Immortal

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.”

I was unfamiliar with the term, and said so. She explained, “VCs look for places to put their money, basically. All they really care about is if an idea can turn into something they can make money off of. Although there’s also something to be said for an idea that sounds good but doesn’t work out, because tax write-offs are sometimes just as valuable. I did a term paper on this stuff if you want to read it.”

“Another time,” I said. “So they’re like patricians?”

“Kind of. Except a patrician might support an artist for the sake of art. These guys are definitely in it for the money.”

“Can anybody be a venture capitalist?”

“Anybody with gobs of hard money, sure. Do you know of anyone?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Can I use your phone?”

*  *  *

An hour later, I had a new best friend in a Swiss banker named Heintz, and a workable plan. Heintz would be spending the next day or two trying to find out what Grindel’s latest investment vehicle was—preferably without spending any of my money first. While Heintz was doing this, I planned to be on a fast plane heading straight out of this hemisphere. This last part didn’t sit well with Clara.

“Look,” I explained to her, “You said yourself he doesn’t have the money for this bounty on his own. That’s his weakness. If he can’t get me, he can’t maintain the bounty, because the investors will pull out.”

“It’s a stupid idea,” she insisted. “You don’t even know for sure if he’s who you think he is. Or where he is.”

“Yeah, but I just need to know where his money is. And who else could it be? We know it’s someone connected with Securidot. You think a low-level programmer has the money to do this when the CEO doesn’t?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” she said. “I think the only way to be sure is to find him. We can do it together.”

“Oh, for Baal’s sake, we cannot. And for five million he doesn’t want to just have a chat.”

“What if he doesn’t even have it?” she asked. “What if the money is a bluff?”

I shook my head. “You don’t hire these kinds of people with bluff money. Not if you want to live through the experience.”

Clara pouted. My death-proof, long-term, but capture-free plan wasn’t flying with her. I couldn’t imagine why. My keeping out of his clutches should—if I was reading this correctly—bankrupt him fairly quickly. And if I had to I could invest directly myself and take him apart from the inside. It was a good plan.

“Which part of this don’t you like?” I asked. “The bloodless part or the part where I run off?”

“It just seems cowardly,” she said after a time.

“Oh, please,” I said. “A word like coward doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does brave or valorous. They’re what you use to describe a dead person. ‘Oh, so-and-so acted bravely when he charged that crowd of Huns armed with only a half-sword and a pair of sandals. Sure he’s dead now, but what valor!’ Well, maybe the dead guy charging the Huns did it to inspire the men he fought with, or maybe he just realized he was already dead and decided to take out as many of his enemies as he could first. And maybe the coward who ran away warned the people behind him that the Huns were coming, and at the end of the day saved more lives for it. Call it cowardice all you want, but I’ll still be breathing when it’s done, and that’s my favorite kind of plan.”

“He’ll keep chasing you,” she said quietly. I’d raised my voice a bit, which I think scared her. The word coward annoys me for some reason. Not that she could have known that.

“Let him,” I said. “I’ll outlive him.”

She looked defeated.

“I didn’t think… when I offered to help, I didn’t think it would be helping you to get away from me. I’m not ready to say good-bye to you yet, Adam,” she admitted.

And there it was, the root of our argument. I had been hanging out, enjoying some good sex, trying to decide when would be the best time to disappear for a century or two. She had apparently been working from a different agenda.

Not to say that women fall in love with me routinely or even that I’m particularly easy to fall in love with, but this has happened before. Even arguing that only one out of ten women with whom I’ve been intimate also fell in love with me at some point, you’d still be looking at decent numbers. The only way to prevent it was to swear off female companionship altogether. I just can’t do that.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, but I wasn’t planning to stay for much longer anyway.” True, now that I had a strategy to work with, it was time to go. I had been holding out for good-bye sex, but it didn’t sound like that was going to happen once I was finished breaking her heart. Ah well.

She wasn’t buying. “You expect me to believe I don’t mean anything to you?”

“You can believe what you want,” I said.

“I don’t.”

“I’m sorry, but… I just needed a place to stay.”

I tried to sound convincing and, well, it was half true in that even if I hadn’t been sleeping with the host, I still would have stayed. But I did have feelings for her. Was love one of those feelings? Hard to say. It was possible I simply no longer remembered what love felt like. What I did remember is what losing someone I loved felt like, and that memory was strong enough to get me heading for the door whenever I found myself in this situation. Like I said—intimacy issues.

“You still can’t trust me, can you?” she asked.

“No, I trust you.” Also true.

We suffered through a lengthy silence.

“Look,” I said finally, “I have to get going.” I couldn’t even look at her when I said this.

“Now?”

“I think it has to be now, don’t you?”

She looked down and wiped a tear. I’m not entirely heartless. This was killing me. “I guess you do,” she said quietly. She reopened her laptop. “Where do you want to go?”