The Immortalists (18 page)

Richard slowed when he came to the edge of a driveway cutting across his path, stepping from the trees and strolling along it toward the road. He made a show of checking the mailbox, but concentrated on his peripheral vision as the limousine stopped about twenty-five yards away.

The man who had been in the front passenger seat was frowning down at the damaged tire, and the driver was already headed toward the trunk. Richard wandered in their direction, trying to get his breathing fully under control and leafing casually through the letters he’d found.

“You guys all right?” he said as he approached. Despite his mouth being bone dry, his voice sounded reasonably natural.

“Just a flat,” the man looking down at it said. “Not a big deal.”

Both were as tall as he was, with expensive suits stretched across thickly muscled backs. Richard examined their waists, finding the bulge of a gun on both.

“I’ve got a jack and a lug wrench at my house if you need it.”

“I think we’re good, thanks,” the man said, going back to help his companion with the spare and leaving the limo’s front doors open and unprotected.

Right on cue, Carly came jogging up the other side of the road, limping slightly from the unhealed wound in her thigh. She was wrapped in formless sweats and a baseball hat in an effort to not attract the attention she did in her normal uniform of running shorts and a tank top. It seemed to work, because after a quick glance the two men went back to trying to free the spare.

She slowed to a walk, her footfalls going quiet as she abandoned the gravel shoulder in favor of asphalt. When she got within ten feet of the open driver’s door, Richard started moving casually toward the passenger side. The bodyguards continued to ignore them, and he gave a subtle nod.

Carly dove through one door and Richard the other, ending up facing backward on his knees in the seat, clawing at the door handle. The bodyguards appeared from behind the trunk and ran at him, one already reaching into his jacket. The silver metal of a gun flashed in the sun, but it was too late—the doors slammed closed, and Carly found the lock button, sealing them in.

Outside, the two men were screaming unintelligible orders as they approached to within a few feet of the window with their guns thrust out in front of them.

According to Seeger, they’d be hesitant to shoot. Even in the unlikely event that the glass wasn’t reinforced, a bullet could be deflected as it passed through, killing the man they’d been hired to protect. To Richard’s ear, though, they didn’t sound hesitant.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

It took a moment for Richard to tear his gaze from the gun barrel trained on him, but he finally managed to shift his focus to the man in the backseat.

In magazine and newspaper photos, Andreas Xander looked every bit the ninety-one years he reported, but in person, he looked a hell of a lot closer to the century mark.

His skin was gray and crisscrossed with broken blood vessels, falling from jutting cheekbones. The whites of his eyes had gone milky yellow and were rimmed in red as they flicked between his two captors.

“Tell them to lower their guns,” Richard said, aiming the pistol Seeger had given him in the old man’s general direction. “We don’t usually do this kind of thing, and you don’t want us any more nervous than we already are.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you two?” he said, reaching for the oxygen tank sitting next to him and increasing the flow to the tubes in his nose. “Are you a moron?”

Outside, one of the men was dialing a phone with his free hand. There wasn’t much time.

“Answer my goddamn question!”

“What question?” Richard said.

This time Xander enunciated as though he were speaking to a small child. “Are. You. A. Moron?”

“I don’t think you should go around insulting people holding you at gunpoint,” Carly said.

Xander lifted an arm and they both jerked back a little, but he just pointed an arthritic finger toward the steering column. “The keys aren’t in the ignition, and the tire’s flat, you stupid hussy. Probably because you shot it out. What’s the plan here? To just sit and wait for SWAT to blow your brains all over my upholstery?”

“Did you just call me a hussy?” Carly said. “Jesus Christ. How old
are
you?”

“Enough!” Richard said. “Look, we’re sorry about this, Mr. Xander. I’ve tried to get in touch with you in a more conventional way, but I can’t even get past your switchboard.”

“Run,” the old man said. “If you’re gone by the time the police get here, I’ll forget this ever happened.”

“I’m Richard Draman, sir. I did biomedical research in the area of progeria. In fact, I—”

“Is it too much trouble for you people to pick up a newspaper every once in a while? Richard Draman died in a plane crash weeks ago.”

“I wasn’t on that plane, Mr. Xander. And neither was August Mason.”

Chris Graden had never been to this part of the island’s compound, and he didn’t know how to interpret the invitation. The garden was strikingly beautiful, with hanging palm trees and an indistinctly shaped pool with a greenish-gray bottom. As with all things Karl did, it was a triumphant combination of aesthetics and function—an outdoor sanctuary that would be completely invisible from above.

Graden followed the guard across the flagstones, aware of the cameras following their progress. The island’s security was becoming as oppressive as it was obsessive. Who were the cameras there to watch? The watchers?

He wondered if Karl ever left. If he had a life somewhere or if he planned to spend the next millennium pulling the world’s strings from the jungle.

They passed through a small gap in the trees, and the man leading him veered off, gesturing toward a table where Karl and Oleg were sitting.

“Please,” Karl said, gesturing toward an empty chair. Graden took it, silently telling himself that he didn’t have anything to worry about. Nothing that had happened with Richard and Carly was his fault. He’d faithfully played the role set out for him.

“Did you have a pleasant flight?”

The small talk seemed out of place coming from his lips. Perhaps intended to put him at ease, it had the opposite effect.

“I did, thank you.”

“Then we’ll proceed. I called you both here to discuss the Draman situation.”

Karl’s expression was passive, but there was something just beneath the surface. Rage.

“Obviously everyone at this table has underestimated their elusiveness and, admittedly, their luck. How this happened, I’m not sure. Chris, you’ve known them for years and were charged with making certain they considered you one of their closest friends. Oleg, you billed yourself as an intelligence mastermind— a man who would have no trouble with a situation like this one. But now we find ourselves in a very difficult position. Not only are the Dramans and their daughter still eluding us, but they’ve discovered more about our group than should have ever been possible. How did this happen?”

The question was clearly not rhetorical. Graden knew that he and the Russian were being asked to defend their actions. Perhaps their lives.

“My jet was used to try to get rid of them,” Graden blurted before Oleg could speak. “But it wasn’t my plan. And I held them at my house until our people came. The fact that they escaped has nothing to do with me. I’m not involved with who’s sent and how competent they are.”

“You did hold them there,” Karl agreed. “According to our recordings, by telling them a great deal.”

“That’s not true! I didn’t tell them anything useful—anything they didn’t already know. I had to stall them. How else could I have done it?”

Karl nodded ambiguously and turned his attention to Oleg, who hadn’t dared to interrupt but whose face had turned increasingly red at Graden’s attempt to deflect blame.

“And yet they got away. Isn’t that right, Oleg?”

“You understand the difficulties of finding reliable people who are sufficiently discreet,” he said. “The men I sent were the only ones available, and there was no way to anticipate that they would have to deal with a former special forces sniper.”

Another noncommittal nod from Karl. “It’s difficult to argue against Chris’s point, though, isn’t it? Planning for the unexpected isn’t what he was hired for. He was asked to keep them there until your people arrived, and he did that.”

Graden relaxed enough that he dared pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher in the middle of the table. The heat and humidity were getting worse as the day went on, and his chair was the only one not shaded.

“Karl, I—”

“And by the time you tracked down this sniper and sent your men to deal with him, he was gone.”

“We located his house within a few hours.”

Karl shrugged. “How is that relevant? Too late is too late. Wouldn’t you say that’s true, Oleg?”

The Russian nodded reluctantly.

“I see this series of events as being brought about by a lack of thoroughness,” Karl said, scooting back enough that he had a view of both men. “Chris, you didn’t watch Richard Draman or Troy Chevalier closely enough. And Oleg, you weren’t aware that the Dramans had gotten off the plane, and then you destroyed it to no purpose. You also allowed August to be tracked to Argentina, which puts me in the position of having to question
all
of our preparations up to this point.”

He waved over the man who had escorted Graden across the garden, and he took a position next to the table.

“Chris, the work you’ve done for us has been very valuable. And, as you said, you’re not an intelligence officer. Your sphere of influence is medical research, and with this one exception, you’ve covered that area competently.”

Graden tried not to show his relief at what appeared to be a dismissal. As terrifying as the thought of death had always been, it was much more so now that it was no longer inevitable.

“But,” Karl continued, “your involvement has been revealed, and we can’t send you back. There could be questions that would be difficult to answer.”

Graden’s eyes widened a bit. Had his schedule been moved up? Was he going to be given the therapy?

The answer came when the man standing next to the table pulled a gun from his shoulder holster.

“No!” Graden shouted, jumping from his chair and holding a hand out. “You said this wasn’t my fault! That I had done a good job for the group.”

“And I meant that, Chris. But if there’s anything we’ve learned from this, it’s that even the smallest loose end can begin to unravel. Your sudden disappearance would just play into the story the Dramans can tell. My hands are tied.”

The pain he expected to accompany the sound of the gun didn’t materialize, and he had to look down at the red stain spreading across his chest before he comprehended what had happened. The tropical heat disappeared, as did the sound of the insects and birds. He looked up into the sky and squinted into the sun, watching it fade to black as he sank to the ground.

Oleg Nazarov maintained eye contact with Karl as two men materialized from the trees and carried away the piece of meat that had been Chris Graden.

“When Mason first told me about his breakthrough, I was skeptical,” Karl said. “But his reputation preceded him, and the possibility that it could be used to create a therapy to reverse the aging process was too great to ignore. I set up a web of satellite labs in remote parts of the world, each working on a tiny piece of the puzzle. I paid government officials to provide human test subjects from their villages and prisons. I raised the three billion dollars it cost. And I controlled the impatience and frustration of the people I recruited while Mason’s work stretched to nearly a quarter century. Some of the men who originally started down this road with me didn’t live long enough to see him succeed. In fact, I almost didn’t.”

Nazarov looked on impassively, unsure where this was going. The trail of blood leading away from the table suggested that his life was hanging in the balance. Not particularly surprising, nor the first time. Involvement with Karl almost defined an all-or-nothing enterprise.

“I tell you this because I want to impress on you how far-reaching this is, Oleg.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? I hope so. I spoke with the group about you, and they were evenly split on how to proceed. For the first time, I had to cast the deciding vote.”

Karl poured himself a glass of water while Nazarov stared at the still full one Chris Graden had left.

“I told them that it would be difficult to make a change at this point. That I have confidence in your ability to operate at a higher level than you have up to this point.”

“Thank you,” Nazarov said, wiping the sweat from his lip with a napkin.

“I understand that you joined us just as a number of difficult situations presented themselves, Oleg. But what
you
need to understand is that next time, the vote won’t go in your favor.”