Immortal

“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