Immortal

58

Jeb Oppenheimer felt like a twenty-five-year-old, mostly because he intended to be one again soon.

Two anonymous coaches containing his men had pulled up some two miles away from the main entrance to the caverns. The heavily armed men under his command disembarked before the vehicles pulled away to park unobtrusively in a lot nearby. With his troops organized into two files, he had walked at the head of the little army alongside Hoffman as they marched out into the desert under cover of night. Ahead, somewhere in the murky darkness, lay his prize.

It had gone by many names over the centuries: the Philosopher’s Stone; the Fountain of Youth; the Elixir. In centuries gone by, alchemists had spent their entire careers attempting to forge this most precious of potions from chemical elements, all the while unaware that somewhere in nature it existed already. Driven by archaic fantasies such as astrology and religion, the fools had sought to conjure gold from lead, diamonds from charcoal and life from piles of seeds. He recalled the medieval belief that living things appeared spontaneously from inanimate foods, based upon the fact that baby mice were often seen to scurry from grain mountains. It beggared belief that people could have believed such things. Yet now, those who had doubted, shunned and mocked Jeb Oppenheimer for his beliefs would be silenced at last in this, his greatest moment of triumph.

‘You’ll never find them.’

The voice was quiet but insistent. Oppenheimer looked at Lillian Cruz beside him. She was staring ahead as they moved across the desolate desert, the rising sun beaming shafts of golden light like the fingers of God across the landscape.

Oppenheimer grinned, not letting her spoil his buoyant mood.

‘I already know where they are,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised how easily loyalty can be bought, how quickly people can be turned when money is waved in front of their greedy faces.’

Lillian remained impassive. ‘Money isn’t everything.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Oppenheimer asked. ‘Where would we be without it? What would life be without it? Our societies would not function, our lives would crumble and fail. What would be the point of working, of striving to be a success?’

‘Life,’ Lillian said, ‘is not dependent on dollars.’

‘Only if you like spending it cowering in a cave foraging for grubs or growing rice in fucking paddy fields,’ he spat back. ‘Money moves us forward, and without it we’d slip backwards into the Dark Ages. You know who did all the building in the Dark Ages, all the study and learning? It was the Vatican, because they hijacked Rome and stole all the money! Everybody else was reduced to living in mud huts and eating leaves for the next thousand years.’

‘Something you’d like to see repeated, Jeb?’ Lillian suggested. ‘You and your grubby little elite sitting in palatial mansions while the rest of us grovel in the dirt?’

Oppenheimer cackled and almost doubled over as the cackle turned to a hacking cough. He hawked something up in his throat with a growl and spat a drooping globule of mucus out on the dust at his feet.

‘The unwashed masses have always groveled in the dirt,’ he muttered, wiping the corner of his mouth with a white handkerchief. ‘Think about all the people out there, in their hundreds of millions, slaving away every day in their jobs to pay their mortgages and send their kids to school, to eat and pay for their homes. It’s no different to slavery, except with better holidays. All the while the elite, as you call us, make billions of dollars and live on luxury yachts. When the world economies crash, as they must every few decades to allow continued growth, we disappear with our profits and leave governments to tax the masses to buy their way out of the debt.’

Lillian Cruz ground her teeth in her jaw as she replied.

‘We know what you people do,’ she muttered with undisguised contempt.

‘And yet you do nothing about it,’ Oppenheimer pointed out. ‘Look at Egypt, at Libya, at Tunisia. Their people didn’t have two sticks to rub together. Their leaders were worth billions of dollars. Their people had no democracy, were under the control of ruthless thugs and secret police, and yet they rose up and overthrew their dictators. I have the greatest respect for them, and nothing but contempt for whingeing cretins like you who complain but do nothing to change the status quo.’

‘You’re saying that you think we should overthrow the government and people like you?’

Oppenheimer smiled as he struggled across the stony ground.

‘Democracy is not the rule of the people,’ he said simply. ‘It is people voting for leaders, who then go ahead and do what they want anyway, regardless of the wishes of their countrymen. May as well be a dictatorship. Isocracy is the real rule of the people, the original desire of ancient Greeks for the people to control the destiny of their nations as one voice, and from where our modern democracy derives. But if left to the people our countries would collapse into anarchy, because most people are too damned stupid to understand the subtleties of government. They simply soak up the crap they’re fed by a free media and spout it in their bars and homes, tangible fallacies like religion and global warming and homeopathy, all the while oblivious to real life passing them by.’

Lillian shook her head slowly.

‘I think that you underestimate people,’ she said softly, ‘like all dictators who are suddenly overthrown and don’t even understand why.’

‘Poetic,’ Oppenheimer conceded as he used his cane to lever himself up the hill they were climbing, ‘but also tragically doomed. Don’t you see? There are just too many of us now gorging on what’s left of our planet’s resources, changing our environment beyond repair. Do you know what happens when populations of any species become so bloated in a confined environment? Novel disease appears and eradicates the excess, its ability to spread, mutate and become lethal exacerbated by the density of the population, its food source. It’s time to excise the demon, to lance the cyst and return to a simpler, less populated world where we can govern our resources with greater ease.’

Cruz scowled at him, deliberately taking a route up the hill that made Oppenheimer’s progress as difficult as possible.

‘You’re a damned fool, Oppenheimer. Most people living in the developing world consume a glass of water and a plate of rice a day. They barely dent the world’s resources despite their numbers. Did you know that fifty percent of the world’s population has never made or received a telephone call?’

‘Probably just as well!’ Oppenheimer shot back.

‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ she replied. ‘Most people in the West don’t. A quarter of the world’s population don’t even have access to electricity. In contrast, New York City’s twenty million people consume as much electricity annually as the entire population of Sub-Saharan Africa, all eight hundred million of them.’

‘And what happens now that all of those people wish to live as we do?’ Oppenheimer asked. ‘How can they? Tell me how twelve billion people can live as Americans do, when the world is clearly struggling to support seven billion, of whom two-thirds live in mud huts in damp forests eating their own dung?’

Lillian skirted a large boulder, blocking Oppenheimer’s path.

‘If we consumed less, allowing them to consume more, there would be no issue.’

‘Pah!’ Oppenheimer jabbed his cane at her. ‘The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that we’ll need seventy percent more food to supply the two and a half billion extra people living on earth by 2050. There’ll be the equivalent populations of Europe, Russia and North America added to our planet by then. If I don’t do this, it’ll all be over for all of us.’

Lillian was about to answer when ahead Hoffman raised his hand above his head and clenched it into a fist. Instantly, the mercenaries stopped moving and sank down into the grasses and thorn scrub.

Oppenheimer crouched down, wincing as his joints ached and creaked beneath him. He edged forward to come alongside Hoffman.

‘What is it?’ he asked. Hoffman made a show of sniffing the air and squinted thoughtfully at the hills surrounding them. Oppenheimer swiped at him with his cane. ‘You’re not Crocodile fucking Dundee, Hoffman, so cut the crap.’

Hoffman gestured down the valley ahead.

‘If we troop further down this valley, the noise could alert them to our presence.’

‘Shall we levitate down instead?’

Hoffman shook his head, too caught up in the throes of his hunter’s prowess to notice Oppenheimer’s jibe.

‘The marker cairns we’ve been following end here at the floor of the valley where it crosses the canyon wash. We’ve descended about six hundred feet and must climb up the mesa opposite. We need to know where they are before we can attack or we’ll be skylined and they’ll see us coming.’

Oppenheimer reached down into his pocket and pulled out the GPS tracker. The screen lit up as he touched the display, and instantly he saw the tiny orange flashing light. He turned the compass to match the direction he was facing, and compared the topography on the screen with the view down the valley. He smiled.

‘You have them?’ Hoffman asked.

Oppenheimer lowered the tracker and pointed ahead.

‘They’re less than a hundred yards away,’ he said. ‘We go now!’

Hoffman turned, shouting over his shoulder. ‘Lock and load, we’re moving in!’

With that, the sound of clicking rifle mechanisms clattered like an army of giant ants rattling through the dawn as the mercenaries got to their feet and began quick-marching toward the hills ahead. Hoffman led them at a swift jog as Oppenheimer struggled along on the rough terrain behind them.

All at once he saw a cave ahead, and then the mercenaries charged as one with their rifles pointed in front of them with a volley of shouts and war cries as they swarmed into the entrance of the cave and were swallowed by the shadows.

Oppenheimer limped along behind them, reaching the cave just as it fell silent and the cries faded. He came to a halt at the entrance to the cave and stood there for a long moment until he saw Hoffman walk out into the sunlight and scowl at him.

‘What the hell do you call this?’

Hoffman tossed a small black device to Oppenheimer, who caught it in one hand. The old man looked down at it and felt rage sear through his veins. The GPS transmitter he’d given to Lopez glinted in the early morning sunlight.

‘The bitch!’ he shouted, and slammed the end of his cane against a nearby rock. ‘She lied! The bitch lied to me!’

From behind him, Lillian Cruz’s voice reached him softly.

‘Money isn’t everything, Jeb.’

Hoffman looked at the tracking device that Oppenheimer slipped into his pocket, then at the nearby cave.

‘Maybe she didn’t lie,’ he suggested. ‘We’ve been following their trail for hours. She wouldn’t have held onto the tracker all this time only to drop it at the last moment. If she’d wanted to lead us away, she could have tied it to a goddamn coyote or something. Maybe she had no choice?’

A mercenary jogged down from a nearby hill top, where stood a lonely-looking tree.

‘I found these up on the hill,’ he said, showing Hoffman a pile of severed ropes. ‘There’s tracks too, fresh. Less than an hour.’

‘They may have been captured and then somehow got free,’ Hoffman speculated. ‘Might be why she tossed the tracker.’

Oppenheimer scowled but said nothing.

Hoffman whirled and snarled at his men as they spilled out from the empty cave.

‘Get up to that tree and get on their trail! Whatever she’s up to, they can’t be far away!’