Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement (2 page)

Only now Roux
had
been remembered, and the journalist had followed a trail of photographs into his past and found him impossibly unchanged despite the seventy years between the first and last picture.

“It could be the same man.” Roux offered a noncommittal shrug. He needed something to throw the young
journalist off the trail, a conclusive spanner in the works that would destroy his faith that it was Roux in the photograph.

“I’m absolutely sure it is, Mr. Roux. It’s you, after all.” He produced another picture, a sepia-tinged photograph of the Russian royal family. Roux was there again. “Do I really need to show you more? I have them. Plenty of them. Enough, I’m sure, to convince you.”

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” Roux told him. “You can’t possibly think these are all of me? They date back nearly a hundred years. That’s impossible.”

“And yet that’s you in each of those pictures, unable to resist the allure of power, rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous. As you say, there’s more than a hundred years between some of these photographs and yet there you are in all of them. And, most interestingly, you haven’t changed a bit. I would ask you what the secret of your young skin is, but I’m assuming it’s not some moisturizer.” His smile was more of a wince.

“A good story, but for one fatal flaw. That’s not me in those pictures, no matter how similar the men are. With the billions of people in the world, it’s hardly surprising that some of us wear recycled faces, is it? How could it be me?”

“You’re denying it?” the journalist asked, gathering the pictures.

“I’m simply pointing out that you are mistaken.”

“And that’s your final word?”

Roux rubbed a hand over his face, a gesture that could easily have been interpreted as having something to hide rather than simple exhaustion. “I really don’t think there’s anything else to say.” He pushed himself to his feet, indicating their meeting was over. He wasn’t about to sit and debate the impossibility of longevity, never mind immortality,
with the young man when the only thing he risked was betraying himself with some careless word that would only strengthen his case.

“Then you’ll have no objection to me running the story, then?”

“What story?” That brought him up sharply. He’d reacted just a little too quickly to the threat. An innocent man wouldn’t have barked out those two words quite as fiercely. He forced himself to sound amused. “There is no story.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. We’ll let the members of the public make up their own minds, shall we? Isn’t that the joy of a free press?”

“I’m not sure I’d call making up some fanciful story anything more than irresponsible, Mr. Moerlen. It certainly isn’t journalism.”

The reporter inclined his head slightly, as though conceding the point. “I’m going to be in Paris for a couple of days. Think about it. I’ll leave these copies of the photographs with you so you can go through them at your leisure. I do hope you will decide that you’d like to talk to me about this miracle, Mr. Roux. You have my number.”

The man got to his feet and held out his hand.

Reluctantly, Roux shook it.

The more he made of the situation, the harder it would be to brush it aside as some bizarre flight of fancy. People didn’t live forever. It was impossible. But then, so much about his life was impossible. He needed time to think about this. It would be easy to pull a few strings and make sure that the story was squashed before there was any danger of it being printed. No one made it to Roux’s age without collecting an awful lot of favors owed in the checks and balances of life. It helped that the story sounded utterly preposterous.

He stood at the front door and watched as the young man drove away in the small Fiat, white crystals of fog gathering in the night. He could taste snow on the breeze. Maybe not tonight, or tomorrow, but soon, Roux thought. He usually liked this time of year because it was all about the end of things, something he’d experienced so much without having faced it himself.

As the fog folded around the journalist’s car, Roux made his way to his study and started to make the calls.

“You absolute bastard!”

Roux had ignored Moerlen’s calls and, when they finally appeared to stop, assumed he’d gotten the message: there wasn’t a serious magazine or newspaper in the world that would touch the story. A few of the editors had humored Moerlen and admitted that yes, it was curious, wasn’t it? But curious or not, it wasn’t for them. A few that Roux knew personally had laughed in the young man’s face.

Roux said nothing.

Instead, he allowed the journalist to vent his frustration over the phone. He was doing the man a favor, even if he didn’t appreciate it. By letting him get it out of his system it minimized the chances of him doing something stupid. Sooner or later Moerlen would find some small circulation magazine that liked the unexplained and unexplainable, which would buy the story and might even run it, but no one took that kind of nonsense seriously.

“It’s not going to work. You can’t gag me, no matter
who you know. I’ll find someone who will publish this story. The truth will come out.”

“Look,” Roux said patiently. “I don’t know what you think you know, but believe me, you don’t. There is no story to sell. Let it go. Get on with your life. Don’t make an enemy of me, son,” Roux said, deliberately patronizing the man on the other end of the line.

“You think you are so clever, don’t you? You think that you have it all worked out. What you don’t get is that the whole world will want to know your story. How can someone live for so long without aging? I’m not naive enough to think you signed some kind of pact with the devil, but something is going on. That is you in those photographs. I know it is. I’ll prove it.”

“I’m sorry that you’ve wasted time on this,” Roux said, signaling an end to the conversation, but the man refused to go.

“Fine. I’ll begin my story by telling everyone how I’ve been muzzled. That makes for a compelling beginning. How someone—you—didn’t want this story out in the public domain. That just makes it more interesting, doesn’t it? Think about it. The fact that the truth is being suppressed is more interesting than the truth itself. Why would you want this kept secret unless you had something to hide? You can try to ridicule me and make me look like a fool, but I won’t be silenced. There are other ways to tell this story. This is the modern world now. Information wants to be free. There are bulletin boards and chat rooms that would devour this type of thing, giving it a life of its own. All I have to do is log in and start to tell the world everything I know. It’s not about money anymore. It’s about the truth. You’ve misjudged me, Mr. Roux, if you think that all I care about is money. I didn’t
turn up on your doorstep trying to blackmail you. I came looking for answers.”

“And that was a mistake,” Roux said, then hung up.

Moerlen was right; the world was changing, and changing faster than it had for decades before. It was already smaller than it had been even twenty years ago with the pernicious invasion of television, but now with so many people having access to computers and those machines somehow connecting like some giant message network, it was so much more dangerous for a man like him.

This was escalating too quickly. The risk now was that it would slip out of his control. There were strings he could pull, more favors he could call in, but once the story had a life of its own there was no way he could put that genie back in the bottle. And that was what those bulletin boards and chat rooms promised to do.

Which meant he had to find another way to stop the story.

He needed to speak to someone who understood this electronic world, and the very real damage that could be done if he were to be exposed. There was one obvious choice, but given that they hadn’t talked for longer than Moerlen had been alive, it wasn’t exactly an easy call to make. The last time they’d been together Garin Braden had tried to kill him. The same thing had happened the time before. A third time and he’d start to take it personally.

He dialed the number, but he was forwarded straight to voice mail.

“Call me,” he said, then hung up.

There was nothing more to say.

Garin—his former pupil—would recognize his voice, and understand just how important it was that they talk simply because he’d swallowed his pride and reached out.

He thought about ignoring the situation and hoping the mess would just go away. The more he fought against it, the more obvious it was he had something to hide, after all. But what if it didn’t go away? What if those damned photographs led to more journalists banging on his door, asking more and more questions he couldn’t answer? He hadn’t asked for this life, even if, looking around him at the riches he had assembled across the centuries, it might look like a blessing rather than a curse. All it would take was the wrong person digging deep enough and everything would begin to unravel. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to begin a new life somewhere else. It was getting harder and harder to do that in this era of powerful computers and international cooperation.

His world, and Garin’s, was in danger of falling apart.

He punched a number on his phone again.

“Mr. Moerlen,” he said before the man on the other end of the line had had a chance to say hello. “You are right, we should meet. I will be in Paris in a couple of hours.”

“I’m so glad you’ve come to your senses, Mr. Roux. But things have changed since the last time we spoke.”

“How so?” Roux asked, not liking the sound of this.

“Remuneration, Mr. Roux.”

“Ah, so despite all of your protestations, this
is
about money, then? I’m disappointed.”

“Don’t be. I’m a child of the modern age. The modern age, as I’m sure you have noticed, is an expensive place to live. Let’s make it the top of the Eiffel Tower shall we?”

Moerlen named a time and hung up.

Roux wondered how much this was going to cost him. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the money. He had plenty of money, but would it ever be enough to guarantee his privacy? Pay the blackmailer once and then what? Expect him to be good for his word and never turn up on the
doorstep again looking for another handout? Blackmail was a dirty business. There could never be an end to it.

Which, unfortunately for Moerlen, meant it needed to end very differently.

* * *

I
T WAS A
long climb.

There were a dozen tourists already on the viewing platform by the time Roux reached it.

There was no sign of Patrice Moerlen.

Roux’s plane had been refueled and would be ready to leave Orly Airport at a moment’s notice if things went the way he assumed they would. He would need to distance himself from the city for a while. A glance at his watch, an eerily precise Patek Philippe chronograph, showed that he was almost five minutes early. He hated to be early for anything; time spent waiting around was time wasted. Perhaps it was because he had so much of it he hoarded it?

A couple of tourists glanced in his direction, no doubt wondering why he had made the dizzying climb up the iron stairs and wasn’t leaning over the rail to take in the view across the city.

“Are you afraid of heights?” a small boy with a thick American accent asked him. “You can’t fall out you know. You’d have to climb and jump because of the railings, so it’s really safe.”

Roux forced a smile.

“That’s good to know.”

The boy’s mother took hold of his arm and pulled him away, muttering something about not talking to strangers.

Roux checked his watch again. Ninety seconds. Still no sign of Moerlen. And no sign of him on the stairs below, working his way up to the platform. This wasn’t good. He couldn’t control the situation. He didn’t like it
when he couldn’t control the situation. The elevator doors opened behind him.

Another handful of tourists emerged, but the journalist wasn’t among them.

As the last of them stepped onto the platform, his phone rang.

He still wasn’t used to the fact that technology had advanced so quickly over the past few years that it was possible to carry a phone around wherever you were in the world, even if reception was patchy.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m at the foot of the tower.”

“I’m not in the mood for games, Mr. Moerlen. You said the observation platform,” Roux said. “I am on the observation platform, you are not. How am I supposed to trust you if you can’t even keep this simple agreement? This does not auger well for our relationship.”

“What can I say? I changed my mind. I wanted to know how serious you were. Now I know.”

“Serious? I’m trying to save you from wasting any more of your life, and in the process ending your career, but it looks like you are intent on leading me off on some wild-goose chase. I don’t appreciate being treated like an idiot.”

“Save me?” Moerlen had the temerity to laugh at him. “Save yourself, you mean. You misjudged me, Mr. Roux. It was never about the money. I’ve only ever been interested in the truth. And you’ve just given it to me. Goodbye.”

Roux pressed against the viewing window, knowing there was no hope of being able to spot the damned journalist so far below.

People milled around like so many ants on the ground below. He’d read somewhere that if a person dropped a
centime on its edge from this height it would cut through a man, splitting him in two. He had a problem. If he didn’t do something about Moerlen now, he might not get the opportunity again before it was too late. He had to stop that story getting out. His privacy afforded him a certain standard of living. Exposed, his life could never be the same again. It really was as simple as that. Moerlen, consciously or not, had forced his hand.

Behind him, the elevator doors began to close. He moved quickly. Two strides, three, and he reached out, sliding his hand between the doors before they could shut. He stepped inside. The silence was punctuated by the occasional disapproving
tut
from the woman whose boy had spoken to him before.

Roux said nothing.

He waited out the short descent, then pushed his way through the doors before they were fully open, elbowing between the next wave of tourists eager to make their way up to the observation platform without the climb.