Craig Russell - A fear of dark water

Fabel had just reached for his door handle when the Land Rover smashed into the back of his car again. This time he was thrown forward without the restraint of his seat belt and his chest slammed painfully against the steering wheel, forcing a pulse of air from his lungs. Winded, he gasped for breath, his body screaming for oxygen. Between desperate gasps, he fumbled to free his service automatic from its holster. Another impact. The SIG-Sauer automatic jumped from his tremulous fingers and fell into the footwell. He turned again in his seat. The Land Rover was reversing away fast. Fabel felt faint and sick from lack of oxygen and his chest hurt with every breath, but he desperately sought to make sense of his situation. He reached for his phone. In the rear-view mirror he saw the car’s huge dark bulk loom at him as it slammed once more into the rear of his BMW. But this impact was different. This time the engine of the Land Rover screamed as the driver floored the accelerator.

Fabel realised what was happening. The bastard was trying to push him off the wharf and into the river.

He instinctively pushed the footbrake to the floor. A useless exercise, he realised immediately, so he slammed the BMW into reverse and pushed back against the four-by-four. It was an unequal struggle and his tyres squealed and smoked as they spun impotently on the smooth cobbles.

He had to get out. He had to get out before the car went over the edge. But he was on the wrong side of the car, the water side. He stared wildly at the grille of the Land Rover, which completely filled his rear-view mirror. Filled Fabel’s universe. Fabel had just decided to risk making the jump when he felt suddenly weightless, and realised that his car had gone over the edge.

There was another impact, this time as the car hit the surface of the water and Fabel was thrown around in the metal confines of his car. Everything went dark and for a moment he thought he had passed out, until he realised, as the passenger cabin of his car filled with cold, oily, dark water, that he was sinking to the bottom of the River Elbe.

He had found out her name remarkably easily. Getting around the encryption had not been difficult. It had taken Roman less than half a day to decode and transfer the information.

Meliha Yazar.

The woman he had seen in the cafe had been Meliha Yazar. Roman felt a profound sadness at the idea that such a beautiful woman would now be dead. So would he be, soon.

He had stopped hating Meliha for leaving the phone for him to find. With that act — which he now felt was not as random as it had first seemed, maybe she had seen him, recognised something in him — she had given him a great gift, for now Roman knew something about himself that he had not known before. He was brave. He had always thought of himself as cowardly, but now he realised that he was not afraid of dying. They would kill him, but before they did he would make sure that the information he had, that she had entrusted to him with that simple act in the cafe, would be passed on to the policeman Fabel and others. Roman realised that sending the information by email would never work. He recognised the sophistication of their expertise and the scope of their technical resources. He genuinely admired some of their work. Truly creative.

But they were dangerous. The first thing they would do when they traced Roman would be to wipe out his email traffic and blogging presence. To silence his electronic singing.

He also knew that he could not simply rely on Fabel, because the chances were he would soon be dead too. Roman and Fabel both represented the outer radiations of a spidering spread of knowledge that had to be contained. A circle that had to be closed.

But that was in the real world. And Roman existed in more than the real world. He knew the truth and the falsity of their fantasy of a digital otherworld. It existed, but it was not somewhere you could go unless you accepted the total death of the ego. A soulless shadow of reality. He knew. He had spent so much of his young life there.

He finished decrypting the files. And there it was: he had found the secret about the Pharos Project that they could never allow to be known. They had been mad to think that they could keep something like that hidden from the world. But, there again, the Big Lie was always the most enduring, the easiest to sustain.

As soon as he had finished transferring the file to the various formats he wanted, Roman went around his apartment, opening the curtains. He struggled with a couple of the half-light windows but managed to get them open and allow some air into the apartment.

Then he went out.

It was sunny. The first really sunny day of the year. The Wilhelmsburg street was full of noise after the quiet of his apartment. He thought about the Albanians who lived below him who had not really been noisy; it had been Roman who had been intolerant simply because he had been unable to remove himself that one step further from mankind and the real world. There had, Roman realised, been people just like him throughout history. The medieval monks who chose the austerity of a monastic cell and the virtual reality of religion; the ancient philosophers who hid in caves or barrels and commented on the human condition from which they had disconnected.

It took him a long time to walk into town. But he had been determined to walk. It meant that every now and then he had to lean against a wall to catch his breath, and he sat down every time the opportunity presented itself on a municipal bench or, on one occasion, even on a lidded waste bin.

He saw the way others looked at him. But today Roman did not care. Today he had a mission to fulfil, a purpose that was, for once, not all about him. He went to the DeutschePost office first and bought five padded envelopes, dropped a memory stick and a handwritten note into each. He paused for a moment before he let the envelopes slip from his grasp and into the mail chute; in that moment, he thought of Meliha, the woman in the cafe, the woman behind the truth. He hoped that somehow, somewhere, she would be aware of what he was doing for her.

After the post office, Roman went to an ATM and withdrew five hundred euros, folded the notes neatly and placed them in a sixth envelope. On the way home he visited two more ATMs, using a different card each time; each time removing five hundred euros. By the time he reached the main door of his apartment building, Roman was wheezing and sweating profusely. He leaned against the wall and looked up at the sky. High above him, the distant glint of a passenger jet left a trail of vapour, like a needle running white thread through blue silk. There is never just one reality, he thought as he watched the jet, wondering what the passengers saw of Wilhelmsburg from that altitude. There are as many realities as there are people on the planet: reality is what lives in each person’s head. When they kill me, he thought, my reality will end, but I will have no sense of it ending. Just as I was not aware before my birth, I will not be aware after my death, so all time only exists as I perceive it. Time began with me and will end with me. I am immortal.

When he had recovered enough, he entered his apartment building and started the slow, painful climb up the stairs. His breathing was even more laboured by the time he reached the door of the apartment beneath his. When the Albanian opened the door and recognised Roman, his face darkened with dull anger; then he seemed to notice the state Roman was in and the anger was replaced by concern.

‘Are you all right? You no look so good…’

‘Jetmir…’ Roman spat the words out between rheumy wheezes. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it… Jetmir?’

The Albanian nodded and moved out to help Roman. Roman nearly laughed: Jetmir was a small, wiry, dark man whom Roman reckoned would be crushed to death if he fell on him.