Immortal at the Edge of the World (11 page)

I had also started to tell her not to go directly to the grave, but to wander around and not spend too much time examining the headstone, and all of the other things you tell someone committing espionage in your stead. But it was quickly apparent that in offering such instruction I was insulting her gravely, so I stopped.

“No markings or notes or packages?” I asked.

“No. I’m not stupid. I looked for those things. There’s nothing chalked on the stone either, and the only newly upturned dirt was upturned to plant flowers. I had your pixie helping and she was also unable to find anything.”

“Yes, but Iza thinks you’re talking to your hand right now,” I said. “Go back to the grave and take a picture of it for me.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“I believe you. Take a picture and send it to me anyway.”

Ten minutes later I had three pictures from different angles around the grave. I was able to confirm that she was in fact looking at the correct stone, and beyond that I saw exactly the same nothing she did.

The flowers looked fresh, though.

“Are there flowers on the other gravesites?” I asked her.

“Some, yes. They all look like they were put in at around the same time.”

I looked at the flowers again. They didn’t look like anything special: orange lilies, a white flower I think was called a Siberian something, and a yellow flower that looked sort of familiar.

I was about to tell Mirella to get a close-up of the yellow flowers when I remembered I could zoom in on the photo on the phone. I’m surprised the modern age hasn’t caused my head to explode yet.

“It’s the yellow flower,” I said after looking at them more closely.

“What is the yellow flower?”

“The message.”

“That’s a terrible message.”

“It’s probably attached to the stem or the root.”

“And you know this how?”

“It’s not a local flower,” I said, which was true but it wasn’t why. The name of the yellow flower was Immortelle. I wasn’t prepared to explain to Mirella why that was significant.

“So now you’d like me to go to the gravesite of the father of a man who we know has a high-powered rifle and dig up the flowers planted there in memory of the deceased, in the middle of a sunny day in a crowded public cemetery?”

“Yes, please. You can plant the flower again after you’ve found whatever’s attached to it.”

“I’m going to hell for this.”

“We can keep each other company there.”

Another few minutes passed before I heard from her again.

“You’re doing this yourself next time,” she complained. “I’m covered in dirt and an old man shouted at me in a language I’m unfamiliar with. I nearly slit his throat just to shut him up. And your pixie won’t stop buzzing around my head like she’s on fire.”

“But you have something.”

“I have something. There was a small waterproof packet tied to a string on the stem of one of the flowers. Would you like me to open it?”

“Please.”
 

A short pause. “Honestly, you boys with your games.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a cell phone. He couldn’t just call you?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t think that’s an ordinary phone.”

“Enh, all right. I’ll bring you your toy.”

“Thank you. But don’t come directly.”

“Why not?”

“If Iza is buzzing around you like that it means you’re being followed.”

*
 
*
 
*

It was three hours before Mirella made it back to the hotel room, with Iza circling around behind her.

“We are no longer being followed,” Mirella said. This caused Iza to buzz about faster. “The pixie disagrees.”

I had been sitting at the window with the drapes drawn, peeking through the thin curtain at the buildings around us to see who was looking back at me. I didn’t identify any kind of pattern in the window occupants, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. I wasn’t sure what to think.

Because we were in a terribly old building we were dealing with thick old walls that were not soundproof in any technologically modern sense, but which were heavy-duty enough to make it unlikely anybody in one of the rooms next to us could press up a glass on the wall—or whatever today’s equivalent would be—and listen in effectively. We had no adjoining doors either.

But again, that didn’t mean nobody was listening. It just meant I didn’t know how they were doing it.

“What did you see, Iza?”

“Men,” she said.

“How many?”

“Lots.” Talking to a pixie is an unnerving experience sometimes. I’m mostly used to it, but I imagine it looked a lot like I was talking to a spirit or something because one only ever addresses the air formerly occupied by the being one is addressing. And her words tended to come from every direction at once.

“This is absurd,” Mirella said. “I know how to shake a tail.”

“I’m sure you do. Iza, are they here in the hotel?”

“Uh-huh. Waited.”

“They waited for you to come back?”

“Waited.”

“Well, that’s your explanation,” I said to my increasingly aggravated bodyguard.

“That’s no explanation.”

“You may very well have successfully lost whoever was following you at the cemetery, but they weren’t tracking you because of Tchekhy, they were tracking you because of me. They must have been here at the hotel already.”

She shook her head and took a turn at the window. It’s one of those things people do when they find out they’re being followed, as if a sneak peek through a curtain will be miraculously illuminating. “I’m very good at what I do, Mr. Justinian. If we were being followed from the airport I’d have known it from the airport.” She closed the curtain. “Paranoia is something new for you. Everything you’ve done to this point has been loud and attention getting. You don’t act like someone who cares about any of this.”

“I didn’t, but now I do. Did you bring the phone?”

“Of course I did.” She pulled the device from her pocket and handed it to me. “Provided it’s actually a phone at all.”

“It is.”

“It has no key pad.”

The device in question was a flip phone with a single button and a small screen. It looked like the sort of futuristic device someone in the 1960s would make in anticipation of what this kind of technology would eventually look like.

“If you want to know why I’m suddenly acting paranoid, this is why,” I sort of half-explained. “If he’s using this, we have a serious problem.”

Mirella stared at me levelly with a cold expression I was growing used to and starting to like a bit more than I probably should have. “You are not going to explain this in a way that will make sense, are you?”

“Not right now, no.”

“Fine. I’m going to go wash this city off of me.”

She marched to the shower, which was actually perfect because I needed all the background noise I could get before using the phone in my hand.

I flipped it open.

A little while ago, a man named Robert Grindel put a bounty on me. The men—and other creatures—he hired all received a phone like the one in my hand. According to Tchekhy, the phones used an advanced form of encryption that was essentially unbreakable. So in a way it actually
was
a futuristic device, in the sense that it was the only truly secure electronic communication method in the world. That I was aware of.

They were also supposedly one-use-only devices, and one of the two I’d given to my Russian friend had already been used. But he’d had a long time to fiddle with them.

I hit the button and waited. It didn’t ring. Instead I heard a series of clicks, and then a familiar voice.

“Who is the girl?” Tchekhy asked without preamble.

“It’s good to hear from you, too.”

“Yes, yes. Who is the girl?”

“My personal bodyguard.”

“I told you to trust no one, and you send this girl and your insect to the drop site. I should hang up and leave you to your fate.”

“Oh come on, that’s not fair. You know better than anyone that was the safest play. Now what’s the problem?”

“Right now my problem is that you are not listening to my advice.”

I had never heard him so agitated before. Historically, I’m the one upset about something and he’s the person I call if I need to calm down and figure out what the hell just happened. He once spent a very patient hour on the phone with me to explain how a DVR worked.

“I trust her,” I said. “She’s okay.”

He laughed. “Yes, because you putting your trust in a pretty girl is something we have learned to rely upon as sound practice.”

“That is so unfair I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Very well, we will put it aside for now. Tell me how many are watching you?”

“I don’t know. Iza seems to think a lot are, but she still thinks cars are a kind of animal. She might have been noticing people whose interest doesn’t extend beyond the fact that we look like Westerners.”

“But you do not think so.”

“I don’t. I think she’s probably right.”

“We are going to assume they are listening to you right now.”

“But they can’t hear us on these phones, right?”

“They can’t hear me, but assuming there are devices in the room, they can hear your responses perfectly well.” I’d thought of this already, actually, which was why I hadn’t said his name aloud. “We need to speak face-to-face, in a location I can control.”

“Where?”

“I’m in the city. Can you follow instructions without repeating them or writing them down?”

Now he was just being mean. “Go ahead,” I said.

“All right. Here is what you do. Step one, don’t bring the girl.”

Chapter Seven

“I don’t understand how he can know so much about language and philosophy and still manage to be so stupid,” Hsu said after a particularly frustrating evening, in reference to our friend Xuangang.

“He never looked up from his books,” I said. “It’s hard to see what’s happening around you if you aren’t looking.”

*
 
*
 
*

When I first heard of it, the fortress was called Shuris-Tsihe. It’s called Narikala now, and it’s no longer much of a fortress. It’s more like a series of walls and a couple of towers staring down at Tbilisi from atop a distant hill. Shuris-Tsihe occasionally defended the city when such a thing was necessary, but more often housed the soldiers who could exit the fortress and defend the city, as that was a much more practical function. (Fixed battlements have their uses, but are limited by a total lack of mobility. Armies can go around them, in other words. Like the French Maginot Line, they are only as useful as the enemy is uncreative.) Tbilisi rested along a couple of profitable trade routes: By land it connected the Southern silk roads with everything north of the Caucasus, and by sea everything coming through Constantinople across the Black Sea and headed eastward. This meant it had to be defended somewhat often because there was money to be made there, and influence to be applied, and power to be used.

Tbilisi’s problem, historically, was a microcosm of everything wrong with the middle of the European/Asian theater for about the last two thousand years. Geographic access meant profitability, but profit led to envy. Access also meant vulnerability, so anyone with a half-decent army and the element of surprise stood a chance of taking a city or two here and there. Constantinople was a rare exception because its location was uniquely accessible and also nearly impregnable thanks to some very impressively high walls and an extremely defendable port. And it was still sacked two or three times.

This is really why the United States and Japan are so economically strong. I’m not even kidding. The only way Japan is getting taken by an invading army is if that army is also Godzilla, and the United States is never going to see a serious threat from Mexico or Canada. Whereas a country like Turkey or Uzbekistan or Poland can wake up one day and find one of its neighbors has gotten all warlike and suddenly they’re getting occupied or renamed. And this used to happen every week in the Middle Ages, for about a thousand years.

I’d never been in the fortress before, which is sort of amazing considering it’s the oldest thing in the region that isn’t me. But most of the time when I was in Tbilisi I was down in the city either stopping to trade or passing through with goods, and if doing that ever landed me in the fortress it would have meant I had done something terribly wrong. So I was glad the first time I saw it up close was when Tchekhy directed me to the top of one of the towers.

There were some nice public walking paths that led from the city to the historic sites like Narikala, and I didn’t take any of them, which was really too bad because finding a decent pair of hiking boots had proven impossible, and that was what I needed.

Buying new clothes had been the first step. Just like Mirella, I had to try and go native, and that meant changing all of my clothing from head to toe, including my shoes. Anything less than that would have been unacceptable, not just because the possibility existed that I might be recognized because of my footwear, but because electronic tracking devices are real things that exist somewhere. This being true, Tchekhy assumed that they were definitely attached to my person and had to be shed before I could do anything else.