Immortal at the Edge of the World (9 page)

I’m the man in the jumpsuit. The redhead is someone who has no doubt had hundreds of names, but for convenience sake I’ve been calling her Eve.

In the video I can be seen speaking to Eve as Clara runs up, carrying a rifle. Just before that, a man named Robert Grindel was shot—by Clara—and carried off under a hail of gunfire by his bulletproof demon bodyguard.

When Clara arrives she draws my focus, and for a few seconds neither of us is looking at Eve.

Eve then turns and walks away from us.

I hit pause at that point, a moment before everything on the video stopped making sense altogether. I knew this because I’d looked at the footage a thousand times, and a thousand times through it I still couldn’t understand what was happening.

“What are you watching?” Mirella asked. She was staring out the window, probably wondering if I’d brought a movie and if it was any good.

“It’s difficult to explain,” I said.

We were 35,000 feet in the air on board a private jet I own, and let me just say if you have a lot of places to go and the money to spare you should definitely get one of these for yourself.

“I’ve been looking at cloud formations for half an hour. Why don’t you show me and not bother with the explanation? Maybe I can figure it out?”

“Sure. It’s more interesting than clouds.” This is something I probably wouldn’t have said not so long ago, when flying was new to me. Then, the idea of looking from the sky down was astonishing.

She walked over and sat next to me on the couch. Of course I have a couch on my plane. I also have a big TV and a wet bar, and the couch opens into a bed. This is a great time to be obscenely wealthy, I’m telling you.

I backed up the video and explained to Mirella who everyone was, in broad terms, then let it play.

“Okay, now watch right here,” I said, once we reached the point where I had previously hit pause. On the screen, Eve has turned away from me and Clara once more, and as happened every other time I watched this video, she simply vanishes.

Mirella blinked a couple of times then said, “It’s a special effect.”

“If I wasn’t one of the people in the scene, I’d agree with you.”

“Wait, so this is real?”

“It’s real. She really did vanish, and I really don’t know how she did it.”

“Play it again.”

I did, and I slowed it down for her.

In the video, Eve notes that nobody is looking, turns around, takes three steps toward the fence, and then she just isn’t there anymore.

“I still don’t believe it,” Mirella said. “It doesn’t even look like a
good
special effect.”

“What do you mean?”

“Give me the remote.”

I handed it over. She played with it for a few minutes before figuring out how to get it to move in super-slow motion. This was something I had never tried because I didn’t know there was such a thing as super-slow motion.

We watched the events play out once again, only now it took a tremendously long time. Finally, Mirella saw what she was looking for and paused it. “There,” she said.

She’d frozen the image at the very instant Eve disappeared from the camera.

“She’s . . . bigger,” I said.

“Yes, that’s what I mean. It’s a terrible effect.”

“Except it isn’t an effect.”

“As you say.”

She started it up again and we watched as Eve expanded until she was no longer visible. It was like watching a balloon stretch so thin it becomes transparent, as if the parts that made up the person of Eve decided they wanted to be further apart from each other, until there was nothing left. I might have considered the possibility I was actually seeing a person being destroyed by some sort of invisible weapon, except I had seen Eve since the day this happened.

More to the point, I had been looking for Eve off and on for a solid ten thousand years. She was the only person I knew who was at least as old as I am, and according to her she’s actually older. But she has a trick I don’t have, which is why every time I thought I had finally found her she ended up eluding me. It was the trick I was watching her perform on video now, and since I knew she had been doing this for a very long time, I also knew there was no mechanism involved. It was just her, somehow vanishing into the wind.

Mirella backed up the video and we watched it a few more times.

“If I could observe, you are clearly some sort of prisoner in this video. As is this vanishing woman.”

“That’s true. This was filmed the night we both escaped. My escape wasn’t as classy as hers, though. I had to use the front gates.” I also had to orchestrate the murder of a whole lot of people, but I don’t really feel all that bad about that because I didn’t much like any of them, except for one or two of the scientists. Plus the vampire who did the actual killing was an old friend, and it was really good to see her.

“Would you like to explain how a wealthy man such as yourself ended up in a situation such as this?”

“I think maybe another time,” I said. “It’s a very long story and you’re unlikely to believe a significant portion of it.”

She rolled her eyes. “You have too many secrets, Mr. Justinian.”

“That’s not true. I have two or three secrets, but they are really good ones.”

We watched it over again. Super-slow motion is strangely hypnotic. I resolved to watch more movies in this mode in the future.

“Where is this shot from?” Mirella asked.

“A security camera on a building nearby.”

I didn’t know footage of what happened that night had existed until the disc showed up in my mail about eight months ago. It had no return address and no note, but I have a friend in the FBI who is in the habit of sending me copies of things the government might have on me, and this certainly looked like one of those things. This was, hopefully, the only camera angle in which I could be identified because an awful lot of awful things happened that evening that I would rather not be connected to. I could ask the sender, but since he works for a government I don’t want to notice me, we try to keep out of touch except in emergencies.

Mirella handed back the remote. “You are going to be a difficult man to guard. I can tell this already.”

“Why is that?”

“Secrets will either get you killed, or they will get me killed, and I am not happy with either possibility.”

*
 
*
 
*

The jet was heading for Istanbul, which is not exactly a quick pond-skip from New York, so I was glad to have the couch and the bar, and the privacy of my own plane in general. It also obviated any need I would have had to worry about the blades hidden on my bodyguard’s person, as we didn’t have to pass through any metal detectors first, and nobody’s suitcase had to get X-rayed. Likewise, Customs is much less of a problem when you own your own jet.

I even have a phone on the plane. I know, you’re thinking
yes, of course I do
, but that’s because you’re used to having a phone everywhere. But for most of my life communication was defined by the speed with which it could be delivered. If a war was over, say, we had to rely on someone going from wherever the war ended to wherever we were to tell us it was over. Now if I need to talk to someone I can summon their voice on a little square. That I can do it while also traveling at ridiculous speeds on the wrong side of the clouds is the sort of thing that makes an immortal man stop and wonder how all this happened so quickly.

Anyway, I mention the phone because about a half an hour after my knife-wielding bodyguard dozed off in her reclining chair it started to ring. So I stumbled over to the desk—stumbled because of the bourbon I’d been drinking, not because the plane was unsteady—and sat down at the desk and answered it.

It took a few seconds to register what the man on the other end of the line was saying. He worked for the company that monitors the electronic security for my house, but I barely remembered even having a security system. It came with the place, and most of the time I left it off when I wasn’t there, just because Iza had a tendency to trigger it. But she was sleeping in a pressurized box under the desk—the pressure change from the plane ride hurts her ears—so I’d activated the system on my way out.

“Are you saying there’s been a break-in?” I asked for I think the second or third time.

“No sir,” said the man whose name was either Randolph or possibly Joseph. Something with a
–ph
in it, I was pretty sure. “That is, we don’t believe your home has been breached physically.”

“Then I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“What I’m saying is, someone . . . communicated with your security software.”

“Communicated?”

“Transmitted into, I guess.”

“No, that isn’t any better.”

Randolph/Joseph sighed. “Maybe I can just send it to you?”

“Send me what?”

“It’s a still image. We don’t know what it means.”

“I’ve been hacked. Someone hacked my security cameras and inserted a photo.”

“Yes, now you’re understanding.”

“I refilled my drink, I think that helped. Why don’t you send me the image?”

“Yes, I can do that.”

I dictated an e-mail address and opened the laptop next to the phone. I barely knew how to use the laptop, but I knew how to turn it on and how to check my e-mail from it, and that was all I needed most of the time. Tchekhy had given it to me, so it could probably hack the Pentagon. I’m sure I was underutilizing it terribly.

In a few minutes I’d managed to open the e-mail from the security person—according to his address his name was actually Larry, so I was pretty far off, it turns out—and download the picture.

I got back on the line. “You’re saying this photo was . . . where again?”

“It was buried in the online memory for one of the security cameras. We think it was just inserted recently. Every ten seconds this image replaced the camera’s footage, for only about an eighth of a second. I’ve asked around and truthfully none of us has ever seen anything like this. We’re not even sure how it could have been done remotely, if it was done remotely at all.”

“But there’s no video evidence of anyone in the house.”

“No sir.”

“Which camera?”

“The study. Why?”

“No reason, just curious.”

The picture being displayed for an eighth of a second every ten seconds on the camera in my study was a picture of me, bald and wearing a red parka. It was likely the only verifiable photograph of my face to ever make it onto the Internet, which meant that in theory anybody could have pulled it down from there at one time or another. It was my own fault, really, since I was the one who put it online.

“Sir, do you want us to send someone around to check out the property?”

The property is on an island off the coast of Seattle. It was tremendously unlikely anybody had made it all the way out there to breach one camera and insert a prank photo, only to not be detected by any other security measure. Sending someone out to check on the integrity of the island seemed like overkill. “No, I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “Let me know if any other images pop up, though, huh?”

“Yes sir.”

He hung up and left me with my mystery photo. I stared at it for a few minutes before deciding I had no idea what was going on and clicked the e-mail box to close it. That was when things really went wacky.

The mail messenger asked if I wanted to save the image before closing, and I said yes because that seemed like what the machine wanted me to say. It even highlighted
yes
to be helpful. But as soon as I did that the laptop jumped to life. Saving the photo had caused something else in the computer to activate, or . . . whatever goes on in these devices, and suddenly the picture took up the whole screen. Then just as suddenly the photo began to melt away and when it did this it left behind a message.

You are being watched.

Move your loved ones to safety and then meet me. I am with father.

Trust nobody.

---T

Tchekhy, it seemed, was alive and well.

Chapter Six

“Understand that if the day comes where I have to flee to survive or fight by your side in the face of certain death, I cannot guarantee the latter?” I said.

“You must not keep many friends,” Hsu said, accepting my extended hand. “And yes, I accept this condition. I don’t believe in certain death.”

*
 
*
 
*

I don’t really have loved ones.

I guess that’s not entirely true. I mean, I do have people I care about, whose lives I would feel badly about shortening whether through some direct action of mine or indirectly because of me. It’s bound to happen from time to time, because I have to interact with people or I go crazy—I tried the hermit thing once, it wasn’t for me—and interaction can have consequences. Every hundred years or so I become involved in circumstances that could end with me dead, and that also tends to put the people around me at risk.

But
loved ones
is really a term reserved for family, and it’s fair to say I don’t have a family of my own, or even people I could readily identify as relatives. Tchekhy sort of knows this, but he also knows I have in the past gone out of my way to avenge someone whose death I felt responsible for, and to put myself in harm’s way to prevent other people from being hurt, and he knows this because I put myself at risk
for
him on one occasion.