I found him. And you seem to think I have. What I told you is true. The truly transcendent aspect of my existence is my beauty. I know that. A famous writer once asked me a question he said I wouldn’t accept at face value, but one that was born from honest curiosity. The question was, What does it feel like to inhabit such a beautiful body? And the thing I tried to make him understand is that I don’t _inhabit_ my body. I AM my body. And I want to give that as a gift to you. As a beginning. I may not be as fair-skinned as your mother, but I know I’m fairer than your Indian girl. _Much_ fairer. Maybe I’m too vain, but right now it seems the only thing I can give you to match what you’ve given me.
MAXWELL› How can you give this photograph to me?
ERIN› I have it on a disk. In a special kind of file. A JPEG file.
MAXWELL› You know how to encode and transmit a JPEG file?
ERIN› I do now. A friend showed me how. She scanned my photo with a hand scanner. The quality of the image isn’t that great, but the photo itself I like. If you want to see it, we’ve got to do it right now, though, or else wait until at least tomorrow.
MAXWELL› I wish very much to see it. Let me give you my e-mail address.
ERIN› Can’t I just send it to Maxwell?
MAXWELL› No. Send it to [email protected] you have that?
ERIN› I’m printing my screen. Where’s that? It’s not an EROS address.
MAXWELL› It’s in Finland. I’ll get it, though.
ERIN› Well if you don’t, assume that my husband got home. Don’t try to contact me. No e-mail or anything. I’ll try again the next chance I get.
MAXWELL› Perhaps tonight?
ERIN› I doubt it. What you told me is a lot to absorb. You must know that.
MAXWELL› I have faith in you.
ERIN› Remember one thing, Max. I’m worthy of my Dark Prince. After you’ve seen my photograph, you’ll know that. The next question is, are you worthy of me?
MAXWELL› You still have no idea whom you are talking to. You’re like the desert traveler who stooped to touch a glimmer of gold in the sand. When he tried to pick it up, he found it would not move. Only when tons of earth-moving equipment had been hauled in did he realize that he had touched the finger of an enormous golden Buddha buried in the sand. That is what you have done today. You have touched the tip of my finger.
ERIN› Good-bye, Max. Sweet dreams.
Shaking with fatigue and excitement, I log out of the chat room and slide Miles’s Trojan Horse disk into the floppy drive. The instructions he left me are simple. First I open the EROS UUEncoder program and convert the.jpg file into a.uue file, which comes out to twenty-one pages of indecipherable text. Then I watch the file-status indicator changing slowly as the.uue file is transmitted to Finland as e-mail: 18 %… 39 %… 58 %… 79 %… 98 %… then:
I press N and stare at the glowing monitor until the bust of Nefertiti swirls into sight. My hands are still shaking. Standing slowly, I look into the tray of the LaserJet III. A neat stack of paper chronicles every unbelievable word Brahma spoke during the past hour. But does it matter? Very soon he will download Miles’s Trojan Horse. As images from his twisted tale tumble through my brain, a voice speaks from a still place inside me. It is Arthur Lenz’s voice, echoing the French phrase he uttered prematurely at the safe house in Virginia:
The beginning of the end.
Maybe now the words are true.
CHAPTER 34
I am highlighting passages from the Brahma printouts when the high-pitched ring that announces a satellite video linkup with EROS headquarters in New York chimes through the office. On the screen of the EROS computer, Nefertiti’s head evaporates, and the face of Jan Krislov materializes in its place. A small window opens near Jan’s left ear, giving a running status report of the video link.
“Hello, Harper,” Jan says in her cool voice. Her moving lips have the jerky quality of low-speed digital video, but the audio is clear. I pull on the headset mike.
“Hello, Jan.”
“Someone wants to speak with you,” she says. “Just a moment.” She looks away from the camera. “All right, go.”
Jan’s face remains on my screen, but after a harsh click, a static-ridden voice says, “Harper?”
“I’m here, Miles.”
“Did you find the Trojan Horse?”
“I found it.”
“Did those goddamn deputies confiscate your computers?”
“No.”
“Thank God. Or Daniel Baxter, rather. The locals knew he’d been using EROS to try to trap Brahma, and they didn’t want to risk crashing the system by screwing with your end of it.”
“What the hell were you doing using a real picture of Erin to mask your Trojan Horse?”
“It was the right thing, Harper. You know it. She’s not in any danger. Absolutely nothing we’ve done leads to the real Erin. She’s not even on the map.” He pauses. “You used it, didn’t you?”
I say nothing.
“Did the cops find the dummy disk I left in the coat?”
“Yes.”
He laughs sharply through the static. “Come on. You got him to download Erin’s photo, didn’t you?”
“Like I had a fucking choice?”
“Brahma told me his whole life story going back three generations. It was like he’d been holding it in forever. And it’s some kind of story.”
“Well?”
“He’s a doctor, just like Drewe guessed. Third generation, actually. There’s way too much to tell, Miles.”
“Give me a summary.”
Looking down at my highlighted pages, I quickly sketch Brahma’s journey from incestuous birth to his marriage to Kali. I quote some of his more chilling passages, but Miles absorbs them all in silence. The only thing that elicits a shocked comment is Brahma’s hemophilia.
