Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

‘I’m okay,’ she said absently. ‘I’d rather stand. I’ve been sitting all day and my leg stiffens up a bit.’

For a split second, Fabel found himself lost for words. Anna picked up on it.

‘Jan,’ she said. ‘I’m fine. I wish we could stop dancing around this. It wasn’t your fault.’

He stared at the report in front of him, more to avoid making eye contact with Anna than to study the file’s contents.

‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘I was in command. Just like I was the night Paul was killed.’

‘This is a dangerous business, Jan. I know that and Paul knew that. You can’t legislate for every eventuality.’

‘I dream about him all the time,’ Fabel said in a flat, quiet voice. ‘Nearly every week or couple of weeks. Always the same dream. We’re always in my father’s study, up in my parents’ house in Norddeich, and Paul talks to me. Not about anything important or significant. He just sits there and chats to me. But I know he’s dead. He has the wound in his head and sometimes he explains that it’s difficult for him to have an opinion or perspective on whatever it is we’re talking about, because he’s dead.’

‘I thought all the dreams had stopped,’ said Anna.

‘That’s what I tell Susanne. The official line. It’s tough living with a psychologist. I don’t know if she believes me, but that’s what I tell her. The point is, I know that if I had done things differently Paul would be alive, Maria Klee wouldn’t be in a mental hospital and you wouldn’t have got shot.’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry — can we drop it?’

‘You’re the boss.’ Anna smiled at him. ‘About the Pharos Project, if I show you mine will you show me yours?’

‘Go ahead…’ Fabel leaned back in his chair.

‘I don’t know why you wanted me to look into this for you, but I’ve been hearing some very dodgy things about Pharos. And — how you knew I won’t ask — but there is a connection with the murders.’

Fabel looked stunned.

‘You did ask me to look at this because there’s some kind of connection?’ asked Anna.

‘No… no, not at all — like I told you, it’s something unrelated.’

‘Then it’s quite some coincidence,’ said Anna. ‘It took a bit of unravelling, but Dominik Korn, who heads the Pharos Project, also heads the consortium that owns and operates Virtual Dimension, the simulated-reality game that all the victims were logged into. So why were you interested in Pharos?’

‘A long shot… I thought there might be a link to the other body we found. The wash-up.’ Fabel sighed. ‘There’s a woman who seems to have gone missing: Meliha Yazar. I think there may be a link to the Pharos Project. She might have been investigating them.’

‘What have you got yourself into, Jan?’ Anna left the window, came over to Fabel’s desk and leaned on it, the concern in her expression genuine.

‘Something I maybe shouldn’t have,’ he said, and meant it. ‘I got talked into it by Berthold Muller-Voigt. This is strictly between us, Anna…’

She nodded.

‘Muller-Voigt is involved with this woman…’ began Fabel.

‘And half the female population of Hamburg, from what I’ve heard,’ said Anna.

‘It’s not like that. Muller-Voigt is nuts about this woman. And he is really concerned about her disappearance.’ Fabel sketched out some of what had passed between him and the Environment Senator.

‘You know,’ said Anna when he was finished, ‘I think I’d better sit down after all. You have no idea what I found out about Pharos. If Muller-Voigt’s latest squeeze really was investigating them, then she could well have got out of her depth. The Pharos Project is the brainchild of Dominik Korn. Have you heard of him?’

‘Not until Muller-Voigt mentioned him to me,’ said Fabel.

‘That’s hardly surprising. Dominik Korn is one of the world’s richest men — worth billions, as is his deputy, Peter Wiegand — but he’s also one of the world’s most reclusive men. No one outside Wiegand and his circle of closest advisers has had contact with him for years. Occasionally he will take part in video conferences with other key people in his business empire. He lives on a massive yacht. And I mean massive. It would make the average Russian oligarch feel inadequate.’

‘Why is he so reclusive?’

‘Apparently he had a diving accident that caused him to have some kind of cataclysmic stroke brought on by severe decompression sickness and other complications. He shouldn’t be alive; it was a miracle that he survived it, but it’s left him in the same kind of condition as the guy you interviewed earlier today. Since then he’s needed round-the-clock care.’

‘And he’s also head of this cult?’

‘Guru number one, apparently. He may sound like a nut-job, but he’s said to be as rich in brains as he is in cash. His IQ is said to be off the scale. He studied…’ Anna referred to her notebook ‘… oceanography, hydrology and environmental science in the United States — he has dual German and US citizenship, by the way — then did a doctoral thesis in hydrology, and then went on to become a hydrometeorologist.’ She looked at her notes again. ‘ Studying the interaction between large bodies of water and the climate. Korn became the world’s leading expert on ecohydrology. That’s what he was doing when he had his accident. He had designed this unique submersible for research work and was taking it on its maiden dive when it all went tits-up.’

‘His accident?’

‘And his epiphany, apparently.’

‘Yes…’ said Fabel. ‘Muller-Voigt made mention of some kind of revelation at the bottom of the sea.’

‘Right up until the accident, the Pharos Project had been an oceanographic research study. Korn had poured millions of his own money into it. It was examining the environmental impact of various human activities at the deepest ocean levels. Then, after his accident and the damage it did to him, Korn changed the nature of the Pharos Project. To start with it became a lobbying body, campaigning against oil exploration in deeper waters. It gained a lot of credibility after the BP thing in the Gulf of Mexico. Then Korn approved members of Pharos getting involved in protests and direct action. After that, about nine months after his accident, Korn started to talk about his epiphany and what it meant.’

‘Which was?’

‘All his adult life, Dominik Korn had positioned himself as a disciple of deep ecology — apparently that means he believed that human beings shouldn’t see themselves as distinct from the ecosystem and that they should work to shape the environment sympathetically while preserving biodiversity, all that sort of stuff. But after his accident he totally rejected the concept of deep ecology and started spouting his theories of disengagement. He claimed his experience five thousand metres down had revealed some kind of universal truth to him.’

‘Don’t they all,’ said Fabel. ‘Going by the number of cults there are, there must be a hell of a lot of universal truths.’

‘Well, Korn’s particular revelation was that he had been damaged because he had been a human in an environment humans had no place being. The philosophy of the Pharos Project is that mankind should remove itself from the environment.’ Anna shrugged. ‘This disengagement he talks about.’

‘Where did you get all this stuff?’

‘The federal boys,’ said Anna. ‘I’ve got a contact there. An ex-boyfriend, actually. He was pretty cagey. He said this was a big thing for the BfV. The French security services and the American FBI are all over the Pharos Project too, apparently. He doesn’t know exactly what it is about it that’s flipped their switches, but the Pharos Project is on all kinds of hot lists.’