Mortal Fear (43 page)

 Around five-thirty it strikes me that Drewe might like it if I whipped up some dinner before she gets home. She might like it a lot. I have a vision of fresh tomatoes from our garden, then remember the heat-shriveled specimens I saw this morning. Without intravenous therapy they’ll never be fit for a dinner table. As usual, it’s too late to thaw anything out. I am nearly reconciled to tuna on toast when Miles walks into the kitchen with his laptop and says, “Why don’t you fire up the search engine?”

 I start to remind him that Brahma said he wouldn’t be back on-line until late tonight, but arguing with Miles is useless. I expel the air from my lungs with a disgusted plosive, walk back into the office, and sit down at the EROS computer.

 The search program begins its monotonous task with an efficient clicking of the hard drive. Searching for Brahma’s prose patterns takes much longer than a search for an account name. After a few distracted minutes of playing guitar on my bed, I look over at the computer. The monitor shows the screen format of a private room. The prompt at the top of the page reads:
MAXWELL>
. The answering prompt reads:
LILITH>
.

 First I yell for Miles. Then I rehang my guitar on the wall and sit down before the EROS computer.

 “He lied to me,” I say when Miles comes in. “He’s back on. He’s talking to Lenz again.”

 “I thought he might. Same old shit from Lenz? Freud dispensed at the level of Sally Jessy Raphael?”

 “Looks like it. Want me to turn up the sound?”

 “Nah.” He sits on the bed and opens his laptop.

 As I skim the usual purple prose, a wave of heat suffuses my face. My eyes have locked onto one passage like a laser sight.

 MAXWELL> I understand too well. The majority of men are asshoels.

 I reread the text above this line, but everything looks normal. Then this appears:

 MAXWELL> We’ve discussed HIV in abstract terms, but we’ve neveer asked each other the one iportant question.

 I try to yell “Miles!” but my voice comes out a whisper.

 “You say something?” he asks.

 “Typos! Look at this!”

 In seconds he’s reading the screen over my shoulder.

 “He keeps making them,” I murmur.

 “He’s not using his voice recognition unit.” Miles grips my shoulder. “He’s on the move!”

 My chest feels hollow. “Lenz knows that, right?”

 “Got to. The FBI agents at EROS probably saw the typos before you did. Scroll back up. I’ll bet he’s been making errors during the whole exchange.”

 I scroll through the previous lines and verify that Miles is correct. “Okay,” I say, trying to calm down. “Okay, they must have seen that. Too many to miss.”

 “Damn,”
Miles says softly. “Lenz pulled it off. I’ll bet an FBI SWAT team is greasing its guns right now.”

 “Brahma goes mobile two or three days before a kill,” I remind him. “Based on his error rate and the old murder dates, anyway.”

 “Reconnaissance,” says Miles. “He’s out there right now using a laptop and a cellular. I wonder how close he is to that safe house.”

 “I’m calling Lenz,” I decide aloud.

 “Why? The FBI’s gearing up to slam this guy down right now.” Miles runs one hand over his still ridiculous crewcut. “You know, now’s the time to trace him.”

 “Why?”

 “Because he’s on a cellular, and we know where he’s headed.”

 “I’m calling the safe house, Miles.”

 “Go ahead, but they’re just going to blow you off.”

 “Fine.” Scrounging in my wallet for the number Lenz gave me, I find it and drop it by the phone. My call is answered on the second ring.

 “Yes?” says a female voice.

 “This is Harper Cole. I need to talk to Dr. Lenz.”

 “You shouldn’t have called here.”

 “I need to make sure he knows something important.”

 “He knows. Harper, this is Margie Ressler.”

 “Margie.” The decoy. “Is everything okay?”

 “Yes, but we can’t tie up this line right now.”

 “I’ve got to tell Lenz about something.”

 “About the errors?”

 “You know about that?”

 “Everything’s under control. Really. Take it easy.”

 Relief washes over me. “Okay. I just wanted to make sure you guys weren’t going to be surprised.”

 “We’re the FBI, Harper. We’re not going to be surprised.” Her voice goes quiet. “You’d better keep
your
eyes open, though. Did you or Miles Turner send e-mail to Mr. Baxter warning him to check tissue donor networks?”

 “Margie—” I stop, unwilling to implicate myself on a phone that might be tapped.

 As if reading my mind, she says, “All I’m going to tell you is that the shit hit the fan after they started checking. You’d better watch your butt.”

 “Thanks. And you’d better take your own advice.”

 “He won’t come tonight. Not if the record’s any indication.”

 Suddenly I hear a babble of male voices.

 “Sir!” Margie answers like a boot camp recruit.

 The phone goes dead in my hand.

 “Well?” asks Miles, back on the bed now.

 “They know.”

 He gives me his dour I-told-you-so look.

 “She also said they got your note about transplant networks.”

 Now he’s paying attention.

 “She said the shit hit the fan when they started checking.”

 Miles ponders this for a few seconds. “Then Drewe must be right. There must be another missing woman.”

 “Jesus. What are we going to do?”

 He takes a deep breath, looks at the floor for a few seconds, then says, “I’m going to code until seven, which is when TBS is showing
I Walk the Line,
with Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld.”

 “You’re kidding.”

 “Nope. I
love
Tuesday Weld. Did you see
Who’ll Stop the Rain
? From Robert Stone’s book? Even Nolte was great in that.”

 “Miles—”

 “Tuesday Weld should have played Holly Golightly in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
not Audrey Hepburn. Even Capote said that. Of course, he said a
young
Tuesday Weld. With her we wouldn’t have gotten that bullshit Hollywood ending. Holly would have—”

 “Miles!”

 He looks up irritably. “What?”

 “Don’t you care what happens at the safe house?”

 “Of course. But it’s not in my power to affect the outcome.”

 “Isn’t there some way to at least monitor the action? Hack into a Bureau computer or something?”

 “Harper, a stakeout is just some guys on the radio. They’re probably not even talking a whole lot.”

 “So?”

 “There’s no computer angle to it. Baxter will want to be there for the collar, so he’s probably at the safe house already, or else on his way. Nothing will have to be relayed to him,
ergo
we can’t intercept anything digital.”

 “What about radio, then?”

 Miles laughs. “We can’t monitor police radio from a thousand miles away.”

 “Why not?”

 “Because it’s
analog,
man. Radio waves that die after a few miles.”

 Smugness is one of my pet peeves. At times like this I want to smack Miles on the side of the head. And somewhere between staring at his arrogant expression and clenching my right fist, a solution arcs through my brain like a Roman candle. As Miles stares, I sit down at my Gateway 2000 and switch on my modem.

 “What are you doing?” he asks.

 “Logging onto CompuServe.”

 “Why?”

 “To eavesdrop on the stakeout.”

 “How?”

 I click the mouse rapidly. “By talking somebody local into doing it for us.”

 “Who’s going to do that?”

 “Ever hear of ham radio?”

 It takes less than five seconds for Miles to see where I’m going. “But ham radio is a totally different frequency spectrum than law enforcement stuff,” he says.

 I don’t even respond. I know he’s kicking himself for not thinking of this first.

 “Ham operators hang out on CompuServe?” he asks, getting up and looking over my shoulder.

 “Either here or AOL. One of my neighbors is a ham nut. He’s mentioned a forum before, and I think it’s on CompuServe. I’m doing a
Find
for the word ‘radio.’ ”

 Suddenly a neat column of words appears on my screen:

 Broadcast Professionals

 CB Handle

 CE Audio Forum

 HamNet Forum

 IQuest($)

 National Public Radio

 “Ha! You see that?”

 “HamNet,” Miles says. “That’s it?”

 “Let’s see.”

 Seconds later we’re staring at the multicolored logo of a computer forum dedicated exclusively to the arcane joys of ham radio. I click the mouse, and topic headings like “Amateur Satellites,” “Swap Shop,” “Utility DX’ing,” and “Hardware/Homebrew” appear.

 “Miles, I guarantee you some of these guys are into a lot more than ham radio. That
Tom Swift
crap with cigar boxes full of vacuum tubes is history. These guys are high tech now.”

 “A couple of old hackers at MIT were into ham,” he says, and I sense how badly he wants to move me out of the chair and take over this job.

 “The only question,” I muse, “is will somebody with the right equipment be close enough to McLean, Virginia, to do it?”

 “Definitely,” Miles says excitedly. “McLean’s the D.C. metro area, not far from Langley. Bound to be somebody there. I’ll bet some of these guys have wet dreams about intercepting CIA and FBI communications.”

 “I don’t know,” I say, reading the screen more closely. “Look at some of these topics. “FCC Compliance” and “Proper Certification.” Maybe they’re not into that kind of stuff.”

 “Why don’t you let me talk to them?” Miles suggests, standing so close that I feel uncomfortable.

 “It’s all yours,” I tell him, rising from the chair.

 He sits and immediately begins composing a forum message. “We just have to approach it right. I’m not a federal fugitive, I’m . . . a reporter. For the
Times Picayune
. So are you.” He pauses, thinking. “We just got a tip about a rogue FBI operation in D.C. It might even involve the ATF. How does that sound?”

 “Like another bad movie.”

 He laughs. “This is great, man. Within two hours we’ll have real-time coverage of Lenz’s little trap, right through your telephone. Just like two tin cans on a thousand-mile string.”

 “What if my phone’s really tapped?”

 “Oh, yeah,” he says, his brow furrowing. “Well . . . I’ll just have to figure something out.”

 The bang of the front door catapults Miles out of his seat and to the nearest window. “Go check!” he commands.

 “Harper, it’s me.”

 “Drewe,” I reassure him. “It’s just Drewe.”

 He steps away from the window and leans against the wall, one hand over his heart. “This is major stress, man. What did I do to deserve this?”

 “I won’t answer that.” I start toward the door. “I’d better fix us some supper.”

 The office door opens before I reach it.

 Drewe stands in the hall holding a large brown paper bag. She is smiling, and her radiance gives me an unexpected lift. Yet it is plain that she does not intend to cross the threshold. Instead, she reaches into the bag and pulls out a paper box printed with red curlicues and an alarmingly orange fluid dribbling down its side.

 “Chinese,” she says. “I figured we were due for a change.”

 “You are a
goddess,
” Miles says with genuine reverence. “I shall kiss your feet and worship forever at the altar of your infinite kindness.”

 Drewe laughs. “Just chew with your mouth closed, and I’ll be satisfied.”

 As she walks away, Miles sits back down at the Gateway.

 “You coming?” I ask.

 He waves one hand. “Just let me post this message. Be right there.”

 As I pass through the door, I hear him say, “This is going to be better than sex.” This from a man who has seen, heard, and perhaps participated in just about every carnal activity the human mind can imagine. I turn and look back. It is the new sight for this century, I think, a man in digital bliss. And yet it is as old as the first hominid who stared mesmerized into a campfire.

 We are fascinated by that which can destroy us.

 CHAPTER 30

 Miles beat his own prediction by over an hour. By the time we finished supper, three ham radio operators in the Washington, D.C. area expressed interest in helping us monitor the communications of the FBI (in the interest of the public’s hallowed right to know, of course). One of these—an ex-marine named Sid Moroney—admitted that he often monitored CIA training exercises on the streets of Washington and its suburbs, and boasted that he maintained a notebook containing the frequencies most commonly used by the government’s more aggressive acronymic agencies. This resource put him over the top, and Miles told him we would e-mail our requirements to him ASAP.

 We spent fifteen minutes arguing about the best way for Moroney to relay what he overheard to us. We wanted it in real time, but we also knew my phones might be tapped. We decided I would stay linked to Sid Moroney via CompuServe on the Gateway, while Miles monitored the EROS computer for any “Lilith”-“Maxwell” activity. Sid could update me on the stakeout by tapping messages into a private room on a CompuServe chat channel. If anything radical started to happen, he was to call my office number and press the mouthpiece of his telephone to his radio receiver, so that we could hear the traffic ourselves. This was a risk, but Miles figured anything serious enough to warrant a call would probably be the climax of the manhunt—which would exonerate us both.

 So far the wait has been anything but climactic. Moroney has intercepted communications indicating a stakeout in progress in the vicinity of the McLean safe house. So far I’ve received six reports from him via CompuServe, transcribing such bloodcurdling radio traffic as:
“Alpha? Red here. Kensington quiet.” “Ten four, Red. Yellow? You there?” “Affirmative, Alpha. Wimbledon clear. Tomorrow must be garbage pickup, everybody’s coming out in their robes to put out the cans.” “Button it, Yellow. Out.”
And so on for the past three and a half hours. The use of “Alpha” reminds me of Daniel Baxter in the trailer at Quantico, but since I can’t hear the voice, there’s no way to tell.