Immortal at the Edge of the World (27 page)

“Sure.”

“I stopped by that facility a year after all the bodies were picked up and found that footage all by myself in a couple of hours. I still can’t believe they missed it.”

I made a point of checking in on the compound from time to time. It’s out in the middle of nothing in particular so it never had any value as anything aside from a military base or medical facility. I knew nobody was using it, and that after all these years the crime scene tape, though tattered and occasionally replaced, was still across the chained gate at the front. I never thought seriously about going back there to look for leftover evidence because I assumed the FBI had some basic standard of competence, and Mike sent me everything they had found.

Smith continued. “The FBI did find the hard drives in the main building, destroyed, but nobody bothered to check the security equipment, which was on a separate system and housed in another building. That’s really too bad, because
everything
that happened that night was recorded there, and it is
gripping
. Speaking as someone who has read the reports of the investigators and seen their utter bafflement over your mess, it pained me to know that everything could have been explained if they’d just checked the right computer. I very nearly sent it to them just so they could sleep at night. But maybe that would have made things worse. Who wants to write in an official report that a vampire did it?”

Something occurred to me. “You wanted me to see it because you wanted me to find out how she did it.”

“That’s spectacular thinking, Adam, and right on the nose. Actually, it’s still a little more complicated than that because the people I’m working with are just as interested as ever in this immortality thing you’ve got going on. They seem to think if they put you and Clara here under enough microscopes they can work out the details without ever having to borrow anything from your vanishing mystery woman. And who am I to say? I’m no scientist. But I’m not interested in that
right now
. In another year, sure, or whenever they’re finally done with Grindel’s corpse.”

I must have registered surprise when he said this because he reacted with a smile. I had gone through a lot to destroy all the research in that compound, but it lived on in Clara. And I had never thought about it before, but of course it was also in the dead body of Bob Grindel. I should have burned the corpse.

“So yes,” he said, “I sent you the security footage because I know you’re a curious man when properly motivated, and if I was going to find out how she did it, my best method aside from asking her myself was to get you to figure it out.”

“How do you know I don’t already know how she did it?”

“That’s a question, isn’t it? I asked myself that many times. But the more I looked into your recent history, the more it looked to me like the actions of someone who is just as stuck on this mortal plane as any of us. You didn’t use this skill to escape Grindel, and honestly the expression on your face when she first disappeared right in front of you was really priceless. A few years later you were staring at what sounds like
nearly
certain death in the form of an angry wood nymph, and if you could have vanished then I’m sure you would have.”

Clara looked at me. “A nymph?”

“Dryad. Not nearly as awesome as it sounds. Long story.”

“But I had my doubts, still,” Smith continued. “I sent you off on this little quest, and at first you seemed to be right on point. You saw that physicist, for instance. Then you spent months running around the world checking out things in museums, and for a while I thought you were still on the trail. Now I think you were just collecting old letters from friends and retrieving some things you used to own and consorting with the occasional criminal. And maybe enjoying the company of this little number over here.”

He gestured to Mirella. She hadn’t moved from her position at the back of the room. It was the only part of the room that enabled her to see anyone entering from the hall and anyone outside through the window. She ignored his obvious attempt to annoy her.

“But I couldn’t ignore the possibility that you
had
figured it out, especially after you seemed to disappear from a hotel room in Tbilisi for hours, according to my sources. Admittedly, these were not the best sources I could buy, but they were the ones available at the time. My best were in Istanbul, where you were supposed to have been going.”

“The attack at the museum,” Mirella said. “It
was
a test.”

“Yes,” Smith said. “They weren’t there to kill you, Adam, but they had to make you think they were.” He looked at Mirella. “How’d they do?”

“The demon was very convincing,” she said. “The goblin less so.”

“Yes, well. They were allowed to kill
you
. It was encouraged. One would think a man bereft of his expensive bodyguard would be more prepared to vanish to save his own life.”

“Except I still don’t know how she did it,” I said. “And unless she turns up again I’ll probably never know.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Smith said. “Because not only do I remain convinced that you are the best person available to find this out for me, right now any hope that Clara has of seeing little Paul again hinges upon my being right.”

“That seems rather unfair,” I said.

“Life is not incredibly fair. I’m sure you’ve learned by now. Some people are given the gift of immortality. Some people are born sterile. Some live tragically short lives due to the actions or inactions of people they have never met. That’s just the way the world works sometimes. As it happens, there are billions of dollars and several government organizations interested in the skill set displayed by this woman and you are the closest thing we have to her, so you had better do everything you can to figure it out.”

At that moment I felt a little stupid. Heintz had told me the investment group was looking at something with a military application and I should have followed up, but immortality is not a military weapon. Mine isn’t, at least, as the wound across my stomach proved. Eve’s trick
was
a weapon, though. I had just never seen it that way before.

“All right,” I said.

“All right? Does that mean yes?”

“It means I figured out how to do it.” I was lying, obviously.

“Good! Then show me.”

“I don’t have everything I need yet.”

“Adam, I saw the redhead wearing nothing but a prison jumpsuit do this, twice. You don’t
need
anything, just do it for me, and when you get back we can have you moved to our testing facility so all the very smart people who are waiting for you there can measure you doing it, and
then
we can get Paul back to his mommy.”

“Here’s the truth, then, Mr. Smith. I have not figured out how, but I have figured out how someone who cannot do what she did can
learn
how to do what she did. But I need something I don’t have right now, and to find it I’m going to need more time than an afternoon at a table in Southern Italy.”

Smith’s eyes lit up, and he leaned forward on the table, clearly excited. What I had said was entirely the truth, but it sounded to my ears no more honest than what I’d just said a minute earlier. Smith appeared to have a very good bullshit detector. “What is this thing you have to find?” he asked.

“I’m not going to tell you. I’m also not going to tell you where it is, or how it works. But when I do find it, you’ll be the first to know.”

He stared at me for a while, sizing me up, it seemed, which was odd for someone who professed to have followed me for as long as he had been. I would think he’d know by now what to expect. “How much time do you need?”

“Six weeks.” This elicited a strangled cry from Clara, but she didn’t say anything more linguistically astute.

“You can have two, and then I expect to see you at our lab with the results.”

“Your lab?”

“It’s a private facility in Scotland, so factor in travel time accordingly. I’ll give you the exact coordinates when you’re ready. Oh, and the place is surrounded by sun lamps, so don’t bring any vampires with you.”

He stood and extended his hand, which I ignored until he lowered it. “Ms. Wasserman knows how to reach me. I’ll show myself out. You two enjoy your reunion.”

Chapter Sixteen

“The only thing anybody understands is violence.”

This was one of the last things Sven ever said to me before he killed himself. As an older vampire he had a touch of the melancholy that was common to the elders of his kind. I usually attributed it to simply running out of things to do, but in Sven’s case it was more complex than that. We spent hours discussing the nature of man, long enough to convince me that what he suffered from was more like a philosophical nihilism.

This may be hard to believe, but I’m pretty optimistic about mankind overall. I grant that I am comparing myself right now to a vampire who killed himself after being unable to bear the idea of humanity any longer, but it seems to me if you wait around long enough, evidence will come along that proves people aren’t all that bad all the time.
 

I couldn’t convince him of this. “You have told me your stories,” he said. “All of them end with you having to either flee or kill everybody. You have sustained your life with the blood of more people than I have.”

He had a point.

*
 
*
 
*

Mr. Smith showed himself all the way out of the building to a car that was waiting for him on the other side of the gate. Mirella watched through the window in the sitting room as he left.

“Was he the only one here?” she asked Clara. “Or are there more men hidden in the walls?”

“Only him,” she said. “But there are probably listening devices in the house, and I think they jacked into the security feed. So if there’s something you guys want to talk about, we probably can’t do it here.”

“I think it’s safe to say we have some things to talk about, yes,” I said.

Mirella—whom I could already tell wasn’t going to be warming up to Clara anytime soon—said, “I’ll search the house and find a safe room for us.”

Clara looked like she was going to mount a protest but decided it wasn’t worth it. Instead she got up and went to a credenza and pulled out a pad of paper, and put it on the table between us. Then she pulled a chair up to the video camera in the corner, stood on that chair, and unplugged the camera.

When she sat down again she had a pen in her hand. On the pad she wrote,
They can still hear us but not see us.
“Was all that true?” she asked. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

“It was true.” On the paper I wrote,
If it still exists. If it doesn’t, I may have to bluff.
“Did you . . . I didn’t ask them for proof of life but . . .”

“I did. You don’t know what he looks like so it wouldn’t have meant anything to you. Adam, I swear, until yesterday I had never even met that man. When I called, I didn’t know I was setting some kind of trap.”

“But he knew you’d call.”

“I wouldn’t have. If it was just ransom I would have paid it and kept you out of it. I didn’t want you knowing about Paul.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t. And don’t ask me about the father. I know you want to.”

“Why did you call, then? If I was the last person you would have called.”

She sighed. “Paul disappeared in the middle of the night. When I found his room empty in the morning all I had waiting for me was a note on the bureau that said,
Tell him we took the boy
. I couldn’t have imagined
him
being anybody but you. So I called, and I expected you to know something about it already. You always seem to have a handle on what people are about or when someone is after you or at least
why
they are. But you didn’t know anything, you just said you’d get here as soon as you could. And then this Smith guy showed up, and said when you got here I was supposed to get you to talk about what you’d been doing. He wouldn’t say what that was or what he was hoping to hear. But he had a video feed of my Paulie, so I was going to do whatever he asked.”

I nodded, and didn’t say the first thing that came to mind, which was that she had a history of betraying me for causes, since at least this particular cause was one I could understand a lot better than the last one.

Clara took the pen from my hand and wrote on the pad,
Not just CIA
.

“Do you still have the video?” I asked, while at the same time with the pen I was writing,
I know but why do you say that?

“It was a live stream off his phone, not something I could keep.”
His men were not Americans,
she wrote.
Heard French, German. Tech expert was Korean.

“Was there anything in the background to help us figure out where he’s being held?”

“He was playing with toys in a windowless white room. I think they thought of that. And that’s probably why I didn’t get to keep anything.”

I took the pen from her, and nearly wrote down what I decided to say out loud instead. “I can’t believe you kept him from me.”

She looked like she was ready to say about ten different things all at the same time. In fairness, she looked exhausted. Her child had been missing for days, and she was being confronted in her house by a guy she had apparently been trying to put behind her for a long time. So it was not an ideal circumstance. “Do you know how hard it is to move on from you when I know neither of us are ever going to get any older? Do you realize how small the world really is?”