Immortal

36

Nicola Lopez heard the heavy Lexus roll up alongside her as she walked toward a Five & Dime, searching for the garments Enrico Zamora had sent her to buy, and then the weighty clunk of the door as it opened while the vehicle was still moving. Instinctively, she rested one hand on the baton under her light jacket and glanced over her shoulder into the vehicle’s gloomy interior.

‘Miss Lopez? A moment of your time, if I may?’

Lopez recognized the gravelly tones of Jeb Oppenheimer and glanced furtively around her at the street. ‘I won’t keep you long,’ came the voice from the interior.

Lopez released her hand on the baton, letting it fall past the pocket of her jacket. She felt the hard cylindrical surface of a pepper-spray can within, and felt emboldened. She turned and climbed into the vehicle.

Oppenheimer offered her an appraising grin as she closed the door and checked out the two bodyguards in the front.

‘I feared for a moment that you would not have the mettle to get in,’ Oppenheimer said.

Lopez shot him a dirty look.

‘Given your habit of abducting people, it should hardly have come as a shock.’

‘Baseless accusations,’ Oppenheimer intoned. ‘Besides, if I’d wanted to abduct you I’d hardly have done so on a crowded street, would I? This was, I assure you, a fortuitous opportunity and I just happened by. Had I been under any real suspicion of such a crime would I not have been arrested by now?’

‘We know you’ve got USAMRIID in your pocket,’ Lopez muttered. ‘Playing innocent isn’t going to win you any laurels.’

‘Nor will playing guilty,’ Oppenheimer said, his friendly expression hardening in an instant. ‘This is not a game, Miss Lopez, it’s a serious business and there are many people who would gladly see my company fail.’

Lopez looked around her at the flashy vehicle, the hired hands and Oppenheimer, then rested her hand on her baton again.

‘You’re one of the richest men alive,’ she spat with contempt. ‘Loose change to you is a lifetime’s salary to most people. Don’t insult me again or I’ll shove that cane of yours somewhere you’ll remember for the rest of your days.’

Both of the guards, who had been staring straight ahead with blank expressions, now turned their heads in unison and focused on Lopez. She met their gazes steadily.

‘Laurel and Hardy here won’t stop me either,’ she added.

Oppenheimer chuckled, a noise that to Lopez sounded like any normal person drawing their terminal breath. The old man waved his bodyguards down, patting the air before him with one skeletal hand.

‘Calm yourself, Nicola, you’re in no danger here.’

‘It’s Ms Lopez to you,’ she said hotly. ‘And I’m sure you made the same promise to Tyler Willis.’

Oppenheimer shifted position in his seat, resting his hands on his cane and leveling a serious gaze at her.

‘We have a mutual purpose here, Ms Lopez. Yours is to discover what happened to Hiram Conley. So is mine. Everything else is irrelevant, mere distractions obscuring a much greater goal.’

‘Which is?’ Lopez asked.

‘The very thing which Hiram Conley possessed,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘A mutation, caused by bacteria, that causes human cellular senescence to cease entirely, rendering the infected individual biologically immortal.’

Lopez took a moment to digest what she’d heard.

‘That’s why Hiram Conley hadn’t aged in a hundred fifty years or more,’ she said, deciding not to mention the possible presence of others likewise afflicted, ‘a biological infection. But it was your men who took the remains from the morgue, along with Lillian Cruz. Your men who destroyed Tyler Willis’s apartment.’

Oppenheimer shook his head.

‘My men have done no such thing,’ he snapped. ‘They went nowhere near that apartment.’

Lopez lost her momentum for a moment as she looked into Oppenheimer’s rheumy gray eyes and realized that he was almost certainly telling the truth.

‘Then who did?’ she asked.

‘Rival companies, most probably,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘You don’t think that I’m the only one in this race, do you? There are literally dozens of major corporations out there who would gladly arrange an accident for me in order to capitalize on the years of research we’ve achieved at SkinGen. Why the hell do you think I travel with bodyguards in a bullet-proof vehicle?’

Lopez shook her head.

‘Not everyone on the planet thinks like you, Oppenheimer,’ she said. ‘Some people are decent enough to work things out on their own, not steal them.’

‘Quaint,’ Oppenheimer observed with a smile that reminded Lopez of a basking alligator. ‘The assumption that other people are of good intent is what most often gets one killed.’

Lopez glanced out of the tinted window at the early-morning shoppers strolling past.

‘You’re boring me, Jeb,’ she said. ‘What’s your point?’

‘That we each have something that the other needs,’ Oppenheimer said smoothly. ‘I want to know where the bacteria that infected Hiram Conley can be found.’

Lopez slowly turned in her seat to face the old man.

‘We don’t know. All we’re interested in right now is finding Lillian Cruz.’

‘Really?’ Oppenheimer muttered. ‘Let me put it to you this way, Ms Lopez. You and your partner, Ethan Warner, are right now achieving absolutely nothing. You’re down here working for the government because they daren’t get their hands dirty themselves, being paid next to nothing to investigate an anomaly that could potentially make all of us wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. Finding out what has happened to Lillian Cruz is an irrelevance compared to that.’

Lopez peered at Oppenheimer.

‘Attempting to bribe a law-enforcement officer is punishable by—’

‘You’re not a law-enforcement officer, in case you’ve forgotten,’ Oppenheimer cut across her. ‘You’re a two-bit bail-bond bounty hunter on a lousy salary with mouths to feed south of the border and not enough left over to buy a third-hand car.’

‘How the hell would you know—’

‘I make it my business to know everything,’ Oppenheimer interrupted. ‘You think that I’m doing all of this for profit but you’re wrong. I’m doing what the politicians and governments of this world haven’t got the guts to do: finding a way to stop humanity from turning our world into a desolate wasteland.’

‘You’re such a hero,’ Lopez uttered.

‘So would you be, if you would only listen to what I have to say. All I need is that one bacterium, a tiny, insignificant life form that could change our lives. That single bacterium is worth more than all of the jewels and fuels on the face of our planet. If you find where it lives, there is nothing that I would not pay to obtain it.’

Lopez raised an eyebrow.

‘If I found it, I’d have an auction.’

‘If you auctioned it, two things would happen,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘Firstly, nobody would believe you if you tried to tell the world what you possessed and your auction would fail, because it would take too long to verify your claims to all but a handful of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies with knowledge and expertise in senescence. Secondly, those companies would pay handsomely to arrange a particularly nasty accident for you before obtaining the bacterium for themselves, or at the very least preventing anyone else from obtaining it.’

Lopez thought for a moment.

‘Tyler’s apartment.’

Oppenheimer nodded. ‘I genuinely had nothing to do with it, but somebody who knows what’s happening here decided to prevent anyone else from grabbing any materials that Tyler Willis may have left behind. This is a situation, Miss Lopez, in which you either help me to obtain those samples or you walk away with nothing.’

Lopez looked out of the windows of the vehicle for a long moment, at the passers-by variously struggling to control children, shopping bags or pets. Hundreds of them, millions, all working their forty hours a week, struggling to pay the bills, being hit with ever more taxes that were then frittered away by the incompetence of successive governments. There were, it seemed, just a handful of very wealthy people for every few million ordinary citizens, and Lopez was more than tired of struggling on a daily basis just to stand still.

She looked at Oppenheimer.

‘And if I agreed? What would you want me to do?’

Oppenheimer looked at one of his bodyguards, who silently produced a small black box no larger than a cigarette packet. Oppenheimer took it, and showed it to her.

‘This is a full service GPS tracker,’ he said, handing her the glossy black device. ‘With this, I can track your movements with its pre-installed and activated SIM card.’

Lopez nodded, familiar with such surveillance devices. Usually attached to cars, they could be used together with the Google Earth service in order to monitor the device’s movement in real time. A GPS assist function via a network was used to boost sensitivity in the event of the GPS signal being temporarily lost. It was accurate to within fifteen meters. No antennas, entirely self-contained and barely three inches long. Perfect.

‘You need do nothing more than carry it on your person at all times,’ Oppenheimer said. ‘If you or your partner, or anyone you have contact with, should locate the source of the bacteria, you place this marker there and call me. That’s all there is to it.’

‘There’s no way I can trust you,’ Lopez countered. ‘You once bought an entire company just to shut it down in revenge for a deal gone bad.’

‘It was I who was wronged,’ Oppenheimer muttered, ‘but in a show of good will, perhaps I could transfer some funds for you this afternoon, call it an appetizer? How does fifty thousand dollars sound?’

Lopez’s stomach flipped but she forced her face to remain impassive.

‘I won’t do it for less than two hundred fifty thousand for starters,’ she said. ‘Wire transfer, for services rendered, all taxes paid. You do the paperwork and send copies to me. I don’t want the IRS climbing up my ass after this is all over.’

Oppenheimer forced a tight grin across his features. ‘You’ll do it then?’

Lopez looked at the tracker in her hand as conflicting thoughts flashed through her mind: Ethan; her penniless family back home; her pathetic apartment in Chicago; the endless search for money to make ends meet. She looked at the hordes of people outside the car, and made her decision.