Immortal at the Edge of the World (34 page)

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But in a few minutes you’re going to have to pick the lock on this machine, so you’d better figure it out.”

“What did you find?”

I leaned back and showed her what was written on the wall: TRY A SNICKERS, ASSHOLE.

*
 
*
 
*

We decided against opening the machine right away, because in the few minutes we had been there we’d already attracted more attention than we wanted to. So instead we slid the machine back against the wall, and went upstairs and took a seat in the cafeteria for what felt like probably the longest hour of my life. Then, with her lockpick in hand, Mirella went back down to the broken vending machine and picked the lock.

“I don’t think we needed to wait,” she said when she came back. “The most interest I drew came from students who realized there was about to be free candy. I don’t believe anyone discussed what I was doing with security. But still, we should leave.”

“Was it there?” I asked.

“It was.” She sat down and slid a cloth-wrapped disc across the table. “He had jammed it near the back of the carrel. We’re fortunate nobody came to fix the machine before we got to it.”

I opened the cloth.

It had been a thousand years. From the moment it was handed to Hsu until he lost it and then found me in the Rhine valley, it had been a thousand years. I’d gone to Mangalore and fought my way out of the Talus compound and watched Hsu die, and this thing in my hands had meanwhile ended up somewhere in Persia, where it was discovered in the ground or in someone’s attic, and sold or donated to a university in a country that didn’t exist until a few hundred years ago. It was the impossible object that was supposed to open a door to an impossible place.

But it wasn’t any of those things. It was a gold astrolabe. It felt cold and rough to the touch, like running a finger across the grooves of a vinyl record, but it did not strike me as any more extraordinary than the brass one I’d seen twelve hours earlier. I held it up in the light and turned it in my hand and fiddled with the still-functioning plates, and nothing happened except my heart beat faster in anticipation of
something
that just never came.

It was a gold astrolabe, and that was all it was.

“So?” Mirella asked.

I slid it into my pocket. “Let’s get out of here.”

*
 
*
 
*

The next stupid thing we did was return to the airplane. I had been thinking there was almost no way we’d make it all the way back there again without facing at least some token resistance, but at worst we were watched and our whereabouts reported. Nobody official or unofficial, armed or otherwise, turned up to impede us. Possibly, Smith didn’t want to create an international incident by holding a firefight on the runway of a national airport. Considering we had brought the guns Brenda had taken—she hated parting with them but agreed they would probably be more useful for us than for her—it probably would have devolved into a firefight pretty quickly.

Brenda hated parting with us, too. She wanted to come along and help, and I nearly agreed, because she had turned out to be a whole lot more useful than the last time we’d encountered one another. But Smith had bragged about sun lamps at this compound of his and I couldn’t think of any reason why that might be a bluff. Besides, I’d already gotten Iza and Jerry killed, Tchekhy had
nearly
been killed, and Brenda was likely going to have to relocate and start over again before Smith found out who she was. Throw in Clara and Paul and probably Mirella and I was pretty sure I’d ruined enough lives in the past couple of months already. Brenda was better off far away from me.

We were in the air just before sunset with a full tank that would just get us over the Atlantic. I had to tell the pilot where we were going before we took off so he knew how much fuel to bring—the tanks were barely large enough to get us to Europe nonstop—and I told him Scotland without even knowing if that was the correct answer. That was where Smith had said he’d be, and it was all I had to go on.

I hoped Tchekhy had better information.

“I did find this investment you spoke of,” he said, after first explaining again that he couldn’t figure out how to make me poor without crashing the world economy. I was on the supersecret phone with him, which was amazing given I couldn’t get any of the other cell phones to work at thirty thousand feet. “It is a pool of venture capital funding loosely structured around speculative medical advances in the field of aging. I was able to track your funds to an account in Gibraltar.”

“What the hell is in Gibraltar?”

“Goat farms and banks. It is not a place where there are things, it is a place where money is held. A fiscal haven. Governments go to this place and say, tell us where this money went, and they say, what money? We don’t know what you are talking about. This is why rich companies and rich people use these places.”

“All right, so the money went to Gibraltar. What then?”

“I have no idea.”

“This is very unhelpful.”

“I could try and assault the offshore holding company’s computers to find out more, but it would take me many months and the money is not likely to be there any longer. You understand that if the person running this account has any idea of what they are doing it will take years to find out where the money
actually
went? And without that access I cannot tell you how large this company is, or what percentage of the whole your investment represents.”

“All right, I understand. What about the Scotland thing?”

“I have little useful news there either. Scotland is not large, but it is large enough to make identifying this compound you described very difficult. I have even borrowed some satellite feeds.”

“The part about the sun lamps didn’t help?”

“Many small facilities have nighttime lights, and it is not really possible to distinguish a sun lamp from a klieg light through a satellite image. And we are assuming the man who told you about Scotland was telling you the truth.”

“I know, but it’s all I have.”

“Nearly all. You have actually invested in a holding company in Scotland. The investment was quite recent, and it looks as if funds movement with this holding company replaced the funds transfers you had been making previously to Gibraltar. It seems reasonable to assume they are interrelated.”

“Maybe I’ll look up that company, then. Is there an address?”

“It is the bank address. That will not help you.”

“Fine, what’s the name of the company, at least?”

“Leewan Sean Enterprises.”

I nearly dropped the phone. “What did you say?”

Chapter Twenty

Heintz’s apartment was unexpected. He was so fastidious in person that it only made sense for him to reside in one of those pristine places where the guys in shaving cream commercials live. I expected stainless steel and white walls and personal belongings that looked like they had just been bought and certainly never used. What we found instead was wood paneling matching brown leather furniture and an overall decorative style that wasn’t a style at all.

In that sense we were at least in the right place. With Tchekhy’s help we had identified the most likely current location of my private banker—Switzerland—and then had to narrow down his residence with Mirella tailing him to and from the banking building for three days. It would have taken less time if Heintz was a human being instead of a goblin, and even less if Iza was still alive.

Once we had the correct building we needed to figure out the apartment number. We were fortunate in that it was neither a large building nor a terribly private one, and with no concierge to have to get past, but it was still a pain. In the end we relied on the mailboxes to help us figure it out, and only by picking the locks on each box until we found one that had mail in it addressed to him.

“There’s nothing here,” Mirella said, having just completed a cursory search of the apartment. It could only be cursory since we were both avoiding the windows. “Although I don’t know what to look for.”

“I don’t either. It’s a modest place, don’t you think? I imagined he made more than this.”

“This is only where he lives. I doubt he brings dates here. Elves are not modest by nature.”

“True. I remember—”

“Shh.” Mirella held a hand up and pointed to the door. It was the third time she had done this because it was the end of the day and people were getting home, and there was no way to tell from the sound of someone walking down the hallway if they were coming to this door or a different one.

Then came a key in the lock, and Juergen Heintz let himself in.

I was sitting in his very comfortable leather chair in a corner and we’d left on no lights, which was as it had been left. Mirella melted away into a dark recess between the living room and the bedroom.

Heintz came in holding his mail, which he skimmed before placing it on the table next to the door.

The apartment wasn’t large. The main living space had two areas identified mainly by furniture. I was in one such area, opposite which sat a very clean desk. Heintz walked to that desk and put his bag on it.

“I know you’re here,” he said without looking up from his desk. “I’m glad you have come.”

“You were expecting me?” I asked.

“Of course I was. I’m going to draw the curtains so we can have some privacy, as I believe there is someone across the street with an unreasonable fascination in my windows, and then you and I can have a drink like proper gentlemen. And please inform Ms. Castille she will not be required to throw that knife in her hand.”

*
 
*
 
*

A few minutes later the curtains were drawn, a lamp was lit, and we all had drinks in our hands like civilized people.

“I’m glad you got my message,” Heintz said.

“Leewan Sean Enterprises was a message?” I asked.

“Of course it was.”

I’ve had more names than I can count, but a few of them stick out in my memory for the way they were used. Hsu, for instance, used to call me Li-Yuan, a name also associated with one of the immortals of Chinese myth. Li-Yuan was also Li-Yuan Iron-Crutch, and sometimes Li-Yuan Xian. This is the name most of the goblins—and elves, if we’re going to call them that—have known me by, much in the same way Brenda and most of the vampires call me Apollo.

Most goblins of Asian descent stick with Li-Yuan Xian, but as one travels toward Europe the name gets Anglicized and bastardized until one is left with something that sounds more Irish than anything: Leewan Sean.

For a goblin or an elf, this is a name that represents a mythological immortal man. Outside that species it means almost nothing. And the last person I heard use the name was Juergen Heintz.

“How were you expecting me to get that message?”

“I expected that the man you have burrowing through my office’s financial systems would tell you eventually. Incidentally, he’s quite impressive.”

“I’ll tell him you said so.”

“He is going to get detected soon, though. I’ve done about all I can to prevent that without it looking obvious that I’m doing so.”

“Why would you . . . no, never mind that. Tell me why you couldn’t just call instead if you had something to tell me? Because you understand how this appears?”

Heintz didn’t say anything at first. He took a sip of his drink—it was brandy, and it was above average—and pulled at his collar until his tie was loose. “Your requests put me in a quandary at times, sir. Some years ago you asked that I look into this group and further to do what was necessary to obtain details on where they were investing their funds. The only way to do that was to involve you in them financially. I did so. You asked that I report back what I had learned, and I did so there as well, up until I could no longer.”

“Who stopped you?” Mirella asked. She was sitting on the couch between us, with Heintz in his desk chair. He was looking less a banker than a harried businessman at the end of a long day. She still looked every inch an assassin.

“
He
did, in a way, when he told me who he really was.” To me, he said, “The VC fund continued to invest in small medical projects over the past several years. None were as large-scale as the failed experiment about which I now believe you are
intimately
familiar, but they centered upon life-extending procedures and so on. I did, I think, share some of this with you. Nothing sounded particularly promising, and no large sums were committed.”

“I remember,” I said. “It sounded like a lot of mysticism and snake oil.”

“So it was. But about two years ago the founders effectively rewrote their own prospectus. A promising lead had come up in the field of teleportation, of all things. It sounded preposterous, but there was documentation attached from various physicists and medical experts supporting the claim. I read these and found the arguments specious to a degree that bordered on fraud. Had you not instructed me to remain involved specifically in this venture I’d have pulled your money. And then by acclaim the decision to invest in this preposterousness was approved, and this had me curious enough to try and find out more.”