The Path to Mephistopheles by Caspar Ambrose (best non fiction books to read txt) 📕

couldn’t worry about such minuscule details right now, he had to get her back on his side of the rail.

“I have an offer for you, one that will change the course of your life forever, one that if you take will make more of an impact on this world than your corpse floating down the Thames,” Thornburg made an attempt to get a little closer now that he had her attention, to which she responded by moving further down the rail, nearly slipping in the process. “Give me five minutes, if you don’t like what I have to say then I’ll get back in my car and forget I ever saw you, and you can get back to killing yourself.”

She began to cry at this and slowly her hands started to slip from the rail, her body moving forward as she seemed to finally completely surrender. Thornburg lunged forward and put his arms around her lifeless body which was about to reach the point of no return. To his surprise she didn’t struggle, simply let him pull her over the rail as the tears now burst forward in full force

“I never wanted to do it,” she gasped out between tears. “I just wanted to forget about him. I just wanted to forget what that piece of shit did to me.”

‘Fuck’, he thought to himself as he let her recompose. She sounded like just another broken woman. Perhaps he had been wrong about her, should have let her just jump. He was looking for someone with drive and just the right amount of broken spirit to push forth. He had saved her however, so he would at least make his proposition, if she wasn’t satisfied with the agreement then he could always dump her back here.

“My car is over there,” Thornburg began to walk. “We can talk there.”

“We talk here.”

“Ok, then I’ll cut the crap,” Thornburg reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a black credit card. “This is a Palladium card. It is connected to an account that will allow you unlimited wealth for the next two years. Should you accept my contract, you will hold the pinnacle of power in your hands. You will be able to build an empire, to make up for past folly, to find the happiness you never had. Should you accept this you will have the world in your hands.”

Her eyes turned near glossy and she went into an almost hypnotic state, he knew he had her. It had been the same with all of the rest, he had perfected his pitch to be able to do it this fast.

“The condition to this offer is that at the end of those two years, your life will be mine.”

“What do you mean… my life?” her voice stuttered slightly. The offer was so real, the card right there in front of her. He didn’t seem to be lying, and just a few minutes prior she had been ready to die, so what did she care for. But the thought of signing away one’s life carried a certain heaviness that escaped not even her.

“I mean, that at the end of two years I will collect payment through your death,” Thornburg stopped to let it sink in and pull a cigarette from the case in his jacket pocket, offering one to her. “If you’re smart and wise with your actions then maybe you can survive past two years. But to date there has been no one which I haven’t exacted payment from.”

“Why would you make such an offer to people?” it all seemed so surreal at this point.

“Because I have the resources and the academic curiosity to keep my conscience at bay,” he pulled a phone from another of his jacket pockets. “Besides, what have you to care about, five minutes ago you were going to jump. The choice is yours, but know if you refuse me now you will never see an opportunity like this again. Do you accept my offer or not?”

The woman stood there for a minute, watching the stranger with a mixture of distraught interest and fear. “I do,” was her response.

Thornburg dialed a number into the phone then raised it to his ear. After about three short rings the call was answered.

“I have somebody.”

He handed the phone to the woman, “There will be a man on the other end of the line to take some information about you. Answer everything he asks.”

The woman took the phone in her hands and held it to her ear, greeted by a gruff voice on the other end.

“Jenny Winsor.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.
“Yes, thank you,” she handed the phone back to the man, who in turn handed her the card he held in his hand.

“Congratulations Jenny. You now have the world in your hands,” with this he turned around, heading back to his car. “We’ll see each other again in a few years.”

“Was there any interest beyond the contract when you first approached her?” Stalls was smoking on a cigarette offered during the story, as was Thornburg.

“Not at that point,” Thornburg admitted. “No, when I initially approached her it was because of what I saw in her. The nine other people I have made that offer to had all been well educated and on two occasions relatively affluent. They had all been selected because of their potential to maximize the opportunity given on the short time scale provided. But with all of them I had been wrong, they had all gotten to the top only to realize it would never bring them the happiness humans seek on a base level. Coupled with the knowledge that their deaths were impending, that they had traded their lives for wealth, they just couldn’t handle it. One of them killed himself before the time was up, and the rest just waited.”

Thornburg paused for a moment. Getting up from the chair and pacing around the office for a moment. Stalls was fascinated and could do nothing but stare, waiting for the man to continue. Finally after about three minutes, Thornburg sat back in the chair and continued.

“I thought if I chose someone so fed up with life that they were ready to end it, that they might be able to make the change those at the top could no longer grasp. I guess on some level I was right, but she was cunning, more so than I was prepared for.”

She had been purchasing at Harrods out the ass and had just moved from a Mercedes S Class to a sportier Porsche 911 Turbo. She had been spending like the poorer of the people he had made contracts with. It wasn’t unexpected, merely a tad disappointing. He had only made the contract a mere three months ago, however time was against her, and it seemed she was on the same path as those prior. The realization that money can never fill the void, only add more weight to it.

He had picked her out of the hopes that she might understand, might realize that the only way to fill that void is to let other people in to it. By giving each person access to unlimited wealth, he had hoped that just one of them would put something in motion that could perpetuate and blossom into something self-sustaining and progressive. That someone could figure out a way to build something self- funding which could help future generations, beginning the reinvention of infrastructure in third world countries or even spreading wealth and furthering education for the improvement of poorer sectors of society.

It had all been for naught. Each one was like himself, trying to realize something too clouded and distorted to ever really understand, struggling to grasp the concept that each of us is merely a small ball of organic matter, stuck to a huge ball of organic and inorganic matter, aimlessly floating in a big black abyss. Thornburg was beginning to suspect that not a single person on the planet escaped the struggle to define and solve this illogicality.

It was something he especially understood, something he had been contemplating for the past hour as he sipped from a whiskey tumbler, his third. He hated the foul liquid, dumbing down generations of dullards one drop at a time. However, he would probably never stop his use of the substance. It quieted his mind, made the machinery switch into low gear, something that his mind never did naturally.

It was a feeling he was beginning to enjoy as he pored over the financial reports to date since he had made his contract with Jenny. Usually his mind was twisting and turning, pondering the condition which he found himself in, disillusioned and confused.

Disillusioned about the state human beings found themselves in. Ten billion people all trying to convince each other while they convince themselves just what the facts of life are. All looking to religion or other external creations to satisfy an internal void everyone carried day to day. Confused as to the fact that no matter what he did, no matter how much money he threw at the problem, nor how many people he talked to, he was never any closer to solving the problem. Dissatisfaction, it seemed was the predominant feeling for himself and kindred spirit, those other dissatisfied people who actively searched out the answer.

He finished his whiskey, no longer wishing to pursue such thoughts, they never led him anywhere. Besides it seemed that Jenny had ceased activities for the night, settling down at the fashionable L’Hotel located off the left bank of the Seine in the Saint-Germaine-des-Pres area of Paris. He set the glass down and shut down the programs he had been using on his laptop before closing that too. Before going to bed he moved to the window, taking in the vibrant view of Tokyo at night, from his advantageous location at the top of the Grand Hyatt. After a few minutes he let out a sigh, and then headed towards his bed in the other room.

As he moved the sheets aside and took off his shirt, his phone rang. It was the second phone he carried, the one that only one other person knew the number too, used only for this little experiment of his. He picked the thing up, it must have been important for the man to be calling at this time.

“Hello Dastun,” Thornburg answered.

“I just thought you might want to know that your target is on her way to Tokyo,” Dastun replied on the other side.

“That can’t be right, she just put up for the night at the L’Hotel in Paris.”

“She purchased tickets with cash and, according to the concierge, didn’t even go to her room after booking it,” Dastun replied. “Apparently she booked the room for two weeks. If I hadn’t been following her, she might even have gotten the slip on us.”

“Why do you think she would be heading here in such secrecy? She couldn’t possibly know where I am, so the possibility of killing me should be out of the question.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that Thornburg, she’s been withdrawing moderate sums of cash at a rate of about ten thousand dollars a week, and from what I’ve seen from following her is that she is quite resourceful when necessary. It wouldn’t be impossible for her to have retained a good investigator,” with this Dastun severed the communication.

He put the phone down on the table and went back to what he was doing. The flight would take