Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

Not real people. Not the real world.

He realised that a thread he had been following had unintentionally led him into the San Francisco headquarters of an environmental technology company. He withdrew as quickly as he could, covering his tracks as he did so. Roman never hit companies in the United States or in Russia. It was not that he had any affection for these nations, it was just that the American FBI was notoriously sophisticated — and tenacious — when it came to tracking down hackers and fraudsters. If you accidentally hacked into a company which supplied anything to the massive US military complex, then the FBI would come after you wherever you were in the world.

And the Russians… well, with the Russians you never knew who you were really stealing from and they had the best hacker talent of any country. Between them, the Americans and the Russians had the best cybercops and cybercrooks on the planet. It was best to stay well away from them.

He pulled out of the American company. After another fifteen minutes he had enriched himself by another six thousand. Euros this time, and from a British airline’s pension fund.

Roman always moved his funds about, sometimes for months, redistributing them, consolidating them, then redistributing them again, before eventually placing small amounts into the various German bank accounts to which he had direct access. He was planning to build a new computer that would be faster than anything he had at present; probably faster and more powerful than anything any cybercop would have. He needed to transfer enough to his credit-card account to cover the purchase of two SATA-interface HyperDrive Fives. It was a much larger sum than he usually liked to transfer at any one time, but he needed the drives.

After he was finished he shut down his equipment, which took some time and was not something he always did. There was more risk of system problems on restart and, of course, it stopped him taking immediate action if one of the many possible law-enforcement agencies came knocking on his door. But he liked to let the hardware cool every now and then. And he always kept the electromagnet ready for use whenever needed.

He half shuffled, half waddled through to the kitchen and took a family-sized bag of snacks back through to the lounge, settling himself into the permanent depression his body had made on the sofa. He switched on the TV and watched an item where a woman wanting to go back to work had to get some old granny from Bavaria to teach the husband how to do the housework and keep their flat clean using environmentally friendly but traditional materials. Lemon juice, vinegar, that kind of stuff.

‘Why?’ snorted Roman contemptuously at the TV before muting the sound and picking up the cellphone from the coffee table.

He examined the phone. A good one. A Nokia 5800. Web-enabled, integrated satnav.

Roman didn’t know why he had stolen it. He had been sitting in the cafe having lunch when she had come in and sat at the table next to him. He tried not to stare at her, but he couldn’t help noticing how beautiful she was: dark hair, large dark eyes. Tall, slim, elegant. She was the kind of woman who would never give someone like Roman a second glance, unless it was a look of disgust. Yet she was exactly the kind of woman he desired; the only kind of woman he desired. The opposite of Elena.

But it wasn’t her beauty that he remembered most. There had been something about the woman in the cafe — about the way she moved her eyes and the way she sat — that had disturbed him. He could have sworn she had been afraid. She had kept looking at the door of the cafe as if she was expecting someone to follow her in. Above all, it had been the way she had put the phone down on the table, placed her paper napkin over it and walked out, forgetting the phone was there. That was why he had taken the phone: not because she had forgotten it and he could return it to her, but because everything about her leaving it behind was fake. She hadn’t forgotten it: she was leaving it somewhere she knew it would be stolen if found.

It was intriguing. She was intriguing. And, for a moment after she had left the cafe, Roman Kraxner, the obese, balding computer geek turned fraudster became his online persona of Rick334, private detective out of New Venice. After paying his bill he had squeezed his bulk past the table she’d been sitting at. He had pretended to drop the hand-held PDA he had been working on onto the table and, when he had picked it up, he had palmed the Nokia.

It was a subterfuge that had been totally unnecessary. No one had been looking in his direction. It was one of the consolations for the fat or ugly: it was not just that people did not notice you; they made a real effort not to notice you.

Roman’s curiosity had been stirred even more when he had got home and flicked through the contents of the phone. There were no contacts in the address lists and Roman got the idea that the phone had been purged shortly before being dumped. All previous destinations in the satnav had also been cleared. The text messages, too.

But one thing had been left untouched: the ringtone. And it was set for everything: incoming calls, text messages, alerts. ‘Message in a Bottle’ by The Police. When Roman had seen that he had known instantly that all his instincts about the woman in the cafe had been right. She had deliberately left the phone for him to find. Like a castaway tossing a bottle into the ocean, she had put something inside this phone. A message. All Roman had to do was find it.

Not that that would present a problem to Roman: the great thing about cellphones was that they were a convergent technology — a phone was a camera, an organiser, a web browser, an mp3 player. Unlike earlier models, this generation of mobile was more computer than phone and Roman had the software to retrieve the data that had been dumped.

It was then that things had become very interesting.

Anna Wolff stood by the window of Fabel’s office, looking out across the dark shapes of the trees in Winterhude Stadtpark. Outside, the light was fading but the sky, now clear of clouds, was a sheet of dark blue silk.

‘That was a long coffee break…’ She turned when Fabel came into the office.

‘What’s this? You our new time-and-motion monitor?’ He sat down behind his desk. ‘I’ve just had a very interesting chat with Fabian Menke of the BfV. About the Pharos Project.’

‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. That and what Technical Section have retrieved from the computers we seized this afternoon.’ Anna tapped a document folder on Fabel’s desk. ‘Interim stuff. As we speak, geeks are burrowing deeper and deeper into silicon.’ She imitated a small crawling animal, wrinkling her nose.

‘Anything hopeful?’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ she sighed. ‘It looks like these guys are clean. Weird, but clean. Of course, we did come up one computer short.’

‘I couldn’t take it away from him, Anna. If you had been there…’ Fabel frowned. ‘Actually, no… if you’d been there you would have taken it. And probably confiscated his wheelchair, too.’

‘We really do need to check it out,’ said Anna. ‘Even if he is physically unlikely to be a suspect, there may be something in his interactions with the victims that could give us something.’

‘I’m well aware of that, Anna. I’ve arranged to send one of Kroeger’s people around to Reisch’s home to check the computer.’ Fabel picked up the folder and flicked through the report inside. ‘I guess we just have to keep plugging away. Hit the next bunch of IP addresses.’

‘We could be at that for ever,’ said Anna.

‘It’s all we’ve got,’ said Fabel. He nodded to the chair opposite. ‘Sit down, Anna.’