Immortal at the Edge of the World (28 page)

“I do, actually.”

“I wanted something for myself. A life, a son, a lot of things that were just mine, but you have the whole world and all I have is this little house on a hill, and I wanted it to stay mine. This was supposed to be an Adam-free zone. But you still got in, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t get in,” I said. “Someone else did.” Mirella reappeared in the doorway and nodded to me, a signal I took to mean she found a place where we could exchange information without having to use a pad and a pen. “I wasn’t the one who took Paul away from you.”

“I know. But he was taken because of you, and that’s close enough.”

*
 
*
 
*

A half an hour later, while ensconced in Clara’s huge kitchen, we opened up one of the computers she had in the house. It was clear that since we had last spent time together she’d advanced beyond macaroni and cheese and scrambled eggs. Either that or she had hired people who knew better.

I know surprisingly little about cooking despite having spent every day of my life eating food. I have an eclectic combination of skills—I wouldn’t know how to make a pasta sauce from scratch but I could construct a still out of spare parts and make alcohol out of potatoes with it. I am probably the first person to ask if you want to know if a plant is edible, but probably the last person to ask if you want to make it taste good.

Clara’s kitchen had spices hanging from the ceiling to dry, which is something I only ever did if I wanted to spend the night unbothered by vampires. She was also either making her own sausage or slowly torturing sacks of meat. Best of all, sitting in an unlabeled jug was a liquid that looked suspiciously like red wine.

“Don’t drink it directly from the jug, I reuse that,” she said when she saw me eyeing it.

I didn’t drink from the jug, and since she was busy trying to make the Wi-Fi signal secure enough for us—I don’t know how she did this, so I’m not going to even pretend to explain it—I just used the nearest receptacle I could find, which was a coffee cup.

While Clara was tapping away, Mirella gestured me to the other end of the kitchen for a private conversation.

“I don’t think this woman has a child,” she said as quietly as she could manage.

“It was a surprise,” I said, “but I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I’ve searched this entire house. I found a child’s bedroom, with child’s things in it, and these things belonged to a child whose name appears to be Paul, but . . . what is the one thing you have not seen since coming in here?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Pictures. There are no pictures anywhere. Parents have pictures of children, it’s what parents do.”

“Mine didn’t. Maybe a cave painting here and there.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I know. And I know you’re doing your job, and I understand why you wouldn’t trust her.”

“She’s betrayed you before, and she’s given me no reason so far to think she’s not doing the same right now.”

I nodded. She was right, and if it were anybody but Clara I’d have decided this on my own already. “If she says there’s a son, there’s a son. We can figure out the rest later.”

“Guys, if you’re done talking about me, I have a secure connection,” Clara said from across the room. “Do you want to tell me what you’re looking for now?”

I pulled Abraham’s letter from my pocket. “It’s called an astrolabe.”

“Ooh, those are nifty. Any one in particular?”

“Yeah. Looks like this.” I held up the diagram. “You know what an astrolabe is?”

“Sure. Never used one, don’t really understand them, but they look cool.” She took the page and began typing rapidly. This was something I was accustomed to from her. Other than Tchekhy, she was always the one person I could turn to if I needed the Internet to give me an answer to an exotic question. I had gotten much better at it over the years—I was certainly more accomplished now than I had been when I first met Clara—but there was no replacing the talent of someone who was born understanding computers.

“They’re pretty simple,” I said. “The face has stars on it in their proper location. If you point it at the night sky and turn the dials until the face of the astrolabe matches the stars in the sky you can figure out what time it is from where the dials stopped. Or when sunrise is going to be, if that’s important to you. Vampires tended to use them for that.”

“What’s so special about this one?”

“Other than that it’s made of gold, I’m not sure. I won’t know until I have it.”

“Gold? That’s rare, right?”

“Most of them were made out of brass or something cheaper. Gold was for tender and jewelry, and the occasional decorative bowl. Astrolabes were for travelers and astrologers, and those weren’t the sort of people who had enough gold to spare to make a tool out of it. So yeah, it’s probably very rare.”

Mirella shot me a look, possibly because it hadn’t occurred to her to define her own search by the metal of the astrolabe.

“Okay, we could start with museums, but I still have my university library access so . . . oh. Is that it?”

She turned the screen so I could take a look. “Looks close,” I said. I held the drawing up to the picture.

“Description says it’s gold,” she said. “And the face looks right.”

Over my shoulder I could hear Mirella
humph
and walk away. It was hard to fathom, but I could have sworn she was jealous.

“Where was it found?” I asked.

“Doesn’t say. Well, it does, but all it says is it was donated from a private collection. The college might have better provenance but they aren’t putting that on information online.”

“Which college?”

“Harvard University. Is it safe for you to show your face in Boston yet?”

*
 
*
 
*

I was officially wanted for questioning in Boston, relating to the murders of two college students in which I had no direct role. More or less. The thing that killed them was looking for me at the time, so that does sort of make me indirectly responsible, but only on nights when I’m feeling particularly bad about myself.

Historically I have dodged official interest by getting out of the jurisdiction of the interested officials until such a time as they all died and everyone forgot I existed or assumed I had long since died as well. That was not the case here, as not nearly enough time had elapsed. But what was true then is true now—I was identified as a homeless guy, so the best disguise was to not look like a homeless guy, and that was something I was currently very good at, insofar as I dressed well, looked clean, and had multiple homes, one of which was also an airplane.

So I wasn’t terribly worried that anybody would be confusing Adam the homeless guy with Francis Justinian, multimillionaire philanthropist. What was worrisome was that the collection we were looking for wasn’t public.

I had spent a lot of time with private collections of all sorts in the past several months, but those meetings were brokered by Heintz over long periods of time following a healthy donation to whatever cause was pertinent to the situation. We had less than two weeks to do this and I had no monetary connection to the university that I was aware of. And I was afraid to ask Heintz for anything at the moment.

I probably had no reason not to trust Juergen Heintz. He had been offering me good advice and managing my money phenomenally well, and he had done it all despite my ignorance of all things financial. And it wasn’t his fault that the only venture capital group I actively cared about was secretly trying to capture me and/or harm me and my friends for financial gain. I hadn’t given him enough information to work with, really. I just figured when they were coming after me again I would recognize the signs, and I hadn’t.

At the same time, now that I knew there was a huge secret conglomerate after me, I had a strong reason to distrust anybody directly connected with the financial industry, and that included Heintz. If there were governments and large corporations involved, there were also big banks involved, and as much as any banker is looking after the interests of their clients, they are also looking after the interests of their banks. It wasn’t always true that the best thing for the bank was also the best thing for the bank’s clients, and if this was one of those times I didn’t want to find out too late.

More to the point, the fact that Francis Justinian was an investor in the secret venture capital group that was now applying pressure to an immortal man named Adam was an advantage. But it was only an advantage as long as that secret venture capital group didn’t know about it. Talking to Heintz might lose me that advantage, because even if the man himself had no intention of acting against me, the phone he spoke to me on belonged to his bank, and who knew who was listening in on that phone other than the two of us?

It was a quandary, because I couldn’t very well leverage my involvement as an investor without asking Heintz to probe, but I couldn’t have him probe and risk losing that leverage.
 

Fortunately, Tchekhy had a secure phone line, and he had been spending the past couple of weeks hacking into my bank account.

“You are unreasonably wealthy,” was the first thing he had to say to me.

“So you got in.”

“I did, thanks to the information you provided. I have spent some time roaming through quite a few accounts with this institution. Once behind the firewall I am afraid I could not contain myself.”

This is what happens when you hand your account number and password over to an anarchist. Those two items—account and password—only got me as far as access to my balances and a limited ability to move funds within the bank. To do what I did when I set up Mirella’s private account required a back-and-forth with Heintz, or whoever deals with his e-mail account. Any significant funds movement had to be touched by a banker, especially if it meant funds exiting the bank. So while it may be fair to argue that Tchekhy didn’t truly
hack
my account after I handed him the password, I needed him to figure out how to take Heintz out of the loop if I needed him to be out of the loop.

“I hope you didn’t steal too much,” I said.

“I didn’t steal anything. But I established some clever little programs that will be siphoning off large quantities of small sums in a few months, so I expect to steal very much in the future. I am glad to hear you are still alive.”

“I am, thank you. I don’t know how much longer that’ll last, but so far so good.”

“I’ve thought some about what you asked of me, and I am not sure it will be possible.”

“Why not?”

“As I said, you are unreasonably wealthy.”

What I asked him to do was see if it was possible to make me poor. As you can imagine, this is something I would have to go around Heintz to accomplish, because bankers are not the sorts of people you go to if you want to deliberately destroy wealth. They are fantastically good at doing it unintentionally, but it was probably too much to hope for that Heintz would accidentally ruin me.

“It’s too much to get rid of?”

“It is too much to steal. It is also diversified nicely, so you will not find yourself a pauper due to a depressed investment in a single market. And I believe you are currently impervious to a full market crash. I would need to redirect a large portion of your money toward an investment that would then collapse.”

“Can you do that?”

“Only if I could find such an investment.”

“Do you know what an Ouroboros is?”

“Yes I think so. This is the snake that eats itself. Ah. What you are describing is a Ponzi scheme.”

“Will that work?”

“I don’t believe so. That is mainly effective in convincing other people to invest their money. If you are the only investor, there is no point. Likewise, a kiting scheme would involve inflating your funds and then watching the inflated funds disappear. But that is both the creation and destruction of imaginary money, whereas your money is currently actual.”

“If you say so. It’s all numbers on a page to me.”

“They are large numbers on an important page.”

“All right, then maybe you can find something worthless for me to invest in, and we can see about moving everything I’ve got into it.”

“I’ll see what I can find. It’s a very curious problem. I will talk to some people over here and perhaps come up with something clever.”

“Thanks. And while you’re in my bank account, I need you to check on one of my investments and get back to me with whatever you can dig up.”

“Are you looking for something in particular?”

“Yes. I’m looking for a site in Scotland. I’ll explain.”

*
 
*
 
*

I had a few more phone calls to make, but we also had to get moving. Getting from Italy to Boston was going to be a travel nightmare, especially since we were starting out half a day’s travel from the plane and had no car to take us there.

“How do you not have a car?” I asked Clara.

“I have a moped, and I hire a car if I need to go anywhere.”

“Groceries?”

“Delivered. And I garden.”

“Since
when
?”