Immortal at the Edge of the World (26 page)

“Bodyguard. Right. Why don’t you take care of your driver and come in?”

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Clara’s estate was very large and very old, and probably had belonged to someone whose family is now under racketeering charges somewhere in the United States. She bought it with her own money, as she happened to be fairly wealthy after collecting on a bounty that had been on my head. If she didn’t have the money I’d have given it to her, but I’m pretty sure she liked it better this way.

We didn’t get much of a tour, stopping at the first common room on the other side of the front door. This could have been because she didn’t want us to see the rest of the house, but I think it was mostly that she noticed how uncomfortable I looked standing upright.

“Jesus Christ, Adam, what happened to you? Another demon?”

“No, I have her for demon control,” I said. “This was from a goblin’s sword.”

I lifted my shirt to show off the wound. After it healed it was going to leave a nasty scar, which was okay. Scars made for great stories, especially when picking up women.

Clara looked suitably impressed and a little concerned. “Maybe you should sit down. For a month or two. Goblins now?”

“Yeah, they’re fun. You’ve already met one.”

Clara was stridently ignoring Mirella, who was taking being ignored in stride. She seemed too preoccupied checking the angles in the house for any potential dangers to worry about a social
faux pas
. I was still wondering where the house staff was.

We sat down at a table that had the kind of sturdy, used look one came to expect from handcrafted wood. Mirella chose to remain standing and circle the room suspiciously. Iza perched on Clara’s shoulder, making a cute buzzing sound I forgot she used to make all the time back when Clara lived with us.

“So why don’t you tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into this time?” Clara asked. “Now that I’ve been dragged into it.”

“I’m not involved in anything,” I said. “Maybe you should start by telling
me
how you have a son I never knew about?”

She sighed grandly, a sound I was deeply familiar with. “I have a son. There, now you know.”

“Clara . . .”

“No, this isn’t about him, this is about what you’re into and what you’re going to do to get him back for me, and that’s all. I am sorry I didn’t tell you about him before, but we weren’t really talking, were we?”

“Where are your people?” Mirella asked. She had made it to the far end of the room and was standing under a security camera. Every few seconds the light on the camera blinked on for a half second and then off again. “Your staff, I mean?”

Clara looked at her with a touch of menace in her eyes. “You speak.”

“Yes, quite a few languages. Where are they? This place looks like a fortress, but you have no soldiers on the walls.”

“I sent them all packing when they let someone take my son. I assumed it was done with help on the inside.” She looked at me. “You were serious; she’s really your bodyguard.”

“Yes.”

“How’d she let you get cut open like that?”

“I was killing something more dangerous than a goblin,” Mirella said. “Has there been a ransom demand?”

“No, I don’t think that’s what this is about.”

“You’re a wealthy woman living alone with a young child. Ransom is the most obvious conclusion. But you don’t think so. You reached for
his
number first, didn’t you?”

“It’s
about
him.”

“And you know this because the men who took your son told you this.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. When will they be arriving?”

“Adam, I don’t like her.”

“Don’t turn to him,” Mirella said. “He already figured this out, he just doesn’t care to confront you about it yet. It’s my job to care, so when are they coming?”

Clara glared at her, but didn’t answer.

“Is there actually a child?” I asked.

“Oh my God! How can you even ask me that?”

“I’m just saying I didn’t know, and that’s a big enough surprise to plant the notion. What’s his name?”

She looked like she was going to cry, and I immediately regretted this line of questioning, which was probably why it was a good thing Mirella was there. I’m really terrible when it comes to thinking straight around women I’m involved with, even after that involvement has ended.

“His name is Paul, and you didn’t know about him because I didn’t want you to. I kept him here because I didn’t want anyone else to know about him either, because I was afraid that one day someone who wanted something from
you
would find us. And that’s just what happened, isn’t it? So what did you do to put us in danger, Adam?”

Mirella leaned on the table, and to make her point abundantly clear she had her sword in her hand. “When. Are. They coming?”

“They’re already here, dammit.”

“Thank you.” Mirella sheathed her sword. To me, she said, “If we want to get this woman’s son back we need to speak to the people who took him, do you agree?”

I didn’t answer because I saw Mirella look up suddenly and put her hand back on the hilt of her sword. Someone new had entered the room.

“My goodness but you are a difficult man to motivate,” a man said from the doorway behind me. Mirella hadn’t killed him, so he probably had no weapon or if he did it wasn’t pointed at me.

I could have turned around to see who was there but every time I twisted like that my stitches behaved badly, so instead I waited until he walked around the table and into my view. What I saw was a slight man, shorter than average but strangely graceful. He looked youthful, with slight wrinkling around the eyes suggesting he was in his early thirties. He had a round face, cropped brown hair, and a nice suit. Aside from that suit, which appeared to be tailored, he was extraordinarily ordinary. It was as if he strived to be the person described as
average
in as many metrics as possible.

This extremely average man sat down at the opposite end of the table as if he were joining a business meeting he had called himself.

He began by addressing Mirella. “You can take your hand off that sword. I’m not going to be doing anything violent.” To me, he said, “Your goblin is very impressive. I look at her and honestly, I don’t know whether I should be hiring her or trying to fuck her. Do you have this problem?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

His eyes took in everyone else in the room, slowly, settling on Iza, who was still sitting on Clara’s shoulder. “Why, look at you,” he said almost to himself. “You must be his goblin-killer.”

“H’lo,” Iza greeted.

He looked at me. “It speaks.”

I was uninterested in explaining the taxonomy of pixies. “I asked you who you are.”

“All right, we can start there. I’m Mr. Smith. That’s not who I actually am, but that’s what you can call me. I could call
you
Mr. Justinian, but I think I’ll stick to Adam, if that’s all right. Unless you have a different name you feel like going with today.”

“Adam is fine. What do you want, Mr. Smith?”

He smiled and held the smile for about two beats longer than was comfortable for anybody. “From you? I want a lot of things.”

“You’re CIA?”

“I’m Mr. Smith. I think we went through this already.”

“All right. Mr. Smith of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Adam. Who I
am
is not as important as what I
want
. I think you were on the right track a minute ago.”

“Then answer the question.”

“I’m getting there, but c’mon, let’s get to know each other a little bit. Sure, CIA, why not? They’re in the mix, but I don’t want to talk about them. I’ve been looking at you for a very long time, so this is really exciting for me. Don’t take all the fun out of it.”

I really, really didn’t like this man. I was about ready to let Mirella kill him. “I just found out about you, so I’m less enthusiastic,” I said. “You understand.”

“I do! Actually, you’ve found out about a lot of new things and people recently, haven’t you?” He was looking at Clara when he said this. Clara was not being all that forthcoming, expression-wise.

I hate going into something like this knowing nothing about the person at the other end of the table. Even when I sat down with Gorrgon Talus I knew a little something about him. True, I didn’t know he was a djinn and it was a trap, but I did know he was someone from whom such behavior might be expected.

I had nothing on Smith at all, other than that he took Clara’s son, a son about whom I also knew nothing. It was actually sort of frustrating because as much as I wanted to figure out Smith, what I
really
wanted to know was who Paul’s father was. It turns out I’m the kind of guy who gets jealous when people have intercourse with my exes. I’m surprised, too.

“Exactly how
long
have you been looking at me?” I asked Smith.

“Hard to say. Sometime shortly after the death of Robert Grindel, I think. Him, and fifty-odd other people. That sort of mess sends ripples.”

Somehow it always came back to Grindel. “You mean, through the intelligence community.”

“I mean through a lot of places. Grindel wasn’t what I’d call a visionary, but he had one good idea, and that and the right connections can do a lot for a person. Now to
you
the people backing him financially were nameless, faceless entities too far removed to worry about, so you never dug deeply enough to see them for what they were. I’m talking about governments, Adam. Governments and some of the largest corporate interests in the world. There was a lot of money riding on the notion of medically induced immortality.”

He was actually wrong about some of that because I had asked Heintz to look into the finances, which led to a venture capital group. The last time I checked I was one of the investors in that group. It was true, though, that I didn’t know who the other investors were. Also, the last time my banker and I had discussed them, they had been chasing something with potential military applications. That had been a year ago, and it was probably my fault for not following up and maybe getting some more details.

Smith continued. “Of course, most of those financiers didn’t know how Grindel was going to deliver what he promised. Most of them didn’t know about
you
, in other words.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“We agree! The fewer people the better, eh?” He winked at me when he said this, and I kind of wanted to kill him myself then.

“I’ve always felt that way, yes.”

“So let me tell you a story. Seems that after that little bloodbath you orchestrated out in the desert, one of the ripples it sent out found me and my people. Unlike you, we were interested almost immediately in who Grindel was in bed with and how much fucking was going on in that bed, and what everybody expected the baby to look like.”

I was guessing there was more involved than just sniffing around, since I’d tried that. Perhaps government clearance was the thing Heintz and I had been missing.

“Did that include the person who was bothering my friend in New York?” I asked.

“The pawnshop? Yes, that was Martin, or . . . well, I called him Martin. He was legit CIA. Good man, kind of pushy, a bit of an ass. I probably should have sent someone with more finesse to do that, but between you and me somebody was going to end up shooting Martin one day anyway. Next time you talk to your Russian phantom, you tell him no hard feelings for me. I might even hire him someday. My tech guy speaks very highly of him.”

“I think the less you know about him the happier he will be.”

Smith nodded. “Fair. We pay really well, though. Anyhoo, so we wanted to find Grindel’s moneymen, and that wasn’t easy. Clara here did a
very
good job of dumping the hard drive data at the base, and you bought up everything else Grindel owned and destroyed most of it, so it took a while. But, as I said, these things cause ripples, and sometimes the absence of a thing can cause ripples, too. So when a guy heading a billion-dollar project dies suddenly and all the research that cost those billions is destroyed—or walks away—that void is filled by people in nice suits asking uncomfortable questions and waving large expense accounts in the air to get answers to those questions. We listened to those questions.”

I was beginning to think we were never getting to the point, or maybe that Smith had no point to get to at all. I was also wondering if Clara had any alcohol lying around.

“Why don’t you skip to the end?” I asked.

“I’ll get there, I promise. Let me tell you about the surveillance video you’ve been spending the last few months looking over. I’m sure it’s no surprise by now that I was the one who sent it to you.”

“Not anymore.”

“I knew if I sent it that way you’d give the credit to your federal friend. If you are concerned, by the way, that he knew anything about me at all, you needn’t be.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Good, I’m glad. A man should trust his friends. Agent Lycos actually did know nothing about that footage, nor did the FBI as a whole because those guys, I swear, they need a map to find their own assholes. No offense intended.”