Immortal (33 page)

It is only with great trepidation that I’ve been slipping back out to Clara a few of the details of my escape plan. I need her to help me secure transportation and a few other things, and while Iza can find me a Humvee, she can’t drive one. Once I’m out, speed and efficiency will be an issue, as the less time I spend out in the open, the better my chances are. Not that my chances are at all good either way.

The plan, incidentally, is incredibly stupid, and it’s very probably going to end up getting me killed. But it’s the best one I can come up with. And when I’m not kicking myself for being unable to think up a better one, I’m blaming Viktor for not listening to me.

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Doctor Viktor Kopalev is hypothetically just as responsible for my situation as Bob Grindel, because the original idea was Viktor’s. All Bob knows is computers and money, and is apparently nearly as clueless as I am when it comes to biology. But he knows a good idea when he sees it. I guess a few years back he caught a whiff of some of the work Viktor had been doing in immune system research and the seemingly unrelated field of human aging. At the time, that work was ninety percent speculative, because Viktor did not yet know I existed. That, and a killer business plan, is what Bob brought to the table. So while Bob secured investors—and test subjects—Viktor put together the team and supervised the building of the laboratory. All the science, basically. And he didn’t once stop to wonder whether he should.

And then they nabbed Eve. I never asked—none of the lab boys have been willing to talk about Eve, other than to comment that she hardly speaks—but I’m guessing they were looking for both of us from the outset and found her first. I don’t know how they did that. But I stopped looking after becoming erroneously convinced she was dead. Maybe it wasn’t that hard. A good deal more difficult, I’m sure, was catching the thing in cell number two. Who knows when—or how—they did that.

At some point Viktor and his team realized they needed more than just Eve to complete the project. As they’re on something of a timetable, Bob redoubled his efforts to catch me. Ergo, bounty hunters and demons and hostages and so on.

As to the project itself, based on the amount of research that would have had to continue well after the death of Viktor Kopalev—had Eve and I never existed—I’d say it’s about a hundred years before its time. Sometimes that’s a good thing. This isn’t one of those times.

I’ve seen lots of big ideas come and go. As a rule, they tend to arrive at, or just before, the world is ready for them. Take something rather simple, like the wheel. The first version of the wheel I ever saw was a part of a child’s wooden toy, and I didn’t see another one for about fifty years when somebody got the splendid idea to put a couple of them under a wood platform and have an ox pull it. We could have probably come up with the wheel hundreds of years before then but we didn’t need to, because we had no domesticated animals, and as foragers, we didn’t have any need to transport things from place to place. We just ate whatever we could find, wherever we could find it, just as soon as it was found. Much like fast food. So it wasn’t that mankind was too stupid to come up with a concept as significant as the wheel before a certain time. We invented it when there was a practical need for it.

In this case, the wheel is my immune system, which is where this whole analogy sort of breaks down, making me think I should have come up with a better one. Anyway, Viktor and his team have figured out how to give my immune reaction to other people. As he described it, it was just a matter of turning on the right gene sequence in a normal human’s body. Finding the gene was the easy part, because they have two living samples to work from. Much harder was figuring out how to get it turned on throughout the whole body. They haven’t said so, but I think that’s what the monster in the second cell is for.

Harder still was determining how to grant immortality. That’s where those damned telomeres Viktor keeps talking about come in. I’ve absolutely no idea what the science behind this part is because I zoned out whenever he tried to explain it to me. Suffice to say it’s complicated, and it involves several courses of treatment and something called “gene therapy.” It is much more difficult to accomplish than the immunity treatment, which I’m told can be distributed in the same manner as your standard vaccine.

So to return to the wheel comparison, say the child’s toy version of the wheel had the power to destroy the world as we know it. Now you see what I mean about a bad analogy.

Try instead to imagine what it would be like if you could go back in time and give the entire Confederate Army a supply of fully automatic machine guns and all the ammo they would ever need. That’s a bit closer to what I’m talking about. Basically, there is a time for everything, and this is not the right time for what Viktor and his team have concocted. And I’ve told Viktor this more times and in more ways than you can possibly imagine, with no luck whatsoever. He’s been focusing on the whole “nobody ever gets sick any more, ever” aspect, which I admit sounds pretty good, up until half the population starves.

And that’s assuming everybody gets a dose, which isn’t how it’s going to happen. Bob is a capitalist, not a humanitarian. He won’t be giving this away. He’ll find the highest bidder, sell out and move on, just like with every other business deal he’s ever cut. Then comes the unappetizing prospect of an immunized population coming up against a non-immunized population, and now you’re looking in the dictionary for a word that means “something worse than genocide.”

Throw into that the unfortunate possibility that the very richest among us—the ones who can afford the special gene therapy treatment—also never happen to die. As I’ve said before, death is just about the only constant in my immortal life, and while I might complain about it from time to time, I think that happens to be a pretty good arrangement. Because whether you’re a Hitler or an Alexander, eventually the universe will do away with you just as it did for Jesus and Gandhi. Death is the great leveler.

Maybe I’m being selfish about my own personal immortality. Maybe I just don’t want to share it. But I also haven’t abused it—much—and I certainly haven’t done any world conquering and mass slaughtering. I frankly don’t think enough of my fellow man to believe others, when handed the same gifts, will act as wisely.

So, where Viktor, who is the worst kind of idealist, sees a future with less pain and suffering, I see only chaos and class warfare and murder and war. He calls me a pessimist and maybe he’s right. But assuming the worst of people has gotten me pretty far.

Since I’ve failed to convince him that he’s managed to create the worst kind of weapon, I’m going to have to deal with the problem directly. Provided I ever get out of my cell.

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Which brings me back to the keyhole. It is not your everyday keyhole, unless you happen to live every day in the nineteenth century. All the doors in the inner compound have an outsized keyhole to fit the outsized keys that are currently on a large ring attached to Ringo’s belt. They had to be big because demons are not known for their fine motor coordination. This is why they typically break down doors to get through them. It’s not necessarily belligerence—although one must never discount belligerence in a demon as a motivating factor—so much as that most keys are simply too small for their fingers to manipulate. I’ve been told some of them can’t even work doorknobs.

Though unusually large, the keyholes are still entirely too small for a human to jam his finger into. (I’ve tried and have two formerly sprained pinky fingers to show for it.) But they’re plenty big enough to accommodate a pixie’s arm.

Just so you know—in case you ever want to try—it’s a hell of a thing to teach a pixie how to pick a lock. It’s not so much that they don’t understand how locks work; it’s that they don’t know what locks are. They don’t even have clothing, for Baal’s sake. So just explaining the basic principles took a week. And without a lock for Iza to practice on—other than the one for my cell door, which I don’t want her opening prematurely—I had to enlist Clara’s help. Which is another thing I’ve relied on my Judas to do for me. No, I’m not comfortable about this at all.

I’m staring at the keyhole because any minute now Iza is going to be unlocking the door. I hope. I gave her the word that tonight is the night about two hours ago, (or however long I’ve been staring) and she flitted off to inform Clara that she needs to ready herself. I did this because this afternoon on my last trip to the lab, Viktor was kind enough to inform me that the tests are over. He now has everything he needs from me and Eve to finish his work. Which means sometime in the next couple of days, Robert Grindel will be arriving to, as he once put it, “discuss compensation” for my time. I fully expect this compensation to prominently feature a bullet in the back of the head.

You may be wondering why I waited this long. If you had an escape plan that was as likely to get you killed as mine, you’d wait, too. What I’ve been waiting for is anybody’s guess. A miracle, I suppose.

The way the plan works, Iza is supposed to wait until Ringo checks out. I had her observe the actions outside my cell for about a week and report her findings, which is how I learned that I’m not being guarded a full twenty-four hours a day. Ringo goes to bed (I assume demons sleep) right around the same time the team from the lab exits for the evening, which is generally sometime after sunset.

After getting me out, Iza will open Eve’s cell and then the lab, where the two of us will be hiding out—possibly having a decent conversation in a place where Eve can’t disappear on me—while Iza completes phase two, which is the part of the plan where lots of people die. Everything after that is kind of dicey.

But first comes getting my door open. I’m beginning to worry that that isn’t going to be happening.

Scratch that. I hear a click. The lock is being manipulated. I jump to my feet and am about to cross the distance and pull open the door—Iza isn’t strong enough to actually do it herself—when the door swings open on its own.

“Hello, Adam,” says the figure in the door.

She steps into the light and I wonder for a second whether Iza simply misunderstood the plan. Otherwise, how could Eve be standing in front of me?

About three seconds pass before I figure out what’s actually happening. All it takes is for Bob to step out from behind Eve, revealing the handgun he’s got pointed at the back of her head.

   
“Glad to see you’re still awake,” he says to me. “It’s time we settled that matter of compensation.”

Now I’m thinking I did put off the escape plan a tad too long.

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With Bob Grindel, and his handgun, standing behind us next to the ever-present Brutus, Eve and I are marched through the compound in a direction that indicates we’re heading for the outer perimeter fence.

“I did promise you’d have an opportunity to meet, Adam,” Bob says, coming off as unspeakably smug. He reminds me a bit of Caligula. Not the movie, the guy. “You can’t say I’ve been dishonest.”

“No, Bob, I guess I can’t.”

Definitely out of the inner compound. We’ve already passed two inner circle buildings that had previously only existed in the map in my head. If I have it figured right, in another fifty paces we’d be passing through the outer ring.

Just looking around, I can tell why it is Bob decided to do this tonight. It’s the last night of a new moon. Visibility stinks, especially since most of the lights in the place are extremely localized, concerned primarily with keeping front stoops lit. The two exceptions are the center of the compound (the midway point between the administrative building and the lab) which is perpetually lit by spotlights atop a centrally located light stand, and the perimeter fence, which has a light stanchion every twenty yards. All provided Clara’s map is accurate.

I keep glancing at Eve to my right. She’s dressed in the same sort of generic white cottons I’d been handed the day I first checked in, but somehow she manages to look simply amazing in it, carrying herself with a certain grace that makes me wonder if her feet are actually touching the ground. I fall in love again five or six times.

Unfortunately, since her initial greeting, she hasn’t said a word. This is not the kind of conversation I had in mind.

“She doesn’t talk much,” Bob says, noting my interest. “I should have mentioned that earlier.”

“Maybe she just isn’t interested in talking to you,” I offer.

Still a good distance from the fence, I manage to pick up the telltale buzzing noise of an adult pixie in flight. If asked to describe the noise, I’d say it falls somewhere between the sound of the wind through a pine tree and the low rasp of corduroy pant legs rubbing together. It’s the sort of thing you have to know you’re hearing in order to catch it, and I’m fairly confident Bob and Brutus don’t. Eve does. She shoots a sidelong glance at me and I can swear I see the barest traces of a grin.