The Immortalists (12 page)

“This is fine right here,” Richard said.

The cab driver pointed through the windshield. “The entrance is up a little farther. I can take you all the way.”

Richard peeled a hundred-dollar bill from a roll of cash in his hand and held it over the seats. “No. This is good. We won’t be long. Would you mind waiting?”

Carly followed him onto the sidewalk running in front of the private airport’s main building and then into the shadow of a tall bush.

“What the hell are we doing, Richard? People saw us when we flew out of here. We’re supposed to be dead.”

“If Mason’s assistant told you that she drove him to the airport two hours before the plane took off, I want to know what happened to him. You talked to the guy at the counter, but I just got a cup of coffee and sat down. No one’s going to remember me.”

“Don’t you think we should—”

He gave her a reassuring smile and hurried toward the front door, feeling his heart rate notch up as he entered the lobby.

“Hi, I’m Richard Grace with the
Washington Post
.”

“Fred Terrance,” the man behind the desk responded without even a hint of recognition. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m doing a story on August Mason, and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”

“Sure. But I can’t say that I ever really met the guy. I mean, he was here for a couple minutes and then went out and got on the plane.” Terrance shook his head. “Bad luck. You know, a new jet with professional pilots. That’s a pretty safe way to travel normally.”

Richard looked out the windows that led to the tarmac. From where he was standing, he could see one plane and a small piece of the runway. He walked closer, widening the angle of his view, and saw four other planes, two with open doors and steps leading into them.

“Did you actually see him get on the plane?” he asked, returning to the counter.

“What do you mean?”

“He walked out that door, right? You saw him.”

“Yeah.”

“Then what?”

“Are you asking if I actually stood here and watched him get on the jet? No. Why would I?”

“Then he could have just wandered off for all you know.”

“What paper did you say you were from again?”

“The
Post
.”

He looked skeptical. “Seems kind of unlikely that he wandered off. There’s a fence surrounding the area, and you need the code to get in and out. If he decided he wanted to leave, he’d have come through here, and I’d have seen him. Besides, if he was still alive, wouldn’t he have mentioned it to someone?”

“What if he got on the wrong plane?”

Terrance laughed. “These aren’t seven forty-sevens, man. You’d notice if someone you didn’t know was sitting next to you grazing on your cheese plate.”

“Still, I get paid to be thorough. Could you tell me what other planes flew out around that time?”

He just stood there, trying to decide how much effort he wanted to put into this. Finally, he let out a long, irritated breath and reached beneath the counter for a notebook.

“OK,” he said, leafing through it. “Four flights went out around the time he was here.”

“Can you tell me anything about them?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Who was on them? Where they were going?”

He tapped the page with his finger. “Two were going to New York. One went to Aspen. The other was headed to Argentina. One of the ones that went to New York was a local businessman who flies out of here two or three times a week. The one that went to Aspen was a family going to their vacation house. The other New York flight was a NetJet. I’ve met the pilot a few times, but I don’t remember who the passengers were.”

“And the Argentina fight?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know anything about it.”

“Come on!” Richard said, holding a hand out as he passed by the bush he’d left his wife in. She took it, and they headed toward the cab waiting by the curb.

“According to the guy in there, Mason was here, and he went out to the planes and never came back.”

“You think he got on one?”

“There was someone going to Argentina. How hard would it have been to snatch him? You’d just walk up and say, ‘Hi, I’m Chris Graden’s pilot. Hop on.’ The question, though, is who. Obviously, Chris had to be involved, but I don’t believe that this is his show. Someone’s pulling his strings.”

Carly stopped short. “Xander.”

“What?”

“Andreas Xander,” she repeated, staring up at him. “Alexandra said that Mason got a lot of calls to do consulting work. But she also said that the most persistent ones were from Xander. He apparently didn’t like being turned down and got pretty nasty.”

“Xander?” Richard said. “When I asked Chris to get in touch with him for me, he said that he didn’t know him.”

“He lied,” Carly said. “About everything.”

Richard started walking again, turning what she’d told him over in his mind. “It actually makes sense. Think about it. Xander’s been pumping money into medical research for years— trying to come up with something that’ll keep him alive. But maybe it’s also something he thinks he can make a billion dollars off of.”

“So he has Chris watching people who are working in related fields,” Carly said, continuing his thought. “Not only to make sure they aren’t getting ahead, but probably to steal ideas that Xander can use. But why take Mason? Why risk it?”

“Xander must be close to something. But he has a problem— something his people can’t figure out,” Richard said. “Even at half speed, August Mason has twice the mental horsepower of anyone else alive. So Chris uses Mason’s guilt about turning me in to lure him to the airport. Then Xander’s people grab him and get him out of the country. I’d bet every dime we have left that Mason’s sitting in a lab right now with a gun pointed at him.” Richard shook his head in disbelief. “Andreas Xander…shit. We’re screwed, Carly. Completely screwed. Do you have any idea how much money and power that son of a bitch has? And doing something like this…he’s obviously gone insane.”

Carly shook her head. “It’s worse than that. He just doesn’t have anything left to lose.”

“Oh, no. Not again,” Susie said, looking up from her coloring book. “That guy is
so
boring.”

Richard was sitting at a makeshift desk working on the laptop they’d bought. In the corner of the screen, a YouTube feed of August Mason speaking at MIT was playing. Despite the video being almost thirty years old, the man still sounded ahead of his time.

“Boring?” he said. “Are you kidding? He’s one of the smartest people of all time. He’s like Newton or Darwin.”

“Who’s Newton Darwin?”

“For God’s sake, Susie…do they teach you anything in school? Anything at all?”

The veins crisscrossing her enlarged forehead seemed to deepen in color as she negotiated some particularly tight lines on Harry Potter’s face. “Sure. But not stuff about that guy. We’d all be in comas or something.”

Richard sighed quietly as his wife came in with a tray of food. Susie rose from the floor long enough to snatch a ham sandwich and squint disapprovingly at her mother’s short, dark hair.

“What have you found out?” Carly said, sliding a chair up next to the computer.

“Not much. The plane landed at a private airport in a rural part of Argentina—mostly farmland and a few small towns. Based on the tail number, I found the corporation that owns the jet, but beyond the fact that they’re based in Slovenia, I can’t get anything else. I don’t even know what they do. It’s like the company exists just to own that plane.”

They’d spent the day researching everything even remotely related to what was happening to them, hoping to find some rational explanation—to find a way to write it all off to paranoia and coincidence. What little they’d turned up, though, pointed to the possibility that they weren’t being paranoid enough.

He lowered his voice so that Susie couldn’t hear. “The only subject that there’s less about on the Internet than the company that owns that plane is us and Mason. I mean there were a few stories right after it happened, but now it’s like we never existed. Even the links I bookmarked a few days ago are going dead. That’s not normal. Things don’t just disappear from the Internet like that.”

He clicked on a picture of Xander, expanding it to fill the screen. The old man was sitting in his ubiquitous wheelchair, skeletal legs covered with a plaid blanket and blotched, loose-fitting face shadowed by a fedora. “It wouldn’t be hard for him to quiet things down. Hell, he owns about half the media—and what he doesn’t own outright, he’s got stock in or a seat on the board. It’s hard to believe a man who fought in World War II could still have the kind of power he does.”

“Maybe that’s how long it takes to get your tentacles into everything on the planet,” Carly said.

It conjured a depressing but accurate mental picture. There was nothing beyond Xander’s reach. He controlled billions of dollars, countless companies, and probably a significant number of America’s elected officials. In contrast, they had an aging former soldier who didn’t trust them, a gingerbread house hideout, and a stockpile of cash that would barely cover a decent used car. Overall, a fairly lopsided playing field.

Burt Seeger appeared in the doorway and looked down at Susie. “I think you’ve been lying on that cold floor long enough, sweetheart. Why don’t you run upstairs and get ready to go for a walk. It’s too pretty a day to be inside.”

She pushed herself to her feet, still nibbling on the sandwich. “We should go to a park. Maybe there would be some kids playing soccer or something. We could watch.”

Seeger smiled, but the strain was clearly visible in his face as Susie started up the stairs.

“What is it?” Carly said. “Has something happened?”

He crossed the room and laid a sheet of paper next to the computer. It was an article about two missing college students printed from the Internet. Richard scanned it but didn’t track on the meaning until he reached their names.

His head sank into his hand while Carly pored over the text, eyes widening in horror. “We…we just got them to take us out of the swamp. They had a boat…”

“No,” Richard said. “This is my fault. I called Mason from their phone. How could I have been so stupid?”

Seeger had retreated to the doorway and was leaning against the jamb with his arms crossed in front of him. “You two seem to be very dangerous to be around.”

Carly looked up from the article. “You can’t think we had something to do with this. That we hurt these kids.”

“No,” the old soldier said. “They were last seen two days ago. And you were here two days ago.”

Richard finally found the strength to raise his head. “Maybe they’re all right. Maybe they—”

Seeger shook his head. “I don’t know who it is you’ve pissed off, but based on the fact that everything you’ve told me now seems to be true, I think we can be pretty confident that no one is ever going to see those two again.”

“They…they couldn’t have been much more than twenty years old,” he stammered. “And I killed them.”

“No,” Seeger said. “You didn’t kill them. Someone else did. And we need to figure out who before anyone else dies.”

Richard looked into his wife’s eyes and saw his own feelings reflected there. This had gone far enough. Annette and Troy. The pilots on Chris’s plane. And now two innocent kids. It had to stop.

“We have to turn ourselves in,” he said. “We can’t let anyone else get hurt because of us.”

Seeger let out a long breath. “With someone as connected as Xander involved, I don’t think just walking into some government office and announcing who you are is all that good an idea. You have no idea how far this thing goes.”

“What then?” Carly said. “Richard’s right, we can’t just stand by while everyone around us is murdered. They all had people who loved them too—who loved them just as much as we love Susie.”

“Look, I have a friend I served with in Afghanistan who’s an FBI agent now—he’s the special agent in charge of the Louisville, Kentucky, office. Why don’t I have him very quietly look into what’s happened—your friend Annette, the investigation into you, the plane, these kids. Then we’ll set up an out-of-the way meeting and talk about what we’re going to do. How does that sound?”

“I don’t know if we want to get you any deeper into this thing, Burt. People aren’t—”

Seeger waved a hand dismissively. “I’d trust this guy with my life—in fact, I have on more than one occasion. I can also tell you he’s one of the smartest, sneakiest sons of bitches I’ve ever met. I don’t think there’s any drawback to hearing what he has to say.”