The Immortalists (23 page)

Burt Seeger took a circuitous route, working his way three blocks north before crossing to the Walmart side of the street. The sidewalk was depressingly empty—walking was an increasingly lost art in America, and it made him far more obvious than he would have liked.

He took a path behind a series of shops bordering one side of the center’s parking lot, staying close to the battered fence that ran along the back and occasionally ducking behind a Dumpster to see if he was being followed.

Nothing.

But then, he really wouldn’t expect to see anything. They’d just watch him and wait until he led them back to Susie before they made a move. The fact that he’d called in Susie’s prescription created a link. Admittedly a tenuous one, but a link nonetheless.

He came to the end of the series of shops and peeked through a gap in the fence. Close up, the Walmart didn’t look any more sinister than it had from a distance. Average people towing average kids and normal grocery bags.

Despite that, he wanted nothing more than to just walk away. It wasn’t an option, though. Susie needed her meds, and this was the only way to get them.

Seeger was about to climb over the fence when he noticed a ladder running up the back of a pizza shop. The roof was flat, ringed by a wall that looked to be in the range of three feet high. A good vantage point to take one last look before diving in head-first.

He ascended the ladder quickly, but ducked back down when his head cleared the top.

His heart rate surged—not necessarily a good thing at his age—but the adrenaline still did the job it always had. His surroundings came into clearer focus, the noises around him separated and sharpened, the aches and pains he’d become so used to disappeared.

After a quick look to confirm no one was approaching from below, he eased himself upward again, stopping when his eyes cleared the ledge.

The man was on the far side of the roof, sitting cross-legged in front of a bank of small monitors. He was wearing tan slacks and a white button-down shirt that accentuated the V of his back and contrasted dark, East Indian skin. The headset resting on his black military-cut hair was wired directly into a console to his right.

Seeger couldn’t be absolutely sure it was the man who had led the team that broke into his house, but the resemblance was a hell of a lot more than superficial.

He eased himself up another rung, trying unsuccessfully to find a plausible explanation for what he saw. A cop on a stakeout who just happened to be of Indian descent? The director of an independent foreign film about the American shopper?

Not likely.

The sun was in his face, which normally would have been a disadvantage, but in this case, it would keep his shadow behind him. The surface of the roof looked like rubber and would absorb the sound of his footsteps if he could avoid the gravel strewn across it.

But even with all that and the element of surprise, what were his chances? There was a time that he wouldn’t have thought twice about an intel-gathering opportunity like this one, but that time was more than a quarter century past. Was it worth the risk?

He fished a knife from his pocket and flipped it open with his thumb. The blade was only three inches long and not really designed for the task at hand, but it was quiet and sharp and would have to do.

Swinging a leg onto the roof, he crept silently forward, pausing when the man ducked down to study the monitors that Seeger could now see were tied into Walmart’s security cameras. The images changed rhythmically—the registers, the refrigeration section—with one exception: the feed from the pharmacy was constant.

With only a few feet to go, the wind kicked up behind him, and he was forced to lunge, worried that the man would smell the obnoxious pineapple-scented shampoo that Susie had so carefully selected for him.

Seeger yanked out the cord connecting the headset and immediately threw his weight left, anticipating the elbow coming around as the man twisted his body into a defensive position.

The years had robbed him of even more speed than he thought, and he got clipped hard enough to cause him to lose his balance and fall toward the edge of the low wall behind him.

The man drove a hand into Seeger’s chest, doubling the force of gravity pulling him toward the brick barrier. He let his knees collapse and managed to take the impact across his shoulder blades instead of his lower spine as the man had planned. The flash of pain was accompanied by a crackling sound that he assumed was shattering bone.

Surprisingly, his right arm still worked, and he threw it forward, fixating on the face less than two feet away. There was no fear or anger in it, just calculation and unwavering determination. It wasn’t the fanatics he worried about. It was the cold sons of bitches like this one. They were the ones who would kill you.

The man swung a fist in a flawlessly timed arc, but Seeger ignored it, focusing on keeping his hand moving feebly forward. He managed to swivel his head away at the last moment, avoiding the full impact of the blow but still sprawling to the ground beneath a now out-of-focus sky.

Stepping forward, the Indian started to press his advantage, but then he slapped a hand to his neck and pulled it back wet with blood. Seeger wasn’t surprised by his confusion. One of the many obsessions he carried with him from the military was the painstaking maintenance of his gear. What the knife concealed in his palm lacked in size, it made up for with its meticulously honed edge. The man hadn’t felt it slice across his carotid artery.

The assassin’s blood spurted powerfully with the beat of his heart, shattering his professional calm. He ignored the life flowing out of him and grabbed Seeger by the shirt, pulling him up and slamming him against the edge of the wall again.

The blade fell from his hand, and he grabbed for the gun stuffed in the back of his pants, abandoning all hope of doing this quietly or learning something useful.

Lining up for a kill shot obviously wasn’t going to happen, and he was forced to aim lower, hoping that a .357 round to the thigh would slow the man down enough for the blood loss to take effect.

The Indian seemed almost clairvoyant, grabbing his wrist and hammering it into the sharp edge of the brick until the weapon went cartwheeling thirty feet to the ground.

Seeger knew that if he didn’t do something quickly, he’d end up lying next to it with his brains leaking all over the asphalt.

He kicked uselessly at the man’s legs, trying to hook a foot around one of them as he was leaned out into the open air. It was no use. He was going over.

Seeger thought of Susie and her parents. Of his wife. And of the many friends who’d gone before him. He was suddenly overcome by the sensation that they were watching and he reached out, grabbing the Indian’s chin and the back of his head in a maneuver that once would have neatly snapped his neck. He twisted as hard as he could, but the years and repeated blows to his back had taken too much out of him. All he could hope for now was that the effort didn’t look pathetic to his imaginary audience.

As expected, the satisfying crack he so wanted to hear didn’t materialize. What he hadn’t anticipated, though, was that as the Indian’s head turned, the gash in his neck opened into a gaping hole. The pulsing flow of blood intensified, spraying across his face and chest, burning his eyes and leaving the metallic taste of iron in his mouth.

Feeling a sudden glimmer of hope, Seeger gripped tighter, keeping the wound open as his one-way trip to the parking lot started to feel a bit less inevitable.

The Indian’s expression became increasingly vague, and a hard shove finally toppled him onto the gravel and tar roof.

Seeger scooped up the knife and dropped a knee onto the man’s chest as he fought weakly to get up.

“Who the hell are you?”

The Indian clamped a hand to his neck again in a futile effort to stop what was left of him from pouring out onto the roof.

“Nobody,” he choked.

“Who do you work for?” Seeger pressed. “There’s no point in not telling me now, son.”

The man’s hand dropped away from his wound, and he turned his blood-soaked face toward the sky.

“
Who do you work for?
”

But he didn’t speak again. The force of the bleeding subsided, and his gaze turned fixed, leaving Seeger to lurch toward the ladder. There was no way the dead man’s team could have missed the battle on the rooftop. They would be coming.

He grabbed the rails and pressed his feet to the sides, sliding down fast enough that his bad leg nearly collapsed when it contacted the ground. He took a few steps back the way he’d come, but then stopped when he saw an armed man sprinting up what he’d hoped to use as an escape route. Seeger turned, but before he could even start in the other direction, he spotted a man rolling over the top of the fence in front of him and dropping nimbly to the ground.

He reached reflexively for his pistol, remembering it wasn’t there just as both men lined up their weapons.

“Drop it!” one of them yelled.

It looked like he’d used up what was left of his luck on the rooftop. This time he was dead. Not in Afghanistan or Somalia or Iraq. At the Walmart.

There was no point in being taken alive, so he crouched and ran at the rickety fence, aiming for a badly damaged section as silencer-muffled shots filled his ears.

Anticipating the bullet impacts, he stumbled and hit the fence backward. The rotted wood gave way, and as he fell through he saw one of the men drop to the ground and the other take cover behind a Dumpster. Seeger was tumbling across the tall grass of the adjacent lot when he realized why he was still alive. They weren’t shooting at him. They were shooting at each other.

The breathy thump of gunshots weren’t slowing, and he leapt to his feet, sprinting as best he could for the road. It wouldn’t be long before the battle behind him was decided and the winner started looking for a new target.

Seeger stayed close to the building, examining the splotchy blue RV that contained Susie Draman. A quick check of his watch suggested that she would be heading to the library to call her parents in exactly ten minutes.

Activity around the vehicle looked completely natural, and he hoped that it wasn’t just a carefully orchestrated illusion—that the men at the Walmart really had been too preoccupied to track him. Hope, though, wasn’t something he normally liked to rely on.

He dialed a number into a prepaid cell and held it to his ear, retreating a little farther into the shadows.

“Hello?”

“Let me talk to the doc.”

“One moment.”

Richard’s voice sounded a bit panicked when it came on. “Why are you calling? We weren’t supposed to talk until tonight. Is Susie all right? What—”

“Calm down,” Seeger said. “Susie’s fine. But I can’t get her meds.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are people all over the store.”

“How—”

“My guess is that they’re tied into the pharmacy computer systems. And damn near everything else as near as I can tell.”

A few seconds went by before Richard spoke again. “How soon can you get here?”

“There’s more, Richard. I’m pretty sure one of them was the man who showed up at my house—Mason’s goon. But there was also someone here who’s definitely
not
on Mason’s team.”

The list of people with the resources to track confidential prescriptions at national chains was fairly short, making the implication obvious: Andreas Xander.

“How soon?” Richard repeated.

“Did you know that Xander was going to have men here?”

“No, but he’s been concerned about Susie. He thinks she’d be safer at the compound.”

It was almost certain that the dusty old bastard was listening, but Seeger didn’t care anymore. “Really, Richard? Andreas Xander’s wringing his hands over the welfare of an eight-year-old girl he’s never met? Exactly how likely do you think that is?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? If you can’t get her the meds she needs, then you have to bring her here. How soon?”

“Reasonably? A few days.”

There was another long pause over the line. “How about unreasonably?”

“Be careful, you idiot!”

The men barely managed to keep Xander’s wheelchair from falling, and they paused to regain their footing before carrying him the rest of the way up the icy steps.

The burst of adrenaline he once would have felt—the racing of the heart, the sensation of wet heat in his palms—was replaced by an increasingly familiar constriction in his chest. He looked behind him to the degree his stiff neck would allow, lingering for a moment on the jagged slope of the stairs, the armed guards strategically positioned on the endless landscape, and at the darkness that he had come to fear.

The wind that had buffeted his helicopter the entire way to this empty corner of Canada began to gust again, penetrating his thick parka and then seeming to continue right through him.

It hadn’t always been so. He’d started his working life at the age of fourteen, delivering ice in a horse-drawn cart. Nothing could touch him then—not the cold, not the backbreaking labor, not the sixteen-hour days.

Now he was at the mercy of everything—a sudden fright, a momentary loss of balance, an insignificant piece of food lodged in the disintegrating muscles of his throat. All he had built over the better part of a century, all he had become was slipping from him to a generation of men—and now even women—who wouldn’t have endured so much as a few hours of his childhood. Privileged fools who had everything handed to them.

“Go,” he said after his men set his chair down in front of the house’s open front door. He listened to them retreat while his eyes adjusted to the glow coming from inside. It was a modest home by his standards, six thousand square feet of log and stone surrounded by a thousand acres of meticulously fenced pine forest.

It had taken an army of forensic accountants, but a moment of carelessness had finally been uncovered in a bank transfer done by one of the wealthy men who had disappeared over the last decade. And the unraveling of that seemingly insignificant error had led him to this place.

Xander used gloved hands to propel his wheelchair through the door, the relative warmth of the interior registering against his skin but refusing to penetrate any farther.

“Andreas!” Bill Garrison called, starting toward him from the far end of the foyer. “I hope you didn’t have too much turbulence coming in.”

“What have you found?” Xander said, uninterested in small talk. There was no more time.

“As near as we can tell, the house was abandoned weeks ago. It’s a hell of a lot easier for them to cut connections than it is for us to make them.”

The detached, businesslike demeanor that Xander had always respected in Garrison now infuriated him. He was the only one other than the Dramans who knew what was at stake, but he treated it no differently than any investigation he’d done before—just another job to pay the mortgage on his suburban home and the tuition for children who used college to escape work.

He was still young enough that his mortality was still just an occasional flash on a distant horizon. It would be years before he really understood what was at stake. What it was like to rot from within.

“We talked to people in the closest town and found a woman who worked here a few years ago. She said it was owned by an unmarried male in his mid thirties. We showed her pictures of the men we’ve identified digitally regressed to about that age, and she tentatively identified one of them as being him.”

“Tentatively?”

“The regression algorithms aren’t perfect, but I’m confident it’s him.”

“So what?” Xander said, trying to control a surge of the hopelessness he had managed to shake off after coming to know Richard Draman. “Where does that get us?”

“Probably nowhere,” Garrison admitted. “These people have been perfecting their ability to disappear for a long time now, and they’ve gotten damn good at it.”

“So this is nothing but another dead end?”

Letting his anger surface wasn’t the release it had once been, now serving only to help obscure his exhaustion and fear. “We can’t afford to always be one step behind these people, Bill.”

“I’m not sure what to tell you. I’m doing everything I can.”

Xander pointed to the open door. “You and your people get out. We’re leaving.”

Garrison nodded and started back up the hallway while Xander sat motionless, fixating on a potted tree dying of neglect in the corner.

Richard Draman had been working for five days on the materials they’d taken from August Mason’s lab, and every time they spoke, it was the same story with different phrasing. Inconclusive. Making progress. Moving in the right direction. All words that Xander had come to recognize as the platitudes of people who had no idea what they were doing.

It was time to admit that it could be ten years before Draman discovered anything useful and even longer before Garrison got close enough to one of these people to capture them. Time that Xander’s doctors all agreed he didn’t have.

He propelled himself down the hallway, looking for answers in the belongings of a man who had beat death, who had cut the last thing that tied him to the ordinary people milling about in the streets leading their useless lives. A man who knew what it was like to feel his strength flood back to him.

People began appearing in the hallway, careful to avert their eyes as they passed on their way to the front door. By the time Garrison materialized, the house had descended into complete silence.

“I’ll be outside if you need anything, Andreas.”

Xander continued to stare blankly at the fading tree, momentarily lost in the past. When he heard the door close behind him, he rolled toward a small table and laid a sealed envelope on it.

The address consisted of two words scrawled in his own shaky hand.

The Immortalists
.