Immortal (26 page)

I realized she was still waiting for an answer, so I gave her one. “I don’t know if I’d call it language,” I said. “We were barely even self-aware. I can remember some specific events, but not very much, and only if I work at it. But I did have a name, sort of. More of a sound than anything. It sounded like ‘urrr’.”

“Ur.”

“No, with a longer
R
. Urrr. Ur was a Sumerian city-state.”

“Maybe they named it after you.”

“Hope not. The Sumerians were pretty obnoxious.”

She seemed satisfied, and lay still for a while. Again, I thought she was asleep until she started speaking.

“So why are you hiding?” she asked. “Really, this time.”

I sighed, although I didn’t mean to. “I thought we went through this.”

She propped herself up on her elbow. “It doesn’t seem like you.”

“You’ve known me for three days.”

“Know what I think? I think that whole mouse story was your way of telling me to shut up about it.”

“It worked.”

“Only because I was horny. I think you already know the name of the guy that’s after you. You just haven’t decided what to do about it.”

“That’s not true,” I lied. “And who said it was a guy? Could be a woman. Or a whole government.”

“Then why aren’t you doing something? Let me help you find out who it is. Then you can . . . I don’t know, exact vengeance, or whatever it is you plan to do to them.”

“I don’t plan to do anything to them,” I said. “I’m going to find a spot on the farthest end of the planet
from
them, and live there for long enough to know that everybody involved is dead.” This was basically true. The reason I wanted to find out more about Robert Grindel was to determine exactly how far his reach extended. And maybe suss out his vulnerabilities.

“No, you aren’t,” she said as regards my plan, such that it was.

“Why not? It’s worked before.”

She sat up. “Look, that demon was about the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, and you faced him down when you could have just run away and waited it out. Whoever hired the demon is just as bad, so you can’t expect me to believe you’re going to hop a plane to Borneo as soon as you get his name.”

“The demon was different,” I said. “He would have been relentless. I had to face him eventually.”

“No, you didn’t. Demons don’t live forever.”

“He killed some friends,” I said, after a pause. “That’s why I faced him. As long as he was looking for me, everyone I met was in danger.”

“Ah-hah!” she exclaimed.

“What?”

“I told you. You’re the hero. If all you cared about was self-preservation . . .”

“Then I would have run. I get your point. It’s wrong, but I get your point.”

“Why am I wrong?”

“I’m just . . . I’m not a hero.” I’m really not. I’ve done enough terrible things in my life to take myself out of the hero sweepstakes for an eternity. But Clara was a romantic.

“You put your life at risk for others,” she said stubbornly. “How is that not heroic?”

“I thought my way out of a situation and that’s all.”

“A situation you would never have been in if you weren’t interested in righting a wrong,” she declared.

I sighed again. We could go back and forth with this all night. “If it makes you feel better to think of me as a hero, okay. But exacting vengeance, as you put it, would be unnecessarily dangerous.”

She fell back on the bed, and after a while said, “But you’re curious.”

“About what?”

“About whoever set this up,” she said. “Five million dollars? For you? You gotta wonder why, right?”

“Not really.”

“Liar.”

“Okay, not curious enough,” I said. “Curiosity killed the cat.”

“I thought you were the mouse behind the radiator.”

“Now I’m the cat.”

“Okay,” she said. “You’re the cat who already knows the name of the dog, then.”

“There’s a dog now?”

She glared at me. “You know his name, Adam,” she insisted.

I sagged back into the bed and let her question hang in the air for a few seconds.

“All right,” I said. “Answer me this. How did you know about my infertility?”

“Your what?”

“You mentioned it, the first day I was here. I never told you about it. How did you know?”

“Is that . . . ?” She fell back against the pillow. “From the MUD, Adam! Jesus, you’re paranoid.”

“I prefer to think of it as extra careful,” I argued weakly.

“You’ve been nailing me for three days and . . . God, I can’t even
speak
to you right now.” She turned away from me on the bed and sulked. I think women are born knowing how to sulk expertly.

We lay there quietly for a few minutes. I made a mental note. Next time I accuse a lover of deception, I was going to have to pick a better time. Like when we were both wearing clothes. And possibly in a public place. You’d think I would have learned this by now.

“So I have some trust issues,” I said after a time.

“No kidding,” she agreed.

“That’s on the MUD? Because that’s not the kind of information I share with anybody.”

She turned back. “Look, Adam. You’re going to have to trust somebody eventually. Obviously whoever is after you knows a whole lot more about you than you realize, and that makes them dangerous. So if I can help you find them,
let
me.”

I nodded, because she was right. There was no other way. I crossed my fingers and hoped this time it was the right decision.

“Have you ever heard of a company called Securidot?”

Clara had not heard of Securidot, but she was a veritable wizard with her little laptop, so it wasn’t long before we both knew a whole lot more about the company.

   
“This buyout you read about before is big news,” Clara said. It was well into the night now, and she was all business with her computer up on the kitchen counter, with her hair pulled up, her hand working a pen on a pad of paper, and her body still entirely naked. I was more tastefully dressed in a pair of pants.

She continued, “Both Securidot and Secure Systems International were hit pretty hard by the recession.”

“Are we in a recession?”

“We were. Plus, there was the dot-com implosion a few years back. That didn’t help.”
 

I only recently learned the word “dot-com” but had no idea there’d been an “implosion.” I would have asked for clarification but it didn’t seem worth my time.

She continued. “They’re competing companies with competing products, but with different market shares. SSI is mostly consumer stuff—small firms and what have you. Securidot has a few smaller customers, but mostly lives off large corporations and government contracts. The buyout of Securidot ended up saving both companies. And it looks like it made a bundle of coin for someone named Robert Grindel. I guess he was the CEO of Securidot until recently. He got a decent buyout.”

She looked up from her computer. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It had been impressed upon me that Grindel doesn’t have enough money to pull off something like this.”

“No,” she agreed. “Not if all he’s got is what came out of this deal. Hang on.”

More typing. I sipped from my water and waited patiently. Having someone else do the searching was probably a good thing. When the Internet was first explained to me, it took me a half an hour to come close to grasping the concept. I kept getting it confused with the old party phone lines that used to be common before everyone got their own telephones.

“All right,” she began, after another lengthy bout of researching, “This guy isn’t just a dot-commer. He’s got a wide range of interests. I Googled him and it looks like . . .”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “You what to him?”

“Googled. I put his name into a search engine.”

“Never mind, go on.”

“Okay. I see his name popping up all over the place associated with five or six different proposals and investment vehicles. So that means he has more money than what he made on the Securidot sale.”

“Enough money?”

“There’s really no way to tell. This is mostly back-channel stuff. Think of him as a facilitator. Someone comes to him with an idea—or he goes out and finds a workable idea himself—and he puts together investors for it. If he’s successful, he gets a cut or a percentage and moves on. Doesn’t even matter if the proposal turns into something successful. He gets paid either way.”

“Nice gig,” I said.

“Yeah. I bet his rolodex is worth millions all by itself. Probably built up his contact list through his association with Securidot.”

“So by catching me, he could be closing out another deal. And it doesn’t even have to be his idea.”

“It’s probably not. But he would already need to know you exist. No telling whether it was him or someone else that brought that knowledge to the table.” She looked up at me. “You look convinced.”

“I pretty much am. Can we figure out what he’s working on right now?”

“Not with public access resources like this, no,” she said. “What you need is somebody with enough money to be considered a viable investor. A venture capitalist.”

I was unfamiliar with the term, and said so. She explained, “VCs look for places to put their money, basically. All they really care about is if an idea can turn into something they can make money off of. Although there’s also something to be said for an idea that sounds good but doesn’t work out, because tax write-offs are sometimes just as valuable. I did a term paper on this stuff if you want to read it.”

“Another time,” I said. “So they’re like patricians?”

“Kind of. Except a patrician might support an artist for the sake of art. These guys are definitely in it for the money.”

“Can anybody be a venture capitalist?”

“Anybody with gobs of hard money, sure. Do you know of anyone?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Can I use your phone?”

*
 
*
 
*

An hour later, I had a new best friend in a Swiss banker named Heintz, and a workable plan. Heintz would be spending the next day or two trying to find out what Grindel’s latest investment vehicle was—preferably without spending any of my money first. While Heintz was doing this, I planned to be on a fast plane heading straight out of this hemisphere. This last part didn’t sit well with Clara.

“Look,” I explained to her, “You said yourself he doesn’t have the money for this bounty on his own. That’s his weakness. If he can’t get me, he can’t maintain the bounty, because the investors will pull out.”

“It’s a stupid idea,” she insisted. “You don’t even know for sure if he’s who you think he is. Or where he is.”

“Yeah, but I just need to know where his money is. And who else could it be? We know it’s someone connected with Securidot. You think a low-level programmer has the money to do this when the CEO doesn’t?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” she said. “I think the only way to be sure is to find him. We can do it together.”

“Oh, for Baal’s sake, we cannot. And for five million he doesn’t want to just have a chat.”

“What if he doesn’t even have it?” she asked. “What if the money is a bluff?”

I shook my head. “You don’t hire these kinds of people with bluff money. Not if you want to live through the experience.”

Clara pouted. My death-proof, long-term, but capture-free plan wasn’t flying with her. I couldn’t imagine why. My keeping out of his clutches should—if I was reading this correctly—bankrupt him fairly quickly. And if I had to I could invest directly myself and take him apart from the inside. It was a good plan.

“Which part of this don’t you like?” I asked. “The bloodless part or the part where I run off?”

“It just seems cowardly,” she said after a time.

“Oh, please,” I said. “A word like
coward
doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does
brave
or
valorous.
They’re what you use to describe a dead person. ‘Oh, so-and-so acted bravely when he charged that crowd of Huns armed with only a half-sword and a pair of sandals. Sure he’s dead now, but what valor!’ Well, maybe the dead guy charging the Huns did it to inspire the men he fought with, or maybe he just realized he was already dead and decided to take out as many of his enemies as he could first. And maybe the coward who ran away warned the people behind him that the Huns were coming, and at the end of the day saved more lives for it. Call it cowardice all you want, but I’ll still be breathing when it’s done, and that’s my favorite kind of plan.”

“He’ll keep chasing you,” she said quietly. I’d raised my voice a bit, which I think scared her. The word
coward
annoys me for some reason. Not that she could have known that.

“Let him,” I said. “I’ll outlive him.”

She looked defeated.

“I didn’t think . . . when I offered to help, I didn’t think it would be helping you to get away from me. I’m not ready to say good-bye to you yet, Adam,” she admitted.

And there it was, the root of our argument. I had been hanging out, enjoying some good sex, trying to decide when would be the best time to disappear for a century or two. She had apparently been working from a different agenda.