Immortal at the Edge of the World (35 page)

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I told you it was a potential military application before I knew we were discussing teleportation. Once I heard this I took it as such lunacy there was no way I was going to stop there. One does not tell one’s largest client his money is going toward a teleportation device without first obtaining much more information. Also, your demands were specific: report back on medical procedures. This was no medical procedure. I took that to mean I could satisfy my curiosity first and then alert you if anything came out of what I had learned. I know now that this was an error on my part, but such is life.

“Digging deeper meant investing more, which I was also free to do per your instructions. And when it came time to promise additional funds on the condition that I—speaking for you—be allowed to see the data supporting the claim, I learned the truth. The proof of principle was in the form of a human person, and this was the same person who had been at the center of their last major investment. It was unsurprising that this information had been held behind layers of confidentiality, because what was eventually going to be required was this person be taken into captivity and studied like a lab animal, and this is the sort of thing most would be morally opposed to.

“This immortal man was the key to both the teleportation concept and the eternal life project that was to be resuming.” He took another long drink and appeared to be in need of a smoke. “I did not at that time associate
him
with you. It wasn’t until after you told me who you were that I began to piece it all together. But by then you had left my office and we could not discuss this over the phone; I fear they have been listening. I needed to find a way to get you to come to
me
, preferably not in my office since I have had eyes upon me from the day I increased the investment. When I detected the cyber attack and saw that it had begun with someone clearly not you, signing in with your password, I did what I could. I opened the Leewan Sean Enterprises account. And I waited.”

“And here we are.”

“Here we are.” He held up his glass as a long-distance toast, which I matched.

“That’s quite a story,” I said.

“It is the truth, sir. I have only ever acted in your best interests as I saw them.”

“Tell me, Mr. Heintz,” Mirella said. “Who are they?”

“Who are who?”

“The people behind the money.”

“That is a foolish question.”

“Why?”

“It presumes a singularity of vision that does not exist.
They
are not some group of people one can sit down at a table with. They are an unthinking market force, and the decisions they make are incremental ones arrived at by multiple parties along a chain of reasoning. No one or two or ten people met and decided they are going to imprison this man. That came about from a series of if-then statements. If it helps, think of these as the actions of a powerful but impersonal god.”

“So I can’t find them and convince them to leave me alone?” I asked.

“There is no
them
, that is what I’m telling you. The people who ultimately own the money backing this endeavor know very little about it, and the people beneath them know only money—is it stable or risky, what is the expected rate of return, and so on. Money knows no morality. The people making the immoral decisions are so far removed from the ones investing in those decisions as to make this an impossible thing to stop. The only way it will ever end is with their success or your death.”

“Well then,” I said, “I guess I had better die.”

*
 
*
 
*

Heintz actually did bring home business from the office, it was just that he didn’t leave any of it in the place. He had in his bag—in addition to blank forms that would become complex business contracts by the time he was done with them—the exact GPS coordinates of the compound I was looking for, along with a blueprint of the layout. He really had been expecting me.

We spent the rest of the evening hashing out the best way to distribute my funds following my demise, with a large portion of it going to the heir I had only recently discovered. This was provided said heir made it to the age of twenty-one, something I was soon to be directly involved in assuring.

Heintz was not so helpful when I asked if there was a way to simply destroy my wealth entirely. The list of reasons he gave for why that was impossible was long and tedious and used words I didn’t completely understand, but he did promise to invest in a lot of risky things he expected to not pan out. In fairness, I think what I was asking him to do might have actually been illegal. Not in the
get me a fake passport
sort of way so much as the
he goes to jail for a long time and gets blamed for a government’s collapse
sort of way. I didn’t press the issue.

Besides, it didn’t matter so much anymore if the money was gone as long as I never went near it again after I was dead.

*
 
*
 
*

“This is not going to be easy,” I said to Mirella.

We were back on the plane again and I was looking at the blueprints. The compound took up a few acres on the Isle of Mull. It was impossible to tell much of anything from the layout other than that I would not be able to just walk in if I expected to walk back out again. I had asked Heintz about the possibility of him arranging a tour for me as a direct investor in the project, but he was quite adamant that this would not work. He had little doubt that the necessary people knew I was Francis Justinian, and besides it was so unusual for an investor to make a personal appearance that it would draw the wrong kind of attention.

“You’ll figure something out,” she said. She was sharpening a knife at the desk, and to be honest, it was incredibly sexy. I don’t even know how it’s possible to sharpen a knife sexily, but she was doing it. “You always do.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “You haven’t been around me for that long.”

“Long enough. And you’ve been alive for long enough for it to be true.”

“Maybe.” I put down the blueprints. “I’m wondering if I should just tell Heintz to kill me now and run off somewhere. This looks like a suicide run.”

“Then do it. Run off.”

“I can’t.”

“I know. It isn’t who you are.”

“It’s sometimes who I am.”

Mirella got up and walked to the edge of the couch. Leaning forward, she kissed me hard on the mouth, her hand on the back of my head to hold me still. It was sweet, passionate, fierce, and a lot briefer than I would have liked. She let go of me after a second or two and stood up again.

“What was that for?”

“You needed one.”

“Could be I need more than just a kiss.”

“You could, but that’s all you’re getting.” She sat back down and resumed the knife sharpening as if nothing had happened. “So are we racing to Scotland now?”

We had not actually told the pilot where to take us yet, but that was where I had intended to go. “It’s where the place is, so if I’m not running I guess that’s where we’re going.”

“Do you want me to cut open the fence with my sword and take on a hundred armed men all alone?”

“No, I’ll be there.”

“Almost all alone. And what happens if we make it past that perimeter?”

“I’ll think of something.”

She sighed. “We can’t just ride in there, shoot up the place, grab the girl and the child, and ride off again. Even if we survive, they’ll find us.”

“Do
you
have any ideas?”

“I have exactly as few ideas as you do, but I’m not going to dive into that headfirst, and you have no reason to. What was the name Hsu called you? Li-Yuan? And that was a god, right?”

“Kind of.”

“Maybe you need to be more godlike.”

“Vengeful?”

“Not vengeful. Gods don’t have to rush anywhere because gods don’t get any older. Gods are patient. Clara and your son aren’t going to be dissected and destroyed this very minute. You know where they are, and you know a lot about who is running the place and even more about who’s funding the place. Actually, from what I’ve heard,
you
are funding the place. So take your time. And when you’re ready, burn it all to the ground like a proper god.”

“Mirella, I think I may love you.”

She flashed that brilliant smile again, and I wanted to get up and kiss her back, and thought maybe if I did it would make it okay not to go find Clara and Paul.

“I know,” she said. “I hear that a lot.”

Part Three

The Edge of the World

Chapter Twenty-One

We argued a lot about magic. Hsu claimed to have spent a part of his life in a kingdom governed by magic itself, whereas I had lived thousands upon thousands of years in this non-magical world and claimed there was no such thing. It was an assertion he couldn’t abide.

“But surely there have been things you have seen that you cannot explain otherwise?” he said one night. This was a little bit after we’d seen what would now be called a shooting star. Hsu had muttered an oath to protect himself from the wrath of whatever god had sent the streaking object across the sky, while I went on about how I once discovered that such things aren’t much more than falling rocks.

“I have seen things I cannot explain, of course,” I said. “And there have been many times I’ve attributed these things to magic of some sort. But without fail I’ve discovered a prosaic explanation eventually. It may take many lifetimes to settle the question, but the answers eventually manifest. The problem is that most men do not have the opportunity to wait a century or two for an explanation.”

He shook his head. “I do not have your perspective. But I see a world full of magic and I cannot understand how it is possible that you do not, unless you are being willfully blind to it.”

“Perspective is important. Do you know that sometimes the sun disappears in the middle of the day? I have seen it happen. The first time I thought—as did all of us—the world was ending. But it reappeared and life continued, and the next time it happened I was less impressed. I have seen Greek fire burn ships at sea and been nearly convinced I was witnessing true magic, until the day I was shown how to make it myself. The recipe required no gods or incantations.”

“You have no faith, then,” he said.

At this time magic and religious miracles were essentially the same thing. There were people who called themselves witches, certainly, but these witches attributed their magic to a deity. Catholic priests also routinely used magic, claiming it was good magic coming from their God, even if it was a curse. To not believe in magic, for Hsu and probably anybody else at the time, was to not believe in gods. If nothing else this was an ironic stance for an occasional god.

“I have faith in many things,” I said. “For instance, I have much greater faith in the ingenuity of mankind than I do in the gods mankind swears to. I have faith that if I see something impossible, an explanation will be found, one day, by someone.”

“I have been to the faery kingdom and back, and I offer you an explanation now—magic.”

“Magic is only the answer until a better one comes along.”

*
 
*
 
*

It’s not all that hard to rent a castle in Scotland if you know whom to ask.

Heintz was able to set up a second set of finances for me under a newly minted fake name, and funded it with monies from one of the very, very many do-nothing businesses I owned. It was something he did so quickly and efficiently I really had to wonder if anything he was doing for my sake was legal. And maybe if this was what he meant when it came to dealing with the people behind all of this—breaking laws in small ways was something they all did, and maybe nobody noticed when those little law-breaking moments added up to something big.

While I was busy establishing my new identity we hired someone to play the role of Francis Justinian for long enough to take my jet from the UK to a hangar in Sri Lanka, and then to disappear. Meanwhile, various appointments were made for Mr. Justinian in different parts of the world that were either canceled at the last second or attended by someone who was tacitly not me. I was modestly certain that Smith and company were aware that I was deceiving them as to my current whereabouts, but also that they did not
know
my current whereabouts.

Those whereabouts were mostly in and about the lands surrounding the aforementioned Scottish castle.

I didn’t need to rent a whole castle, but it was the nicest place in the area, and the most private by far. Everything else in the vicinity was full of people and livestock. Plus, coordinating assaults and sieges and military exercises in a castle was a pleasantly familiar thing for me.

The castle came with forty acres of unfarmable land. It was up on a rocky hill that overlooked the ocean to the west, with a simply spectacular view of the Isle of Mull. On some nights we could see the base with binoculars from the top of the castle. I liked the view.

We’d gotten a lot of much more up-close looks of the compound than just that. Mirella went on most of the sorties without me, just because I was slightly more recognizable, but I had talked her into giving me two or three direct looks. I knew the place inside and out from photographs, but there was nothing like standing on the other side of the fence, even if it was from half a mile away, at night.