The Redactor, Chapter 12

Thirty-thousand feet in the night sky above the sands of the ancient Persian Empire, modern day Iraq, I had finally found calm.

  A calm that was broken minutes later, at 12:39 AM Hong Kong time.

  My heart had been beating at a leisurely 80 bpm. Seated in Cattle Class of the Emirates airlines Airbus A380, my decisions were limited to whether I would have the satay chicken with rice or the beef and vegetables, and when precisely to empty my bladder of its beer ballast. Until the plane landed, I was in Fate’s iron grip.

  After the cabin lights dimmed, I switched on my personal light and pulled out my fifteen-year pen and a notebook I had bought at the airport. I had doodled in its margins and begun turning over in my mind the plot of my novel.

  The small video screen embedded in the chair in front of me was a distracting glare, and it was when I navigated its menu to kill the screen that I noticed I could access the internet.

  With a moment’s hesitation I called up my email.

  My inbox was full of stale letters, but for three new messages, marked in bold. Two were spam. The third was from Matthew Price, the university systems administrator.

  I opened it and read the following message:

 

  Jack.

  I looked into your login problem. Not sure what’s going on there, but—get this—your account was hacked a couple of weeks back. I don’t know what the hacker wanted or got. But I traced the attack origin to a cloud server on the west coast of the US (which doesn’t mean much).

  I hope you don’t mind, but I returned fire and hacked the server. Turns out its currently registered to a H. Beck. Does that name meaning anything to you? I poked through the server’s file system and found the only active branch of the tree besides security patches (hah!) is a Wordpress blog. I’ll paste the address below. It’s private, but I dug the admin password out. It’s ConRadsh3art. Doesn’t make any sense to me, but maybe you’ll have more luck.

  Sorry to disturb you. He or she may just be some script-kiddy who got hold of a hacking library, but better to be safe...

  Cheers, Matt.

 

  My heart was no longer beating at 80 bpm.

  I quit the email and entered the blog address Matt had sent me. The internet browser loaded up the address, and a title blazed on the screen, painfully bright in the dim cabin: The Immortal Novel, by Hieronymus Beck.

  My hand went to Hiero’s novel notes stowed in my back pocket. I wriggled in the seat until I could extract them. I placed the folded-up wad on the tray table, unfolded it, and smoothed the paper flat.

  The topmost sheet described the (attempted) murder of Rhianne Goldman. The title of the page was Case notes #1 for The Immortal Novel, by Hieronymus Beck.

  My eyes flicked again to the screen and I scrolled down.

  More text. A date—yesterday’s. And “Chapter 8”. Below that was a handful of paragraphs of text. As I read, the hairs on my neck stood up.

 

  Deed done. The heroin flooding Li Min’s system has shut down her heart.

  Some girls look good with short hair. Li Min looks good dead.

  I don’t mean to be cruel. It’s true. A quiet has settled over her fragile body, now that her anxious spirit has set sail on eternal waters. Her skin is smooth to the touch and already cooling. With a finger, I travel over it, across her flanks, which are covered in almost microscopic down—find a small birthmark on her inner thigh I hadn’t noticed before. Got to slow down, lover boy.

  An idea occurs to me. I grasp her wrists and lift her arms, which had come to rest at awkward angles. I lift them above her head, and bow them into a heart shape.

  Ah, true love.

  Then I’m laughing. What a prick.

  I tweak her nose, and begin the mop up.

  Condom. My underwear—third wear, turn them inside out. Shit, I wouldn’t be surprised if the washing machine spits these guys out. Her underwear, just to be safe. Wipe off the lamp switch, drawer handles and top, door handle. In the living room, let’s see. Rack back through the ol’ memory. Did I touch the kitchen taps? Rinse some dishes? Doesn’t sound like me. Do ‘em anyway. Wine glass, the one without the lipstick. Glossy magazine. Pretending to be interested in Wood Turning—those were hard yards, but worth it. Light switch and done. Need to hurry now. [MC coming.]

  “Night, honey,” I say into the quiet apartment, and exit stage left.

 

  I finished reading the entry and lay back in my seat. A kind of heat was prickling all over my body, and my temples were throbbing. I flicked my wrist to see the Medline’s display—in the orange, okay.

  I blinked and read the blog post, Chapter 8, again. Hiero had recorded how he murdered Li Min and put it on the internet. Sure, it was private. But all it would take was a click of a button to publish it to the world.

  And there was that reference to MC. Just like the one I had found in Li Min’s journal. She had written it in anticipation of Hiero’s arrival. But she had written MC Griffen.

  What did it mean? It made no sense.

  Hiero’s text blazed at me from the video screen. I shut my eyes, but behind my lids there was an even brighter blaze—the memory of Li Min’s lifeless body, which shock had seared onto my brain. I tried to push it away, but it didn’t budge. I had to open my eyes.

 

  My thoughts swam for minutes until finally my mind bit on a thought. I switched back to my email and wrote a message to Jean.

 

  Jean — still in the shit.

  You have to see this, and then, please, forward it to the Murdoch police station in Perth, with the subject Re: Jack Griffin and Rhianne Goldman.

  Go to the URL I’ll paste below. It’s a blog of that little shit recording what he is doing. It’s there in black and white, an account of how he murdered a girl in a Hong Kong apartment.

  The blog is private, but you can enter it with user ‘admin’ and password ‘ConRadsh3art’.

  Now do you think I have ADD?

 

  Message sent, I switched off the screen and put away Hiero’s notes and my notebook. The urge to write had evaporated. I pressed the call button, and when a hostess arrived I asked for the stiffest drink they stocked, wondering at what point they refuse to provide alcohol.

  Turns out to be the fifth drink.