I’m willing to concede that the wisdom contained within the Bible is worth at least a little pondering, but anyone who thinks, for instance, that because pixies aren’t featured they are therefore bad in some way needs to re-evaluate.
I returned to the matter at hand. “So, where are we?”
“I am on my third company,” he said. “I was able to trace the first email address to a forwarding address at a tech firm in Colorado, and from there to a savings-and-loan in New Mexico.”
“This guy knows a lot of email administrators,” I commented.
“Da. But fortunately, things are going faster now, because…” He stopped and did a staring-off-into-the-distance thing.
“Because what?” I asked, but it was as if I was no longer in the room. He started typing faster, and then paused. Then he wheeled over to another computer and engaged a search engine.
“There,” he said. “I should have figured it out earlier.”
“What?”
“All three of the companies have the same security profile. They contracted the same firm to establish their firewalls.”
I almost understood that. “Is that unusual?”
“Possibly it is simply a coincidence. Do you believe in coincidences?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Nor do I.”
I looked at the search engine results. “Securidot,” I read.
“They are in Seattle. I believe your mystery pursuer is associated with them. He or she must have established a back door to the security program the company sells and is using it to create the phantom email accounts.”
“Can you tell exactly who it is within the company?”
“I doubt they would be foolish enough to allow for that possibility. The very fact that there is a back door access into a supposedly impregnable firewall program puts the entire company in danger. Discovery might even land them in prison.”
“Can you keep tracking the emails anyway?” I asked. “And keep a record of all of them. It might come in handy.”
“Of course.”
I sat at the computer with the Securidot web page displayed and started reading, while Tchekhy returned to his work.
According to their website Securidot was started in the mid-1990s by Robert Grindel. His story read like the prototypical dot-com success story. Geeky guy comes up with a neat-o idea, lots of companies pay lots of money for the product of his neat-o idea, geeky guy makes a bundle, and buys a professional sports franchise. All except for the sports franchise part.
Aside from this well-burnished history, the site itself wasn’t very useful, especially since I wasn’t a major corporation looking for a good security program.
“Anything else?” I asked. “This is pretty basic stuff.”
“Try Lexis/Nexis,” he suggested. “You can look up old newspaper articles there. I have an account.”
“A legal account?” I asked.
“Does that matter?”
I followed a bookmark to Tchekhy’s illegal Lexis/Nexis account. (Honestly I don’t think he pays for anything.) Results there proved more interesting. Securidot had just hit the jackpot on a buyout deal with a company called Secure Systems International doing the buying. I wondered if SSI knew Securidot’s program came with a back door.
Information on Grindel himself was a bit more compelling. For starters, the legend on the Securidot website was, as I’d suspected, a very polished version of the truth. He’d actually founded the company with a man named Brian Standish. Brian was the techno-geek and the founder of the technology the company made its millions on. Robert was a different kind of ideas man. He got the backers, founded the company, ran the business, and eventually marginalized Brian entirely. Brian Standish took a buyout six months before Securidot was sold. Reading between the lines, I got the impression Robert knew he was going to sell out and forced out Brian beforehand.
Which was only sort of interesting. Nothing in the articles I found was a smoking gun. Still, I began to think that Robert Grindel was the guy I was looking for. Or rather, the guy who was looking for me. He just seemed like the type. I bounced the idea off Tchekhy.
“It’s possible,” he said. “But I think you should be looking for someone who is more wealthy. Perhaps even a government.”
“Maybe so.” The bounty on my head was roughly one fifth of what Grindel had earned from the sale. Tchekhy had a good point.
“You know,” Tchekhy said, “there is a very easy way to find out more about who is after you. We could simply call him.”
He picked up the phone I’d taken from Stan and tossed it to me. The phone had been the proverbial 300-pound gorilla in the room for the entire day. We both knew it was the fastest way to get quick information but we also knew that using it could be entirely too dangerous. If the person on the other end of the line recognized that neither of us was Stan they might be able to do something we weren’t prepared for. Like activate a tracking device. Or set off an explosive charge in the phone. It sounded paranoid, but at this particular juncture, paranoia was a useful impulse.
Hesitantly, I flipped the phone open.
“Oh, hell,” I said.
“What?”
I held up the phone so he could read the small display screen. It read “NYC.”
“Does this mean a demon is about to arrive at my front door, Efgeniy?” He’d been ignoring the possibility, just as I was avoiding having to admit I’d put him in danger.
“Um, maybe,” I said.
He looked rather cross. “Then you should leave,” he suggested. “Contact me later and perhaps I’ll have finished this trace.”
“Not that easy,” I said. “He might still show up here.”
“I can care for myself,” he argued.
I held up the photos of Gary and Nate. “You haven’t dealt with anything like this.”
“The Lord will protect me,” he declared stubbornly. “I will be fine.”
“Yes, well… just in case He’s busy, maybe I should come up with something else.”
“Then you had better come up with it quickly,” he said.
I’d been working on an idea for the last hour, actually. “Did you say you could post to this MUD thing?”
“Yes. Why?”
“How far is Central Park from here?”
Chapter 14
Viktor just showed me a speculative article he wrote for Discover magazine. It’s about me, which is a little scary considering he wrote it five years ago. Well technically speaking it isn’t about me. It’s about someone like me. A purely theoretical me, if you will.
The gist of it was that a lot of the knowledge he needed to do the research he’s now doing was already out there. As he put it, there is a time for every scientific idea and now is the time for this one. This is the latest volley in our argument. I’m still not buying.
Anyway, it went a long way toward explaining how he ended up getting attached to this project.
* * *
I reached the pond at the southern edge of Central Park at around ten. By then the darkness was nearly complete, and a decent chill had settled over the whole city. There was a waning moon to see by but it was playing chicken with a bank of clouds, so there were times when I had nothing but the street lamps.
I had with me the bag with all my stuff plus the still-unused satellite phone and a heavy red parka on loan from Tchekhy with Stan’s gun stuffed in one of the pockets. The red parka stood out, as it was supposed to. An hour earlier a digital photo of me wearing it was uploaded onto the MUD along with the message “taken today just outside of Central Park!” Tchekhy posted it under the name of a regular New York contributor to the site, which made more sense than setting up a new account and immediately posting information on the dodgy immortal, something we both agreed would arouse suspicion as to the provenance of that information. The only one who would be wise to it was the guy whose account we used, and since Tchekhy disabled his account right after posting, it would take days for the
truth to come out. I only needed one evening.
Passing by the pond, I headed north. The plan was to parade myself up and down the park. That would still make me a tough find because it’s a big place, but I didn’t need much, just a couple of MUD groupies to snap some pictures and at least one or two bounty hunters. And no muggers. That’d be good.
At the half hour point, I passed a police officer on horseback. I resisted the urge to ask him how many cops patrolled the park at night because that could be a major problem. Hopefully if there were a lot of them, they weren’t very quick responders.
I had a conversation once with the guy who designed the landscape for Central Park. His name was Frederick Olmstead, and by God could he talk. I’d had the misfortune of sharing a passenger compartment on a train ride from St. Louis to Chicago, and I think I got in maybe three words edgewise. Everything with him was nature, nature, nature, which I guess one could expect from a landscaper, but he really went over the top with all of it. He seemed to think his arrangements let “nature speak for itself” as compared to the gigantic, artificial floral displays of exotic plants that he seemed to show great disdain for. If I’d managed get a word in I would have told him I heard nature speak for itself on a number of occasions, and I suspect he wouldn’t like what nature really had to say.
I doubt he would have liked what happened to Central Park in the years since he passed either. Even in the dark I could tell that much of his original vision had been allowed to slip away with time. But everything does, doesn’t it?
At one hour from the time I’d first entered the park I reached the northern edge and turned around again, choosing a different path. If Tchekhy was wrong about any of this it was going to be a long night.
I found an unoccupied bench and took a seat. It was time to check. I pulled out the sat phone and flipped it open. The backlit display verified that things were going as planned. It read “Cntrl Pk-Now.”
* * *
Another hour later I’d moved to a different bench, this one in the middle of the park and overlooking the lake. I could see the moisture in the clouds that had engulfed the visible sky, and I could see my breath. It was going to snow, unless it got too cold for it. I’d worry that I was going to catch my death in the form of a cold, if I caught colds.
The closest I had come to any interesting activity involved a lengthy conversation with a wino who thought I was his wife, and two separate flashbulb incidents involving unseen cameramen who probably scurried off immediately to post their images of the legendary immortal.
I was tired. I’d ingested nothing substantial beyond pizza, vodka, and coffee, and walking the breadth of Central Park with that as sustenance can be taxing. If nobody showed soon I was going to take a nap.
But then I heard something. It was footfall coming from my left, faint but unmistakable, and definitely not belonging to any horse or demon. It was getting louder. Someone was approaching.
I watched as a young woman came into view. The bench was on a low hill, so while she’d probably been on the path for a while it wasn’t until she was about fifty feet away that I could even see her. She was wearing tight-fitting acid-wash jeans, sneakers, and a faded green army jacket that looked surprisingly good on her, given that green army jackets are not generally meant to be flattering. Underneath the coat was a black turtleneck. She had long, dirty blonde hair that obscured part of her face.
I had reason to suspect everyone because Central Park at night—no matter how many cops are around—is not a very safe place to take a nighttime stroll. But it was difficult to see potential danger in this attractive, five-foot-three package heading my way.
Once she got close enough for it to be entirely too obvious that I was staring, I shifted my gaze to the lights reflecting off the surface of the water, relying on the occasional stolen glance and my peripheral vision to track her progress.
I have a failing when it comes to attractive women. I’m a starer. Can’t help it. You’d think after a few dozen centuries I’d be able to do something about this, because most women can sense when they’re being stared at and some react negatively to it. But while I can look at another man’s face and see twenty people I’d known over the centuries who looked exactly like him, every woman looks fairly unique to me. So, when I stare, it’s either out of mild wonder or outright awe, depending on how drunk I am.
When she reached the bench she sat down next to me. I was doing my damnedest to pretend I didn’t notice anything, which is stupid, because pretending not to stare is even more obvious than staring. I turned and gave her the “hey, how ya doin’?” nod that mankind has perfected over centuries of hanging out together in public places. Given neither of us was exactly waiting for a bus, this came off as silly—to me, at least—but I had to acknowledge her somehow.
We sat for another minute, staring at the lake.
“I thought you’d be shorter,” she said finally.
I looked at her. “I’m sorry, what?” Brown eyes. Very nice.
“Living so long and all,” she explained. “People were shorter way back when. I figured you’d be shorter.”
“Do I know you?”
She brushed the hair back from her face and smiled. She had a fascinating triangular structure to her face, with high cheekbones and a chin that tapered to a point. “Sure. I’m Jonas Milagro.”
A man’s name, last I checked. But that sort of thing changes so often I no longer assume. “Should that sound familiar?” I asked. And it sort of did.
“It ought to. A few hours ago somebody using my name posted a photo of you on the Internet.”
That’s where I’d heard it.
“But, I have two accounts,” she said. “I also go by the name of Alan Guff.”
That’s definitely a guy’s name. “You don’t look like an Alan.”
“Well thank you,” she smiled. “I don’t think I look like a Jonas either.”
“Not really, no.”
“It’s not unusual. You go on a MUD to pretend to be somebody else, right? So, I switch genders sometimes. Usually it’s the other way around. I belong to ten different MUDs, and I think maybe twenty percent of the ‘women’ on them are actually women.”
“So… you’re here because your account was hijacked?” I asked.
“No. But maybe you can introduce me to whoever did that for you sometime. Neat trick. I’m here because I think you’re the real thing. And I want to know what made you decide to drag half of Manhattan into Central Park tonight with your little ‘come and get me’ post.”
“Maybe I was just bored.”
“Oh? Were you?” She looked me in the eyes. “Just bored? Because it looked a little desperate to me.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Clara.”
“Clara, if I told you that tonight the most dangerous place in this entire city is next to me on a park bench, would you believe me?”
A strange expression passed over her. It was fear, but not exactly fear. Like the prospect of danger was something erotic. “I might,” she said with a grin. “What kind of danger are we talking about?”
“The kind that could be permanent,” I suggested.
“You’ll have to do better than that, Mr. Immortal. Girl doesn’t take a nighttime stroll in Central Park if she’s afraid of a little danger.”
I could see that. Clara was starting to remind me of a repressed French duchess I used to spend time with. She liked being spanked with an ivory hairbrush.
“All right,” I said. “It’s a trap.”
She looked a tad skeptical. “For who?” she asked. “You?”
“No, I set the trap. It’s for someone else.”
“And you’re springing this trap alone? Or are there soldiers hidden in the lake or something? Because you don’t look like all that much, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Sure it is.” Clara took my hand in hers and gave me a flirty smile, and the possibility dawne
d on me that I was dealing with a groupie. Go figure. “How about we take off before the bad people come?”
Did she think I went through all this trouble just to pick up a woman?
I heard, to the right of the bench and just off the path, a gun cock. “Do not move, sir.” It was a man’s voice with a hint of Mississippi.
I looked at Clara. “Too late,” I said. “They’re here.”
Chapter 15
Iza finally found her way. It’s difficult to piece together from her syntax, but I think there were exhaust fans that were tough to navigate around. It’s a very small, closed system—my cell is technically a stand-alone building—so you’d think it wouldn’t have been all that difficult. There are only so many places to try.
So, her basic message was, “tell me what to do.”
I’ve decided that since Clara went through the trouble to smuggle my tamed pixie into the place that I should trust her. (Although knowing about Iza at all means Clara had to have been eavesdropping on me. Two demerits for that.) Besides, I didn’t have much to lose. It’s not like they can do anything worse to me.
The problem is pixies aren’t good with complex instructions. This is going to take a while.
* * *
The guy with the voice and the gun was still behind me.
“Put your hands on your head,” he ordered.
“I can’t,” I said. “You told me not to move.”
I felt the barrel of the gun up against my head. “Funny man,” he said. Maybe not Mississippi. Georgia? “Go on and do it.”
I did as I was told while still looking into Clara’s eyes. She was looking at the man behind me, and she appeared scared but not out-of-her-mind scared. This I took to mean two things. One, I had a human behind me, and two, maybe she was telling the truth about knowing how to handle herself.
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