Landstuhl, Germany—Three days later
“You really think this will work?” Tam asked.
“I do,” Avery said. It was not the first time Tam had asked, and Avery knew that, more than anything else, what the leader of the Myrmidons was looking for was simple reassurance. After losing so much in their battle with the Immortal, Tam was understandably reluctant to allow herself to hope, particularly when what Avery was asking her to believe verged on the miraculous.
She opened her backpack and took out the Brazen Head, placing it on the bedside table. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on this,” she said. “And there’s a lot of research to back it up. Hallucinogenic compounds like LSD have been shown to stimulate brain activity and even restore damaged synaptic pathways. That’s how Ray Spaulding was able to survive exposure to the fire suppressant. And he only got a small dose of the vapors.”
Spaulding had actually made a remarkable recovery not only from his exposure to the fire extinguishing halocarbons but also from the head injury he had received from the butt of Martiel’s pistol, which bore further testimony to the efficacy of the vapors.
Avery did not add that the same physical process had enabled Thom Martiel to escape suffocation in the cloud of heptafluoropropane gas released after Stone’s electrical fire. Stone had survived as well, though whether he was still alive was one of many unanswered questions about what had happened that night in Spokane.
What they knew for certain was that, following the alarm and the activation of the fire suppression system, someone—presumably Martiel—had dragged Ray Spaulding out of the master terminal enclosure and away from the suffocating cloud, after which that same person had made as-yet-unknown alterations to the Mystic source code before using the Immortal Mysteries Forum to arrange a pick-up at one of the fire exits on the side of the admin building. While Tam had been cautiously making her way down the aisle to the master terminal, Martiel had taken a circuitous route to reach the exit behind her. A review of the feed from the security camera monitoring that door showed two men—Martiel and Stone, though their faces were never turned to the camera—leaving the building and getting in one of the protestor’s vehicles. The owner of the truck had covered his license plate with silver tape, making an identification impossible.
Immediately following the pick-up, the protestors had picked up and left en masse, overwhelming the abilities of on-scene law enforcement agencies to maintain control. The sheriff’s department, not realizing that the protestors were at least partly complicit in the murder of several Iron River security guards, had simply removed their barricades and allowed the vehicles to depart. The subsequent investigation had identified several of the protestors—some had come from as far away as Tennessee—but none of them admitted to knowledge of the clandestine assault on the data facility, or any personal knowledge of Martiel’s current whereabouts. The trail had gone cold.
It was also unclear what Martiel’s plan for Mystic had actually been, or if he had succeeded. Wayne Valero had a team of software engineers going through the code with a fine-toothed comb, but so far they had not found any changes to the operating system. Since shutting Mystic down would have been disastrous, everyone was holding their collective breath, waiting for Martiel’s data bomb to go off. But when the next day dawned, and the financial markets opened, it was mostly business as usual, and with each passing hour, the likelihood of an attack seemed to diminish. The only unusual activity reported in the markets were a number of unscheduled and sizable payments to the IMF and World Bank loan accounts of several developing nations in Africa and Asia. Funding for the loan payments had come from Nutria Mills Inc. and from the personal accounts of Nutria Mills’ chairman Peter Furst, but neither Furst nor anyone from his company were commenting on the profoundly charitable gesture. The unexpected transactions caused a slight but only temporary dip in the currency markets.
Tam had recognized this activity as the opening move in Martiel’s plan to crash the currency system, but there had been no subsequent market manipulations. After three days, it seemed evident that someone had pulled the plug on the scheme. The misstep, if that was indeed what it was, had put a dent in Nutria Mills finances, and while the company would almost certainly recover in time, there was no immediate danger of Furst using his fortune as seed money to finance an economic apocalypse.
It was a victory, but both bittersweet and incomplete. Peter Furst had, for the time being at least, escaped justice for his part in the criminal conspiracy. The Immortal, aka Thom Martiel—if that was his real name—remained at large, and even though the Immortal Mysteries Forum had been shut down, the rabid sentiments that had fueled it remained every bit as potent. Worst of all, Gavin Stone was either a hostage or dead.
The Myrmidons would be very busy for the foreseeable future.
Greg Johns and Kasey Kim had both been relocated to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Facility, the primary medical care facility for the US military outside of the United States. Greg would make a full recovery, but the outlook for Kasey was less uncertain. She had been extubated and was breathing on her own, without supplemental oxygen, which was a hopeful sign, but she had not yet regained consciousness and was only partly responsive to stimulus which was why Tam and Avery had made the decision to stop in on their way to Zurich, where they would return the Brazen Head to Maxim Loew.
Avery reached into her backpack again and, after a quick check to make sure that none of the staff were looking, removed a portable single-burner hot plate. She found an electrical outlet, plugged it in and then placed the Brazen Head on the burner. After a few minutes, she heard the familiar ticking and stirring sounds as the water began heating up.
“Once this gets going,” Avery said, “we’ll probably want to clear out for a few minutes.”
Tam looked over at Greg who nodded, and then they both turned and stepped through the door. Avery followed on their heels, closing the door to the private room behind her.
“You sure that stuff is safe?” Tam said. “I mean, you were pretty loopy back at Iron River. And don’t even get me started on what happened to you in Scotland.”
“I’m fine,” Avery said. “I actually feel great. Energized.”
“What about acid flashbacks?” Greg said. “I’ve heard those can happen months, even years later.”
Avery frowned at him. “Not helpful.” She put a reassuring hand on Tam’s shoulder. “Kasey will be fine.”
“Yeah, but will she be able to pass a drug test?”
Avery could only shrug.
Just then, they heard a voice from behind the door, the voice of the automaton, chanting its weird mechanical message.
“Memento mori. Memento mori.”
“What on earth?” Tam said, looking alarmed as she reached for the doorknob.
Avery winced. “Oops. Forgot about that.”
“Does it have a mute button?”
Before Avery could answer, the nurse—a large African-American woman who could have passed for Tam’s bigger, slightly meaner twin sister—stepped out of the next room down the hall. She immediately noticed the three of them loitering outside Kasey’s room, put her hands on her hips and glared at them accusingly “What’s all that commotion?”
“Sorry,” Avery said guiltily. “It’s the TV. We thought maybe...uh, you know. Stimulation.”
“Y’all are stimulating the entire floor.”
“I’ll turn it down.” Avery didn’t know how she was going to make good on the promise, but she figured she had to do something to placate the nurse, so she reached for the door handle. When she opened the door, a cloud of foul-smelling steam rolled out into the corridor.
“Oh, my,” cried the nurse, starting toward them. “What is going on in there?”
“It’s aromatherapy,” Tam said quickly.
“That’s right,” Greg echoed. He took a step forward, trying to block the woman’s path. “She’s Korean. That’s kimchee you’re smelling. It’s her favorite—”
“I know what kimchee is,” the nurse shot back, “and that ain’t it.”
Avery grabbed a quick breath of mostly fresh air and then hurried into the room. The air was thick with sulfurous vapors, but she plowed through the haze to the table where the automaton kept chattering away.
“Memento mori.”
She switched off the hotplate. It would take a few minutes for the air to clear, but she knew that if she could rapidly cool the Brazen Head, maybe running cold water over it in the sink, it would stop talking, so she ducked into the bathroom and grabbed a towel to protect her hands before grabbing ahold of the hot metal.
That was when she heard someone coughing.
She hurried out of the bathroom and found Kasey, head raised, one hand covering her mouth and nose. Her bleary eyes met Avery’s and then she turned her head toward the doorway where Tam, Greg and the nurse were all trying to crowd through.
She stared at them for a moment, her expression a mixture of confusion and revulsion, and then lowered her hand and rolled her eyes. “Really, Greg? Kimchee?”
Unknown location
The man who called himself the Immortal—and sometimes Thom Martiel—placed both his fists on the tabletop, palms facing downward, and raised his eyes to look at Gavin Stone. “Choose.”
A wry smile tugged at the corners of Stone’s mouth. “We could make a game out of just this,” he said. “Do I know enough about you to decide which hand holds the black, and which holds the white? Or even better, can I guess which you think I will choose?”
Martiel frowned. “I didn’t make a deliberate choice,” he said. “I mixed them up without looking. I don’t know which is which. That’s the whole point. Randomization.”
“Nothing is truly random,” Stone said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Even though you didn’t realize it, you moved the pebbles in a very specific way. Like this...” He reached out with both hands, taking a smooth perfectly round pebble about the diameter of a nickel from each of the two bowls beside the game board, just as Martiel had done a moment before, and held them up—a white pebble in his left hand, a black pebble in his right. “This is the starting configuration.”
He brought his hands together, cupping both pebbles between them, and then proceeded to shake them, like a high roller getting ready to shoot craps in Las Vegas. After a few seconds of this, he separated his hands, careful not to drop the pebbles or reveal them to either himself or Martiel. “Which hand holds the black now? Do you know?”
Martiel sighed. “Your right.”
Stone shook his head. “You’re just guessing. You were supposed to be paying attention. If you had watched my hands, you wouldn’t have to guess.”
“There’s still too much uncertainty in the system,” Martiel said. “Do the pebbles change place each time you shake them? There’s no way for me to know.”
“But there is,” Stone insisted. “If you’re paying attention. That’s your problem. You don’t pay attention. You believe there’s such a thing as an unimportant detail. That’s why I always beat you.”
“Not unimportant. Just unknowable. It’s simple chaos theory. Some variables behave in ways that are too complex to be predicted. And I would hardly say that you ‘always’ beat me.”
Stone laughed and then opened his right hand to reveal a black pebble. “Touché,” he said, and dropped both pebbles back into their respective bowls. He then reached out with his right hand and tapped Martiel’s left fist. “That one.”
Martiel uncurled both hands to reveal the pebbles he was holding; the black pebble was in the hand Stone had indicated. Martiel dropped his pebbles into the bowls as well and then drew the bowl with the white pebbles closer to him.
“This is a perfect example of what I mean,” Martiel went on, tapping the game board in the center of the table. It was a simple affair—a square of light-colored lacquered wood, about eighteen inches on any side, crisscrossed with a grid pattern of lines—nineteen by nineteen. “It is one of the oldest games in history. A simple game. Simple rules. Much easier to learn than chess or even checkers. The game tokens all have the same value. They don’t move. There are no dice to roll. No randomness at all. Just two players taking turns placing their pebbles on the board to claim territory. And yet, from such simple beginnings, there are more possible outcomes than there are atoms in the universe. It’s impossible to see all the variations from the beginning of the game.”
“I love the name,” Stone deadpanned. “Go. It’s like a reminder to quit stalling.”
Martiel chuckled. “I can never tell when you’re being serious.”
“I’m always serious about the details.”
“Is that how you knew we would survive when you triggered the fire suppression system? You observed all those details that everyone else disregarded, did the math in your head, and realized the vapors from the Brazen Head would keep our brains alive without oxygen?”
Stone stared back at him for a moment. He disliked answering questions, particularly from men like this so-called Immortal, for the same reason he was content to let Martiel ramble on about the ancient Chinese board game. When people talked, they revealed themselves to the world. Sometimes they revealed information through an off-hand comment or a Freudian slip, but more often—and to Stone’s way of thinking, more importantly—they exhibited behaviors and habits that could be used for everything from determining truth or falsehood to social engineering. What Avery would call “Jedi mind tricks.”
He wondered absently if he would ever see Avery again, then banished the thought. That wasn’t important right now.
“I didn’t know,” he admitted. “I thought we were both going to die.”
Martiel blinked, clearly trying to hide his incredulity. “You were willing to sacrifice your own life to stop me? I owe you an apology, Gavin. You were right. I really don’t understand the first thing about you.”
Good, Stone thought, but he did not say it aloud. “Then let’s play.”
Martiel picked up a white pebble, held it between a thumb and forefinger. “Tell me this, then. Why did you—”
“No,” Stone said. “No more freebies. If you want to learn at my feet, you’re going to have to earn it.”
“This intrigues me. What sort of arrangement do you have in mind?”
“We play.” Stone pointed at the Go board. “Winner gets to ask his question.”
Martiel affected a look of surprise. “You? Need to ask me something? What was it you said? I’m an open book to you?”
“There are still one or two things I haven’t figured out. I’m sure I’ll get it in time, but playing for it gives me added incentive to win.”
Martiel considered this for a moment. “And what question would you ask of me?”
“I’m torn between asking your real name, or why you call yourself ‘the Immortal.’ I’m more interested in the latter, but I’m really afraid the answer is going to disappoint me.”
Martiel chuckled. “Oh, I think you’ll like that story. If you win, of course.”
“Of course. And just so I know the stakes I’m playing for, what’s your question?”
Martiel’s smile remained, but his eyes were cold, calculating now. “I’m sure you already know. The same question I’ve asked you since I woke up. Why? Why didn’t you turn me over to your friends? Or leave me there to die? Why did you drag me out of there, impersonate me—tell my followers that you were the Immortal and that I was you?”
He raised his hands high enough to remove most of the slack from the heavy chain attached to both his wrist and ankle manacles and shook them for emphasis. “And why are you keeping me a prisoner here?”
“I guess I should have established some rules about compound questions,” Stone said. “But as it happens, there’s a single answer to all of those. Not that I’ll ever tell you.”
“Reneging already?”
“No. I just know that I’m going to win.”
Martiel held his stare a moment longer. “Black always starts. It’s your move.”
End
If you enjoyed Mystic, try Primordial!
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