“I cannot definitively ascertain whether she is the individual behind the MUD character we borrowed, but that account is still disabled, and I have seen no recorded attempts by the owner to access or reactivate the account. This would appear to parallel your request that she not contribute.
“As to your question regarding this Cult of the Immortal she spoke of, I did find a private chat room log bearing such a title within the MUD. The discussions there appear innocent, if not a bit banal. Based on certain anatomical speculations, it is apparent these persons have not met you.”
Nice.
“Another detail which might bear some interest. I found a monthly fee on her credit card for an organization called All-Mother. Based on their web site, it is some form of proto-feminist group. I did not probe too deeply as it appears they have a very persistent firewall, but I can if you wish. Beware militant feminists, my old friend.”
I found it hard to believe there was any firewall Tchekhy couldn’t get past with a little work. Could be he didn’t try hard enough. Or he thought it was a dead end. He was probably right.
“As to the other matter, I tracked the ownership of the MUD as far as I could. I am afraid I could not put a name with the email, but I can tell you the trail does end at Securidot to someone within that company with access to the email administrative files. And, as I am sure you are curious, other than the MUD I could not find anything connecting Ms. Wassermann to Securidot.
“If you need any additional information you may send this device back with your… pixie. Click thrice rapidly to record, once to stop. I hope this finds you well.”
So Clara checked out, Securidot was probably a dead end, and I should beware militant feminists. Not the kind of information I was hoping for but it would have to do, unless I felt like spending a week passing the tape recorder back and forth. I wasn’t going to risk visiting Tchekhy directly, not after almost leading a demon straight to him. At least I was reasonably sure nobody could find me at Clara’s. If they could, they already would have.
I needed to find out more about Robert Grindel. Tchekhy wasn’t convinced that Grindel was the man behind the curtain, but Tchekhy is an old cold warrior at heart and thus would always be inclined toward blaming a government apparatus whenever possible. (And he did have some historical precedent to fall back on.) I was less conspiracy-minded, preferring to put my stock in the proverbial wild-eyed madman. Grindel seemed like the type.
The question was how to research without leaving the apartment. I would need Clara’s laptop. And possibly Clara. I just had to convince myself I could trust her.
Iza had finished off the mushrooms and was buzzing around with renewed fervor.
“Shouldn’t you wait a half hour before you do that?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“I go back?” she asked.
“Not now,” I said, pocketing the recorder. “Thank you, Iza.”
“All done?”
“If I need you, I’ll leave some mushrooms up here. Okay?” Because you never know when a pixie will come in handy, especially a tame one.
“Okay.” Without so much as a fare-thee-well, she buzzed off. Whoever said ignorance is bliss had been talking to a pixie.
* * *
“You freeze anything off?” Clara asked as I re-entered the apartment with the telescope in tow. She was sitting at the kitchen counter eating a slice of cold pizza and reading the laptop screen. Stark naked.
You can draw your own conclusions regarding a woman who prefers to walk about her curtain-free apartment without a stitch on. My thoughts drifted between wondering what deep-rooted factors from her past led to such exhibitionistic behavior and quietly applauding my good fortune. I could only imagine what the people in the building across the street thought.
“No frostbite that I’m aware of,” I said as casually as one can when speaking to a naked woman. “What’cha doing?”
“Reading my mail,” she said. “Got about a hundred inquiries about you from the MUD folks. And the boards have gone nuts over the Central Park massacre. Since everybody knew you were there, the consensus seems to be that you’re dead, and that’s led to a massive freak-out regarding the philosophical consequences of a dead immortal. It’s pretty interesting. You sure I can’t respond?”
“Please don’t,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt.
She pushed away the laptop. “Again, why?”
“I told you. Somebody is after me and I don’t know who.”
“You know that sounds kinda paranoid, right?”
“You were there,” I said. “How many more armed men do you think would have shown up if we stuck around? Aside from the police?”
“I know that, but it’s not like my web access can be traced.”
“They’ll find the building,” I said. “That’s close enough.”
She sighed theatrically, in a manner reminiscent of Marie Antoinette. (I’ve found while women’s faces tend to be fairly unique, their expressions of exasperation are often not.) With youth comes restlessness. In the last forty-eight hours we’d had six versions of this conversation. I was putting up with it because I sort of liked her a lot. Same as with Marie.
“Hanging with an immortal not as exciting as you thought?”
“No, Adam, it’s not that. I don’t understand why you’re just… waiting. If somebody is after you, do something about it.”
Having attained total personal nakedness myself, I walked past her to the refrigerator for some water and a decent pregnant pause while I tried to find an analogy that fit the current century and get me out of the conversation at the same time.
“I saw a cat pin a mouse behind a radiator once,” I said, having chosen the first clunky analogy I could think of. “The cat couldn’t reach the mouse and the mouse had no place to go except out from behind the radiator. Détente.”
“Okay.”
“So the cat just sat there and waited for the mouse to panic and make a break for it. For hours.”
She closed her laptop and fixed me with an arch look. “And you’re the mouse.”
“And the best thing to do is not panic. Plus, I can wait for a very, very long time.”
“You just made that story up.”
I smiled. “How could you tell?”
“You would have saved the mouse,” she declared confidently.
“You know me that well, do you?”
“I do.” She got off the chair and walked around the kitchen bar and up to me until our bodies were just touching. It might have been mildly exciting with clothing. It was considerably more so without. “You would have rescued the mouse because that’s what you do. You’re the hero.”
“Not a hero?” I asked. “The hero?”
“That’s right.” She took the water bottle from my hand and put it down on the counter. “You’re the one who comes to the rescue. The knight in shining armor.”
“I was never a knight.”
She lifted her leg and wrapped it around my hip, pulling herself onto me. “Liar,” she whispered.
* * *
Much later, after a lengthy and elaborate workout that involved every flat surface in the apartment and about half of the vertical ones, we lay together on the bed and enjoyed a little post-coital peace.
“What was your first name?” Clara asked from her position under my arm. Her breathing had been so regular I’d thought she was asleep.
“When?”
“In the beginning.”
“I didn’t really have one.”
“Everyone has a name. You didn’t grow up in a preverbal society.”
I sat up and looked down at her. “How do you know?”
“Because,” she said, rolling onto her back. “You have the capacity for language. Did you know that if you don’t introduce language to a person by the age of twelve, they never develop it?”
“Now who’s making things up?”
“I did not make that up. I’ll show you the study.”
“Well, then they just made it up,” I insisted.
I have a real love/hate relationship with science. On the one hand, I can speak from personal experience that scientific and technological advances have made life a whole hell of a lot easier in just about every way imaginable. (Just two words illustrate that point amply—indoor plumbing.) But I also remember when science meant bleeding people to get the sickness out of them, boring holes in heads to free the evil spirits, and serving powdered human remains to cure gout. If there’s one thing I’ve been thankful for in my many years, it’s that I never had to experience the hundreds of dubious medical solutions offered for the supposed benefit of mankind.
I realized she was still waiting for an answer, so I gave her one. “I don’t know if I’d call it language,” I said. “We were barely even self-aware. I can remember some specific events, but not very much, and only if I work at it. But I did have a name, sort of. More of a sound than anything. It sounded like ‘urrr’.”
“Ur.”
“No, with a longer R. Urrr. Ur was a Sumerian city-state.”
“Maybe they named it after you.”
“Hope not. The Sumerians were pretty obnoxious.”
She seemed satisfied, and lay still for a while. Again, I thought she was asleep until she started speaking.
“So why are you hiding?” she asked. “Really, this time.”
I sighed, although I didn’t mean to. “I thought we went through this.”
She propped herself up on her elbow. “It doesn’t seem like you.”
“You’ve known me for three days.”
“Know what I think? I think that whole mouse story was your way of telling me to shut up about it.”
“It worked.”
“Only because I was horny. I think you already know the name of the guy that’s after you. You just haven’t decided what to do about it.”
“That’s not true,” I lied. “And who said it was a guy? Could be a woman. Or a whole government.”
“Then why aren’t you doing something? Let me help you find out who it is. Then you can… I don’t know, exact vengeance, or whatever it is you plan to do to them.”
“I don’t plan to do anything to them,” I said. “I’m going to find a spot on the farthest end of the planet from them, and live there for long enough to know that everybody involved is dead.” This was basically true. The reason I wanted to find out more about Robert Grindel was to determine exactly how far his reach extended. And maybe suss out his vulnerabilities.
“No, you aren’t,” she said as regards my plan, such that it was.
“Why not? It’s worked before.”
She sat up. “Look, that demon was about the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, and you faced him down when you could have just run away and waited it out. Whoever hired the demon is just as bad, so you can’t expect me to believe you’re going to hop a plane to Borneo as soon as you get his name.”
“The demon was different,” I said. “He would have been relentless. I had to face him eventually.”
“No, you didn’t. Demons don’t live forever.”
“He killed some friends,” I said, after a pause. “That’s why I faced him. As long as he was looking for me, everyone I met was in danger.”
“Ah-hah!” she exclaimed.
“What?”
“I told you. You’re the hero. If all you cared about was self-preservation…”
“Then I would have run. I get your point. It’s wrong, but I get your point.”
“Why am I wrong?”
“I’m just… I’m not a hero.” I’m really not. I’ve done enough terrible things in my life to take myself out of the hero sweepstakes for an eternity. But Clara was a romantic.
“You put your life at risk for others,” she said stubbornly. “How is that not heroic?”
“I thought my way out of a situation and that’s all.”
“A situation you would never have been in if you weren’t interested in righting a wrong,” she declared.
I sighed again. We could go back and forth with this all night. “If it makes you feel better to think of me as a hero, okay. But exacting vengeance, as you put it, would be unnecessarily dangerous.”
She fell back on the bed, and after a while said, “But you’re curious.”
“About what?”
“About whoever set this up,” she said. “Five million dollars? For you? You gotta wonder why, right?”
“Not really.”
“Liar.”
“Okay, not curious enough,” I said. “Curiosity killed the cat.”
“I thought you were the mouse behind the radiator.”
“Now I’m the cat.”
“Okay,” she said. “You’re the cat who already knows the name of the dog, then.”
“There’s a dog now?”
She glared at me. “You know his name, Adam,” she insisted.
I sagged back into the bed and let her question hang in the air for a few seconds.
“All right,” I said. “Answer me this. How did you know about my infertility?”
“Your what?”
“You mentioned it, the first day I was here. I never told you about it. How did you know?”
“Is that… ?” She fell back against the pillow. “From the MUD, Adam! Jesus, you’re paranoid.”
“I prefer to think of it as extra careful,” I argued weakly.
“You’ve been nailing me for three days and… God, I can’t even speak to you right now.” She turned away from me on the bed and sulked. I think women are born knowing how to sulk expertly.
We lay there quietly for a few minutes. I made a mental note. Next time I accuse a lover of deception, I was going to have to pick a better time. Like when we were both wearing clothes. And possibly in a public place. You’d think I would have learned this by now.
“So I have some trust issues,” I said after a time.
“No kidding,” she agreed.
“That’s on the MUD? Because that’s not the kind of information I share with anybody.”
She turned back. “Look, Adam. You’re going to have to trust somebody eventually. Obviously whoever is after you knows a whole lot more about you than you realize, and that makes them dangerous. So if I can help you find them, let me.”
I nodded, because she was right. There was no other way. I crossed my fingers and hoped this time it was the right decision.
“Have you ever heard of a company called Securidot?”
Chapter 19
Clara had not heard of Securidot, but she was a veritable wizard with her little laptop, so it wasn’t long before we both knew a whole lot more about the company.
“This buyout you read about before is big news,” Clara said. It was well into the night now, and she was all business with her computer up on the kitchen counter, with her hair pulled up, her hand working a pen on a pad of paper, and her body still entirely naked. I was more tastefully dressed in a pair of pants.
She continued, “Both Securidot and Secure Systems International were hit pretty hard by the recession.”
“Are we in a recession?”
“We were. Plus, there was the dot-com implosion a few years back. That didn’t help.”
I only recently learned the word “dot-com” but had no idea there’d been an “implosion.” I would have asked for clarification but it didn’t seem worth my time.
She continued. “They’re competing companies with competing products, but with different market shares. SSI is mostly consumer stuff—small firms and what have you. Securidot has a few smaller customers, but mostly lives off large corporations and government contracts. The buyout of Securidot ended up saving both companies. And it looks like it made a bundle of coin for someone named Robert Grindel. I guess he was the CEO of Securidot until recently. He got a decent buyout.”
She looked up from her computer. “That’s him, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It had been impressed upon me
that Grindel doesn’t have enough money to pull off something like this.”
“No,” she agreed. “Not if all he’s got is what came out of this deal. Hang on.”
More typing. I sipped from my water and waited patiently. Having someone else do the searching was probably a good thing. When the Internet was first explained to me, it took me a half an hour to come close to grasping the concept. I kept getting it confused with the old party phone lines that used to be common before everyone got their own telephones.
“All right,” she began, after another lengthy bout of researching, “This guy isn’t just a dot-commer. He’s got a wide range of interests. I Googled him and it looks like…”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “You what to him?”
“Googled. I put his name into a search engine.”
“Never mind, go on.”
“Okay. I see his name popping up all over the place associated with five or six different proposals and investment vehicles. So that means he has more money than what he made on the Securidot sale.”
“Enough money?”
“There’s really no way to tell. This is mostly back-channel stuff. Think of him as a facilitator. Someone comes to him with an idea—or he goes out and finds a workable idea himself—and he puts together investors for it. If he’s successful, he gets a cut or a percentage and moves on. Doesn’t even matter if the proposal turns into something successful. He gets paid either way.”
“Nice gig,” I said.
“Yeah. I bet his rolodex is worth millions all by itself. Probably built up his contact list through his association with Securidot.”
“So by catching me, he could be closing out another deal. And it doesn’t even have to be his idea.”
“It’s probably not. But he would already need to know you exist. No telling whether it was him or someone else that brought that knowledge to the table.” She looked up at me. “You look convinced.”
“I pretty much am. Can we figure out what he’s working on right now?”
“Not with public access resources like this, no,” she said. “What you need is somebody with enough money to be considered a viable investor. A venture capitalist.”
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