I hadn’t, either.
“How long’ve you been standing there?”
“I just opened the door. I thought I heard you in here.”
I turned in my chair. The second time he’d spoken, I’d recognized the voice. The dreamy-eyed guy I’d seen in the museum and then run into later on the street the day I’d been interrogated by Inspector Jayne was filling the doorway with his dark, dreamy good looks. He’d told me he worked at the ALD, but I’d put him out of my mind. Like Christian, in another life, I’d have dated him in a heartbeat. Why, then, had it been Barrons I’d ended up kissing?
“Hey, beautiful girl. Fancy seeing you here. Small world, isn’t it?”
“Hey.” I blushed a little. I do that when a good-looking guy calls me beautiful. Especially now that every time I look in a mirror, I hardly recognize myself. Ironically, when your world comes completely unglued, it’s the paste of the everyday, meaningless little things that suddenly seem like real gems.
“You two know each other?” Christian looked baffled.
“We’ve run into each other a time or two,” I replied.
“They’re looking for you back at the office, Chris,” said the dreamy-eyed guy. “Elle wants to talk to you.”
“Can’t it wait?” said Christian impatiently.
He shrugged. “She didn’t seem to think so. Something about misappropriated funds or something. I told her I’m sure it’s just a bookkeeping error, but she’s on one.”
Christian rolled his eyes. “That woman is impossible. Will you tell her I’ll be there in five?”
“Sure, man.” His gaze cut to me. “Is this the boyfriend you meant?”
I shook my head.
“But you have one?”
“Dozens, remember?”
He laughed. “See you around, beautiful girl. Five minutes, Chris. You know how Elle gets about you.” Dragging a finger across his throat, he grinned and left.
Christian hurried to the door and shut it. “Okay, we’ve got to talk fast because I need this job for the time being and lately Elle seems to be looking for any reason to fire me. There’s something you need to see.” He opened his backpack and pulled out a leather notebook, tied with knotted cord. “My uncles sent me to Dublin for a reason, Mac. Well, several, but only one immediately concerns you. I’ve been watching your employer.”
“Barrons? Why?” What had he learned? Something that might help me sort through my own worries about who and what he was?
“My uncles are collectors. Everything they’ve been trying to collect for the past few years your employer has been going after, too. Some of it he’s gotten, some of it my uncles have gotten, and still other items have gone to a third party.” He withdrew a file from his notebook and handed me a magazine folded open to a page. “Is that Jericho Barrons?”
A brief glance was enough. “Yes.” He was nearly lost in the shadows, standing behind a group of men, but the flash had caught his face at just the right angle to bathe it starkly in light. Though the photo was grainy, there was no mistaking him. Barrons is unusual. He says his ancestry is Basque and Pict.
Criminals and barbarians, I’d mocked when he’d told me. He certainly looks the part.
“How old would you say he is?”
“In this picture?”
“No, now.”
“He’s thirty. I saw it on his driver’s license.” His birthday was coming up; on Halloween he’d be thirty-one.
“Look at the date on the magazine.”
I flipped to the cover. The photo had been taken seventeen years ago, which meant he’d been thirteen at the time of the photograph, if the date on his driver’s license was to be believed. Obviously, it wasn’t. No thirteen-year old boy in the world looked that mature.
Christian handed me another magazine, this one featuring a gathering of wealthy socialites at a gala at a British museum. Again, Barrons was unmistakable in it, even half turned as he was from the camera. Same hair and faultlessly tailored clothing, same expression on the haughty old-world face: a mixture of boredom and predatory amusement.
I flipped to the cover. This photo had been taken forty-one years ago. I flipped back to the photo and studied it carefully, looking for anomalies. There were none. It was either Barrons, or he had a grandfather who’d been his identical twin, and if this was Barrons in the photo, he was currently seventy-one years old.
Next, Christian passed me a photocopy of a newspaper article with a faded black-and-white photo of a group of uniformed men. Barrons was the only one not wearing a uniform. As was the case in the last two photos, he was angled slightly away, as if trying to slip off before the shot could be snapped. And, as was the case in the last two photos, he didn’t look a day older or younger than he did today.
“Do you know who that is?” Christian pointed to the big, rawboned, thirtyish man in the center of the photograph.
I shook my head.
“Michael Collins. He was a famous Irish revolutionary leader.”
“So?”
“He was killed in 1922. This picture was taken two months before he died.”
I did some rapid math. That would mean Barrons wasn’t seventy-one, he was an extremely well preserved one hundred and fifteen. “Maybe he had a relative,” I offered, “with a strong genetic resemblance.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said flatly. “Why do people do that? Say things out loud they don’t even remotely believe?”
He was right. I didn’t believe it. The pictures were too identical. I’d spent enough time with Jericho Barrons that I knew the way his limbs moved, the way he stood, the expressions he wore. It was him, in all those pictures. Inside, a part of me went very still.
Barrons was old. Impossibly old. Being kept alive by Gripper possession? Was that possible? “Are there more of these?” I wondered how far back Christian’s uncles had traced him. I wanted to take these photographs with me, slap them against Barrons’ chest and demand answers, even though I knew I’d never get any.
He glanced at his watch. “Yes, but I have to go.”
“Let me hold on to these a few days.”
“No way. My uncles would kill me if Barrons got his hands on them.”
I relinquished them reluctantly. I could begin research of my own, now that I knew what to look for. I wasn’t sure I needed to. What difference if Barrons were a hundred, a thousand, or several thousand? The point was: He was inhuman. The question was: How bad was whatever he really was?