* * *
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?”
Chapter 20
Here’s what I don’t get. I’ve been listening to these guys talk and talk about how my body works, but whenever I bring up the next step they get all vague with me, using phrases like “transformational genetic event,” which doesn’t sound like anything with which I am familiar. I do know that whatever this “event” is, it has something to do with a virus. Beyond that? No idea. But I am wondering if it has to do with what’s in the reinforced building next to mine.
I need to think about it some more. I’ve got time. I can figure this out.
* * *
After much thought, we decided I should take a flight from JFK to Heathrow and pick my destination from there. Clara wanted to know where I was going to end up, but she also didn’t. Something about lots of beer and daddy’s credit card and having a weak moment. I tried to sympathize without sounding like I wanted her to come with me. (I did sort of want her to come with me.) And I didn’t actually know where I was going to go once I reached London, although it crossed my mind to visit my money in Switzerland. Or to return to Amsterdam. Have I mentioned how much I love Amsterdam?
I actually thought it would be a miracle if I made it on the plane, but I didn’t tell her that. With the demon out of the way, all I had to worry about was ingenuity on the part of my human pursuers, or simply luck smiling on the wrong person at the wrong moment, and that seemed like pretty good odds when I thought about it in the abstract. But now that I was actually going out into the world, in a more-or-less mad dash for the border, I was beginning to have my doubts. And since I’d already done a fabulous job of burning my bridge with Clara, I couldn’t stay any longer either.
Clara reserved a ticket for me under one of the passports I hadn’t used lately, meaning I had to brush up on my Spanish as I was going to have to be Gaspar Esperanzo for a little while. This is not as easy as it sounds, not when you’re fluent in almost every European dialect there ever was. I had to look up some Spanish-language web sites to get my head in the right century. I also had to give Clara some cash since it was the aforementioned daddy’s credit card that bought my ticket. (It’s surprisingly difficult to buy a ticket online with cash.)
Three in the morning with large portions of the city sleeping, it was time to say good-bye. Significantly, she’d managed to put on some clothes for the occasion.
“Will you let me know you’re okay?” she asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Of course.”
“Then I will,” I said, although I probably wouldn’t. It was unspoken, but while making the formal arrangements for my departure, a sense of resignation had imposed itself on the proceedings. She’d stopped arguing, and I had stopped forcing myself to be so callous. “I think it would be best if you tried to get on with your life,” I added helpfully. “And maybe I’ll catch up with you someday. When you’re married and insanely happy.”