A Fear of Dark Water (13 page)

Of course it was me, thought Roman.
I
called them. And I’ll be sending an email to the landlord, you can be sure of that.

‘You should go up there,’ the Albanian shouted for Roman to hear. ‘I tell you. I tell you that what you should be doing. That what you should do … You should finding out what he got on all those computers. Little boys, little girls, I bet.’

Roman felt something between fear and fury surge up from someone deep inside. How dare he? How dare
those people
say these things about him?

The other voice: slightly louder now, but still calm and even more authoritative. A hint of warning in the tone. Leaning closer into the door, Roman still couldn’t make out what the policeman was saying. A few words. An injunction against bothering Roman. A warning to keep the music down. A mention of Hamburg city ordinances. All voices lower now. Calmer.

The deeper voice laughed at something that the Albanian said. Laughing at what? Laughing at whom? Were they laughing at
him
? Why was the policeman laughing? He was supposed to be there to shut them up. Stop that stupid music. That was why Roman had called him here.

Roman couldn’t hear the policeman’s voice any more. He heard the outer door at the bottom of the apartment block’s stairwell slam shut. Something muttered, loudly, in Albanian and then the slamming of a second door: the downstairs apartment.

He stood at the door for a moment, straining to hear footsteps on the stairs; the Albanian coming up to confront him. Nothing. Roman turned and leaned his back against the door. He felt something high in his chest, almost in his throat. A fluttering. He knew he would feel it again, every time he had to pass the Albanian’s door. And, although Roman did everything he could to avoid leaving his flat, when he did go out it took him a breathless age to pass the Albanian’s apartment.

God, how he hated living here. He was better than this. Better than the people around him. Better than this shitty little flat. Better than living in Wilhelmsburg.

Most of all, he hated living above the Albanians. Their country of origin was immaterial to Roman: he hated living above anyone, because what he loathed most of all about this flat was the climb up the stairwell. Since he had lost his job in the computer store, it was an effort that Roman had to make less and less. His flat was only two floors up, but the climb was enough to completely rob him of his breath and leave him white-faced and sweating, his lungs screaming for oxygen. There were times, frequent times, when his meal would be cold by the time he had brought it up the stairs: Roman never cooked. Occasionally he would reheat food in the microwave but he had never so much as made a cup of coffee in the apartment’s tiny kitchen. Everything he ate or drank came from a can or a box or a styrene container.

The flat itself comprised three rooms. Four, if you counted the bathroom. The apartment building was reasonably new and was well maintained by the landlord, and when Roman had moved in the decor had been fresh and clean. But now the inside of Roman’s flat was untidy and grubby. He found doing housework tiring; not tedious – literally exhausting, sapping every ounce of energy from him. Ten minutes of moving trash from one corner of a room to another drained him; made him sweat until he dripped and was wheezing for breath. And ten minutes would make no difference to the piles of magazines and books, the detritus of convenience meals, the empty soft-drink cans.

Not that Roman cared that much about the look of his apartment. No one ever came here. No friends, no women, nobody. And it didn’t carry any great significance for him personally; he did not attach the concept of
home
to this place. If fact, Roman Kraxner didn’t really have much of a concept of
home
. Or at least, not in the physical world. He did have a sense of belonging, but it was not anchored in any tangible physical reality; for Roman, there was another universe of opportunity, of freedom from the constraints of his body, that was his true medium.
That
was where he truly belonged. Where he truly existed.

After he was convinced the Albanian had in fact gone back into his apartment and was not coming up the stairs to challenge him, Roman shuffled across the messy living room, past the bank of monitors, speakers, hard disks and keyboards arrayed on the table against the far wall, and made his way to the toilet. His gut was aching as it always did when he was stressed – as it did most of the time – and he felt the urge to void his bowels become more than vague. Plugging his iPod earphones into his ears, he dropped his tracksuit bottoms and lowered the one hundred and eighty kilograms of his bulk onto the toilet. As he listened to music and played computer games, Roman strained until his breathing became even more laboured and his face even more livid than usual. Nothing.

It was, as his doctor had explained, the inevitable result of Roman’s diet, devoid as it was of anything that looked remotely like it had grown in the ground. What Roman had not explained to his physician was that he despised anything that smacked of the natural world; he relished artificiality, the semblance of synthesis. The more processed, the more manufactured the look of the food, the more Roman liked it. He preferred his meat ground, pulped,
extruded
. Any fibre he consumed lay hidden as a paste for bulking his hamburgers and hot dogs, his meat patties and battered chicken pieces. The bread buns and subs that his meat came in had to be white and smooth with no hint of a cereal origin or texture. His preference for vivid unnatural colours in the desserts, the ice creams and the beverages he consumed allowed him to place a conceptual distance between himself and anything resembling a dairy. It was the main reason Roman favoured American fast-food outlets over local Schnellimbiss or Würstchenbude snack stands: there was a science and an art to making food look as if it had little or nothing to do with the natural world; and it seemed only natural to Roman that it had been perfected by the same nation that had put a man on the moon.

After twenty minutes the urge to defecate remained undimmed, but the spasms in Roman’s bowels had still failed to produce anything. It had been over a week since he had had a productive bowel movement. Sighing, he pulled up his tracksuit bottoms and made his way back through to the lounge-cum-diner and to the table where he had his computers set up. It was a gateway to that other universe, to those other identities. It purred at him: the soft whirring of internal cooling fans in the two 8-core MacPros, the massive HP, the five external drives that, between them, gave him seven terabytes of data storage, the blade server unit he had built himself. Thousands of euros’ worth of computer technology purred a soft invitation to another life.

This small area of shining technology was the only part of his apartment that was clean and tidy. Roman kept this part of his environment dust-free, ordered, illuminated in the otherwise darkened room. It was also where he had his most expensive pieces of furniture: the sturdy table on which he had his equipment arrayed, like the command desk of a space-programme mission-control room, and the chair that Roman had had specially made for himself. It was the most expensive thing he had ever purchased; more expensive even than any single piece of his computer hardware. The chair moulded itself into his body, or his body moulded into it; it swivelled, tilted, glided in response, it seemed to Roman, to his will. It was the ultimate computer chair, the brochure had assured him. But where the real expense had come had been in having it custom-built to support Roman’s mass. The manufacturers in Munich had sent someone all the way to Hamburg to visit Roman in his apartment. The technician had, at first, looked suspicious when he had seen the modesty and semi-squalor of Roman’s home, but the suspicion had evaporated when he had done a quick mental calculation of the value of the computer-related technology arrayed on the desk. It had almost been as if he had understood Roman; that he had met others like him.

Roman remembered that when he had first sat in the chair the comfort had been sublime. It seemed to support every square centimetre of his body, making him feel, ironically, almost weightless. Now, as he eased himself into the chair, he still experienced some of that sense of relief, of sublime comfort, but less so than before. He knew the reason: the chair had been crafted to fit him perfectly when he had ordered it. Now, three months and seven kilos later, the fit was no longer perfect.

Roman drew as deep a breath as his obesity-hypoventilation syndrome, which compelled him to sleep each night with an oxygen mask, allowed him to draw and switched on his four flat-screen monitors, which had been configured to offer a continuous display. A single window.

Roman loved this moment: immersion. He could disconnect from the mass of his body, from the mass of the world. Like a beached whale swept suddenly back out to sea and into a natural environment of grace, Roman became weightless, formless, in a world where his mind and his mind alone was all that mattered. Here he communicated with other beings without form. Here he could be anyone, anything. Here there were no noisy Albanian neighbours, no colic spasms, no disgust at what looked back at you from the mirror.

Roman would spend the next seven hours, late into the night, in the cybernetic world. He would chat, play, be someone else. He would spend most of that time in
Virtual Dimension
. He had been a member for nearly a year. In
Virtual Dimension
he was slim, attractive, successful. Officially, his job was as a private detective and he had a string of mistresses, a penthouse apartment that looked out over the lagoons of New Venice, and he drove a 1962 Ferrari 250 GT convertible. He had dozens of friends and attended e-drugs parties.

In
Virtual Dimension
he had no weight problem, no grubby Wilhelmsburg flat, no Albanian neighbours. He ached to be back there.

But first, Roman had work to do.

The truth was that although Roman hated living in Wilhelmsburg, he could have easily afforded to move out at any time. The only thing stopping him was the questions that would be asked about how he had managed to amass such a fortune. He had a powerful electromagnet, weighing five kilos, permanently plugged into the power supply, ready to be switched on with a flick of his thumb and swept across his hard drives, destroying the data inside. The evidence.

If they came.

He would play
Virtual Dimension
soon. But first, he had to attend to business. He sat before thousands of euros’ worth of technology which required constant updating, maintaining, expanding. And the way Roman paid for it all was to divert large sums of money from all around the world into accounts that he had all around the world.

But Roman was more than just a fraudster. He was an artist. No one was looking for him yet, because no one knew yet that the money was missing. Every institution, organisation and company that he had defrauded was hit immediately by a computer virus that erased data, destroyed records, wiped clean all traces of his visit. Each virus was different. Each was an individual, unique creation. A work of art.

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.

Chapter Fourteen

Müller-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 Müller-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 Müller-Voigt came back in.

‘Like it?’ asked Müller-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.’ Müller-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.’