And then I remembered something totally new: Uzra had been there, too, crouched at the foot of the bed like a cat, her eyes glowing. While the men stood over me, she had pressed up against Adair for his attention, stood on tiptoes and said something to him in that tongue I didn’t understand. He understood her, though; he knew that she wanted him to save me.
Had she really been there? This wasn’t how I’d recalled the scene before, but now it was impossible to see it any other way. Uzra had been in my room, watching over me. She asked Adair to save me. Later, we were friends: I was her only friend. And Adair didn’t tell me Uzra’s story until much later, after Jonathan had joined us—as though he didn’t want me to know.
I wanted to blame the narcotic for clouding my head and leaving me strangely restless. Fragments of the past moved above me like stars in a constellation; perhaps our destinies are not so fixed, after all. By hiding her story from me, could Adair have been trying to spare me? Did he want me not to think badly of her? Maybe I was remembering it all wrong. What was memory and how could it be trusted, when it could be altered so easily? Maybe it was all because of Savva and the bloody theory he’d planted in my head, that there was no truth. It seemed blasphemous to consider even for a moment that there was no such thing as truth: you might as well say there were no such things as gravity, or day or night. Or that time would run out one day, that we’d all grow old and die. Despite the evidence, I clung to the promise that there were some truths we could depend on, truths like a brick wall that stood solidly at our backs. I didn’t want to be left adrift in an unexplained cosmos. My head swam, my heart ached. I wanted my punishment to be over.
TEN
BOSTON
Adair stood in the front room of Jude’s town house and stared down on the street. He’d grown to hate this house in the weeks he’d lived there, hated its pristine plainness, its monumental emptiness. Hated these oversize windows; it was like living in a glass box. He watched people scuttle up and down the sidewalk, oblivious to him—as they should be—and yet, he simmered with a nameless rage at the sight of them. He was angry all the time. Jude said it was natural, given what he’d gone through. Gave it some fancy name: post–traumatic stress disorder. I don’t believe in it, Adair had snapped. I don’t believe in any of your nonsense.
He was beginning to realize that there might be something to this stress disorder. Even with all he’d accomplished in the days since his escape, he was disappointed and restless. His eye was forever on the next prize. Desire, he mused, seemed to be a constant force of the universe, a basic condition of man, even if the ability to satisfy that want—more often than not—was lacking.
He had emerged from his basement prison with nothing, not so much as a penny in his pocket; and yet, a few weeks later, he had secured enough money to put him back on his feet, and reacquired the two books of secret knowledge, the source of his power. He should’ve been pleased to have accomplished this much in so little time, but that was not the case. He sat in Jude’s house, wondering how he might find Lanore. Jude hadn’t been able to find the least little bit about her. Until she was in his possession, to do with as he pleased, he could not rest.
Lanny’s whereabouts weren’t the only thing bothering Adair. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was beginning to feel a lack of confidence. Returning to find the world so completely changed, he began to doubt himself. Everything moved in fast motion and the thought of trying to keep apace paralyzed him. How would he ever catch up to Lanore when there were so many more people in the world, more cities and villages, more remote outposts—more places where she could be hiding.
All he did know was that she was far away enough that he barely felt her presence.
Watching pedestrians from an obscured chair in the sitting room, Adair noticed that everyone was glued to their devices—computers, cell phones, tablets—as Jude was. Apparently this complicated equipment was the only way to know what was going on around you, your eyes and ears having been made inferior. And it was certainly how people kept tabs on one another. In the old days, it was easy enough to find a man, and Adair had been as skilled as anyone at tracking an adult or child, whether following footprints and trampled grass through field and forest, or in cities and towns, where you might make sly inquiries of prostitutes and shopkeepers. But he suspected such skills wouldn’t get him far today when all the footprints were electronic.
He sat in the front room of Jude’s stark home, turning the problem over in his mind. It wasn’t long before Jude joined him—as he always did, anxious about leaving Adair on his own for long, as though he were a feeble old man or half-wit child who would get into trouble—and Pendleton scurried in behind him. The once powerful industrialist wasn’t doing well since his transformation, Adair had noticed. Fitful and twitchy, he was still in shock and overwhelmed. He had taken to watching Adair constantly, and followed him like an anxious dog. He hovered in the corner, seeming less a man than a spare shadow. Of all the people he’d transformed, Pendleton seemed to be having the most difficult adjustment. Adair wondered if this had something to do with the modern age, if something about the times made it harder to accept the supernatural.
“What’s wrong, Adair?” Jude asked as he dropped into a seat. “You should be happy. Aren’t things going exactly the way you wanted?”
Adair lifted an eyebrow before speaking. “We have made no progress in finding Lanore.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Jude said, cloyingly upbeat. Whenever Jude was like this, falsely optimistic, Adair knew not to trust him. His enthusiasm was his greatest tell. “The question at hand is how best to trace Lanore’s whereabouts from when she left Boston, in the early 1800s, to the present day. We could hire a private investigator . . . you know, like a detective,” Jude offered.
“Do you know an investigator who would take on a two-hundred-year-old mystery?” Adair asked scornfully.
A low voice came from the back of the room: “I do.”
Adair swiveled around. He’d nearly forgotten Pendleton was there. With eyes shrunken to red pinpoints and the tip of his nose twitching in distress, he reminded Adair of a worried animal hovering at the edge of a field.
“What did you say?” Adair snarled.
The man shut his mouth tightly, seeming to weigh whether he should speak again, but when one minute passed, and then another, and his head had not been taken off, he finally ventured, “It might be nothing, but I know someone who might be able to help you. I’ve used him in the past when I needed to find corporate data to, uh, nudge a deal along.” Pendleton paused, as though considering the legality of what he’d just revealed. “He can find anything, if it has to do with the internet.”
Again—no surprise—the answer was to turn to the internet. Adair was rather tired of the way people talked about the damn thing, the magic box with fantastical tentacles apparently connected to every piece of information in the universe. Yet, so far, all Adair could see was a rabbit hole designed by the devil to waste men’s time and raise their hopes.
Jude leaned toward Adair with a confidential air. “This is his area of expertise; you’d do well to take his advice. Jack’s people were able to solve some pretty spectacular cases of data theft. A few required inside knowledge so privileged and compartmentalized that people swore it had to come from the chief accountant or head of data management. It was like he could spirit this stuff out of thin air.”
Spirit stuff out of thin air—isn’t that what he himself had done, before? Adair thought wistfully. Make the impossible happen with nothing more than a couple of grams of minerals and a few words? The meaning of the phrase had changed. It also served to warn Adair about relying too much on the computer to communicate with the others if it could give up its secrets that easily. He still had information he wished to protect, a string of confidants he’d planted in specific locations, fail-safes to whom he could turn in the most desperate of emergencies. It was information committed to memory, and he vowed then not to trus
t these details to the computer.
He looked back at Pendleton. “This man, does he come from around here? Can you arrange a meeting?”
Pendleton nodded hesitantly, as though starting to wonder if he’d been wise to offer the suggestion; after all, if it didn’t work, there would surely be repercussions.
“Then do so. Set it up right away.” Perhaps Pendleton would turn out to be more useful to him than Jude, who wouldn’t lift a finger unless it was to line his own pockets, all the while feigning devoted service to his maker. Adair found Jude’s transparency almost charming—it certainly was predictable—but as a servant he had limitations. Pendleton might turn out to be a good addition after all.
Pendleton’s contact came the next evening. He was a short man of dark and indeterminate complexion, dressed in layers of rumpled clothing. His hair, which looked as though it had gone unwashed for days, laid flat against his skull, complementing the greasy lenses of his black-framed eyeglasses. He smoked a crumpled cigarette, broken in the middle, and his gaze darted shiftily from Adair to Jude and back as they walked to the dimly lit dining room.
“What is your name?” Adair asked the stranger.
The visitor thought about his response for a moment. “You can call me Maurice. I’m a grad student at MIT, working on my PhD.”
Jude cut in. “PhD at MIT. That’s all well and good, but you know the kind of work we’re offering. Pendleton always said you were the best, and that’s why I called you. All we care about is whether you can do the job and whether you can keep a secret. How much do you usually charge for your services?”
Maurice shrugged, sending ash tumbling from the tip of his cigarette. “Depends on what you want. But for a big job of a confidential nature, could be as high as”—his gaze shifted between the two men facing him, and his breath quickened as he calculated how much of a risk to take—“maybe $50,000?” Then he swallowed, and waited.
“This will be a highly unusual case.” Adair fixed his gaze on him as he spoke. “I think you’ll find it enormously challenging, and for this reason I’ll pay you $250,000,” Adair said, aware that Jude turned toward him abruptly in surprise. “For that, I expect you to listen to every bit of direction you are given. No questions. And absolute secrecy. You can tell no one of your task. Absolutely no details can be revealed. But if you find what I’m looking for within two weeks, I’ll double your fee.” Jude cleared his throat, unhappy at how free Adair was with their money.
Maurice looked back at Adair in astonishment, a sheen of sweat coating his face. “How could I say no to that? You got a deal.”
“Listen closely,” Adair continued, leaning toward him. He’d thought hard about what could be done to trace Lanore to the present day and had come to the conclusion that, as a woman alive in the early 1800s, few records would be kept in her name. She’d be hidden in the shadow of whichever man to whom she’d attached herself—and she was good at that, he knew. The one man she’d never let too far out of her sight was Jonathan. Fortuitously, as he’d decided to take Jonathan’s perfect body for his own shortly after meeting him, Adair had already set up a new identity for Jonathan under the name Jacob Moore. The account he’d set up in Jacob Moore’s name would leave the trail needed to trace Jonathan’s whereabouts, which should lead back to her.
“In 1823, a sum of money was transferred within the First Bank of Boston, from the account of a Count Adair cel Rau, to set up an account for a Jacob Moore. Moore’s Boston account was credited with transfers from banks in St. Petersburg, Paris, and elsewhere, all from the same count’s bank accounts. The lawyer in Boston who managed the transfers was named Pinnerly. At some point, Moore’s money would have been transferred to the account of someone else. I want you to find out who was the beneficiary of Moore’s estate.”
The hacker coughed and raised both eyebrows as he scribbled everything on a scrap of paper.
“And then you are to find the beneficiary of that man’s estate, and so on and so on, up to the present day,” Adair finished, sitting back in his chair. “In other words, I want you to find out who is in possession of Jacob Moore’s money today.”
“Sounds like some kind of word problem out of a math textbook,” Maurice joked, but when neither man facing him so much as blinked, he dropped his nervous smile. “Let me get this straight: you want me to find a money trail from two hundred years ago and follow it to the present day?” Bewildered, he looked from Adair to Jude. “Did banks even keep records back then?”
“They most certainly did,” Adair replied. “I’ve been told you are capable of finding the most obscure piece of financial information, no matter how well it’s hidden. If you can’t find the answer, then no one can. That’s why I’ve come to you, and that’s why I’m offering such generous compensation.”
“I’m not a historian,” he said sheepishly. “I find hidden money, but today’s money. I can’t find it if it’s sitting in a ledger somewhere.”
“Then hire specialists—historians. Or bribe people inside the Bank of Boston, or the Federal Reserve, or whatever you need to do,” Jude snapped. “I take it that is what you do: bribe insiders.”
Maurice colored. “Let’s say I end up needing to hire consultants. You just told me I can’t divulge anything about this job. . . .”
“Don’t be cute,” Jude said. “Give them only a part of the task, or hide what it is you’re really after. You know how to do this.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Adair took over. “Do whatever it takes to get the answer to me as quickly as possible. I’ll pay you $50,000 if you fail, $250,000 if you succeed, and half a million dollars if you bring me the answer within two weeks.”
“Only $50,000 if I fail?” Maurice frowned. His cigarette was now burnt to ash and scattered, forgotten, over the fine table. “I’ll be spending the same amount of time and money whether I get you the answer or not.”
“I’m not going to pay you the same whether you succeed or fail. I’ve found that a little extra incentive makes all the difference between success and failure,” Adair said, pushing back from the table. “If you want a big payday, my advice is to find what I want.”
The hacker’s nerve apparently failed him at this point, and he stared into his lap rather than address his employers. “I have to say, this is a really strange request. Can I ask why you’re doing this? If I know what it is you’re looking for—really looking for—I’ll have a better chance of finding it.”
“You’ve been told all you need to know. The information you’ve been given should take you on a journey. I want you to tell me where it leads you,” Adair said.
But that had been no help at all; if anything, the hacker looked more dispirited. Adair stopped in his tracks, realizing that this was no time to hold back any information. All his efforts had led him to this crumpled mess of a man sitting at the table in front of him. This man was his best chance at finding Lanore, and it would be futile to take half-measures now.
“Wait, there is one detail that may prove helpful. . . .” He glanced at Jude, anticipating an objection, before continuing. “Pretend Jacob Moore has never gone away; pretend he has been alive for more than two hundred years and follow the transfer of funds. Lastly, the most important detail . . . this Jacob Moore: he was said to be uncommonly handsome—the kind of looks that defy time, so burned are they in the memory of the beholder.”
The kind of looks that inspire love at first sight, thought Adair with a touch of bitterness. He’d come so close to taking Jonathan as his vessel, and the sole reason—he laughed at his naïveté now—had been to please Lanore. He had been resigned to the fact that she would always love Jonathan more, and had thought that by taking on Jonathan’s form, he could give her the greatest gift of all: the experience of feeling real love, at the self-assured hands of a real man, in the body of her first love. When Lanny discovered his plan, though, she’d meted out a punishment of her own: two hundred years behind the wall. It was time to pay her back . . . and yet, Adair felt
something tugging for consideration at the back of his mind, like a street urchin pulling on his sleeve. Distracted, he walked out on the meeting and left Jude to see the visitor out.
He wandered to a corner, led by a voice cutting through his fury and anticipation of revenge. A plaintive voice reminded him that he missed Lanore. He still remembered how she, and she alone, could make him feel. Why this one woman? It wasn’t that he lacked for choice. There were women everywhere he turned, of every size, shape, coloring, age, temperament, and yet none interested him. His eye would pass over each one and wander to the crowd, continuing to search for Lanore. He was alarmed to realize that only she would satisfy his restlessness.
After escorting Maurice to the front door, Jude sought out Adair. “What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.
Did his melancholy show on his face? Adair wondered, touching his cheek. He would sooner die than admit the truth to Jude. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you offer him so much money to do the job? He would’ve been happy with fifty thousand. You could’ve offered him seventy-five, even a hundred thou. You offered him so much, it’ll make him wonder why.”
So, Jude had no idea what was troubling him and, as usual, was focused on money, Adair was pleased to see. He had a ready answer at hand. “To impress upon him the importance of finding the answer. It’s simple: if he knows he’ll be well rewarded, he’ll try harder to find the answers sooner. I’m weary of waiting; it’s time to find Lanore.”
The hacker called nine days later to set up a meeting. He sounded exhausted and slightly deranged, refusing to hand over his findings and insisting that he needed to explain how he’d pieced the entire chain of data together for Adair to have any faith in the result. When Maurice arrived that evening, he looked even worse than expected. He appeared not to have slept since their last meeting; his skin was puffy and bloated, as though he had been living off salty snack foods and caffeine. His hair was even greasier, if that was possible, and he bore the rank odor of the unwashed. He might’ve even been wearing the same clothes. He went straight to the same place at the dining table and pulled a small notebook from his pocket, drawing attention to the nicotine burns on his fingers.