Immortal at the Edge of the World (38 page)

After several minutes it became clear that nobody was coming to the fence to open it.

Lorgus waved more emphatically to the camera lens, which didn’t do any good.

“Now we know,” he said without turning. “At least one thing is different.”

He got out of the truck and walked up to the fence. “Hello?” he shouted, looking through the chain-link and acting more or less like any confused deliveryman would be when confronted with an unexpected absence of people where there should be people. Nobody came running from the other side.

After waiting for another two minutes, Lorgus exhibited one of the qualities that make satyrs so useful. He jumped over the fence.

A few seconds later he had reached the circuit box and pushed the button. The gates slid open. He stepped back outside and waited to see if the opened gate caused anybody to come running. It didn’t. He climbed back into the truck.

“
We drive to the appointed location as if we had been let inside as normal
,” he said in Greek for the benefit of the second satyr, whose responsibility it was to radio the other trucks. “
Guns ready, but hidden.
”

They all had the aforementioned Kalashnikovs—they were semiautomatic rifles whose brand I couldn’t actually tell you, but we called them Kalashnikovs—on the inside of the jumpsuits they were wearing. The suits were extremely baggy, needless to say.

We drove slowly into the compound. Mirella and I peered through the side windows as well as we could, but it was very hard to identify anything going on out there, so we had to rely on Lorgus.

“Ordinarily,” he said under his breath, “there would be people walking about. I have seen no persons. This is alarming. I am afraid to ask, but do you suppose we got the dosage wrong and poisoned them all?”

“I don’t think it’s possible to die from one large dose,” I said. “Extended long-term use can drive you insane, but that’s the worst of it.”

“Hold on, there is someone.”
 

He stopped the truck.

The man was leaning against the external wall of one of the barracks. He was dressed in a black sweater and olive green army fatigue pants, which was typical for the security force. Also typical, he had an M16 on a strap around his shoulders.

“Hello, friend,” Lorgus called out. “How are you?”

The man smiled, but didn’t answer.

Lorgus was temporarily at a loss. “It’s a lovely day, don’t you think?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes it is. We’ll just be on our way, then.”

“Right, hey. Bunnies, man,” he said. “Bunnies. Right?”

“Right you are,” Lorgus said happily. “Bunnies, indeed.” To us he said, “I believe your plan is working.”

“Either that or bunnies are the best thing ever,” I said.

*
 
*
 
*

We stopped the trucks at the loading dock for the cafeteria. Contractually, all the food that didn’t come out of a vending machine was food we provided, and all of that food went into and came out of the cafeteria. Likewise, all the water used by the facility for drinking and bathing came from a large water tank that was replenished four times a month by a truck we also owned. So the people there had been drinking and eating high doses of hallucinogens for three or four days. We based this on expected consumption rates, numbers we’d spent two months collating. It was all very scientific, meaning I had nothing to do with the specific calculations.

According to those numbers, the peak impact of the drug would be roughly the same time we turned up with our delivery. It was on a curve, so there were likely a number of people there who were nearly lucid and a number who were far worse than the bunny fan we’d come across. If we were extremely lucky, that would be good enough.

Lorgus hopped out and opened the loading dock door, and then the satyrs went about unloading the cargo as they were supposed to. While they were doing this, Mirella and I climbed out and looked around.

The base was made up of a series of prefabricated buildings arranged in a grid. We were pretty clear about which of the buildings were living quarters, which were administrative, and where people went to eat. That left one building in the center of the place unaccounted for. It was the only building that was actively guarded every day, and it was where we assumed Clara and Paul were being held.

At the loading dock, Mirella and I weren’t standing all that far away from the target location. It was just a quick straight-ahead between two administrative buildings and a dogleg right and we would be there. In my pocket was a cloned keycard to get us past the front entrance after the guards had been dispatched, and that card had taken me months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain. We had blueprints of the interior of the building that would hopefully narrow down our search once we were inside. And in the event of resistance we had a variety of coordinated responses to choose from, including one that had satyrs scaling the walls and providing suppressing fire from the rooftops.

In other words, we had a thorough plan, and it was going perfectly so far. All I had to do was start running for that building.

And I couldn’t bring myself to move. Something was wrong.

“It’s way too quiet,” I said to Mirella.

“You know where you are going?” Lorgus asked us.

“Yes,” Mirella said, “it’s not far.”

I looked around. It was the kind of quiet I had learned to distrust, largely because quiet like this was what usually preceded natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. “I didn’t realize how much of a canyon this place was,” I said.

“How do you mean?” Mirella asked.

“On the Silk Road, there were stretches through the mountains that were basically designed for ambushes—low road, steep sides, good cover on the top of the pass. A few archers could take out a whole caravan if they planned it right.”

“That may be true, but until we see evidence of this we should keep moving.”

She was right. On the Road, the problem with sections like this was that they were the only way to get through certain areas. Once you started down that path you had no choice but to keep driving forward even if you thought you were in the middle of a trap.

“Let’s go, then,” I said. To Lorgus, I said, “We’ll call for backup if it comes to it.”

We didn’t get more than twenty feet from the loading dock, though, before the trap was sprung. Later I decided the sense of unease I felt was attributable in part to the fact that all the windows on all the buildings around us were open, but it’s likely I didn’t notice this detail until there was a gun barrel extended out of every second one.

“That’s far enough,” said a familiar voice. It was Smith, talking through a loudspeaker.

Mirella went for the sword strapped to her back. “Don’t,” I said. “It’s a shooting gallery.” I looked around and noted that more than one of the satyrs were reaching for their guns. “Stand down, everyone!” I ordered.

“There won’t be another opportunity,” Mirella said. The look in her eyes was full of murder. “We can make the corner.”

“I don’t think we can.”

Smith walked around the corner with two armed men next to him and a microphone in his hand. “Good advice,” he said, regarding the stand-down order. “Let’s not turn this into a bloodbath. It’s such a nice day.”

He came to a stop in front of me. I was close enough to kill him if I didn’t mind dying, too. I thought about it.

“So where’d I screw up?” I asked.

He turned to the man on his left. “Tie them both up.” To me he said, “I think we can both agree the screwup was planning this thing in the first place, but I’ll give you that. You probably couldn’t keep away, huh?”

“Not really, no,” I said as his man zip-tied my wrists behind my back.

“It was the drug,” Smith said. “Clever idea, and I bet you thought our filters wouldn’t detect it.”

“I did.”

“Except ever since your little excursion in the Pacific Northwest the government I sometimes work for has been trying to weaponize it. Soon as I saw what was coming in through the food I knew it was you.”

I’d thought all the samples of the bacteria had died off before anyone had a chance to do much of anything with it. Then I remembered the huge vats of
kykeon
the cult had left behind on the beach and realized the US government had all the samples it could ever need. It was a thought I probably should have had sooner.

This is what I get for coming up with a plan that doesn’t involve killing everybody in sight.

“Anyway,” Smith said, “glad you came. Come on, I’ll take you to Clara. Say goodbye to your friends.”

I turned to Mirella, already being pulled away to where the satyrs were being grouped together and disarmed. Nobody had bothered to take any of her blades away— they had just zip-tied her. And I knew she could get out of them with a wrist flick. I was pretty sure the reason they weren’t worrying about that was that she wouldn’t be given the opportunity. She knew it, too.

My eyes drifted up to the rooftops. There were snipers up there, too, one per roof. This was about as wrong as the plan could have gone, clearly.

There was someone else up there, too. He was on the rooftop directly behind Smith, on the corner several yards from the crouching sniper. It would have been easy for anybody to see him since he was standing up straight, but all eyes were on us so I was the only one who did. Probably, that was intentional.

He was a very old goblin, with wispy white hair balding on the top but long at the back and in a ponytail. He looked fit, and had a long sword in his hand. He was dressed in brown calf’s leather that looked like it fit tighter than it did the last time I saw him. But overall, given the time and the place, Hsu looked pretty good.

I glanced away quickly, before anyone else noticed him. Provided anyone else could see him, of course. The possibility that I was hallucinating was real, and that was a much better explanation than that the man I saw die a thousand years ago was standing on a rooftop above me.

“
Save my people first!
” I shouted. I did it while staring at Smith, and I said it in an early pre-German dialect. One of the great things about this particular tongue, aside from the high likelihood that only Hsu would understand it, was that every word sounded unpleasant when shouted. This is still true of German, actually. I once got into a fight after calling a guy a pen.

“Cursing me out in dead languages won’t help,” Smith said.

“I know, but it makes me feel better,” I said.

“Good for you. Come on, let’s go.”

I snuck another look at the rooftop. Hsu was gone. If he was ever there.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Smith walked me to the mystery building, alone, possibly thinking I was no threat with my hands bound. This was untrue, but I wasn’t going to fight someone with only my legs and head if I didn’t have to, and he was taking me to where I wanted to go anyway.

We went in through the unguarded front entrance, opened with Smith’s keycard and not mine. I kind of wanted to know if all the money I had spent on the skeleton key had been worth it but stopped short of volunteering to get the door for us.

Past the door, up a flight of stairs, and down a nondescript hallway and we were in a large office with a number of notable details: One wall had about ten flat screen televisions showing video surveillance footage of parts of the compound, and one chair had Clara in it.

Clara didn’t look too bad. She was dressed like a hospital intern, she had on no makeup, her hair was a mess, and the bags under her eyes betrayed a lack of sleep, but it was apparent nobody had been actively torturing her. So that was good. She looked up and gave me a little smile.

“When are you going to stop walking into traps trying to rescue me, Adam?” she asked.

“Can’t help myself. And this time it looked like you actually needed a rescue.”

“It was still a trap.”

“I’m getting that.”

Smith sat me down in a chair next to her. My hands were still behind my back, so this was super uncomfortable. Clara was not bound, but I had a feeling that was less of a concern in her case. I didn’t see Paul anywhere but I was sure the idea of him was keeping her in check.

“Turns out I’m the father,” I said to her.

“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t want you to know, but if you were to find out I think I could have come up with a better way to tell you. That was probably unpleasant.”

“Any idea how it’s possible?”

“I dunno. You’re the one who thinks you’re infertile.”

Smith sat down at the desk we were both facing. “It’s because you’re both immortal,” he said. “Oh, sorry to interrupt, I just thought we’d skip ahead if that’s okay. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

“How about you tell me why I’m not dead?” I asked. “You said yourself you don’t need me if you have her and Paul.”

“Right, that’s a good starting point. We do need you. The kid’s yours, but he doesn’t have what we need.”

“He caught the flu,” Clara said.

“He was sick?” I asked.

“A couple of times when he was younger, and they gave him the flu here because they didn’t believe me. He’s better now.”