“That it was a possibility made SOFIA necessary.”
“And SOFIA made the SD 1031 necessary.”
He nodded. “Necessary, yes.”
“Because the Operative Nine couldn’t risk the Item of Special Interest falling into the wrong hands.”
“The results could be catastrophic.”
“So he needed a way to keep a thumb on the Special Item—and a way to . . . terminate the experiment if that became—”
“Necessary,” he said.
“Necessary. Right. The Operative Nine didn’t have a choice.”
“No choice,” he echoed.
“Because he’s the Operative Nine. He has to consider the inconsiderable. Think the unthinkable.”
“The unthinkable.”
“Not just the zigs—the zags too.”
“Alfred, I—” He turned around to face me.
“And it didn’t matter this Item of Special Interest was a fifteen-year-old kid.”
He went stiff on me; I was touching a raw nerve. “Your . . . gift was crucial in recovering the Seals— indispensable, in fact. If we had had access to it in previous missions, lives would have been saved, needless suffering avoided . . .”
“Previous missions? What missions? Missions like Abkhazia? Those kinds of missions, Sam?”
“Of course, yes. Of course, missions like Abkhazia.” He cleared his throat. “You have said it yourself, Alfred. An Operative Nine must think the unthinkable, consider every possible application of a Special Item, particularly those scenarios in which it might fall into unfriendly hands.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“You know the answer to that.”
“No, Sam, why didn’t you tell me after you left OIPEP? Why didn’t you tell me when I decided to go with Nueve?”
“Because I thought SOFIA was dead. Dr. Smith told me she killed the project when she took office as director, and I believed her.”
“I guess Nueve overruled her.”
“With the backing of the board,” he said with a nod.
“You still should have told me.”
“Yes. You’re right. I should have.”
“Well,” I said. “Well, okay. All right. Abby’s working on that. Or maybe she isn’t. Can we trust her? Should we trust her?”
“I trust her,” he said. “I always have.”
“Okay. So she’s gonna work on getting the board on our side and we’re gonna work on getting this thing out of my head.”
I slid into the empty chair across from him. He refused to look me in the eye. I should have guessed the reason. I should have figured there was something else he wasn’t telling me, but I still wanted to believe the best. I still wanted everything to be okay. Because after everything I’d been through, I was still a kid. I didn’t know then that my childhood was about to come to a crashing end. That was the ticktock inside my head. Not a bomb, but a clock: the clock of my childhood winding down.
“Alfred, the SD 1031 cannot be removed.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it can. You put it in; you can take it out.”
He slowly shook his head.
“Any attempt to extract it will cause the device to detonate.” His head was bowed, his shoulders rounded, his hands pressed together in his lap, palm to palm, as if in prayer.
“It can’t be removed,” I said.
“No.”
“Or disabled.”
“No.”
“Or the signal jammed somehow.”
“Alfred . . .”
“And OIPEP will always know where I am.”
“It isn’t a matter of . . . yes. Yes, Alfred. Always.”
“And anytime it feels like it, it can hit the red button, and I’m dead.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s not a damn thing you or Abby Smith or any other of the six billion people on the planet can do about it.”
“Yes.”
I stood up. I shoved the table out of the way. I grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him onto the bed. He fell next to the gun. I picked it up and rammed it against his temple.
“You were my guardian. You swore you would protect me. ‘I will never abandon you or betray you.’ That’s what you said. That’s what you said!”
He didn’t say anything at first. Then he whispered, “Forgive.”
“God’s business,” I said. “Not mine.”
“Your business too,” he whispered. “Especially yours.”
I ignored him. “You’ve done it now, haven’t you? Just like
Mogart, just like Paimon, only you’ve aced them, you’ve done ’em one better. You think you can save me? You were supposed to, you promised to, but instead you’ve killed me, Samuel. You’ve killed me.”
00:23:39:07
We were interrupted by a soft, insistent rapping on the door. Samuel heard it before I did.
“Alfred,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“Alfred, there’s someone at the door.”
“Good. Maybe it’s the maid and she can clean up the mess after I blow your ugly hound-dog head off.”
But I rolled off the bed and took a position a few steps from the door, gun raised, as Samuel got up and peeped through the peephole. Then he glanced back at me.
“Extraordinary,” he said. He opened the door and there was Ashley standing in the doorway. She looked at him; she looked at me; and then out came the sunny Southern California prom queen smile.
“Hi!” she said.
Samuel grabbed her arm, made a quick survey of the parking lot, and pulled her into the room.
“Are you going to shoot me again?” she asked me.
I lowered the gun. “How did you find us?” I asked.
“You gave me this, remember?” She was holding the black box. “If you’re going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you should take the tracking device with you.”
Samuel pulled it out of her hands.
“Why are you here?” he demanded.
“The same reason you are,” she shot back, looking at me. “Some things matter and some things don’t.”
“Alfred,” Samuel said. “Give me the gun.”
“He’s going to shoot me, Alfred,” Ashley said calmly. “You can take the Op Nine out of the job, but you can’t take the job out of the Op Nine.”
“You may have been followed. Alfred.”
I handed him the gun and he disappeared into the night. I sank onto the end of the bed. All of a sudden I was very tired, the most tired I’d been in a long time. She sat beside me.
“I thought—I was sure—you were dead,” she said. She took my hand.
“I’m not.”
“I’m glad.”
Then she hauled off and slapped me across the cheek.
“Don’t ever do that again, understand?” she said. She punched me as hard as she could in the chest. “You’re my assignment.”
She burst into tears. I held her while she cried. Then she pushed away and angrily brushed the tears from her perfectly formed, perfectly tanned cheeks.
“You shouldn’t have come back, Ashley.”
“You shouldn’t have dumped me.”
“You know why.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“ ‘Right.’ Does it still matter, Ashley? Not what’s necessary, but what’s right?”
“Of course it still matters.”
I nodded. “So if it still matters, if right isn’t wrong, then there’s just one thing left to do.”
“What?”
“Complete the circle.”
Samuel came back in. He locked the door. He looked at Ashley for a long, uncomfortable moment. She looked right back at him, her chin raised in defiance.
“I wasn’t followed,” she said.
He ignored her. “Alfred, I’ve been thinking, and perhaps your instinct was correct. Our hope lies in Director Smith. She still might be able to persuade the board to abandon SOFIA and reinstitute the
Phoenix Protocol.”
Ashley agreed. “It might be possible for our engineers to find a way to disable the SD 1031 without killing you.”
“So we make for headquarters in the morning and pray we stay one step ahead of our enemies,” Sam said.
I started to say no, I couldn’t go, not yet, and then it hit me if I said no I would have to say why: I had to save Mr. Needlemier from Vosch. But if I told them that, Sam would do anything it took to stop me. My thing-that-must-be-done wasn’t his thing-that-must-be-done, and if I told him my thing, he was going to do his thing, and that would mean Vosch would do his thing, and that was torturing Mr. Needlemier like he did Sam, maybe even killing him and his family, all because he had the misfortune of knowing Alfred Kropp. I wasn’t going to let that happen.
00:20:56:31
Sam tried reaching Abby Smith twice before we turned in for the night. He had the top-secret number for the cell phone she kept with her at all times, but even that call wouldn’t go through.
“She’s dead,” I told him. “Or been fired. Or captured by Nueve. We’re walking right into a trap.”
“Simply because something is possible does not make it probable, Alfred,” he said.
“Oh. Thanks, Sensei, I feel better now.”
Ashley took the first watch. She pulled a chair in front of the door and sat there with the gun in her lap. I waited until Samuel was asleep, then eased out of bed and sat in the empty chair across from her.
“Why did you come back?” I asked.
“Because I’m an idiot,” she said.
“You’re not an idiot,” I said. “Which is why I asked in the first place.”
“I’m in love with someone I shouldn’t be in love with,” she said. “It’s wrong and I know it’s wrong and still I can’t help myself.”
I was shocked. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Ashley began to cry. She slumped in the chair and I came out of mine to catch her. The gun fell to the carpet. She pushed her face into the nook between my neck and shoulder and sobbed.
“Whatever happens, Alfred, I want you to understand something.”
“Sure.”
“I meant what I said about that time machine.”
“And I meant what I said,” I said, though I couldn’t remember what exactly I said or when, exactly, I said it.
I pressed my lips into her hair.
00:19:48:05
After she calmed down and told me she was going to be okay, I dragged myself back to the bed and had another dream.
I was walking across a familiar field of tall grass and in front of me was a yew tree, and under the tree sat a beautiful woman in flowing white robes. It was the Lady in White. I hadn’t seen her since Mogart killed me with Excalibur. I was crying with joy as I ran toward her.
She turned to me and her beauty took my breath away, the absolute perfection of her.
“You never told me who you are,” I said. “Who are you?”
“You know, Alfred. You have always known.”
A radiant light shone around her face.
“Who am I, Alfred son of Lancelot?”
She smiled and the light around her face began to sear her flesh, burning it away until her skull gleamed white in front of me, wearing the leering, knowing smile of all skulls. Her voice thundered inside my head.
“I AM THE DRAGON AND MY NAME IS SOFIA!”
I woke up. The room was silent except for the humming of the air unit beneath the window. I looked toward the door. Ashley was still sitting there. In the bluish half-light eking through the window, she looked as if she too was part of a dream. I watched her for a couple of minutes, glad and not glad at the same time that she had found me.
If you’re going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you should take the tracking device with you.
I slipped out of bed and padded to the table in my sock feet. Mom always said you should never go barefoot in a hotel room because carpet was a breeding ground for all kinds of nasty germs and contagious diseases. Mom had a thing about stuff like that. Every week she went through about twelve cans of Lysol.
Ashley watched me slide into the empty chair across from her. I thought she looked tired, especially around the eyes.
“Let me take the watch,” I said. “I can’t sleep.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
“Bad dreams.”
The black box sat on the table between us. I touched it. She watched me touch it. Her eyes flicked from my hand on the box to my face then back to the box again. She didn’t say anything. Box. My face. Box.
“This huge flat-faced dude tried very hard to kill me today,” I told her. “Big. Six five, six six maybe, at least three hundred pounds, with a dagger about the size of my forearm. Came right at me.”
“What happened?” she whispered.
“I took him out.” I drew in a deep breath. “I killed him.”
She ran her hand through her golden hair.
“I’d rather have a hundred Flat-Faces coming at me than this,” I said, stroking the edge of the box. “Nueve said it was no bigger than a pencil lead. It’s the little things that kill us faster—sometimes better. Like germs. Or cancer cells. The spot on my mom’s temple was the size of a pea when she found it, and six months later she was dead. It’s those things you can’t see. Like that old story of the blind men and the elephant.”
“I don’t know that story,” she said. Her eyes shone in the ambient light coming from the parking lot.
“These guys blind from birth are taken to this elephant and each one touches a different part. One guy feels the trunk, another the tail, another a leg and so on, and someone asks them, ‘What is an elephant?’ The one who felt the trunk says an elephant is like a plow; the one who felt the tusk said it was like a tree; the one who felt the leg said it was like column to a temple. All of them got it wrong because they couldn’t see it whole, but that didn’t change what it was. It was still an elephant.”
“Okay . . .” she said. She was waiting for the punch line.
“See, sometimes it’s right there in front of you, only you’re too close to see it.”
I pressed the blue button. The red light came on. She jerked forward, her free hand instinctively going for the box. I pulled it away and cradled it in my lap.
“Alfred, what are you doing?”
“Seeing if what I felt was a tree or an elephant.”
If you’re going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you should take the tracking device with you.
“At Camp Echo I asked you about the range of the tracking device,” I said. “You said maybe a mile or two.”
“It’s a GPS, Alfred,” she said slowly, carefully. “I didn’t know that until I tested it in Knoxville. I really didn’t know the range when you asked me.”
“GPS, gotcha.” I ran my fingertip over the glowing red button. “So it doesn’t matter how far I run, Nueve and company will always know where to find me.”
She swallowed. “I guess so.”
“You guess so? Don’t you know so?”
“Alfred, you’re making me very nervous. Why don’t you put that down before you do something you shouldn’t.”
“I probably should,” I agreed. “I’m not sure what happened next, whether the blind men were told what they really felt and if they got mad because they had it all wrong. Maybe it’s better for everybody involved to call an elephant a tree and leave it at that.”
“Give me the box, Alfred.” She was leaning over the table, her left hand extended toward me, her right gripping the butt of the semiautomatic.
I’m in love with someone I shouldn’t be in love with. It’s wrong and I know it’s wrong and still I can’t help myself.
“Nueve let me run off into the woods even though he had no way to find me. I had the only box on the mountain. Then he let me fly off the mountain with both boxes, free to go wherever I wanted and he’d have no way to track me, at least until he could get another box and that would take time, time he really
couldn’t afford because anything could happen, right? There’d be a huge gap where he wouldn’t know where I was and he’d have no way of protecting the Company’s investment. That’s what I am—the investment—and that’s his job: protecting it. So why did he let me go?”
“Why?” Ashley echoed.
“The answer is the elephant, Ashley. The answer is he didn’t let me go. I never escaped from the Company, except once, when I gave you the slip on the plane.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. “Alfred, you’re . . . you’re being paranoid. That’s understandable, but I told you—”
“Right. I own you. I’m your assignment.”
“No, not like that. Not that way.” She shook her golden hair and it swirled around her tanned face, which didn’t look so tan right then.
“Who assigned you to me, Ashley? Was it Director Smith or the Operative Nine?”
I pressed the red button. Her whole body went rigid as the display sprang to life: 30 . . . 29 . . . 28 . . . 27 . . .
“See, I’m pretty confident I know,” I said. “So confident I’m willing to bet my life on it.”
She lunged across the table at me. I sprang from the chair and it thumped onto the germy carpet.
19 . . . 18 . . . 17 . . . 16 . . .
“Who is it, Ashley? Me or Nueve? Who really owns you?”
I tossed the box at her. She dropped the gun and caught it in both hands. Her shoulders shook as her thin fingers danced over the keypad.
The red light went black.
I picked up the fallen chair and sat down. She slumped into hers in front of the door, the gun lying forgotten at her feet as she cradled the box like a newborn baby in against her chest.
“Now tell me some bull crap about that being a lucky guess,” I said. “In love with someone you shouldn’t be. I guess so. Guessed wrong the first time, guessed right this time.”
“It isn’t what you think,” she whispered. She wouldn’t look at me.
“You don’t have to explain anything, Ashley.”
I got up, went into the bathroom, and came back out with a few sheets of toilet paper, which I tried to hand to her. She said, “I won’t wipe my face with toilet paper, Alfred.”