I stared at Mike for a long time. The ravine. His hand on my wrist. The black sword in my other hand.
I had it then. The answer popped into my head the same way all my memories had in the morgue.
I turned to Mr. Needlemier. “Where in Florida is the Devil’s Millhopper?”
“Gainesville.”
I turned to Op Nine. “I’ve got it now. I think I know what has to be done.”
51
Mike trailed behind us as we trotted to the Lexus.
“Tell me the truth,” he called after us. “You never had my mom, did you?”
Op Nine turned. “That is something you will not know until this is over—however it ends. You have been neutralized as a factor in this affair, Michael.”
“I never liked you,” Mike said. “And you can bet your bottom dollar the director’s going to hear about this.”
“Should we succeed, he will no longer be director and you will no longer be an operative. Both of you have violated our most solemn oath never to interfere with the affairs of any nation.” His dark eyes glittered. “And by doing so, you have endangered the very thing you intended to preserve.”
He got into the car. I slid in beside him and Mr. Needlemier closed my door. Soon we were heading back down the mountain. I looked through the window behind me and watched as the fog engulfed Mike Arnold.
“Now tell me what you intend to do, Alfred,” Op Nine said. “What is it that must be done?”
I explained it to him. Neither he nor Mr. Needlemier said a word.
We were on Alcoa Highway, about two miles from the airport, crawling along in the dense fog, when I finished and Op Nine said, “It is madness.”
“Well,” I said, “in case nobody’s noticed, I’m already leaning in that direction.”
“But it has no hope of success.”
“You know that isn’t true,” I said. “Paimon can’t risk letting me die.”
“Alfred, your life means nothing to Paimon.”
“No, but the Vessel means everything. And I’m the key to it. Paimon won’t risk losing the key.”
He shook his head. I cleared my throat. “And anyway, if it doesn’t work, you’ll still have the Vessel and you can try something else.”
He turned away then and looked out the window, though there was nothing to look at but his reflection in the glass. He reached over and put his right hand on my forearm.
“Alfred, I am sorry for all this. Sorry for bringing you to the nexus and sorry for lying to you.”
“Why did you bring me to the nexus?”
“You were the carrier of the active agent. We had to be prepared for any contingency.”
“You had the same idea—to use me for a bomb or something?”
He didn’t say anything. He kept staring at his reflection.
“It’s not easy, is it? Being a SPA.”
He shook his head. “No.” He started to say something else, but he decided to leave it at that, I guessed. “No.”
The CCR was parked where we’d left it at the airport. Mr. Needlemier hung back, looking a little awkward, as I carried Op Nine’s duffel and my sword to the supercharged sports car. I dropped the duffel into the passenger seat and stuck the sword into the space behind it. I went back to the Lexus.
“This is totally outside the range of my experience,” Mr. Needlemier said. Then he added, unnecessarily, “I’m frightened, Alfred.”
“Doing something helps,” I told him. “Otherwise it just eats you alive. Do you know about the secret chamber beneath Mr. Samson’s desk?”
He stared at me and didn’t say anything.
“Guess not. There’s a secret chamber under Mr. Samson’s desk. The desktop lifts up and there’s a keypad. The numbers correspond to letters just like on a telephone. The code is my name.”
“Your name?”
“I don’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but the code is ‘Alfred.’ When you get it open, put the Vessel inside and lock it back down again. Understand?”
He nodded. “Yes, I understand. Is there anything else, Alfred?” “I don’t want to be adopted by Horace Tuttle.”
“Of course, but you understand the final decision is up to the judge.”
“And I don’t want him to be the trustee of the estate. I want you to be.”
“Me?”
“And if I don’t make it back—and I probably won’t—I want you to take all the money and give it away.”
“Give it—who do I give it to?”
“I don’t know. Find some worthy people. Start with the kids living with the Tuttles. Especially the kid named Kenny. Take care of him, Mr. Needlemier.”
“Of course.”
“I’m telling you this in case things don’t work out. Anyway, I’m talking too much. I have to go. Good-bye, Mr. Needlemier.”
Back at the CCR, I told Op Nine, “You’re driving.” I dug the old book from the duffel bag, along with a map. “I’ve got to study.”
52
“We’re taking I-75 all the way,” I told Op Nine, tracing the route with my index finger. “It goes right through Gainesville.”
I wasted about two minutes trying to refold the map. What is it about maps? Folding them is like trying to work a puzzle. I gave up and stuffed it behind my headrest. Then I opened The Ars Goetia and flipped through it, looking for the Words of Command.
Op Nine glanced over at me.
“If not spoken exactly, word for word, the command will fail,” he pointed out.
“Thanks for the tip,” I muttered. “There’s about twenty different incantations here. Which one do I use?”
“The Words of Constraint.”
That particular spell went on for half a page. Even on my best days, I was horrible at memorization. I looked over at him.
Ask him, a voice whispered inside my head. Ask and hear his answer!
It didn’t surprise me, hearing the voice. The whispering had been going on for a while, but I had been able to ignore it for the most part. Now it was louder, more insistent. I didn’t wonder whose voice it was. I’d heard it before. It was the voice of Paimon, the voice of the demon king.
I cleared my throat. “I know this whole thing is my fault . . .”
It is thy fault, worthless carcass!
“And probably since I’m the one who screwed things up I should fix them, but wouldn’t it make more sense if you did it?”
Now listen as he abandons thee!
“I mean,” I added when he didn’t say anything, “you already know these spells, right?”
Op Nine didn’t look at me. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
See? Thou art alone. There is no one to help thee.
I rubbed my temples and said, “They’re talking to me. Inside my head. Do you think they know what I’m thinking?”
“I don’t know, Alfred.”
“Because if they do, they know what the plan is and there’s no hope.”
He echoed me, nodding. “No hope.”
“Well, at least this way I’ll never be lonely,” I said, trying to make a joke, but he didn’t laugh.
“I hear them too, Alfred,” he said quietly. “But I do not think we are possessed in the layman’s sense of the word. I believe what we are hearing are our own doubts and fears, amplified tenfold.”
“What the heck does that mean?”
“What we fear,” he said. “Our own voice of despair. The secret gnawing doubts we all have. They turn them upon us.”
Stupid, pathetic, disgusting loser! Dost thou believe we can be overcome by the likes of thee? Before Time was, we have been and shall always be! Who art thou disgusting mound of rotting flesh to challenge our dominion!
The fog was thicker than ever. With no points of reference, it didn’t seem as if we were moving at all.
“We’re not going to make it in time,” I said. “So let’s just pull to the side of the road and wait for the end.”
“Alfred,” he started, and th
en stopped. Something up ahead had caught his attention.
A hole had appeared in the fog, its sides perfectly smooth and round, the opening about twice the width of the car. It looked like the mouth of a tunnel.
Come to us now, carcass. Bring us the Seal.
“They’ve decided to help us,” I said.
He grunted and didn’t say anything. He had put back on the old Op Nine expressionless mask.
“Hit it,” I said, and Op Nine floored the gas.
We hit the tunnel at 230 mph and the fog in the “walls” spun and twisted with our passing. I looked behind us and saw the tunnel collapsing, closing us off.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said after a hundred miles had slid by and the words on the page had become black blobs swimming before my eyes.
“You should try to sleep,” he said.
I shook my head. “What I’d really like to do is brush my teeth. I can’t remember the last time I brushed them. You know, they’re the one thing about my personal appearance I actually took pride in.” I ran my tongue over the front ones and my left incisor jiggled. Knowing what was going to happen didn’t calm me any as I reached into my mouth and gave the tooth a gentle push. It broke off in my mouth. I spat the tooth into my palm.
“What is it?” Op Nine asked.
The coppery taste of blood in my mouth. The broken tooth in my hand. The weeping sores all over my body.
“Alfred?”
I flung the tooth to the floorboards and, knowing I shouldn’t, reached back into my mouth and tugged at one of my molars. I heard a squishing sound as it pulled free from the gum.
“Jerks,” I breathed. “Those dirty, demonic jerks!”
I hurled the molar against the windshield. Op Nine whipped his head in my direction as I began to stamp my foot as hard as I could, throwing such a fit he must have thought this time I had really lost it. He took his foot off the accelerator and I screamed at him to speed up.
My hissy fit didn’t last long; hissy fits take energy, and I didn’t have much left. In fact, I didn’t have much of anything left: I ran my hands through my hair and huge wads of it came away in my fists. By this point the fact that my hair was falling out left me numb.
Bit by bit since that night in the Sahara, they had been chipping away at me and I thought I would be just a nub of myself by the time we reached the devil’s door. Nub-o’-Kropp. The skin felt loose on my body and I wondered if it might start sloughing off like a snake’s, leaving my muscles and tendons exposed like those 3-D models they use in science class to teach human anatomy.
I sat back in the seat, gasping and snuffling, and Op Nine didn’t say anything but kept his hands tight on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the tiny black hole straight ahead, and after a while I noticed the tunnel’s walls had changed color from cotton white to deep yellow. After a few more miles the yellow had darkened to a dusky orange.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Op Nine didn’t answer. I said, “You talked more before you knew who you were. What is it— too dangerous to talk? Something classified might slip out?”
“My memory returned at the cabin. I was in the back when I heard the fight by the front door. I followed the sound and saw you and Mike rolling down the hill. At that moment it all came back to me.”
“When it came back to me, it hit like a freight train.”
“Yes. My experience was similar.”
I flipped the book back open to the incantations, and tore the page containing the Words of Constraint from the binding. He winced at the sound. Then I folded the page into quarters and jammed it into the front pocket of my Dockers.
“You realize there will be very little oxygen,” he said. “There is a strong likelihood you will pass out.”
I thought about telling him there was a strong likelihood I would take the heavy book in my lap and smack him over the head with it, but I didn’t say anything.
“Or freeze to death.”
“Okay . . .”
“And your entire plan hinges on the assumption of anthropomorphism.”
“Yeah, I was worried about that,” I said. “The anthropomorphism.” “They do not think as we do, Alfred. Paimon may decide to find another way to the Seal.”
“Then why send me to find it in the first place? They had the chance to kill me in that house in Evanston. Why didn’t they?”
He pursed his lips, his eyes glued to the road.
“You know why, don’t you?” I asked.
“I have a theory.”
“I’d love to hear it.”
“I don’t know if that would be wise.”
“Right. Not wise. Like taking my blood from me was.”
“You know why we didn’t tell you.”
“The First Protocol?”
He nodded. I said, “But you can supersede the First Protocol, right? You’re the SPA; you can ignore all of them if you want. Anyway, it makes sense now, why you kept me so close afterward. Had to protect your source of the active agent, didn’t you?”
My teeth jiggled in their sockets as I talked, so I tried to move my tongue as little as possible, which slurred my words and made me sound like a dental patient, my mouth stuffed with cotton.
“For years, Alfred, I worked to build a weapon that had the potential to control an intrusion agent, but the difficulty was finding an active agent—until Dr. Smith showed me your dossier immediately following Mike’s theft of the Seals. It occurred to me your blood might have certain properties . . .”
“So once you had me on the Pandora, you drained my blood through my armpit and stuck it into the bullets.”
“We were desperate.”
He betrayed thee once! He will betray thee again!
The walls of the tunnel had darkened to bloodred. I figured we were getting close to the door.
“I’m going to get one of these cars when this is over,” I said. I figured maybe if I kept talking the voice inside my head would shut up. “Girls might notice me then. But I’d have to follow the speed limit and I’m thinking that would seem really slow now that I’ve taken it to the max. I think I would resent them. I mean traffic laws, not girls. Is that what happens once you start ignoring the rules, Samuel? I’ve got this feeling that when I’m back in school I’m going to laugh in the face of my math teacher when she hands out the tests. I used to sweat buckets before a test, get sick to my stomach, get the shakes. I don’t think that’s going to happen now. And I was scared to death of girls, especially the pretty ones, but after this, girls are cake. Except it might be hard getting a date with no teeth and smelling like a sewer pipe.”
Op Nine took a deep breath and said, “There is always tension, Alfred, between the life we want and the life we find.” He eased off the accelerator and added, “The tunnel veers to the right ahead. I think we have reached the exit.”
53
I checked the time as Op Nine bore right onto the exit ramp.
“About thirty minutes to spare,” I said. “That’s good. I’m not usually this punctual.”
The car shook suddenly as thunder crashed overhead.
“I figured they’d pull out all the stops: thunder and lightning, ice and fire from the sky, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, you name it. It’s very biblical, but you read the Bible and half the catastrophes are caused by God. You were a priest. What’s that about?”
After about half a mile, the tunnel made a sharp left, then a right, and coming out of this turn we saw it, a spinning mass of orange flecked with white, directly ahead. Where the red walls of the tunnel met this light was a ring of pure white flame, and I thought of the circus and the flaming rings they made those poor big cats jump through.
Op Nine slowed to a crawl, and maybe a hundred yards from this burning mouth before the devil’s door, he brought the car to a full stop and turned off the engine.
“This is folly, Alfred,” he murmured.
“Shut up,” I said.
“Madness.”
“Cut it out, wi
ll ya? What kind of pep talk is this?” I started to shiver, though it was warm inside the car. My lower jaw was jerking up and down as I shook and I was afraid the rest of my teeth would shatter. “You’re supposed to be comfor—comforty—comforting me. You must have been a lousy priest.”
“I was a lousy priest.”
I looked over at him. He was staring into the mouth of fire.
“Samuel,” I said. “What did you see in Abalam’s eyes?”
“You know what I saw.”
“Abkhazia?”
He nodded. I could see the orange and white fire reflected in his dark eyes.
“Abkhazia, near the Black Sea, and home to Krubera, the deepest cave on earth. The Company had received reports of . . . unusual phenomenon in that region, the most compelling of which came from a team of National Geographic explorers, who had descended to the five-thousand-foot mark of the cave before abruptly returning to the surface. You know the area of my expertise, Alfred, so I needn’t tell you the nature of those most unusual reports and what drove a team of experienced, highly regarded scientists to abandon their quest to reach the deepest recesses of Krubera. There are some things deep within the belly of the earth that should never be disturbed.
“On July 18, 1983, two of us were inserted into Krubera. Myself and the very best operative the Company had at the time—a young man with a brilliant future, a protégé of mine who idolized me and who would obey any order I gave, no matter how ridiculous. These are the kind of agents OIPEP looks for, Alfred. Men and women who are willing to challenge the very gates of hell itself for the sake of the mission.” He gave a bitter laugh. “The mission!”
“On the third day of our descent, as we reached the four-thousand-foot mark, an earthquake struck, as is common in that region. I would like to say it was borne of natural causes . . . but I cannot say that; even to this day, I cannot say that. The cave collapsed a thousand feet above us, burying us under three tons of rock. We had carried in enough water and rations to sustain two people for seven days.”
He swallowed hard, and I watched his prominent Adam’s apple bob up and down.
“Or one person for fourteen days,” he added.