“Your disappearance was a death gesture, I take it,” she said.
“Yes. I didn’t plan to go anywhere until the people who knew me aged out. Death by other means.”
“You didn’t wait long enough.”
“I already know that. As I said, events conspired.”
“We severed the connection,” Mirella said, “between his life before and now. This is why we’re hiring you, and the man who did our papers before now. To keep the separation clean.”
“It didn’t work,” Ina said. “Someone, it seems, knew you were not dead, and now associates of that somebody appear to be aware that you are currently in Paris.”
“Associates,” I repeated, as that seemed important. “Is there a bounty on me? Because I’ve been through this before.”
“Not a bounty, immortal man. A hit. A longstanding one, as it turns out. The contract was initiated three years ago. I assume you were on the island three years ago? It’s the only thing that would have protected you.”
“Oh,” I said, “yes. I was.”
There was a great deal of vetting involved in even visiting the island. I always thought it was sort of paranoid, initiated by the council to prevent some of its more controversial residents from an assassination. It never occurred to me that I might also benefit from this protection.
The bounty I previously had to get out of was very different from whatever this was; the people behind that one wanted me alive. This was clearly someone else.
“What is the source of the hit?” Mirella asked.
“Unknown. It came via the usual channels.” Ina took a longer look at Mirella. “You swam those waters for a time, I can tell. You’re armed, and not with the usual sort of weapons.”
“I’m not unfamiliar with murder-for-hire,” Mirella said. “Is it reputable?”
“Five-star, and for quite a lot of money.” To me, Ina said, “I don’t know how much you were worth before your paper suicide, but I would wager you are now worth much more as an actual dead man than you were in that life.”
“I seriously doubt that,” I said. “But I get your point.”
I was one of the richest people in the world, for a little while—probably the second or third time I’ve been able to make that claim in my lifetime. It depends on how one counts personal wealth, and probably also how one defines the ‘world’. I think it’s probably a more impressive claim now than it was a few thousand years ago, just because of the size of the population.
“Thank you for the warning,” I said. “As soon as we have those other two passports, we’ll be out of your way.”
“That isn’t the only reason I’m telling you this,” she said. “I wanted it out in the open now, in case you thought whatever steps I took after this were in some way up-selling, as it were, to an imagined threat.”
“I don’t know how to take that. What do you mean, up-selling?”
“I understand,” Mirella said. She stretched, and raised an arm until her hand was tickling the hasp of the sword sticking out of the scabbard on her back. She did this when she was expecting violence.
“When will they be arriving for us?” she asked.
I was just slow enough to need a couple of beats to fully comprehend what Mirella meant. I’m not prepared to blame the alcohol, because that would just prove she was right about recommending I stay sober. But it was probably the alcohol.
Anyway, what I had missed and my girlfriend hadn’t, was that the part about there being a contract on my head wasn’t an abstract conversational point. There was an immediate, practical application.
“We have time,” Ina said. “I don’t expect them to enter the building at all, as the wise thing would be to await your departure. Right here, you’re cornered. The only way out is down the elevator and through the lobby. A smart play would be a sharpshooter across the street, but they may not be smart. We will see.”
“Fire escape?” Mirella asked.
“Yes, there is one of course, but the door is alarmed. You’ll just be notifying them of where to expect your exit. And the stairwell releases into the lobby, so as long as you’re using public exits, a sharpshooter across the street is still in play.”
“You have another way out,” I said.
“I do. It’s in the event someone decided they felt the same way about my life as someone does about yours, but it will suffice here.”
“I’m going to go back to up-sell. What do you want in exchange for this safe passage?”
“A good word with your benefactor, on the occasion of your continued survival. Imagine how this could go: you exit my home and are assaulted. You survive, or you don’t survive; in either case, I was here, you were here, now I look involved. It could be argued, that were I an active participant in the execution of the bounty, the financial benefits would make becoming an enemy of Dimitri Romanov tolerable.”
“Does it?”
“No, immortal man. I have money. I value peace more highly. In this, I can only speak for myself. The man who referred you here follows his own conscience.”
“Jacques was so afraid of Dimitri he couldn’t even say his name,” I said.
“A healthy terror for one in his position. But greed can convince a person to try and outrace the devil. I’m sure you’re no stranger to the siren call of avarice.”
“I grew out of it a long time ago. How do you know he did betray us?”
“I don’t, but someone knows you’re here. Assembling killers on short notice creates ripples, and I’ve been seeing those ripples all evening. It was only after we met that it became clear what the cause was.”
“So, you can get us out of here,” Mirella reiterated.
“Out of the building, and as far as the airport, if you need. My advice would be to take the earliest flight back to the South Pacific and disappear yourselves once more. The island remains off-limits to those in the know and secret to those not in the know. Dimitri can send someone else on this errand of yours.”
“That isn’t really an option,” I said.
Not said, was exactly how unsafe the island had recently become, thanks to a tsunami and something like an attack by an invasive species. It was good to know this wasn’t public knowledge, even if it seemed insane for it not to be, given how many had died as a consequence of those two events. But, most of the dead were non-human, and as weird as this seemed, they valued secrecy more highly than their own lives.
“Surely, you have turned your back to impending cataclysm before,” Ina said. “I would say your survival depended on such an attitude. Unless the contract is mistaken, you have no special abilities.”
“Well that’s just hurtful.”
For the record, she was right; I don’t get old and I can’t get sick (so far) but that’s about it.
“It isn’t Dimitri Romanov’s problem to solve,” Mirella said. “He’s only providing tactical support for the expedition.”
“Then perhaps you should consider another era in which to tilt at this windmill.”
There was a DING from the end of the hallway, prompting Ina to jump to her feet.
“The second passports are done,” she said, heading for the back room. “The airport, then? Assuming you haven’t concluded I’m inventing a threat to improve my standing with your sponsor.”
“We believe you,” I said. “Just get us out of the building, we’ll figure out where we’re going from there.”
“Very good.”
She got halfway down the hall when we all heard another DING. This one came from the front entryway.
“Oh dear,” Ina said.
“Was that the elevator?” I asked.
“It was. Someone with a key engaged the penthouse level.”
“I take it you weren’t expecting any other guests?” Mirella asked.
“No. I apologize, it appears they are opting for a frontal assault after all, and we have less time than I thought.”
It seemed like we were jumping to a lot of successive conclusions at the same time,
but these weren’t people I was intimately familiar with, so Ina’s understanding of the situation was the one that made the most sense at the moment.
Still, Jacques didn’t seem all that betrayal-ish when I sat with him, being far more concerned with getting out of our transaction okay. He was also reluctant to involve himself in the part where he got us in touch with Ina. If he’d been planning to betray us all along, he would have had a different way to do it, and then decided what was about to happen was a better plan. Or, it wasn’t him, and someone else—presumably someone close to Jacques—was behind this.
Or nobody was coming and we weren’t about to get attacked.
“They opt a closed-quarters attack over hidden sniper,” Mirella noted, as she drew her sword. She keeps it aligned with her spine, and short enough to allow her to still bend at the waist without it being awkward. She owns a larger sword, but that’s for special occasions. “Interesting decision.”
“A stupid one,” Ina said. She looked at me. “Are you armed?”
“She’s my weapon.”
“That’s lovely, but unhelpful.”
Ina put her hand on a spot on the hallway wall, and a panel slid open, revealing a nifty collection of guns.
“The goblin is a fine weapon, but maybe you can back her up with more than confidence in her abilities,” she said.
“Those might help. It depends on what’s coming up in the elevator. Any ideas?”
“I assumed they would be intelligent enough to wait until you exited. I don’t know how much I trust my own answer to this question.”
“Best guess.”
“Human. I don’t think Jacques has anything more interesting on his payroll.”
I took a Glock from the cabinet, and confirmed that it came with a full clip.
“I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” I said. “The best way to keep Dimitri from finding out about a betrayal is to either pay off or eliminate everyone who could tell him, so this sort of makes sense.”
It could have also been that whoever was doing this wasn’t smart at all, but very, very stupid. This was the option that had me sort of worried, because if we were dealing with the exceptionally dumb, there was a good chance a demon was riding up the elevator.
We gathered in the entryway. The man at the door had his gun out and was watching the number above the elevator doors go up. I didn’t remember how many floors the building had, so I couldn’t tell when it was close, but given he was holding his breath I thought we were probably about there.
Ina positioned herself between us and the door, armed with what I would call a small cannon. I didn’t know what kind of gun it was, but that was what it looked like. Mirella was next to me, sword out.
“Hey, I have a question,” I said. “Do you have to be in the lift in order for it to reach the penthouse?”
Ina looked at me for a hard second.
“No. It’s a direct trip when the key is engaged and the button depressed. One could turn the key, hit the button, and step out if so inclined. Why?”
This was what was bugging me. Anybody coming up the elevator had to know that there would be a ton of forewarning to the occupants of the penthouse that someone was coming, that nobody was expecting them, and that there would be a lot of bullets flying in their direction as soon as the doors opened. So either they were bulletproof—which meant standing there to defend ourselves in this manner was a waste of time—or something else was being sent up the elevator.
The door dinged again. The guard whose name we never got crouched down and prepared to shoot whatever came through the doors. I felt sort of bad about never getting his name, because he was about to die and I had no time to warn him properly of that fact.
All I did have time to do was grab Ina’s collar and yank her backwards. My other hand (I dropped the gun) had a hold of Mirella.
Other than those two things, I had time to shout one word of warning, so it had to be a decent word. What I came up with was, “BOMB!”
I’m pretty sure the door opened at that point and the explosive device inside the elevator did what it was supposed to do. I can’t be a hundred percent positive that’s precisely what happened, because I didn’t hear the doors slide apart, and after the explosion I couldn’t hear much of anything at all, not right away. However, I can speak with great confidence that my guess was correct, and there was a bomb on the elevator, since once the detonation occurred it was pretty impossible to deny this.
When I pulled everyone back it was to get behind the nearest wall, which happened to be a retaining wall. Anything less than that and I wouldn’t be around to tell you about it. There was, for instance, another wall consisting of not much more than plasterboard, separating the entryway from the kitchen, and that wall vanished in a puff of white dust. Ina’s doorman had been in front of the wall, and he too vanished in a puff, albeit a much more gruesome one.
I think I must have lost consciousness for a minute or two, because the next thing I was aware of, after the blast knocked us all backwards—I landed on the couch—was Mirella shaking me and saying something I couldn’t hear.
Ina, she was asking, where is Ina?
I staggered to my feet, decided that was a bad idea, and sat down again. The room was full of smoke and dust, and smelled like pulverized human. (One of the many unfortunate things about being immortal is that I’ve smelled this often enough to know exactly what I’m smelling.) There were cracks in most of the windows on the ceiling and wall, and a few of them were growing as I watched. Soon, we would be exposed to the night air. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, except for the part where the glass had to fall somewhere and we were under a lot of it.
Mirella found Ina lying beneath part of a table on the other side of the room.
I didn’t appreciate the urgency of the task in the moment; my head was too scrambled. I figured the fire department was undoubtedly on their way, and those guys were trained to do things like help tiny women with vaguely German accents out from under a pile of rubble. There was no rush to get it done ourselves. Then, I decided Mirella did this in order to interrogate our host on the subject of where the fire exit was, so that we could leave that way ourselves.
I was half right. That was obviously the question asked, but once Ina told Mirella where it was, Mirella ran in that direction alone.
I probably said something out loud about this, along the lines of hey, don’t forget me, but I still couldn’t hear so I don’t know how audible I was. She kept going, sword in one hand and a dagger in the other, looking like she had been somewhere else when the bomb went off. Maybe goblins just didn’t get concussions.
Then I understood.
You don’t just send a bomb up and hope for the best, not when there’s money in proving it killed who it was supposed to kill. You send a team up the stairwell to make sure, and to deal with anybody still breathing.
I watched my girlfriend disappear into the smoke, and then got to my feet and tried to find a weapon with which to provide some backup. Hand-to-hand was out of the question, as my equilibrium was shot: it felt like I was the bad kind of drunk.
What I found was Ina’s cannon. It looked like something between a rocket launcher and a shotgun, but it had a trigger and a barrel, and was probably loaded and ready to fire. What it would fire was a good question, and one I really should have sought an answer to prior to using it, but: my girlfriend was facing off an unknown number of people alone, somewhere in the middle of the smoke and plaster dust. Time was at a premium.
My hearing was starting to return, so I followed what sounds I could pick up through the smoke until—all at once—I came on the scene.
I was too late, but in a good way; she didn’t need my help after all. Mirella was standing over possibly three bodies, covered in blood and looking happier than I’d seen her in a really long time.
We don’t talk about it, but she likes killing people a whole lot more than she probably should.
“Put that down before you
shoot me with it,” she said.
“Any more coming?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But I would recommend we find Ina’s third way out rather than attempting the stairs.”
Just then, a loud CRASH took away my hearing again for a few seconds. We were standing at one end of a side corridor that had been behind a door, with the fire exit at the other end of the corridor. This was a part of the penthouse that was covered by a non-glass roof, which was good, because that was what had made the crashing noise: the ceiling had caved in.
Mirella ran back to the living room. I followed as quickly as I could.
As I said, being open to the night air was probably ultimately a good thing, as the Paris winds cleared out the smoke and dust almost immediately. The winds were also strong enough to tip someone with equilibrium issues off the side, though, so I stayed far from the edge and let Mirella dig out our host. Ina looked to have avoided damage from the falling glass thanks to the tabletop she was beneath.
Ina pointed, and Mirella got her to her feet. Get me to my office, Ina was saying. The three of us stumbled down the hall.
Her computer room was largely undamaged by the explosion. It also still had power, which was a little surprising.
“I have to destroy all of this,” Ina said, reaching into one of the machines. She pulled out two passports. “My apologies, I will be unable to provide you with the third identification this evening.”
“That’s okay.” I said. “How do we get out of here?”
Ina stepped past the computers to the wall on the far end, reached down and slid up a panel.
“It’s for laundry service,” she said. “Don’t worry, there’s an electrical lift; you won’t be free-falling into the basement.”
“Will they be surprised to find us instead of laundry down there?” I asked.
“It’s a prearranged escape route; they will know what to do. Hand me that gun.”
I did.
“I’m going to shoot the electronics as you descend, and then go down after you, so don’t be alarmed by the report of the gun. I trust you will be gone by the time I reach the basement, and so: best of luck to you both.”
Immortal From Hell Page 4