“I don’t expect you to to take it all in right away. I have to be honest, the only reason that I am telling you is that you saw me survive an attack that I should in no way have survived and I felt that I was left with no options other than tell you or disappear. If I trusted you any less I would have put my plans for leaving Caine Foster behind into motion ahead of schedule and disappeared, but I do trust you, not that I can explain precisely why, so here I am doing something that I almost never do, telling someone my truth.”
“Well, I appreciate the trust, Caine, I just hope that I can live up to it. So what’s the plan, I mean you must have some idea who attacked you and why. Does it have anything to do with your, er, status?”
“I’ve been thinking about it, and I did rather expect you to ask that. There are other people like me, I know because I have met some of them, and they in turn told me of others, but there is no great contest going on where we secretly fight one another with swords and try to decapitate each other. That really is just the movies, well and TV too, but frankly they never should have done that TV series. I digress. My point is that I don’t think my ‘status’, as you put it, has anything to do with the attack. In fact I think that it may have been as mundane and pathetic as my having upset a group of religious nutcases with my last book. I don’t know if you read it, but the main character was a vocal and rather disrespectful atheist?”
“Of course I read it, everyone did after all the attention that Transom got. The first genre novel ever to make it onto the Booker shortlist and then It didn’t win! Everyone wanted to see what you would do next. Of course now I know that you didn’t do it next, but at the time we were all eager to read the next Caine Foster novel. I remember the character, Guy Forrester, right? He was a bit of a prick about the religion thing, but I don’t remember him being particularly extreme.”
“Well, I didn’t think that he was either, but about a week after “Ride the Moon” came out I started getting death threats, through my agent not directly at first anyway. They were all from a group calling themselves The Soldiers of Christ, and basically they were repeated admonishments over my Godless ways and notifications of my imminent demise at the hands of their faithful warriors. We told the Police, but none of us took any of it very seriously. For one thing no one had heard of the group and even if they had, there were strong indications from the threats that they were in the US and seeing as I was not it became even less likely that I was going to worry about these people. Of course when Bradshaw was caught and the Police got that confession out of him it did cross my mind that maybe he had targeted Fran as a punishment for “Ride the Moon”, after all his spouting about God and cleansing the souls of his victims and all of that was enough to make me wonder. It turned out he had the reading age of a nine year old and the Police found no indication that he had ever read one of my books, so I stopped worrying about that connection as well. Anyway, the threats stopped coming after about six months and I thought no more of it until last night in the hospital. The person that attacked us, and I am assuming that they were male but I can’t be sure, was not a petty criminal, they knew how to use that knife and they were not interested in robbing us. The only thing that person was trying to do was kill me, and perhaps you too Andrea, and so I started to wonder about the threats again. I began to wonder if they had simply been biding their time, or worse still if they were not very clever and it had taken them this long to find me, but either way it seems that someone is serious enough about doing me harm that they are prepared to get someone capable involved.”
“What do you mean capable?”
“Whoever that was, they knew how to fight, properly. That was an assassin, plain and simple. What I don’t know yet is whether or not they were simply a hired gun, so to speak, or if they were actually invested in the attempt beyond a paycheque. If they were, then I expect that I am still in danger, and my concern is that I am unlikely to get the local Police to take it all that seriously and then there is the issue that if you are around me then you are probably either a target as well by this point, or at least at risk of being considered an acceptable collateral loss. I think that we might as well assume that getting out of town and lying low somewhere might be a good idea. If the assassin is motivated to try again I would rather make it hard for them to find me, find us.”
“Where do you want to go? More to the point if it’s going to be safer maybe we should go to different places and meet up in a few days or weeks? I’ve found you now and we’ve definitely gotten past the hard part of the whole ‘hi I’m your dead wife’s half-sister that you never met’ conversation, so perhaps we should be as cautious as we can be. I have a flight back to the States in eight days time anyway…”
It occurred to me for the first time that Andrea probably had a job to go back to, a life, her own future. Sure she had traveled to the UK to find out about her sister, but she had not been planning on staying; she had probably not been planning on meeting an immortal and having her entire understanding of the world stood on its head. I had formulated this entire thought about her and I hitting the road together to lay low, when in reality she was going to have to leave me and my world and go back to her own. It certainly changed my outlook on the whole idea of laying low, and now I was starting to think about other alternatives, choices which I could not make with Andrea in tow.
“Well, Andrea, I’ve been thinking about taking a trip to the States for a while, and there are a few people I might try to see here before I do, so I guess it would make sense for us to take separate roads for a while and then meet up again in a couple of weeks. I had not really considered that you would need to go home at some point, Hell I haven’t even asked you where home is.”
She chuckled, not at my oversight, but more at the absurdity of the situation, I believe.
“Caine, it never occurred to me, but there’s a lot of things that by now a normal friendship would have covered long ago. I live in Maine, I work at a small municipal airport in a place called Greenville, as an administrator. I’m planning to go back there, in fact I’ll fly all the way home thanks to the discounts and so forth that I can get as an insider. If you want to come and find me there in a few days, even a couple of weeks then that would be great, but I don’t want you to think that I expect you to come. I mean it’s in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of rural Maine, so if it was not on your list of places to visit then I would understand.”
“Andrea, I would love to see where you live. I guess that I will be in touch before I get too close, see if you can’t help me out with flying in as well. I mean, I like to drive, but the idea of flying in is oddly exciting.”
We swapped cellphone numbers and email addresses and made plans to leave the next morning, then Andrea turned in for the night. I sat up for a while, nursing a large dram of single malt and trying to decide whether I would head to Scotland or Berlin the next morning after I’d dropped Andrea at the train. I wondered if the reason I could not sleep was that I was starting to fear that the assassin would be back, but I knew in my heart that it was nothing to do with that. If he came I would be as ready as I could be and that would either save me or end me. No the real issue was that I had a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that this was the beginning of something that was going to end up being bigger than me, bigger than I imagined, and I was not looking forward to that.

“You were not successful, you do realise that don’t you?”
Richard nodded
“We have confirmation that Caine Foster is still alive, despite your claim that you had dealt him a series of fatal wounds. The question that we need to answer is whether or not you were mistaken, because if you were not then something much more interesting is going on here.”