Immortal at the Edge of the World (10 page)

Anyway, it took me about ten minutes to understand what had happened on my laptop. Since Tchekhy was the one who’d given it to me, I had to think there was something installed on it that could decode a specific encrypted message, and that this message was attached to the photograph somehow, so when I moved it from wherever it lives when it’s sitting in an e-mail box to wherever it goes when I agreed to save it, the code was recognized and unlocked.

Incidentally, while I know next to nothing about computers I know a great deal about encryption, because people have been trying to send coded messages for as long as there has been written language. Actually, secret communication was why written language was invented in the first place.

The question was what to do with the message. The clear implication was that somebody planned to use the people I cared about against me in some way, but the effectiveness of such a plan required that they know who those people are, and that those people might be important enough to get me to do something I wouldn’t otherwise be willing to do.
 

I didn’t feel like notifying every last person I could think of that they needed to go hide in a panic room until further notice, not when I didn’t even know why I was telling them to do that yet. Really, about the only person who came to mind as soon as I read
loved ones
was Clara, and she was probably the safest one on my mental list who wasn’t a three hundred-year-old vampire.

Clara was currently living somewhere in the Northern Italian countryside—I did not have the exact address but I could get it with a phone call—on a large private estate. She had her own security detail, in part because she already knows how dangerous it can be to know me, and in part because she happens to be immortal. There are some people in this world who would care about that last part very much if they ever found out.

Despite Iza’s repeated insistence that we go see her, I had been keeping my distance since Clara left me, which was something like seven years ago. I knew about the security and the estate because I wanted to make sure she was okay, and because maybe I didn’t want to lose track of the only other immortal around who can’t vanish on command.

That said, because she is like me, she also can’t be poisoned and she can’t get sick. So if you throw that in with the security detail and the private estate and her personal wealth, she was easily the safest person on any list I might wish to make—safer, certainly, than the Russian computer hacker who told me to warn everyone.

Other than Clara, there was Eloise, the aforementioned vampire who can really take care of herself just fine. There was Mike Lycos, the FBI agent who sent me the disc, and who is also a werewolf and thus probably not at great risk. There was Ariadne, who last I checked was working for the Greek government and was high enough up the political ladder to have her own security. There was another vampire in Boston I was pretty sure nobody could connect me to at this point, an oracle in California who likewise had hardly any connection to me, an iffrit I wouldn’t mind seeing dead, a satyr or two that nobody in their right minds would mess with, Heintz, and Iza.
 

Oh, and Eve. And good luck to them if they want to try and catch her.

I wanted to call Clara and warn her. She knew Tchekhy, so there was a decent chance she’d recognize that my call was due to the gravity of the situation and not for some other silly reason like I missed her and needed an excuse to get her on the phone. But I was nearly positive that’s how it would look if I tried. So instead, I made arrangements to visit Tchekhy’s father.

*
 
*
 
*

The only good thing about getting the message when I did was that I was already crossing the Atlantic. It would have been even better if Tchekhy’s father had been buried in Istanbul, but the gravesite was in Tbilisi, Georgia, which was a much less convenient location.

Tchekhy’s father passed back when you had to make plans to avoid involving yourself in the Soviet Union whenever you could. But since one side of the family was from Georgia—which was only ever barely a part of the USSR as a whole—getting him a plot in an old Armenian burial place there was feasible, and actually preferable, as I believe the kind of Christianity his family practices is Greek Orthodox.

I didn’t ask why it mattered where he was buried—for most of the time I knew him he lived in the US and that seemed like a perfectly good final resting place—but I assume there was some sort of familial/sentimental thing going on. I am not super-understanding about death, I’m afraid. I’ve seen more of it than anybody, and am so used to it I have to be careful not to say something insensitive.

It took most of the morning to alter our flight plans from Istanbul to Tbilisi, and another half day to make the necessary arrangements on the ground. I also had to get Heintz to contact the museum in Istanbul to ask them to postpone for me. He would probably have to agree to donate more money to put the collection on hold until I got there, but it was worth it if what I was looking for was there. If it wasn’t, well, I’d thrown a lot of money away already and I still had plenty left.

*
 
*
 
*

I have a long history with Tbilisi and with Georgia, enough that I have to remind myself not to call them Tiflis and Iberia. Tbilisi is right in the middle of a major trade route or two, so nearly every time I traveled east I stopped there. Sometimes I even liked it better than Constantinople, which still had a certain Roman arrogance to it that was wearisome.

When we left our very modern airplane and took a hired car to Kala, the oldest part of the city, it was like time traveling.

“You can afford the nicest hotel, and you pick the oldest one instead,” Mirella said, watching the buildings become older and less dependent on sound architecture and suffering more obviously from the consequences of gravity.
 

“Modern hotels are all modern in the same way,” I said. “Old hotels are unique.”
 

“What if they are unique in a way that doesn’t include hot water?”

“There’s always that risk, yes.”

It was going to be hard to travel with someone who didn’t know how old I was. I just wasn’t sure yet how she was going to take that information. But the more questions she asked the harder it was going to be to satisfy her curiosity. Not that I wasn’t enjoying her curiosity.

There was almost nothing left in Tbilisi to remind me of the city I used to market my goods in—even in Kala the buildings are only about two hundred years old—so it wasn’t all that depressing, really. Traditionally I visit a place again after a while away and I’m just devastated by what’s changed, but I already went through that when I was in Tbilisi for the funeral. Between that trip and my previous visit the entire city had been burned to the ground by the Turks, and it had been a beautiful place that was burned to the ground. It’s beautiful now, mind you, but a slightly more modern (to me) beautiful. It’s not as bad for me as a place like Athens, say, which still has pieces of things standing that I remember being built.

Anyway we checked into a room large enough so it didn’t feel weird sharing it with my attractive female bodyguard, and after waking up a very hungry pixie the three of us went out and found some more appropriate clothing for Mirella.

It goes without saying that Tchekhy was not actually sitting at his father’s grave waiting for me. He’d likely not even gone near the grave himself since arriving in Tbilisi, and instead had sent someone he could trust. He
might
have had somebody watching it, but it was much more likely he left something there for me to find. I wasn’t about to walk to the gravesite myself either, not without having a better idea of what was going on. I could send Iza, as pixies make for excellent recon solutions under most circumstances, but I wasn’t sure if she was clever enough to recognize a dead drop when she saw one.

Mirella was, but she looked too much like an American tourist and/or a ninja assassin depending on the outfit, so we picked up some local clothes for her.

“I look awful in this,” she said grumpily, emerging from the bathroom dressed in a colorful skirt and loose cotton blouse, with sandals on her feet. She didn’t look awful in it—I sincerely doubted there was anything she could look awful in—but she did look a little bit more like a resident.

“You look fine,” I insisted. “Iza?”

“Look fine,” she agreed between bites of mushroom. Iza was still getting over the fact that Clara was not actually located in New York, and was probably still a little angry with me even though I had no control over this.

“I am going to burn these as soon as this is over,” Mirella said.

“If you want. Just don’t do it on the airplane.”

She grumped back into the bathroom and I thought again about what I was asking her to do and why it was that I trusted her enough to involve her at all. Tchekhy’s message—which I had not shared with her—said to trust nobody, and that presumably included Heintz, and by extension the person he hired to keep an eye on my back. But while I had known Heintz for a while, I didn’t have any trouble with the idea that I shouldn’t trust him. Mirella I had known for less than a week and I was already getting her involved in a game of espionage.

“Hey, who pays you?” I asked her through the door. Possibly because the question was so peculiar, she opened the door again. She had unbuttoned the blouse already, intending to try on another set of clothes. We’d bought four outfits, as I was under the mistaken impression that the shopping was something she was enjoying. She still had on a bra underneath so this wasn’t nearly as exciting as it could have been.

“I’m paid by the security firm. You know that.”

“Yes, but how does it work exactly?”

“Your Mr. Heintz pays my firm, and my firm pays me. I’m well compensated, if that’s your concern. The clothing isn’t so bad that I’m going to file for hazard pay.”

“You
do
like the clothes.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She closed the door again.

“All right, but let’s say I wanted to hire you directly, how would I do that?” I asked through the door.

“I thought you weren’t in any real danger.”

“I’m not.”

“Good, because if I have this correctly you’re sending me to meet with the man who shot at you, and I’m going to have nothing to protect me but itchy cotton.”

“You’ll have knives on you, don’t even pretend you won’t.”

She opened the door again and emerged looking better than she had in the last outfit by a wide margin. The blouse was bright yellow and the skirt was a mix of light blue and green. Summer colors. She had her hair pulled back, which made her European ancestry pop out through her cheekbones.
 

“This isn’t so bad,” she decided. “I’m going to take the difficulty you’re having forming words right now to mean you agree with me. Now, why do you ask?”

“I’d be more comfortable paying you directly, that’s all.”

“That’s not all. You’re keeping secrets again. But all right. Do you mean pay the security firm directly rather than through your banker friend?”

“No, just pay you directly myself.”

“This arrangement isn’t unheard of. But let me repeat myself. I’m very well compensated.”

“I understand. How about after this is over you make a couple of phone calls, and I’ll put a few million into an account for you, and we’ll go from there?”

“A few . . .” She fixed me with a look that was both devastating and a little scary. I decided to be turned on by it, even though I probably should have been thinking about defending myself. “You understand my services don’t include
that,
no matter what you want to pay me.”

“It’s not like that.”

“You take me off to this nice city and dress me up, pretend you have an important job for me to do . . .”

“I swear.”

“Because if it turns out you’re some kind of insane kinky lunatic . . .”

“Really. Ask Iza.”

“The naked pixie would know from kink.”

“Oh, just make the calls.”

She huffed back into the bathroom and closed the door. “You’re going to explain yourself one day,” she said after a minute or two.

“What do you want explained?”

“Today? Today I want to know why you’re the only wealthy man on Earth who legitimately doesn’t care about money.”

“I have enough not to care all that much about it. Isn’t that normal?”

She emerged wearing pieces of the second outfit mixed with elements of a third outfit. The combination made her look positively dowdy.

“I liked it better a minute ago,” I said.

“You want me to not be memorable, so this will do. And no. It’s not normal. Rich people care more about money than poor people do. You spend money like a man with no heirs and six months to live.”

“Well, you’re half right.”

*
 
*
 
*

Mirella visited the grave the following morning, armed with a smartphone, a pixie, and for all I know two-dozen blades. It didn’t take long before I received news from her in the form of a total lack of news.

“There’s nothing here,” she said over the aforementioned smartphone. I’d given her the precise location of the headstone from memory, and so long as there had been no significant geographic upheaval in the interim, I expected the directions to be accurate. And of course she knew what name to look for, even though the writing was in Cyrillic.