Immortal at the Edge of the World (13 page)

“No. Anyone watching would have assumed that both myself and my visitor had perished in the same explosion. But I left through the tunnel.”

“You tunneled your way out?”

“It was already there. Many parts of that city have underground tunnels, my friend. This is one reason I never left that location. I had an escape route, which led from my basement chamber to the basement of the building across the street. I rented a room on the top story that overlooked my storefront. There I kept an emergency bag and a few other things.”

“Like a sniper rifle.”

“Yes. I had it out not in anticipation of your arrival, however. I imagined if I waited long enough whoever was with my visitor would reveal themselves. I know I was told to expect you to visit, but I did not know whether I could trust anything I was told. And the rest I suspect you know.”

“I showed up and you shot at me.”

“I shot at your car door to get you out of there before anyone saw you. And as soon as I did that I knew it was time to start the fire and then leave.”

“So you never saw anyone else?”

“If the man was with a second person, that person was patient beyond all reason. I think he came alone.”

My own memory of that scene was something of a blur. Between the explosion and the gunfire and—maybe—the alcohol, there was no way I was going to remember someone out of place on the street. A mature yeti could have been standing next to me and I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

“I can find out if the guy was a Fed,” I told him. “I’ll make a call.”

“That will not be necessary.”

“It’s okay, I owe him a call anyway. Have you followed up on the fire?”

“
Da
, in the official reports there were no persons in the building so no deaths were registered. The private files in the police computers have identified the partial remains of a human but there is not enough to determine whose. The detective closed the case positing that
I
was the dead man, except, of course, he does not know who I am either, as none of the legal property documents record my actual name, or truly the name of any real person. This detective sounded very aggravated in his write-up.”

“I’ll make sure there aren’t any other investigations going on.”

Tchekhy sighed the way he always did when I didn’t understand something he was telling me. “Perhaps I have undersold the gravity of this situation,” he said. “Somebody is after you.”

“That’s been happening a lot lately. I can deal with it.”

“No. This is not as it was before. This is not some bounty, or a group of religious fanatics. This is larger.”

“Like what?”

“I truthfully do not know, and that is the problem. The man I killed worked for someone capable of hiding from
me
. Not only that, they hacked my computer, and that is something I did not think anyone was capable of doing. These are not the people you stand up to, Efgeniy. I think it is time for you to disappear.”

“You’re scared.”

“I am worried.”

There have been many times in my life where the solution to a problem was to outlive that problem. It made a lot of sense for the bulk of human history, because sometimes a long walk or a boat ride would be enough to completely exit the sphere of influence of whomever I might have pissed off. It worked fine when I fled Egypt and just hung out on the Greek side of the Mediterranean for a few hundred years. It worked when I left England for America, and about ten or eleven times in the Middle Ages, when every roving band was its own autonomous culture.

Ten years ago I would have thought I could do the same thing: lock up my money for the next time I needed it, take enough to travel with, and disappear for a hundred years or so. But I was pretty sure there weren’t any places left to hide anymore, not unless the moon has developed nomadic tribes since the last time I checked.

“I don’t know if I can,” I said. “Not without getting rid of a whole lot of money and staging my own death, and those things take time to do right.” What I didn’t say was that I would also have to suspend the quest I was currently on, and I wasn’t fully prepared to do that just yet.

He nodded, and stood. “Well, it is my advice to you. Disappear, and make this the last conversation we have together. If you will not take my advice, then speak to me only on the phone I gave to you, and only after you have secured privacy on your end of the call. We are using technology that could make me very wealthy if I had the time to exploit it, so please put it to good use.”

He extended his hand and we shook, like men concluding a business meeting rather than friends who were probably never seeing one another face-to-face again.

“What will you do now?” I asked him.

“I have places I can disappear into. I will be in a Baltic state, but please don’t ask me to tell you more than that.”

“I’m sorry it was my association that caused this problem for you,” I said.

“It’s nothing. You are family.”

I turned to leave, but another thought occurred to me. “Hey, do you still have what you need to hack your way into stuff? Or whatever you call it?”

“I do. Whom did you want me to hack?”

“A bank.”

“I do this often. Which bank? I may have inroads already established.”

“Probably not
this
bank,” I said. “But I do have a way for you to get in.”

Chapter Eight

I used to talk a lot about wealth with Aurus. As a Roman he had trouble grasping some of the basic concepts behind acquired merchant wealth because he grew up in Constantinople, and the mentality of the old Empire was still embedded in that culture. Wealth in his reckoning meant political power and influence, and while that held true for the people lucky enough to be born into the right kind of families, it tacitly excluded people like us, trying to earn our own wealth.

It’s a problem that doesn’t really make sense to a modern person, because now wealth is more directly equated with money, and money is a fungible substitute for birthright. So I spent hours—Aurus was not stupid but he was also less than brilliant—going over what it meant to be a wealthy merchant, and what he could do with that kind of wealth.

We used to use a hundi broker to send funds back to the Middle East when we were traveling in the Far East. Aurus had a sister and brother-in-law who owned a tiny fragment of farmland in the countryside beyond the walls of Constantinople. As soon as he had earnings, he began sending them to her. It was an act of faith on his part because he didn’t understand the idea behind what he was sending, and if he had understood it he would then not understand how it got to her.

To the latter point, a hundi is really simple. If I give a broker in India three hundred pieces of gold and tell him I want someone in Constantinople to have it, he will keep the gold and record my having given it to him. He will then forward a ledger that includes my transaction to his brother, who lives in Constantinople. Meanwhile, I’ve sent a letter of my own to my friend in Constantinople telling him to go to the brother to get the gold. My friend goes to the brother and gets gold from him, and the ledger transaction is completed.

And that’s it. Very simple, really. The brokers keep a fee, and they always have gold on hand to pay out because people send money in both directions. But Aurus could not get the idea down. It wasn’t until we returned to Constantinople after two years of travel, and he got to visit his sister on her now-much-larger farm, that he realized this money was real.

*
 
*
 
*

The most surprising part of the conversation with Tchekhy might have been that he didn’t just come right out and say a government was after me. That was the sort of speculation I’d come to expect from my friend, who is either the only sane man on the planet or a high-functioning paranoid. But aside from making sure we weren’t visible to satellites, which certainly indicated he had a government on his mind, he never came right out and said so.

And it probably was a government, or someone with those kinds of resources. I’d changed our destination from Istanbul to Tbilisi while in flight, so if they picked up our trail from the airport they had to have had operatives in both cities. That meant a pretty large operation, the kind that was only possible if you were a government or a major corporation.

What was also interesting was that I was being followed, but not hunted. Being hunted is something I’m used to, as that’s a thing that sometimes happens to me. It’s one of the consequences of being the only immortal man on the planet, because people for some reason think I have some sort of wisdom or magical significance or, depending on the era, scientific value. I remember a tribe a very long time ago that convinced themselves my urine would heal the sick, and I could not take a piss without someone throwing a bowl under me for about seventy years. It sucked, and it only got worse when someone decided my blood must be even more important.

Being followed was an entirely different thing. The last time it happened was because someone thought I was possibly financing terrorism, because that’s what we immortals do with our money or something. I would say it was a harmless presumption since I wasn’t doing anything of the sort, except that proof isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for getting oneself imprisoned, either historically or right now. And long-term incarceration for me is just not a good thing.

What I was currently doing with my time and money—still nothing to do with terrorism—also didn’t really deserve anyone else’s attention. If I was feeling romantic about it I’d call it a quest, but all I was really doing was trying to answer a question I’d been ignoring for a thousand years. It was a project that could at best be considered frivolous, and at worst ridiculous and silly, as would be obvious to anybody I bothered to explain it to if I ever got around to doing that. It was important to
me
, but I couldn’t see how anyone else would care. It certainly didn’t deserve full-time surveillance.

I tried to tell myself it was probably a corporation. They’re the size of governments nowadays and sometimes have more clout, and they’re nice and predictable because at the end of the day their motivation is to make money. I can work with that.

Governments have all kinds of different motivations, and only one of them is monetary. A government can be run by a fanatic, which can make them just about the most dangerous organized entity there is, because fanatics don’t listen to reason and don’t act logically. (Corporations can be run by fanatics, too, but fanatics aren’t big money earners in the business world, historically. So they don’t last long.) I will go to the other side of the planet to avoid a fanatical government apparatus if I have to.

By the time I got back to the hotel room I had decided it didn’t much matter, because both options were terrible. Mirella greeted me at the door in a bathrobe, which was a simply fantastic way to be greeted.

“That’s a good look for you,” I said.

“Shut up. It’s in case anyone came to the door wondering why you had not left. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“If we’re being watched, the people watching us think you’ve been in the room this whole time. Now they know you weren’t.”

This was a good point. “I hadn’t actually thought about how I was going to sneak back in.”

“Well, now they’ll spend the day reconstructing your morning. I hope your friend took the appropriate precautions.”

“He’ll be fine. But we have to get out of here.”

“To where?”

“At least as far as the plane. After that I haven’t decided yet.”

*
 
*
 
*

I still hadn’t decided by the time we were in the air, which was a decision in its own right, since we were bound for Istanbul next and I didn’t tell anyone on the flight crew not to bring us there. I was torn between radically altering my schedule and maybe tipping off the people following me that I knew they were following, and keeping to the itinerary and acting ignorant until I decided what to do.

I don’t much like going to Istanbul. I haven’t been there very often since the name change, and I only went a handful of times when it was Constantinople. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy the place. I saw Constantinople when it was the most beautiful city on the planet, and I don’t honestly know if I have ever seen any man-made thing as magnificent since. I would compare it to seeing a woman’s beauty fade with old age, except I have seen that thousands of times and what happened to this city was far worse.

Well all right, not
that
bad. Not as bad as, say, Dresden. But until you know what the Hagia Sofia looked like after it was finished—and you can’t know, because there are no pictures—you just can’t understand.

There were a couple of other good reasons for not spending a lot of time there back then. First, as beautiful as it was, it was still full of Romans. Second, my business dealings always left me one step removed from the center of the merchant class in the city, and that was partly by design. I didn’t want to become settled, and I didn’t want my wealth tied to land, because—and I think I’ve said this before—land is only useful if the empire (or country or tribe) that recognizes it as yours continues to exist. A deed isn’t going to do you much good if the government that gave it to you has been burned to the ground. So when I dealt with the marketplace in Constantinople it was as a supplier of goods to a taxpayer. I barely made a profit, but it was worth it for the hassle I avoided.