The Whisperer (10 page)

“There’s nothing here.”

Rosa’s disconsolate observation brought Mila back to reality. The computer was completely empty.

But Goran wasn’t convinced. “There’s a web browser.”

“But the computer isn’t connected to the Internet,” Boris pointed out.

Sarah Rosa had worked out what the criminologist was getting at. She picked up her mobile and checked the display: “There’s a signal…he could have been connected by mobile phone.”

She immediately opened the browser screen and checked the list of addresses in its history. There was only one.

“That’s what Bermann was doing in here!”

There was a sequence of numbers. The address was a code.

“It’s probably the address of a restricted server,” Rosa suggested.

“What does that mean?” Boris asked.

“That you can’t get to it via a search engine and you have to have a key to get in. It’s probably contained inside the computer. But if it isn’t, we risk denying ourselves access forever.”

“Then we’ve got to be careful and do exactly what Bermann did…” said Goran before turning towards Stern: “Do we have his mobile phone?”

“Yes, I’ve got it in the car with his home computer.”

“Then go and get it…”

When Stern got back, he found them in silence. They were waiting for him with ill-disguised impatience. The officer passed Bermann’s mobile phone to Rosa, who connected it to the computer and switched it on. The server took a moment to recognize the call. It was processing the data. Then it quickly started loading.

“Apparently we can get in without any difficulty.”

Eyes fixed on the screen, they waited for the image that would appear in a few minutes. It could be anything, Mila thought. A powerful tension united the members of the team, like a charge of energy crackling from one body to the next. She could feel it in the air.

The monitor began to settle into an arrangement of pixels arranged in order across the screen like little pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But what they saw wasn’t what they were expecting. The energy that had filled the room until a moment before drained away in an instant and the enthusiasm vanished.

The screen was blank.

“It must be a firewall,” Rosa announced. “It interpreted our attempt as an intrusion.”

“Did you hide the signal?” asked Boris uneasily.

“Of course I did!” the woman snapped. “Do you think I’m an idiot? There’s probably a code or something…”

“Some sort of log-in and password?” asked Goran, wanting to know more about it.

“Something like that,” Rosa replied distractedly. “What we had was an address for a direct connection. Log-in and password are old-fashioned mechanisms: they leave traces and they can always lead you to someone. Anyone who enters this site wants to remain anonymous.”

Mila still hadn’t said a word and the conversation was making her nervous. She breathed deeply and clenched her fists until her fingers cracked. There was something that didn’t tally, but she couldn’t work out what it was. Goran turned towards her for a moment, as if stung by her gaze. Mila pretended not to notice.

Meanwhile the atmosphere in the room was overheating. Boris had decided to unleash on Sarah Rosa his frustration at this failure. “If you thought the site might be blocked, why didn’t you follow a parallel connection procedure?”

“Why didn’t you suggest it?”

“Why, what happens in cases like that?” asked Goran.

“What happens is that when a system like this is blocked there’s no way of penetrating it!”

“We could try to come up with a new code and have another go,” Sarah Rosa suggested.

“Really? There will be millions of combinations,” Boris scoffed.

“Oh, piss off! Are you trying to put all the blame on me?”

Mila went on watching this curious exchange in silence.

“If anyone had any ideas to put forward, or any advice to give, they could have done it before!”

“But you jump down our throats every time we open our mouths!”

“Boris, just leave me alone! I could also point out that—”

“What’s this?”

Goran’s phrase fell between the adversaries like a barrier. His tone wasn’t alarmed, or impatient, as Mila might have expected, but still made them fall silent at last.

The criminologist was pointing at something in front of him. Following the line of his outstretched arm, they found themselves studying the computer screen again.

It wasn’t black anymore.

In the upper part, by the left-hand edge, some writing had appeared.

“Oh, Christ!” exclaimed Boris.

“So, what is it? Can any of you tell me?” Goran asked again.

Rosa sat down at the monitor again, with her hands outstretched towards the keyboard. “We’re in,” she announced.

The others gathered around her to get a better view.

The cursor under the phrase went on flashing, waiting for an answer, one that didn’t come for the time being.

“Look, could someone please explain to me what’s going on?” Goran was losing patience now.

Rosa quickly delivered an explanation. “It’s a ‘door.’”

“Which is?”

“It’s a means of access. It seems to me that we’re inside a complex system. And this is a dialogue window: a kind of chat…there’s someone at the other end.”

“And they want to talk to us…” added Boris.

“Or to Alexander Bermann,” Mila corrected him.

“So what are we waiting for? Let’s answer!” said Stern, with a note of urgency in his voice.

Gavila looked at Boris: he was the communication expert. The young officer nodded and took his place behind Sarah Rosa, so that he could suggest what she should write.

“Tell them you’re here.”

And she wrote:

They waited a few moments and then another phrase appeared on the monitor.

Boris dictated the next reply to Sarah Rosa. But he recommended using only lower-case letters, like the person at the other end, and then explained that some people feel intimidated by the use of capitals. And they really wanted the other person to feel at ease.

Someone had been asking questions? About what? Everyone, and Goran in particular, immediately had a sense that the person they were talking to was involved in something shady.

“Maybe he’s been interrogated by the police, but they didn’t think it was advisable to hold him,” suggested Rosa.

“Or perhaps they didn’t have sufficient proof,” Stern said, backing her up.

The figure of an accomplice of Bermann’s started forming in their minds. Mila thought back to what had happened in the motel, when she had thought someone was following her on the gravel. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, for fear that she’d only been imagining it.

A pause.

There was no reply. Boris tried to get round the obstacle by asking something else.

More than the obscurity of the words, it was the grammatical mistakes that worried Goran.

“It might be a code of recognition,” he explained. “He might be waiting for us to make some mistakes as well. And if we don’t, he might terminate the communication.”

“You’re right. Then copy the language and put in your own mistakes,” Boris suggested to Rosa.

Meanwhile some more words appeared on the screen:

The conversation wasn’t getting them anywhere. Then Boris asked Sarah Rosa to reply that soon they would know “when,” but for the time being it was better to recapitulate the whole plan, to be sure that the other person knew it.

Mila thought that was an excellent idea; that way they would have an advantage over whoever it was at the other end. A moment later, the reply came:

No one understood a thing. Boris looked round, in search of suggestions. He caught Gavila’s eye: “What do you think, Dr. Gavila?”

The criminologist was thinking. “I don’t know…there’s something I’m not getting. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“I had the same feeling,” said Boris. “The guy who’s speaking seems…seems either to be retarded or to have some sort of psychological deficiency.”

Goran came closer to Boris: “You’ve got to bring him out into the open.”

“How?”

“I don’t know…tell him you’re safer than him, and that you’re thinking of calling the whole thing off. Tell him ‘they’ are on your tail as well, and then ask him to give you some proof…that’s it: ask him to call you on a secure number!”

Rosa hurried to tap in the question. But for a long time there was nothing in the space for the answer but the blinking cursor.

Then something began to appear on the screen.

It was quite plain: either he was very cunning or he really was afraid of being spied on.

“Insist. Get round it. I want to know who ‘they’ are,” said Goran. “Ask him where they are right now…”

The answer came quickly.

“Ask him how close,” insisted Goran.

“And what the hell does that mean?” Boris snorted, bringing his hands behind his neck in a gesture of exasperation.

Rosa slumped against the back of the chair and shook her head, disheartened. “If ‘they’ are so close and they’re keeping an eye on him, how come they can’t see what he’s writing?”

“Because he can’t see what we’re seeing.”

It was Mila who said it. And she was pleased to notice that they hadn’t turned to look at her as if a ghost had just spoken. Instead, her remark sparked the group’s interest.

“What do you mean?” asked Gavila.

“We’ve been taking it for granted that he has a blank screen in front of him just like we do. But I think his dialogue window is inserted in a web page that contains other elements: perhaps graphic animations, words or images of some kind…That’s why even though they’re close to him ‘they’ can’t tell that he’s communicating with us.”

“She’s right!” said Stern.

The room filled once more with a tentative euphoria. Goran turned to Sarah Rosa: “Can we see what he’s seeing?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll send him a recognition signal and, when his computer bounces it back to me, we’ll have the Internet address that he’s logged on to.” As she was explaining all this, the officer was already opening her notebook to create a second Internet connection.

A moment later the words appeared on the main screen:

Boris looked at Goran: “What should we say?”

“Take your time. But don’t arouse his suspicions.”

Boris wrote to wait a few seconds, because there was someone at the door and he had to go and get it.

Meanwhile, in the notebook, Sarah Rosa managed to copy the Internet address from which the other person was communicating. “There, got it…” she announced.

She inserted the data in the URL bar and pressed enter.

A few seconds later a web page appeared.

It would have been impossible to say whether it was astonishment or horror that left her speechless.

On the screen, bears were dancing with giraffes, hippopotami were beating out the rhythm on bongos and a chimpanzee was playing the ukulele. The room filled with music. And as the jungle came to life all around them, a brightly colored butterfly welcomed them to the site.

Its name was Priscilla
.

They were stunned with disbelief. Then Boris looked at the main screen where the question still shone out:

It was only then that the officer managed to utter those four painful words:

“Fuck…it’s a child.”

T
he word most frequently entered in search engines is
sex
. The second is
God
. Every time Goran thought about it, he wondered why anyone would try to find God on the Internet, of all places. In third place, there are actually two words:
Britney Spears
. And joint third is
death
.

Sex
,
God
,
death
and
Britney Spears
.

The first time Goran had entered his wife’s name in a search engine had been just three months before. He didn’t know why he had done it. The idea had just come to him, instinctively. He hadn’t been sure he would find her, and he actually hadn’t found her. But that was officially the last place he would have thought of looking for her. Was it possible that he knew so little about her? From that moment something had snapped within him.

He had worked out why he was following her.

In reality, he didn’t want to know where she was. Deep down, he didn’t really care. What he really wanted to know was whether she was
happy
right then. Because that was what made him angry: that she had left him and Tommy so that she could be happy somewhere else. Can a person be capable of hurting someone so deeply in order to follow a selfish desire for happiness? Obviously they could. She had done it and, what was worse, she hadn’t come back to repair things, to heal the wound, that tear in the flesh of the man with whom she had chosen to share her life, and in the flesh of his flesh. Because you
can
come back, you have to. There’s always a moment when, walking along, looking straight ahead, you hear something—a cry—and you turn a bit to see if everything’s still as it was, or whether something has changed in the people we left behind us, and in ourselves. That moment comes, for everyone. Why not for her? Because she hadn’t even tried? No silent phone call in the dead of night. No wordless card. How many times had Goran stood and waited outside Tommy’s school hoping to catch her secretly spying on her son? And yet there was nothing. She hadn’t even gone to check that he was all right. Goran had started wondering about the person he had thought he would be able to keep by his side for his whole life.

What, really, made him so different from Veronica Bermann?

That woman had been tricked. Her husband had used her to create a respectable facade, so that she would look after his possessions: his name, his house, his belongings, everything. Because, in the end, what he wanted was somewhere else. But unlike Goran, Mrs. Bermann sensed the abyss that gaped beneath her perfect life, she had sniffed out its rotten smell. And had said nothing. She had joined in with the deception, even without taking part in it. She had been an accomplice in the silence, a companion in the performance, a wife for good or ill.

Goran, on the other hand, had never suspected that his wife might abandon him. Not a clue, not a sign, not even a sign of decay that one might remember and say, “Yes! It was so obvious and like an idiot I didn’t notice.” He would rather have discovered that he was a terrible husband so that he could blame himself, his carelessness, his lack of attention. He wished he could find the reasons within himself: that way at least he would have had some. And there was nothing, just silence. And doubts. He had given the rest of the world the crudest version of the facts: she had walked out, full stop. Because Goran knew that everyone would see what he wanted them to see. Someone would see the poor husband. Someone else, the man who must have done something to her to make her run away. And he had immediately identified himself in those roles, passing freely from one to the other. Because every pain is ordinary in its own way.

And what about her? For how long had she pretended? Who could say how long the idea had been maturing. Who knows how much it had taken to enrich it with unmentionable dreams, with thoughts hidden under the pillow every evening, as she slept next to him. Weaving that desire with the everyday gestures of a mother, of a wife. Until those fantasies became a project, a plan. A
design
. Who could say when she had convinced herself or worked out that what she imagined could be realized. The pupa contained the secret of its metamorphosis and meanwhile she went on living alongside them, alongside him and Tommy, silently preparing for change.

And where was she now? In a parallel universe, made up of men and women like the ones Goran met every day, made of houses to run, husbands to support, children to nurture. A world identical and banal, but far removed from him and from Tommy, with new colors, new friends, new faces, new names. What was she looking for in that world? Basically we are all in search of answers in a parallel universe, Goran thought. Like the people who use the web to look up
sex,
God,
death
and
Britney Spears
.

Alexander Bermann, on the other hand, went on the Internet in search of children.

It had all come out at once. From the opening of the website
Priscilla the Butterfly
on Bermann’s computer to the identification of the international server that managed that system, everything had begun to come into shape.

It was a pedophile network with branches in various different states.

Mila was right: “her” music teacher was on there too.

The special unit for Internet crimes had identified almost a hundred subscribers. The first arrests had taken place, others would be happening in the next few hours. A small but well-selected number of subscribers. All professional people beyond suspicion, affluent and hence willing to pay large sums to preserve their anonymity.

Among them, Alexander Bermann.

On his way home that night, Goran thought again of the mild-mannered man, always smiling and morally upright in the descriptions of Bermann’s friends and acquaintances. A perfect mask. Who could say what had made him connect the idea of Bermann with the idea of his wife. Or perhaps he knew but didn’t want to admit it. At any rate, once the threshold had been crossed he would set those reflections aside and dedicate himself completely to Tommy, as he had promised him on the phone, when he had told him he would be coming home soon. His son had received the news enthusiastically and asked him if they could send out for pizza. Goran had agreed easily, knowing that that small concession would be enough to keep him happy. Children are always able to draw some kind of happiness from the things that happen to them.

So Goran had found himself getting pizza with pepperoni for himself and double mozzarella for Tommy. They had ordered the pizza together on the phone, because ordering pizzas was a shared ritual. Tommy had dialed the number and Goran had made the request. Then they had got out the big plates bought specially for the purpose. Tommy would drink fruit juice, Goran had allowed himself a beer. Before bringing them to the table, they had put their glasses in the freezer, so that they would be opaque with frost and cold enough to receive their drinks.

But Goran was far from peaceful. His mind was still running to that perfect organization. The officers in the special web-crime unit had unearthed a database containing more than three thousand children’s names, linked with addresses and photographs. The network used fake domains for children to lure victims into the trap…so like the ones in the cartoons that Goran and Tommy had watched together after dinner on a satellite channel. The blue tiger and the white lion. As his son had cuddled up against him, concentrating completely on the two jungle friends, Goran had watched him.

I have to protect him,
he thought.

And the thought had given him a strange fear deep in his chest, a dark, sticky knot. The dread of not doing enough, of not being enough. Because a single parent can’t be enough. Even if Tommy and he basically managed. But what would have happened if, behind Bermann’s blank computer screen, rather than that unknown child, it had been his Tommy? Would he have been capable of noticing that someone was trying to enter his son’s mind, his son’s life?

As Tommy finished his homework, Goran had hidden himself away in his study. It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, so he had started flicking through Bermann’s file again, finding various bits of food for thought that might be useful to the investigation.

First of all, that leather armchair in the basement, the one on which Krepp had found no fingerprints.

On everything else, but not there…why?

He was sure there was a reason for that, too. And yet, every time he thought he had grasped a concept, his mind slipped elsewhere. To the dangers surrounding the life of his son.

Goran was a criminologist, he knew what evil was made of. But he had always observed it from a distance, as an academic. He had never been corrupted by the idea that the same evil might somehow stretch out its bony finger until it touched him. Now, though, he was thinking about it.

When do you become a “monster”?

That term, which he had officially banned, now returned to the deepest recess of his mind. Because he wanted to know how it happens. When you realize you have crossed that boundary.

Bermann belonged to a perfect organization, with a related hierarchy and status system. The sales representative had joined it while at university. In those days the Internet was not yet seen as a hunting ground, and it took a considerable effort to stay in the shadows and not arouse suspicion. That was why followers were advised to create a safe and exemplary life for themselves in which they could hide their own true nature and conceal their own impulses. Blend in, and disappear; those were the key words of the strategy.

Bermann had come back from university with a crystal clear idea of what he would do. First of all he had traced an old school friend that he hadn’t seen for years. Veronica, who had never been pretty enough for the boys—himself included—to take an interest in her. He had led her to believe that his was a love that he had nurtured for years and shyly concealed. And she, as predicted, had immediately agreed to marry him. The first years of marriage had passed as they do for all couples, with highs and lows. He frequently traveled for work. In reality he was often taking advantage of his travels to meet others like himself or to groom his young prey.

With the advent of the Internet things had got much easier. Pedophiles had immediately started making use of that incredible instrument that not only let them act under cover of anonymity, but also set up ingenious traps to manipulate their victims.

But Alexander Bermann couldn’t complete his perfectly planned disguise, because Veronica couldn’t give him an heir. That was the missing piece, the detail that would truly have put him beyond suspicion: because a father isn’t interested in other people’s children.

The criminologist brushed aside the fury that had risen up in his throat and closed the file that had been getting fatter and fatter over the last few hours. He didn’t want to read it anymore. In fact he wanted only to go to bed and dull himself with sleep.

Who could Albert be but Bermann? Even if they had yet to link him to the graveyard of arms and the disappearance of all six little girls, and find the missing corpses, no one more than he would deserve to wear the executioner’s garb.

But the more Goran thought about it the less convinced he was.

At eight o’clock Roche would officially announce the capture of the guilty man at a packed press conference. Goran realized that the idea tormenting him now had started buzzing around in his head soon after he had discovered Bermann’s secret. Lingering behind, foggily indistinct, the idea had squatted in a corner of his mind all afternoon. But in the shadows where it had taken refuge it went on pulsing, to show him it was there, and it was alive. Only now, in the peace of his room, Goran had decided to concentrate on it fully.

There’s something in this business that doesn’t add up…

You don’t think Bermann’s guilty?

Oh, of course I do: the man was a pedophile. But he didn’t kill the six little girls. He has nothing to do with it…

How can you be so sure?

Because if Alexander Bermann really was our Albert, we would have found the
last
little girl in his boot—number six—and not Debby, the first. She would already have been rotting for some time…

And just as he was becoming aware of this deduction, the criminologist looked at his watch: a few minutes till the press conference at eight.

He had to stop Roche.

The chief inspector had summoned the main newspapers as soon as information about developments in the Bermann case had started circulating. The official pretext was that he didn’t want the journalists to get hold of the information secondhand, perhaps badly filtered by some confidential source. In reality, he was worried that the story could trickle away in different directions, excluding him from the limelight.

Roche was good at handling events like this, he knew how to gauge the wait and he derived a certain pleasure from leaving the press dangling. That was why he started those meetings a few minutes late, letting it be known that as head of the team he was always delayed by last-minute developments.

The inspector enjoyed the murmur coming from the press room next to his office: it was like energy that fed on his ego. Meanwhile he sat there calmly, with his feet on the desk that he had inherited from his predecessor, whose vice inspector he had been for a long time—too long, he thought, and had had no compunction about firing eight years before.

The lines on his phone had gone on lighting up uninterruptedly. But he had no intention of replying: he wanted to let the tension mount.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Roche.

As soon as she entered, Mila noticed a smug grin on the chief inspector’s face. She had wondered why on earth he wanted to see her.

“Officer Vasquez, I wanted to thank you personally for the invaluable contribution that you have made to this investigation.”

Mila would have blushed if she hadn’t understood that this was only the calculated prelude to getting rid of her. “I don’t think I did much, sir.”