Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

And the greatest virus of them all — the Trojan of all Trojans — was the Klabautermann Virus. His masterpiece of destructive programming.

Because obese, reclusive, Roman Kraxner — twenty-eight, one hundred and eighty kilos, with no university degree but an IQ of 162 and an Abitur result of 1.0, living in a grubby three-room apartment in Wilhelmsburg — was one of the most successful internet hackers and fraudsters in the world.

And it was time for him to go to work.

Muller-Voigt came back into the lounge from the kitchen, carrying a tray with a coffee pot and two cups on it. Fabel noticed that the pot and cups were made from a very fine white china and were of an elegant, restrained modern design. He had seen exactly the same set in the Alsterhaus store down on Jungfernstieg and had wanted to buy it, but had decided he could not justify the expense. His East Frisian providence had triumphed over his Hamburg savoir faire.

While Muller-Voigt had been in the kitchen, Fabel had picked up the small piece of sculpture that had sat in the centre of the coffee table. It was a modernist piece. Some kind of stylised dragon. It had a beauty to it, but there was something about it that also disturbed Fabel. It was an inanimate lump of bronze but looked as if it was writhing as he watched. He put it back on the table when Muller-Voigt came back in.

‘Like it?’ asked Muller-Voigt as he set the coffee tray down. ‘I had it specially commissioned. It’s a representation of Rahab, the ancient Hebrew sea daemon. The creator of storms and the father of chaos.’

‘Strange choice,’ said Fabel, his eyes still on the bronze, still half-expecting to see it twist and writhe.

‘It represents my enemy, if you like,’ the politician said. ‘A monster we are creating out of Nature.’ Muller-Voigt paused to hand Fabel his coffee. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, I checked with the organisers of the conference I met Meliha at. I asked them to go through their records of delegates and attendees. It wasn’t open to the general public and everyone who attended did so by invitation and registration. They had no record of Meliha whatsoever. I saw her delegate badge, Fabel. We all had to have our photographs taken for those and we had to supply all kinds of information for security. As a foreign national, she would have had to show her passport as proof of identity. By the way, that was one of the reasons why, when you asked if she could have been an illegal, I said no. In today’s security climate they would not have let her into the Congress Center otherwise. In fact, I would go so far as to say that there is absolutely no way Meliha could have been there if she hadn’t been registered for the event and her details checked.’

‘Administrative errors happen. Maybe her details have been accidentally wiped,’ said Fabel.

‘Mmm… just like her email to me has disappeared from my computer.’

‘That was because of a computer virus that we all know about.’

‘It’s a hell of a coincidence, though, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ said Fabel. And if there was one thing Fabel didn’t believe in, it was coincidences.

‘And who’s to say that the Klabautermann Virus isn’t targeted? That it is a tool for deleting carefully selected information and hiding it in plain sight in a mass deletion?’

Fabel laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Herr Senator, but I think we’re wandering into the area of conspiracy theories.’

‘You think?’ Muller-Voigt poured more coffee. Fabel accepted it but knew he would regret it later. He had a low tolerance for caffeine and he knew that a second cup would keep him awake that night. Susanne habitually teased him about it, saying it was because all he had ever drunk while growing up in East Frisia was tea. But somehow Fabel didn’t think the coffee would be the only thing to keep him from sleep.

It was now dark outside and Fabel noticed that the lighting in the lounge increased automatically to compensate.

‘Look, Herr Muller-Voigt,’ said Fabel. ‘I have to ask you this. Did you give any money or gifts or anything of any value to Meliha? Maybe even information that may have some value or be of use-’

‘I see,’ Muller-Voigt cut across him. ‘You think that I’ve been honeytrapped. No fool like an old fool, is that it?’

Fabel started to protest but the politician held up his hand.

‘I don’t blame you. I have to admit that the thought had gone through my head, but the answer is no. I can honestly say that nothing of any material, commercial or political advantage ever passed between us. We became lovers. It was as simple and as complicated as that. And now she’s gone and I’m struggling to convince you that she ever existed. I’m beginning to struggle to convince myself of that.’

‘People either exist or they don’t, Herr Senator. And if they do exist then they leave material traces.’

‘That’s what I believed, too. But when I’d run out of all other ideas I used a contact I have in the education department. I got her to run a check with her contact in the University of Istanbul and gave her the rough span of years during which I reckoned Meliha would have been a student.’

‘And she drew a blank as well.’ Fabel made it a statement rather than a question.

‘That’s why I said to you that Meliha wasn’t missing, but that she has disappeared. Not just physically but, as far as I can see, from any form of public record. It’s almost as if someone has hit a button and deleted Meliha from existence.’

A silence fell over the two men. Fabel studied his coffee cup and considered what Muller-Voigt had told him. Fabel had heard stories like this before. People deranged with anxiety over a missing person elaborating their disappearance into some huge conspiracy, just to make sense of it. But Fabel knew this was not one of those cases. What Muller-Voigt was telling him made absolutely no sense at all, and Fabel believed every word of it.

‘If what you say is true… No, let me put that better: if what you suspect is true, then it would take massive resources and organisation. Are you saying the government, or a government is behind this? You said that you thought Meliha was into something that might have placed her in danger. What, exactly?’

Muller-Voigt regarded Fabel for a moment, as if assessing him.

‘Do you remember what I said about how we used to be more connected to Nature?’ he said. ‘That we could interpret our environment?’

Fabel nodded.

‘I need you to keep that in mind for a while. Have you heard of the Pharos Project?’

Fabel remembered the poster he had passed when running Susanne to the airport: the overdone symbolism of the lighthouse in the storm.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Heard of it but I don’t know anything much about it.’

‘The Pharos Project is purportedly an environmental organisation. It has a massive corporate conglomerate, headed by its founder, behind it. The European headquarters of the Pharos Project is, believe it or not, just a few kilometres from here. There’s an old disused lighthouse out on the coast, just to the north of Horne: they’ve renovated the original lighthouse and added this massive building beside it. They call the building itself the Europa Pharos. You should see it — it is actually a beautiful piece of architecture and, of course, environmentally self-sustaining. It projects out on stilts over the water. There’s another one, apparently, on the coast of Maine, called the Americas Pharos. Anyway, the Pharos Project uses its status as an environmental research and pressure group to avoid being classed as a religious or philosophical movement, or an out-and-out political organisation.’

‘You’re saying they’re covering up being a cult?’