Hellenic Immortal (5 page)

By the time I was done, I was covered in blood and not feeling much better about things. I considered moving on to the horses, but they took one look at me and ran off on their own. My first opportunity to learn how to ride a horse would have to wait.

I buried what remained of Karyos in an unmarked grave at the edge of the campsite where, for all I know, he still lies. (The soldiers I left for the wolves.) It was an inadequate memorial, but we didn’t have headstones then, because unless you’re talking about merchant accounting, we barely had a written language. What we had was oral history, which was why, for centuries afterwards, I shared the story of Karyos’s death with everyone who got my wine recipe.

“BETTER THE STRANGER WITH WITS THAN A WITLESS FRIEND.”

From the archives of Silenus the Elder. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

A long life and a good memory sometimes just means any creature comfort you want to name has a maudlin story to go with it. It’s gotten so I can hardly enjoy anything anymore. And I can still hear Karyos’s voice recommending moderation whenever I have a hangover.

   
It took me only an hour to polish off the Greek wine-and-water combo that Ariadne—I was assuming it was her—had been good enough to set me up with, and when I was done I called room service and got some more. The next thing I knew, two days had passed and I hadn’t left my room except to put my empties down in the hallway. Management had to send someone up to make sure I wasn’t suicidal, and also to point out that the cash deposit I’d put down on the room was no longer adequate to cover my stay. So I threw the guy another grand and sent him off.

Eventually, I passed out.

*
 
*
 
*

“Good to see you’re still alive,” said a man at the foot of the bed. It was late at night and I’d been asleep for either two hours or twenty-six, and I was banking on the latter. The room was pitch black, the shades drawn and the lights switched off. I couldn’t recall if I’d left it like that.

I looked toward the sound of the voice, but I had no hope of seeing who had spoken. Maybe I was imagining things.

I rolled into a sitting position. “I hope you’re right. If not, the afterlife has hangovers.”

“There’s a bottle of water on the table to your right,” my visitor helpfully informed me. He had a low, gruff, but non-threatening voice that sounded not at all familiar. As dark as it was, I couldn’t tell whether he had a gun on me or not, so I assumed he did. If you ever find yourself in this situation, you should absolutely assume a gun is involved.

“Thanks.” I reached out in that direction until I came upon the bottle. “How long have you been sitting there?” I knew he was sitting because of the direction of his voice. A standing midget seemed like a bad bet.

“I dunno,” he answered. “A few hours.”

I uncapped the water and took a deep swig. “Guess you’re not here to kill me or rob me.”

“What makes you say that?”
 

“I’d be dead already. Unless you’re looking for a fight.” That would, incidentally, be incredibly stupid. I may not look like much, but you don’t want to deal with me in hand-to-hand. Just trust me; you pick up a lot of things when you live this long.

“Maybe I need you to tell me where the money is.”

“It’s under the bed,” I said helpfully.

“Okay.” A match flame erupted from his corner of the room, which ruined what meager night vision I had been working on. He lit a cigarette. “How much do you have?”
 

Well this was just silly. I put the water down and threw on the light switch next to the bed.

“Don’t really know,” I admitted, in regards to the money. I blinked my vision clear.

My visitor was a man of medium height and medium build, who had long, curly black hair that ran down the back of his neck and a scruffy, unshaven face with a prominent chin and a pug nose. Not what I’d call handsome. He had on black jeans and a deep blue collared shirt that was unbuttoned at the neck, with black combat boots. A tweed sports jacket was draped over the chair and I was guessing he had a tie he was supposed to be wearing in the pocket of it. Oh, and he did have a gun, but it was in a shoulder holster. I’d been holding out hope that he was just an over-enthusiastic employee taking the presumptive suicide watch on me a bit too seriously, but he didn’t look like someone who worked for a hotel; he looked like an undercover cop from a seventies TV series.

“Is that better?”
 

“A little,” I said, still squinting. “Can I have one of those?”

“Sure.” He tossed me the pack and the book of matches.

“Thanks.” I lit up. I’m not a big smoker. Not sure why, since cancer has never been an issue for me. I think it’s how it makes my lungs feel. Granted, the odds of my needing to employ my long-distance running skills in this day and age are pretty slim, but still. “How’d you get in here?”
 

“Let myself in,” he replied.

“I gathered that. I’m . . .” I struggled for a minute to remember which name I should be giving him. I know I said I practice that sort of thing, but I’m not generally pressed to come up with it before a shower. “Jason. Jason Stargill.”

“Mike Lycos.” He stepped across the room to offer his hand, which I took. Big hands, hairy knuckles. I could have probably done something about the gun once he strayed close enough to touch, but I held back. Might have been because he hadn’t actually threatened me yet.

“So who do you work for, Mike?” I asked.

“Oh, I didn’t say?” he remarked, feigning surprise. He pulled out a wallet from his pants and held up an identification card. “I’m FBI.”

“Can I see that?” He handed it to me. It looked legit, but since it was only the second one I’d ever seen, I couldn’t be sure. The picture matched, except in the photo he was wearing a suit. I gave it back to him and returned to my water. “What does the FBI want with me?”

“We’re not sure yet,” he admitted. He returned to the chair, reached down under it, and pulled out a file folder. “Let’s start with this.” He stepped over and handed it to me. “Does this person look familiar?”

Inside was a collection of photographs, the very first of which was a woman I did indeed know. “She introduced herself as Ariadne . . . terrible photo,” I added, tapping my finger on it.

“It’s from her ID badge. Her government badge.”

“She works for you guys?”

He didn’t answer. I continued through the photographs and found various action shots of her, including one taken when she leaned in to whisper in my ear. “You look good in profile,” he commented. “That’s definitely your best side there.”

“So who were you following that night? Me or her?”

I didn’t get an answer for that either. He took back the portfolio. “Her name is Ariadne Papos. Up until about six months ago she was a systems analyst for the Bureau.”

“Was?”

“She walked off the job.” He dropped his cigarette butt into the bowl I’d been drinking from not so long ago.

“Uh-huh,” I said, rubbing my eyes and trying to figure out just where the hell this was going. “And systems analyst means what exactly?”

He smiled. “It doesn’t mean anything, Jason. That’s the point. If we called her a homeland security information gatherer, that would just be awkward.”

“ ‘Spy’ is pretty succinct.”

“It is,” he agreed. “But it’s not accurate. Ms. Papos wasn’t a field operative. She was just, well, a systems analyst, like I said. Besides, we’re the FBI. You’re thinking of a different agency.”

“Right.” I got up on my feet and disposed of my own cigarette. “Well this has been fun. Now I think I need a shower, maybe a shave. It was nice talking to you.”

“You never met her before?” he asked.

“Not before that night, no. Now unless you want to tell me why the FBI is so interested in the movements of a retired analyst that breaking and entering is considered a viable option, I think we’re done. Don’t you?”

“What if I told you the last file she accessed from her workstation was yours, Adam?”

That caught me a bit short. “My name is Jason,” I insisted.

“Sure, right now. You’ve had a whole bevy of names, haven’t you?”

Hard to argue with anybody willing to use
bevy
in a sentence. “What do you mean, ‘my file’?” We were standing nose-to-nose now, or more precisely, my nose to his forehead. He wasn’t all that tall.

“Just what I said. Now you can blow me off if you want, but I’ll have to keep following you until I’ve found out everything I need to know.”

I looked down at him. “What makes you think I can’t shake you?”
 

He just grinned. “C’mon. We can compare dick size all night.”

“Yeah, all right,” I acquiesced. I was beginning to like Mike, which is a difficult thing to admit, given he was armed and had camped out in my bedroom for goodness knows how many hours. Not to mention the fact he’d been following me before that. But he didn’t remind me of the Romans like most lawmen nowadays do, and I appreciated that.

I didn’t much care for the Romans, if you hadn’t guessed. And I
was
one.

I paced around to stretch my legs and tried to remind my muscles how to work properly just in case my assessment of Mike was suddenly proven very wrong. “So tell me about my supposed file.”
 

“What do you want to know?”

“How about what am I doing with a file in the first place?”
 

“Are you kidding? Your kind of money doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere. Attention-wise, you’re a very popular man.”

“That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

“It’s not supposed to. Let me explain how the world works nowadays. Thanks to 9/11, there are whole sections of the U.S. government that do nothing but follow money. And there is a lot to follow. If you’ve got more than $500,000 in your account somebody somewhere has a file on you.”

That made some sense. And I should have thought of it myself. “Okay, so, it’s not a big deal, this file?”

“Oh no, it’s a very big deal,” he disagreed. “Especially now.”

Mike was giving me a headache on top of my hangover. “Why now?” I asked, rubbing my temple.

“Ariadne,” he stated, as if this had some special meaning. “Once she walked off her job, I was called in to figure out exactly what she had been up to before she decided to disappear. Based on what we were able to reconstruct from her home hard drive, she’s associated with an organization we believe has terrorist intentions.”

“Guess you don’t vet your employees all that well.” I walked over to the sink, which was actually outside of the bathroom, and splashed some water onto my face. The guy in the mirror looked like hell.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “someone dropped the ball on that one. Anyway, near as we can tell, she’s trying to contact you.”

“She already did,” I pointed out, using the hand towel to dry my face.

“But she didn’t say anything. Right?”

“No, but she did send some wine up.”

“Some of the guys think that was a signal. What do you think?”

I dropped the towel on the counter and sat back down on the bed. “I think she wanted me to have a bottle of wine. Why’s she trying to contact me?”

“That’s what we’d like to know. Based on what I’ve seen, she appears to have developed a profound interest in you. The running theory in the Bureau is that she wants to approach you for financing, which makes some sense.”

“Because I’m rich?” I offered.

“Aren’t you?”

“The hotel is full of rich people. Why me?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly an answer there, Mike.”

“Yeah, well I don’t know the answer. Hence the problem. You traveled here on cash?”

“I did.”

“And what was your thinking there? It’s harder to get things done without plastic. You must know that.”

“Maybe I didn’t want any government agency sticking its nose into my business by tracking my credit card activity.”

He grinned. “Yeah. Saw that in a movie, did you? Look, you’ve got about $87,000 in that suitcase under the bed.”

“I thought you didn’t know where the money was hidden.”

He shrugged. “I lied. And I had some time to kill while waiting for you to wake up. Let me explain how folks in my line of work think. There are only three types of people who travel with that much cash specifically because they think it can’t be tracked: crooks, tax evaders, terrorists, or financers of terrorist activities.”

“Gamblers?” I offered.

“Card-counters, maybe. You count cards?”

I shook my head. “How about people who just like looking at big piles of money?”

“Statistically, very unlikely,” he said. “Right now, the house money is on terrorism. And you meeting up with Ariadne Papos just about sealed it.”

“So supposedly I’m already financing her, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what the thinking is. Not that it makes a ton of sense. She knows you’re under surveillance, or she should, so the way you two made contact doesn’t fit. Too clumsy. But nobody seems to be listening to me when I point that out.”

Now I was pacing. It’s a little tough discovering exactly how transparent your activities have been when you spend so much time trying to prevent exactly that.