Mortal Fear. Greg Iles

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       Prologue

       Dear Father.

       We landed in New Orleans yesterday evening.

       A humid city.

       Flat, low, dispersed. A single grouping of tall buildings in the distance.

       The taxi driver was a Cajun, surprisingly. A thin brown wrinkled man. Rather like getting a Chinese cabbie in Chinatown. I expected an Eastern European, as I see everywhere else.

       He kept glancing into the rearview mirror as we passed through a town he called “Metry”—a place where the whites once fled to escape “da niggas.” Now they flee across Lake Pontchartrain. I worked at the computer in my lap but kept an ear open to his words.

       Night descended over a rising moon as we swept onto an elevated section of freeway and passed the Superdome. Kali must have been a black shadow to him, beside me in the backseat, a shadow with bright black eyes.

       She wanted to kill the driver.

       I could feel it.

       In her handbag. The scarf—sacred weapon. I see an image in her mind: he stops at a traffic light as we descend the ramp to the lower world of surface streets. She slips the noose around his throat and silently steals his life …

       I lay a hand lightly on her wrist and feel a twitch that verifies my sense. She is ready.

       I know that if I slide my hand beneath her sari I will find her moist. She lives for these nights.

       I hope the security is no tighter than I expect.

       I slide my hand beneath her sari.

       She is wet. Burning.

       Time is fire.

       So opposite we are, so perfectly opposite. I understand restraint. Control. The defiance of it.

       Kali understands only being.

       She lets her head loll back on the car seat, black eyes glittering beneath half-closed lids. I move my hand as we descend the ramp onto Poydras, possibly saving the driver’s life.

       We move toward Canal and the French Quarter.

       Kali climaxes soundlessly.

       The driver smells her. Pungent, fierce. I see alertness in the back of his neck, the angle of his head. His eyes dart to the rearview mirror. A whore? he wonders.

       Kali smiles at him in the mirror. There is death in her smile. Death that a man might walk willingly into. She is startlingly beautiful. And so she should be.

       You paid her father good money for her.

       We exited the taxi at Galatoire’s, entered the restaurant, then left and changed cabs twice again. Tiresome but effective.

       Security was heavy at the mansion, but no worse than I had expected. A small army, as befits an American cult figure. Bodyguards hired from God-knows-what agency—probably some outfit run by an ex-policeman who swilled Jax on the job for twenty years.

       The ironwork of the fence was exquisite. The French influence. I let my right hand graze the points as we moved along it. They would bruise me, I knew, but I felt fit. Almost reckless. The grillwork matched that on the second-story balconies.

       Quaint.

       The street was crowded with all manner of tourists. Gawkers, most of them. I inclined my head as we passed the gate guards. One nodded slightly, glanced at my briefcase. The other followed Kali with his eyes. Even the billowing sari could not hide the hard contours of her body.

       “After we turn the corner?” she asked.

       “If the crowd thins.”

       When we turned the corner, the crowd melted away as though scattered by a stage manager. Kali bunched up her sari and was over the ironwork in seconds, into the palm fronds and banana trees. I was more careful. I passed the briefcase through the bars, then worked my way over.

       We stood together in the dripping trees, looking at the floodlit face of the mansion. Solid stonework, like an outbuilding of Versailles. Kali’s hand dropped to my distended zipper. She lightly squeezed me, a nurse checking a pulse.

       I shivered. “We must wait.”

       A short intake of breath. “How long?”

       I crouched in the tenebrous foliage, booted up the computer, and logged back onto EROS. “She’s still at her computer. She’s searching for me.”

       “Then let her find you.”

       I shut off the computer and put it back into the case. “The rightmost upper window,” I said, recalling the photocopied blueprints that the archives so dutifully sent me. “Now.”

       Crossing the open ground between fence and mansion was daunting for me. For Kali nothing. She believes we are invisible in such moments. Less than shadows. We are our intent.

       I opened my briefcase beneath the side balcony. Kali took out the rope and hurled the rubberized hook over the ironwork of the balcony rail. She climbs like a thief.

       I tossed up the briefcase.

       A rape kit, police would call it.

       But it is so much more.

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