Immortal

46

Saffron Oppenheimer led Ethan and Lopez down to the valley floor. On Ethan’s advice, she sent her colleagues moving along the top of the valley, deliberately making themselves visible to deter any further attacks from the soldiers he knew must be somewhere ahead of them. After a mile Saffron changed direction and moved down a different canyon. Within ten minutes Ethan spotted the glow of camp fires nestled in the canyon’s depths. Above them the sky was ablaze with trillions of distant stars glowing amid the sweeping veil of the Milky Way.

The last time he had really looked at such a panorama had been deep in another desert landscape, searching desperately for Joanna Defoe among the warrens of Gaza City. Ethan watched Saffron Oppenheimer as she led them toward the camp fires ahead, and was struck by the similarities between the eco-warrior and Joanna; the same determination and drive, the same disregard for danger, and an almost identical passion for justice. It was that passion that had almost gotten Joanna killed in Bogotá, Colombia, long before she finally vanished from the streets of Gaza City. Ethan felt a sudden surge of compassion for Saffron as he realized that her unwavering determination could also only lead to tragedy.

‘Is this where your band of merry men hide out?’ he asked her as they walked.

‘We move around,’ Saffron explained, ‘never the same place twice and always concealed. The rangers spot us occasionally but they don’t bother us to speak of. We don’t cause any trouble.’

‘Except when you’re shooting at people,’ Lopez pointed out.

‘Saved your ass, didn’t it?’ Saffron lobbed back and stopped on the track. ‘And you speak when I tell you to, not before.’

Ethan stared in surprise at Saffron. He was aware of her dislike of Lopez, but her reaction was excessive. ‘You nearly killed that man,’ Ethan said, impressed and yet appalled at the same time. ‘You didn’t hesitate.’

Saffron sighed as they walked.

‘That wasn’t a man,’ she said with what sounded to Ethan like pure contempt. ‘Leastways not as far as I’m concerned. They’ve lived out here for a long time and they’ve chased us out of camps more than once and stolen our supplies. They’re usually armed and they’re as cunning as wolves, but we’ve generally avoided each other.’

‘You’re armed too,’ Ethan said. ‘Sooner or later someone’s going to get hurt.’

‘Have they killed any of your people?’ Lopez asked.

‘No,’ Saffron replied coldly, not looking at Lopez, ‘but they’ve shot at us often enough. My people aren’t armed as a rule, I just brought them along because I wanted those guys to think they were outnumbered and outgunned.’

‘You said it wasn’t a man,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

The camp was small, with two fires and Saffron’s questionable comrades arranged in a figure of eight around them, variously cooking, smoking and drinking beer. They looked up and watched silently as Saffron led Ethan and Lopez through the camp and beyond, to a small outcrop of rock overlooking the valley some thirty feet above the camp. She sat down cross-legged and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders.

Lopez sat down as far from Saffron as she could get. Ethan gestured to the camp.

‘You don’t want to sit down there by the fire?’

‘I don’t want them to hear this conversation,’ she replied. ‘They don’t really know what’s going on.’

Ethan sat down beside her.

‘And what is going on, exactly?’

‘Do you know where Tyler Willis is?’ Saffron asked him, not looking him in the eye but staring down toward the flickering camp fires below.

‘He’s dead,’ Ethan said, seeing no sense in skirting the issue. ‘He was found yesterday.’

Even in the faint glow from the fires, Ethan thought he could see Saffron’s features turn pale. He heard her take a deep breath, then let it slowly out before speaking.

‘And Lee Carson?’

Ethan felt a jolt at the mention of Carson’s name and stared at Saffron for a long moment.

‘You knew him?’

Saffron’s eyes closed and her head sagged, and Ethan realized he’d spoken about Carson in the past tense.

‘What happened?’ Saffron asked, finally looking at Ethan. ‘I heard rumors that something bad went down in Socorro. I went to the town and friends filled me in on what little they knew. That’s why I came looking for you out here. What happened to Lee?’

‘He was shot and killed, probably by one of his own,’ Ethan said. ‘Saffron, I need to know what’s going on here. Things are already out of hand, people are dying and we can’t solve this until somebody starts talking.’

Saffron nodded, swatting a tear from her eye with her sleeve. Her breathing was ragged, but she seemed to Ethan to be holding herself together.

‘There’s something about the men who live out here,’ Saffron said finally, ‘something that my grandfather wants to use. He’s willing to do anything to get hold of them, including kill.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Lopez asked as Ethan saw her hand move inside her pocket, keying a button on a recording device.

‘Lee Carson,’ Saffron said to Ethan, ignoring her. ‘He and I… we were friends.’

‘For a long time?’ Ethan asked.

‘A few months,’ Saffron said. ‘It wasn’t serious, and I figured out long ago that Lee wasn’t the kind to settle down or anything. We had fun, but he kept disappearing for days on end, no contact. In the end, I decided to follow him and find out what was going on.’

Saffron hugged her legs, pulling her knees up under her chin against the chill night air as she went on.

‘He came out this way, right out into the deserts to a place called Golden. You ever heard of it?’ When Ethan and Lopez shook their heads, Saffron went on. ‘It’s a ghost town, one that’s stood empty for decades. Lee went there and met with other men who seemed to be his friends. But there was a shouting match, a lot of pushing and shoving, and eventually Lee took off with some other guy, an old man with a gray beard.’

‘Hiram Conley,’ Lopez guessed. ‘He’s also dead, and his body was taken from a morgue in Santa Fe along with the medical examiner working on him.’

Ethan reached into his jacket pocket and produced the photograph of the old soldiers around the wagon. He held it out to Saffron, who pulled out her cell phone and illuminated the photograph with the screen. Ethan saw her eyes widen at the image as she recognized faces, and then she saw the dates.

‘It’s got to be some kind of fake,’ she said.

‘It’s not,’ Ethan said. ‘I checked through the public records and found the original image, correctly dated. This is a copy, but of a genuine 1862 photograph.’

Saffron stared at the image for a moment longer, and then out into the darkness where small free-tailed bats were just visible fluttering across the star fields.

‘You’re saying Lee Carson was about a hundred fifty years old?’

‘Give or take,’ Lopez said. ‘And so are all the others.’

‘How is that possible?’ Saffron asked.

‘According to Tyler Willis,’ Ethan said, ‘it’s something bacterial that must have evolved to reside within humans. These men must have at some point been exposed to that bacteria and ingested it in some way.’

Saffron thought for a moment.

‘So that’s what Jeb’s been after,’ she realized. ‘Something like this would be worth more money than exists in the whole world. He’d do anything to get his hands on it.’

‘It’s worse than that,’ Ethan said. ‘Jeb’s plan isn’t just to provide the elite with biological immortality. He wants to make sure that the rest of the world is effectively bred out of existence by the fortunate few. He’s a eugenicist, determined that only the best and brightest human beings should have the right to breed.’

Saffron looked as though she were about to throw up.

‘And I’ve been helping him,’ she gasped in horror.

‘Why though?’ Lopez asked. ‘Why did you attack the Aspen Center? Why not attack SkinGen instead and do us all a favor?’

Saffron looked away from them. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said.

‘I don’t think it is,’ Ethan said. ‘You’re working for Jeb Oppenheimer.’

‘My job is to steal data from rival companies working in the same fields as SkinGen,’ Saffron said. ‘I then destroy the existing records, effectively rendering the company useless, and deliver the stolen data to Jeb who uses it to advance his own clinical studies. It helps him get the jump on the competition.’

Ethan nodded slowly as he finally got it.

‘Jeb’s got something on you and he’s using it to blackmail you into making these attacks,’ he said. ‘It can’t be your inheritance because you’ve said you don’t want it, so my guess is that it’s something to do with the death of one of your colleagues in an attack several years ago: you must have been involved, and Jeb knows it.’