Immortal at the Edge of the World (12 page)

Getting out of the hotel room without anybody knowing I’d left was challenging, too, because even if I dressed in different clothing it wasn’t going to be hard figuring out who I was if I was the only guy entering or leaving the room. We were also several floors up with no fire escape, so there was really only one way in or out.

But it turns out if you order enough food from room service—and I always stay in hotels with room service because people bringing food to your bedroom is really the best thing about hotels, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise—they send a big rolling cart, and you can ask them to leave it if you’re nice enough about it. And if you order all that food right when the kitchen closes you can keep the cart all night.

So at around six the next morning, Mirella pushed the cart to the elevator, took it down a couple of flights, and left it in a hallway. She then returned to the room and complained loudly to me about having to do that. She had to yell because that was the only way she could be heard over the shower that I was surely standing in at the time. Then she closed the hotel room door. An hour later a staff member found the strangely heavy cart in the hallway and wheeled it down to the kitchen, and that’s when I got out and left the building through the staff entrance.

For the next three hours I wandered the streets of Tbilisi, picking up different bits of clothing along the way while speaking half-decent Georgian—spending lari instead of US dollars—and doing everything I could to shake anybody who might still be following. Then I took to the hillside and climbed up to the fortress the hard way: through the woods. It was easily the most unpleasant way to get there, but I’m used to walking through forests so it wasn’t as awful as it could have been. And it was a decent way to guarantee nobody was following me on foot.

The section I’d been directed to find was one that had been closed off due to safety concerns. I was inclined to trust the warning signs, since even the parts of the place that were considered safe looked like they were a loud sneeze away from collapsing. As I stepped over the low barricade and climbed the narrow steps to a particularly alarming tower, I could only hope my friend knew more about the stability of the place than whoever owned the signs did.

The view was really nice. I was alone for more than an hour, looking at the city and wondering what it must have been like for one of the caliph’s soldiers to stand in that spot waiting for an attack that probably never came. The fortress was impregnable for the time, but you didn’t have to attack the fortress to win the city so it didn’t matter much. In the end, it was an earthquake that took down Narikala, not an army.

“You were not followed,” Tchekhy said, stepping beside me. I’d heard him coming, and felt confident that he was not in a mood to push me off the edge. Otherwise I might have stepped away before he’d gotten that close.

“That’s not a question.”

“No, it is a statement. I watched you climb, and nobody climbed after you.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Yes, well.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Perhaps on another day we will rely upon your instinctual risk assessment skills. Come.”

I followed him down a flight of steps and up a second flight until we were in a small space that would have been for archers if we were under siege and people still used arrows for defensive purposes. I kind of miss those days, if only because an arrow in flight is both beautiful and fairly easy to get out of the way of if you’re looking for it. A hail of gunfire is much harder to evade and not nearly as picturesque. Noisier, too.

Tchekhy had two chairs set up for us next to a cooler. He sat himself down slowly in one of the chairs, which was alarming to witness, honestly. He had never been a small man, but he always had a certain nimbleness to his movements. That agility was largely absent now, and I didn’t know if that was due to age or infirmity or some combination of the two. But this was a man I’d known since he was a child, so no matter what, he was going to appear much older than he should be, to me.

He opened the cooler and pulled out two beers, extending one to me, which I took while taking the other chair.

“Here we have privacy,” he said.

“We had a view before.”

“We did, yes. But if we can see, so we can be seen. And I do not want to be seen.”

“Are we worrying about satellites right now?”

“We are worrying about everything. Satellites, missiles directed by satellites, eavesdropping equipment deployed by drones. All is on the table right now.”

“So we’re going full-on paranoid. Good to know. I thought you were dead, by the way.”

He laughed. “No you did not.”

“I did, for like an hour.”

“Then you had started drinking earlier in the day than usual, my friend. I was concerned I was being too obvious.”

I had already finished my first beer and was reaching for a second. I find myself drinking more heavily around Tchekhy than just about any other human, because almost without fail he has something to say that makes me want to get very drunk very quickly. I’ve often wondered if he had this effect on everyone, or just me.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“With the shop?”

“Yes, start there.”

“Actually, it begins earlier.”

“Super. Begin wherever it begins. We have some time, right? Unless this place is about to collapse around us.”

“No, the
Do Not Enter
signs are mine. This room might outlive you. And we have all the time we need unless one of my compatriots below alerts me otherwise.”

“Or until the beer runs out.”

“Yes,” he said, taking a long sip of his own. “I am embarrassed to say this story begins with my getting hacked.”

I blinked emphatically. “I’m sorry,
you
got hacked?”

I don’t know very much about computers, and I probably never will, but what I do know is that my Russian friend is one of those people everyone thinks probably exists out there in the world, but nobody expects to actually meet because what they do is too fantastic. It is true that most everything nowadays runs on computers, and it is also true that there are people out there living off this fact, and it is further true that Tchekhy is one such person. It’s likely he hasn’t earned an honest income his entire life, paid a bill for anything, or put down a single penny for taxes in any country. I don’t believe that legally he even exists. He doesn’t get hacked, because he’s the guy you hire to do that job.

“
Da.
I was as surprised as you.”

“Who was it?”

He shrugged. “I thought I knew all the people who were potentially capable of doing such a thing, but over the last few weeks I have concluded only that it was none of them.”

“The last few weeks?”

“This was some time ago. I noticed a modest energy spike in a subroutine on one of my servers and decided to figure out what was causing it. It was so small it could have been a broken code or a shorted wire, so I was surprised to discover it was neither of those things—someone had snuck a self-propagating program into my hard drive.”

“You know I don’t understand any of this, right?” I said, grabbing beer number three.

“I will put it more simply. A Trojan horse was inserted into my computer, and the Trojans inside were searching for information in my files, bundling what they found, and transmitting it in small packets.”

“I’m sorry if you think that was simpler.” I knew the Trojans and actually fought in that war, so while he might have imagined this was an analogy that would have worked for me, all I could picture were tiny men poking a circuit board with a sharp stick. It was not a useful image.

“I isolated them as soon as they were discovered, so they could still collect data but not transmit. I had to find out what they were looking for before I destroyed them. What I learned was that they were looking for you.”

“The tiny Trojans were.”

“In this scenario, yes.”

This didn’t seem like a huge deal to me. “I’m not that hard to find right now.”

“Yes, you are living a very noisy existence of late, I have noticed. We will talk about this presently, but first you should know that this rogue program did not find anything important—some of your past IDs, but not much else. I would say this is because I have purged records on you, but truthfully I had very little to purge. You have no parentage or national origin that anybody would recognize, so anyone looking into my files to figure out who you really are would be stymied most thoroughly. You are not in any real legal sense a person.”

“So this isn’t why you torched the shop?”

“It is the beginning of the why.”

Tchekhy took a deep breath and another beer and fidgeted in his seat as if he was suddenly uncomfortable, and maybe that was exactly correct.

“I had to destroy the shop because of the dead man inside,” he said finally.

“Oh. Well, that’s a good reason.”

“I thought so, yes.”

“Who was this man?”

“I do not truly know. It was the second time he had appeared. The first time he presented an above-average counterfeit of a government identification badge that claimed he was FBI.”

“FBI? Yeah, it probably was a counterfeit.”

“I know it was because I examined it, but why do you say this?”

“I have a guy in the Bureau I can trust. I know you’re about to remind me not to trust anybody, but I have good reason. If the Feds were looking for me again he’d have tipped me off.”

“Well this man, whoever he was, knew a good deal more about
me
than I was fully comfortable with, but he attempted to use that information primarily as leverage to obtain details about you that were not readily evident from any of my files.”

“What sort of things?”

“The usual. What is your real name, where do you come from, where does your money come from? Who is your family? He wanted to know not only who you are, but how to get at you. I, of course, did not answer.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?” I asked. “When it was happening, I mean?”

“I did not know who he was or what he represented, and I further did not know what he already knew about you. It seemed likely the entire point of his showing up and saying these things was to inspire me to contact you. So I did not do this.”

“There are less direct ways to reach me. I think you already proved that.”

“
Da
, but I thought I could unearth who he truly was first. I imagined if it were knowable, I had the tools to know it. I was mistaken. I knew nothing more about him when he returned a second time than I had when he first visited. This was the same morning you came to see me, and he turned up because you were in New York.”

“He knew? Nobody knew. It was a last minute trip.”

“But as you say, you are not difficult to find right now. You are an elephant in the tall grass, Efgeniy. You understand I knew you were in town within hours of your arrival, yes?”

“But you have people.”

“I have one or two, but I was not camping out at the airport in anticipation. You say nobody knew you were in New York, but you have a flight crew on that plane of yours, and you landed at an airport with staff, and you were driven in cars steered by other people, and you checked into a hotel staffed by dozens upon dozens more. Everything you are doing right now creates a ripple. Why is this?”

“I’m working on a project.”

“Does this project involve being taken hostage for a ransom? Or attracting the attention of some local dictator?”

“No, it involves being obviously rich and using those riches to gain access to places I might not otherwise be able to gain access to.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Sure. I’m looking for the faery kingdom.”

“If you do not wish to answer you can simply say so.”

“Anyway, so the guy turned up again the same morning I was in town.”

“He said they were expecting you to make a visit and had some demands of me along the lines of placing a tracking device on your person and obtaining travel information and a great many other details I was no more interested in providing at that time than I had been on the previous occasion.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You are welcome, although I believe I acted with both our interests in mind. This time his threats were more specific and while I did not for a moment believe this man had the full force of the US government behind him, he had a dangerous level of knowledge regarding both of us. I decided that the only reasonable solution was to invite him into my sound-proofed basement and shoot him in the face.”

“That’s . . . very decisive of you,” I said. There have been conversations between us in the past where the topic of murder came up, but I was usually the one playing the role of murderer, for one reason or another. I always knew if it came to it, Tchekhy would pull the necessary triggers, but it was still a little surprising to hear him speak so frankly.

“It was obvious then that the shop had to go, but I was uncertain if the dead man on my floor was alone or not, so I rigged my incendiaries to a remote and left him there.”

“You weren’t seen leaving?”