Purity (78 page)

The “trusted adviser” Tom had mentioned on the phone: who else could it have been but Leila Helou? Tom had asked his new woman what to do about the Halliburton Papers, his new woman had nixed it, and now, eight years later, it was all too obvious why: because Tom had told her about the murder of Horst Kleinholz. What else could
dirty secrets
refer to? She'd practically accused Andreas of cold-blooded murder.

When he reread her words yet again, the Killer stepped right out into the open, in the form of a wish to crush Tom's cranium with a blunt object. If there had been a way to get past U.S. Immigration, he would have gone to Denver and murdered Tom. For having glimpsed the Killer. For rejecting the most authentic overtures of friendship Andreas had ever made. For spurning him again and again, for the shame of that. And for submitting to his wife and deferring to his girlfriend. For seducing Andreas and then betraying him to the girlfriend; for not keeping his pretty mouth shut. But above all for his American
sanctimony
: “I'm not saying there's no place for the loathsome, criminal, fame-chasing, poop-flinging, grave-defiling things you do. But I'm afraid that my clean house is not the place for them.” He'd all but said that on the telephone.

“I can't believe you did this to me,” Andreas muttered. “I can't believe you did this to me…”

He was rational enough to recognize that Tom still wasn't likely to incriminate himself by exposing Andreas's crime. What inflamed his paranoia was the thought that Tom had seen the Killer in him. The thought was like an electrode in his brain. He couldn't stop pushing the button, and it gave him, each time, an identical jolt of dread and hatred.

Pleading illness to his interns, he holed up in his bedroom and searched for dirt on Tom and Helou. Already the blogosphere and social media were a-crackle with outrage at her
CJR
interview. In the world of so-called adults, Helou was a respected journalist, but in the online world she was getting reamed as fiercely as Andreas was being defended. Somehow, instead of reassuring him, this made him hate the Aberant-Helou nexus all the more. They'd deliberately provoked the very bloggers and tweeters whom he was devoting more and more of his existence to appeasing. Again the pointed sanctimony, again the message:
We're what you can never be. We disdain not only you but the virtual world in which you increasingly exist. We're capable of the love you were incapable of having for Annagret …

According to Google, Helou was married to a disabled novelist on whom she presumably was cheating. But if she was appearing in public with Tom, they must not have cared what people thought. A more promising question was what had happened to Tom's wife. After 1991, there were zero contemporaneous records for anyone with her name and birth date. Andreas was seized with the hope that Tom had murdered her and gotten away with it. This seemed fantastically improbable, but in a way it also didn't. Tom had spoken, after all, of being unable to live either with Laird or without her. And he had, after all, helped Andreas bury a body.

Following an instinct, he turned his attention to Laird and discovered that her billionaire father had set up a trust fund for her; the
Wichita Eagle
had reported on the tax filings. There was also evidence that Tom had founded Denver Independent with money from the father. But not a lot of money. Not the kind of money that Anabel would be worth if she was still alive. Was she alive? Or, better yet, a corpse? An instinct told Andreas that, dead or alive, she might be a way to inflict pain and chaos on Tom from a distance.

He went to his lead hacker, Chen, and asked how easily they could steal a lot of computer processing capacity.

“How much?” Chen said.

“I have two good photos of a twenty-four-year-old woman who's now in her late fifties. I want to run a facial-recognition match on every photo database we can access.”

“Worldwide?”

“Start with the U.S.”

“It's a lot. Try to do it fast, they'll catch us. So many of these farms, you can only grab a few minutes at a time. We got some really good farms, but we don't want to lose them.”

“What would less than fast be?”

“Weeks, maybe more. And that's just for U.S.”

“See what you can do. Be as safe as you can.”

Their facial-recognition software was nearly NSA-grade but still didn't work very well. (The NSA's didn't either.) Every day for several weeks, Chen forwarded Andreas pictures of late-middle-aged women who didn't look much like Anabel Laird. But going through the images gave him something to do, made him feel as if a plot were being advanced, took the worst edge off his paranoia. And then, for neither the first time nor the last time, he got lucky.

He'd always considered good luck his birthright—his mother had said it herself: the world conformed to whatever he felt like doing—but his bad luck with Dan Tierney had shaken his faith in it. The resolution of the image of a gray-haired supermarket employee in Felton, California, was too low to show the scar visible on Laird's forehead in the older pictures, and because the employee wasn't smiling he couldn't confirm the gap between her front teeth. But when he saw the employee's name, Penelope Tyler, and connected it with her years at Tyler School of Art, he sensed that his good luck had returned. He walked out of the tech building and looked up at the Bolivian sun, spread his arms, and soaked up its hot light.

Penelope Tyler was clearly a person who'd tried to disappear. The employee photo was the only image of her anywhere, and her official footprint was impressively faint. It took Andreas nearly an hour to discover that she had a daughter. This daughter, Purity, was relatively richly documented, with profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn and a very shaky credit history. He studied the pictures of her and recent pictures of Tom, comparing her eyebrows with Tom's eyebrows, her mouth with Tom's mouth, and concluded that she had to be his daughter. But there was no sign of contact between them, not on social media, not in her college or health records, nothing anywhere. Given that she'd been born not long after Laird vanished, it could only be that Tom didn't know she existed. Why else would Laird have changed her identity?

The girl was indirectly worth a shitload of money, a billion-size sum, and almost certainly didn't know it. She was making student-loan payments, living in a house that looked semi-derelict in Street View, and working as an “outreach associate” for an alternative-energy start-up. The money interested Andreas to the extent that it might make his life easier if he could get his hands on some of it. But it wasn't the reason he kept clicking through the photographs he had of Purity Tyler. Nor were her looks, though pleasant enough, the reason he conceived such a murderous desire for her. What mattered was that she was Tom's.

He set up a secure connection and called Annagret. Over the years, he'd been careful not to fall completely out of touch with her. He remembered her birthday and occasionally forwarded her links pertaining to one of her causes. For all the energy she'd invested in the project of closeness, it was remarkable how unclose she felt to him. How random it was—apart from her beauty—that he'd ever had anything to do with her. Not only was she small in her ambitions, she seemed perfectly content to be small. She'd left Berlin and moved to
Düsseldorf
. But her emails to him were always cordial and admiring, with many exclamation marks.

On the phone, after making sure she was alone, he explained what he needed her to do. “Consider this a free vacation in America,” he said.

“I hate America,” she said. “I thought Obama would change things, but it's still just guns, drones, Guantánamo.”

“Guantánamo is unfortunate, I agree. I'm not asking you to like the country. I'm just asking you to go there. I'd do it myself if I could, but I can't.”

“I'm not sure I can, either,” she said. “I know you always thought I was a good liar, but I don't like doing that anymore.”

“It doesn't mean you're not still good at it.”

“And maybe … Well. Is it really so terrible if this person tells the world what we did? I still think about it almost every day. I can't watch movies with any violence in them. Twenty-five years later, it still gives me panic attacks.”

“I'm sorry about that. But Aberant is threatening to discredit everything I've done.”

“I understand. The Project is very important. And I've always wished there was some way to make up for what I did to you. But—how does bringing his daughter to Bolivia help you?”

“Leave that to me.”

A silence fell. Worrisome.

“Andreas,” she said finally. “Do you feel bad about what we did?”

“Of course I do.”

“OK. I don't know what I'm thinking about. I guess our time together. Sometimes I feel really bad about it. I know I disappointed you. But that's not why I feel bad. There's something else—I can't explain it.”

He was alarmed but spoke calmly. “What is it?”

“I don't know. I see your life now, all your girlfriends, and … Sometimes I wonder why you didn't have affairs when you were with me. It's OK if you did. You can tell me now.”

“I never did. I was trying to be good to you.”

“You
are
good. I know all the fantastic good things you've done. Sometimes I can't believe I used to live with you. But still … Do you really feel bad about the thing we did?”

“Yes!”

“OK. I don't know what I'm thinking about.”

He sighed. So many years, and they still had to have
discussions
.

“I feel bad about the sex,” she said suddenly. “I'm sorry, but that's what it is.”

“What about it?” he managed to say.

“I don't know. But I have more experience now, more to compare it to. And hearing your voice—I don't know. It's bringing back something I don't like to think about. Some really bad feeling I can't describe. It's making me panic, a little bit. Right now. I'm feeling panic.”

“It was all mixed up with the thing we did. Maybe it was why we couldn't stay together.”

She took an audibly deep breath. “Andreas, this girl—why do you want me to bring her to you?”

“To make her believe in the Project. That's our best protection. If she's on our side, her father won't do anything.”

“OK.”

“Annagret, that's all it is.”

“OK. OK. But can I at least take Martin with me?”

“Who is Martin?”

“A man I feel close with. Safe with.”

“Certainly. All the better. Just, obviously”—he laughed creakily—“don't tell him anything.”

Safe with
: the words pushed the button connected to the electrode. All these years, and he was still thinking of killing her. How much of his subatomic life he must have unwittingly betrayed in his ten years with her! He'd been lucky that she was too young to make sense of it. But she'd lived with it and become aware of it in hindsight. The thought of her latter-day awareness, his hideous exposure in the eyes of someone who wasn't him, was almost as bad as the thought of what Tom had seen.

While he waited to hear from her in Oakland, he took honest stock of himself and saw how much ground he'd lost in his battle with the Killer. How laughably venial his old preoccupation with online porn now seemed; how poignantly tempered with good intentions his plot to murder Horst. His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of hating Tom and conspiring to take revenge on him. At the rate he was going, he might soon be all Killer. And again he sensed that he would be a dead man, literally, once the Killer was fully in command. That he was who the Killer was actually intent on killing.

It therefore came as something of a relief to hear from Annagret that she'd botched her sales pitch to Pip Tyler and alienated the girl. With a sense of reprieve, he threw himself into the less insane work of collaborating on the film that the American auteur Jay Cotter was making of his life, based in part on
The Crime of Love
. He holed up at the Cortez for two weeks with Cotter and his production designer; he had long phone talks with Toni Field, instructing her in the ways of Katya. When he returned to Los Volcanes, another project, no less dear to his heart, was coming to fruition—a splendid dump of emails and under-the-table agreements between the Russian petroleum giant Gazprom and the Putin government. Although the Project now ran substantially on autopilot, Andreas had personally brokered the Gazprom leak and dictated the terms of its release to the
Guardian
and the
Times
. The leak's provenance had required intricate laundering, an impenetrable maze of electronic red herrings to protect the source. Andreas also particularly loathed Vladimir Putin, for his youthful work with the Stasi, and he was determined to inflict maximum embarrassment on Putin's government, because it was harboring Edward Snowden, about whose purity of motive far too much had been said online. In the twelve-minute video he recorded for uploading the day before the
Times
and the
Guardian
ran their stories, he was at his artful best in needling Putin and rebuking, subtly, the online voices who'd allowed the one-hit wonder Snowden to distract them from his own twenty-five-year record. His continuing ability to rise to great occasions, coupled with the prospect of being the hero of a medium-budget movie with global distribution, was a welcome distraction from the problem of Tom Aberant.

The email that Pip Tyler then sent him, out of the blue, intensified his sense of reprieve. In reality, she was nothing like the figure from his vengeful imaginings. She was young-sounding, intelligent, amusingly reckless. The humor and hostility of her emails were a balm to his nerves. How sick of sycophancy he'd become since he succumbed to paranoia! How refreshing it was to be called out on his dishonesty! As he found himself warming to Pip's emails, he imagined an escape route that the Killer had failed to foresee, a providential loophole: what if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?