Immortal (30 page)

The first thing Patti did, when I handed her the coordinates Grindel had given me, was check her map and confirm. “There’s no airfield at that location.”

   
“It’s in Arizona somewhere,” I offered helpfully.

“I know it’s in Arizona. It’s probably a dried lake bed or something. Not my point.”

She sat down and made a few calculations and then a few phone calls, and in another twenty minutes, she had the entire itinerary planned out. Patti seemed very competent, which was good. I always look for competence in someone who’s going to be flying me somewhere. I’m still pretty sure man was not meant to fly, so the confidence that the person doing that flying is not also a raving nut job helps me cope. I knew more than a couple of self-professed geniuses in my day who managed to turn glue and some bird feathers into inadvertent suicide.

The problem with the lack of an airport, as Patti explained to me shortly after takeoff, was refueling. If she wasn’t landing on an airstrip she needed to get to the coordinates with enough fuel to cover a trip to the nearest one. “It changes the dynamics of the flight plan a bit.”

It turns out it doesn’t take all that long to make it across the United States. This is one of those things I still can’t quite get used to. For most of my life, distances were calculated by how long it would take to walk from one place to the next. Then it was how long a good horse could take you in a day. Now it’s motorized vehicles and planes, and I’ve only had a century to adjust. Flying in general doesn’t bother me so much—as long as I don’t think about it all too long—because it’s conceptually so far removed from any other experience that I have nothing to compare it to. It’s the efficiency that messes me up.

As Patti pointed out when handing me the itinerary, she could have drawn up a plan to get me there in under a day if I wanted. I didn’t, mainly because as expected, the cell phone I was using couldn’t pick up a signal at thirty-thousand feet. And I had a follow-up phone call or two to place.

*
 
*
 
*

We made small talk for most of the flight. Patti was decidedly professional about the whole thing, not once bringing up the gun in my bag or her suspicion that whatever I was involved in, it was in all likelihood illegal.

Instead, we talked about Patti and her sordid love life. The bulk of her tale lasted about three hours and took us through two states. Which was plenty of time to learn more than anybody who isn’t a priest or a lover should have any right to know about another person. The good news was I hardly had to talk at all. Sure, I could have volunteered something to the conversation—I have learned enough to know that when a woman talks, one should at least nod and grunt appreciatively from time to time—but once she got into a rhythm there was no stopping her.

“Oh, listen to me!” she said finally, shortly after the amusing tale of Dan, the garbage man who liked to dress in a tutu at night. “I’ve been doing all the talking. Sorry, it’s a nervous thing. I talk a lot when I’m nervous.”

“I make you nervous?”

“Not you exactly, no,” she said, without elaboration. She meant the gun. “So what’s your story?”

“You don’t really want to know, do you?”

She glanced over at me. “Kinda,” she said. “You just don’t seem the type.”

“The type for what?”

“To be involved in . . . whatever. Crime, I guess. There’s a big black cloud of trouble around your head.”

“You reading my aura now?”

She smiled. “Pilots know clouds.”

I laughed. “So how does a person who is, as you say, involved in crime, act ordinarily?”

“There’s two types—nervous or way too calm. The nervous ones spend the whole time bouncing up and down and staring at shit on the dashboard and asking stupid questions. I hate that. But the calm ones are worse. They just sit there and don’t move, or talk, or anything. The whole flight is one uncomfortable pause. I hate that.”

“Okay. Which category do I fit in?”

She stared at me for a five count, the way someone might if they were attempting to count your eyelashes. “Maybe neither. Except for the cloud, I’d put you somewhere between tourist and businessman,” she concluded.

“Maybe that’s all I am,” I offered. “A businessman on vacation.”

“Right,” she said sarcastically.

She quieted down for a while, checking random dials or whatever one is supposed to check when one flies an airplane. She hadn’t touched the stick in over an hour, which made me wonder how much pilots actually have to do to fly planes. Not like she had to swerve to avoid things. Seemed pretty easy to me.

“How old are you?” Patti asked, finally.

“Isn’t that an impolite question?”

“There are no impolite questions at this altitude.”

“Okay. How old do I look?”

She frowned. “You have a habit of answering questions with questions, you know that? Maybe thirty-five.”

“Okay. Thirty-five, then.”

“Except you don’t act thirty-five, so that can’t be right.”

“How should I act?” I was trying not to be too forthcoming, because I’d only recently learned exactly how much trouble it caused when I was. It helped that I was currently sober, and thus less likely to run off at the mouth. Plus, this was sort of interesting.

“Oh, I know what it is!” she exclaimed. “You’re a vet.”

“A pet doctor?”

“Don’t play dumb. What was it? Iraq?”

That was a tricky one to answer. If I said yes, we might have gotten bogged down in questions about divisions and units, and I didn’t know enough about regular army to lie convincingly. And once you start talking about this stuff, you quickly find the person you’re speaking to knows someone who knows someone you might have served with. But I couldn’t very well tell her that the last time I fought in something that was big enough to come with a name was during the Peloponnesian War.

“What about me cries out veteran, exactly?”

“Dunno. But I know a few. There was this World War vet I used to know. He didn’t give a damn about much of anything. Or maybe it was just that he knew nothing that came next would ever be quite so bad. It was a confidence thing. That’s it, that’s the vibe I’m getting.”

I decided it was time to cut off the conversation entirely. Either that or start talking about the Greeks.

“You’re wrong,” I said curtly. “I never fought in a war.”

“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

And then we settled into one of those uncomfortable silences she had been talking about earlier.

*
 
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*

Patti had been good enough to set us up at a hotel near the airfield after the first leg of the trip. Separate rooms, of course. As soon as I was alone, I arranged a call to Switzerland.

As you may have already guessed, I’m sort of terrible about money. I can never really keep decent track of what is, and isn’t, a lot of it, which is just not my fault. Seriously, I remember when I could buy a horse with what a loaf of bread costs now. So when I first called the Swiss bank from Clara’s apartment and gave them the necessary account information, I learned two things. The first was I now had my own private banker, Heintz, whose only job was to kiss up to me. This was because of the second thing. The exact balance in my account. Heintz had to read it to me five times because I’d never heard a number that large before, and I frankly didn’t know what to make of it. “That’s a lot, isn’t it?” was about all I could muster.

So the money was nice, but far more important was what that money got me, i.e., a Swiss banker who wanted to keep me happy at all times. Which was why I felt comfortable having him look into Robert Grindel’s finances.

What I learned on my follow-up call from the hotel room was that Clara and I had been correct about at least one thing. Grindel was indeed swimming in venture capital money.

The question was, what was Grindel offering his current investors? Heintz’s best guess put the project somewhere in the field of medicine, based mainly on the types of projects these investors had previously shown interest in.

“For us to learn more, we must first show an active interest in investing,” he said. “Would you like for me to make the necessary arrangements?”

If I were at that moment sitting on a beach in Fiji, I’d have said yes. But as I was about to get the answers I needed on my own, it seemed superfluous. Plus, this was in all likelihood the last chance I would have to speak to Heintz for some time.

“No,” I said. “But I am interested in how one gets this sort of money from these sorts of people. How fluid is the situation?”

“I am not sure I understand.”

“I assume one has to provide the investors with solid evidence that one’s project is worth investing into. How much proof? And what would constitute a breach of contract? What would make the investors decide to ask for their money back?”

“Ah,” he said. “That varies wildly from circumstance to circumstance. Mostly, it is up to each venture capitalist as regards their personal comfort level in the arena of standards of proof. A person who has shown past success in a particular avenue, and who has a new idea that merely looks good on paper, can do quite well. For others, a prototype, or an experiment proving the viability of a theory. It depends on the hypothetical product. And again, on how stringent the investor’s vetting procedures are.”

“And breach of contract?”

“That would take quite a lot. One would need to prove not only did the concept that initially warranted the investment fail to bear fruit, but the party which proposed it was consciously aware the product would not succeed. This is exceedingly difficult to prove. Investors are notoriously skittish for just this reason. Most arrangements involve a gradual influx of funding contingent upon pre-established goals being met along the way. Using this Mr. Grindel as an example, he could have his funding cut quite suddenly from one or all of the investors if at one point he failed to deliver an aspect of the project as promised.”

“All right,” I said. “I think I understand. Now let me ask you something, Heintz, understanding first that this is an entirely hypothetical question.”

“Of course.”

“Let’s just say I wanted to destroy Robert Grindel, immediately. Can this be done?”

“Do you intend ‘destroy’ to mean financially or some other way?” His tone did not change in the slightest, even when discussing what had to be an allusion to murder. I so very liked this whole personal Swiss banker thing. I made a mental note to pay more attention to my money in the future.

“I mean financially,” I said. “Is he vulnerable?”

“Most assuredly. Any time the bulk of one’s finances comes from a source outside of one’s own fortune, one is vulnerable. Immediacy is another matter.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“Things do not happen quickly in high finance,” he said. Heintz had very rapidly come to grips with my naïveté. Actually, given that according to my account I was roughly a hundred-and-forty-seven years old, he’d come to grips with a large number of seemingly impossible things already, so my lack of financial acumen was probably comparatively minor. He continued, “Even were I to devise a way to cut off all of his funding today, in all likelihood he would have access to several months of advanced funds. And it would take years for the investors to successfully reclaim their initial investments, if at all.”

“Even in a case of fraud?”

“At this level, that word is effectively meaningless. And realistically, the worst I could do was inspire his investors to apply a more hands-on approach to his project. Enforce timetables, that sort of thing. It would be a nuisance, but that’s all it would be, provided he has a viable product.”

“And we can’t find out what that product is,” I reiterated.

“Not without some time. I would be happy to make inquiries.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. I would have told him I just wanted some idea of what I was walking into, but that might have welcomed more questions than I needed to answer.

*
 
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*

The second leg of our journey was much shorter, and took us to within fifty miles of the designated landing site. It was there that Patti topped off her gas tank for what would be a very quick round trip into the veritable middle of nowhere.

“Here,” I said, as she climbed back into the pilot’s seat and started up the engine. I was handing her a wad of cash.

“What’s that, a tip?” she said. “I’ve already been paid.”

“It’s a little extra. For your discretion.”

She shrugged it off. “Give it to me when we get there.”

“Take it now,” I urged. “When we land, I want you to slow down enough to let me off and then get out of there.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m very serious. I don’t want them to see you. If it’s at all possible, I want you to pick a landing point at least a quarter mile off target. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Why is this, again?”

“If someone sees the tail numbers on your plane they can trace it back to you, right?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Well, let’s make sure nobody can do that, shall we?”

She fixed me with a quizzical look but didn’t pursue the point any further. And maybe I was being unduly paranoid but, as I’ve said, sometimes paranoia is worth the trouble. It got me through most of the fifteenth century.

We covered the last leg in under an hour. As requested, she put us down a good distance from the meeting point.

“Here we are,” she said, as we rolled to a stop.

“You do fine work,” I said, unbuckling myself.

“I know. Hey, tell me something, before you go.”

“If I can.”

“How much trouble are you in?”

I smiled. “I don’t really know yet.”

“Whatever this is about, I hope it goes well for you.”

We shook hands. “Believe it or not,” I said, “it’s about a girl.”

“That figures,” she rolled her eyes. “Be careful.”

I slammed the door to the plane and watched until she successfully reached altitude. Then I pointed myself in the right direction and started walking.