I pushed the paper into my pocket. “Okay.”
“I really do want to protect you,” she said. “And I really do—I really do have feelings for you. That’s the reason, Alfred. The only reason I agreed to any of this.”
“Where is Nueve?” I asked.
“I have no idea—” she started. Then she stopped herself and said, “On his way.”
“How soon?”
“An hour, maybe two—”
“I want a head start.”
“There’s nowhere you can go where he can’t find you.”
“We,” I said. “Say it. We.”
“We,” she said.
“A friend of mine is in trouble. I’ve got to save him before some very bad people do a very bad thing to him or his family. So I’m leaving, and you’re going to let me.”
“I can’t let you, Alfred.”
I gently pried the box from her fingers.
“You’re not going to wake up Sam. You’re not going to come after me. You’re going to sit here and wait for your boyfriend and when he gets here you’re going to say I took the box and bopped you over the head with it. I’ll bop you right now, if you think that’ll make it more believable.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “That it’s something you really don’t want to do.”
I stepped around her and unlatched the door. I heard a clicking sound behind me. Turning around, I saw the gun in her hands, and the gun was pointed at the center of my thick forehead.
“Were you lying?” I asked.
“You know I was.”
“Not about Nueve,” I said. “Not about your assignment. About the right thing still mattering. Were you lying? Does it still matter? I think it does. Sometimes I get confused about what the right thing is, but in all this, in everything that happened since I found Excalibur, I always tried to do the right thing. Like now my right thing is trying to save my friend. Your right thing is giving me the chance to save him. That’s the right thing, Ashley. The thing-that-must-be-done. Sometimes the thing-that-must-be-done and the right thing are the same thing for both people. Sometimes they’re not, like Samuel putting a bomb in my skull. Right for him. Wrong for me. But just because something like that happens doesn’t mean you stop trying to do the right thing.”
I was feeling a little dizzy and a lot tired. I needed to leave. I said, “So you do your thing and I’ll do my thing and maybe in the end everything will turn out just fine.”
I opened the door and cold air poured into the room. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Maybe from the cold, maybe from the fact that Ashley was pointing a semiautomatic at my face.
“At least tell me where you’re going,” she said.
“Where it began,” I said, and then I stepped into the night and the door swung closed behind me.
I walked across the parking lot, and the muscles between my shoulder blades twitched, expecting the bullet. I knew she had to be watching me through the window, but I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was Mr. Needlemier. The world wasn’t in jeopardy this time, just one person in it, and that’s just as important.
I walked a half mile down the road to the gas station where I bought the corn dogs. I asked the clerk if I could use her phone.
“Why?” she asked.
“My car broke down. I need to call my dad.”
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
“It’s dead.” So was my dad, but I didn’t want to overload her with too much information.
She clearly didn’t believe me. Maybe if I bought something she’d let me use the phone. I bought a Big Gulp and asked again if I could use the phone.
“There’s a pay phone outside—or don’t you have any money either?”
“I just bought a Big Gulp,” I pointed out. I went back outside. I hadn’t seen the pay phone: it was on the far side of the property, out of the bright lights of the station. I walked into the shadows and got the number from the operator. How many hours was England ahead of us? Or was it behind us? On the twelfth ring, a lady came on the line and thanked me for calling Tintagel International World Headquarters.
“Jourdain Garmot,” I said.
The line popped with static.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Mr. Garmot is not in at the present. May I take a message or direct you to his voice mail?”
“Vosch, then.”
“I’m sorry—who did you say?”
“Vosch,” I said louder. “I don’t know his first name.”
“One moment please.” Music began to play in my ear. I had snuck out of the room without a jacket—mostly because I didn’t have a jacket. I shivered. The line popped and I heard her say, “Sir, I’ve checked the company directory and there’s no listing for a—”
“Check again. This is Alfred Kropp.”
“Kropp? Is that with a C or a K?”
“With a K.”
“One P or PP?”
“PP.”
The music came back on. I stamped my feet and shifted my weight from side to side and blew on a cupped hand, then switched the receiver to blow on the other.
“Mr. Krapp?”
“Kropp.”
“One moment please for Mr. Vosch.”
A series of clicks and pops as she routed the call. I looked up. The sky was cloudless and brilliant with stars. I’d never seen so many stars.
“Kropp,” Vosch said.
“Vosch. I’m ready.”
“Where are you?”
I told him.
“Stay there. I’ll make the arrangements.”
“I’m going to wait inside the store,” I said. “It’s cold. And Vosch? Is it too late for Mr. Needlemier?”
“No, Alfred. You’re just in time.”
I waited inside the store, sipping my Big Gulp. The clerk was glaring at me, so I bought a Snickers. I thought about buying another corn dog, but two was the lucky number. I kept glancing at my watch. Every second that passed was a second where Ashley might change her mind or Nueve might arrive and change it for her. I wondered if Sam would kill Nueve or if Nueve would win that battle. They were both Op Nines at the top of their game; it would be a close match. I watched the deserted lot through the plate-glass windows.
“Get hold of your dad?” the clerk asked.
I nodded. “It won’t be long now.”
A black Lincoln Navigator pulled up next to the building. The front passenger door swung open and Vosch stepped out, snapping the collar of his fashionable tan duster. He did a slow turn, surveying the lot, right hand inside the pocket of the duster.
I told the clerk bye and she said, “Hey, let’s do it again real soon,” and then I was standing outside in the cold before Vosch.
“I’m alone,” I said.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, Alfred.”
“I’m the son of a knight. Honesty’s in our blood.”
He laughed like I had gotten off a good joke, opened the door for me, and I slid into the second seat. I was sitting beside a small, weaselly looking guy with a sharp nose and narrow shoulders, who smelled like peanut butter. He said, “Don’t move,” and then he frisked me. Vosch rode shotgun next to a big, flat-faced, slitty-eyed goon who could have been a clone of the big, flat-faced, slitty-eyed goon I took out on the highway. Like pretty girls, I guess, big, flat-faced, slitty-eyed goons were a dime a dozen.
“He’s clean,” Weasel said.
We got on I-15 heading north toward the airport.
“I know where you’re taking me,” I said. “I know where the circle ends.”
“Most apropos, yes?” Vosch asked.
“Oui,” I said.
00:11:03:21
When you look down at it from thirty-five thousand feet, the Atlantic is as featureless as a chalkboard and about as interesting to watch. But I watched it, hoping the gray monotony would make me drows
y. I needed sleep.
Vosch reclined in the leather seat across from me, wearing a white turtleneck and gray slacks. Flat-Face II sat directly behind me and Weasel beside him, both fast asleep, their snores bugging the heck out of me. Nothing is more annoying than a person sleeping when you can’t.
I watched the ocean. Vosch watched me.
“ ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone,’ ” he said softly. “ ‘Alone on a wide wide sea!/And never a saint took pity on/My Soul in agony . . .’ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ by Coleridge. Do you know it?”
I didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to care.
“ ‘Poetry is how the soul breathes . . .’ I forget who said that. I suspect your exposure to it is limited to the lyrics of P. Diddy and Jay-Z. You can listen to them if you like. We have satellite radio. And television. There’s also a full library of DVDs onboard. We just added the complete six-volume Three Stooges collection. In high def! You might find the parallels comforting.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“And books,” he said. “Classics and popular literature. No comics, I’m afraid. You strike me as an Archie fan. That Jughead! And will Arch ever choose between Veronica and Betty?”
“You’re really a well-rounded guy,” I said. “Poetry, books, music, comics, kidnapping, torture, assassination.”
“Oh, I dabble. What is the American expression? Jack of all trades, master of none.”
“There’s one thing that’s been bugging me,” I said.
“About the Thirteenth Skull.”
He smiled, an eyebrow climbing toward his hairline.
“Yes?”
“Why does Jourdain need to kill me to get it?”
“Why does he—?” Vosch cracked up. He laughed until tears shone in his eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“Ah, Alfred,” Vosch said as he dabbed his cheek with a white handkerchief. “I suppose for the same reason the chicken must cross the road.”
“A friend told me Jourdain was chasing a myth.”
“A friend told you this? You should exercise better judgment in your choice of friends, I would say!”
He reached forward suddenly and, before I could react, grabbed my head, his palm pressed against my nose, fingertips digging into my scalp.
“There is nothing mythical about our quest, Alfred Kropp. Even now the Skull is within our possession and in a few hours it will find its place among the Twelve.”
He started to go on and then stopped himself. I wondered if he was disobeying orders by telling me.
He changed the subject.
“I knew you would call, of course. Once you realized we would take Needlemier. He’s the largest piece left on the board; you couldn’t afford to lose him. And ‘Greater love hath no man than this,’ yes?”
“I know that one. It’s from the Bible.”
“Though Needlemier somewhat stretches the definition of ‘friend.’ He gave Samuel to us quicker than you can say Judas.”
“Maybe he’s just not cut out for this kind of chess.”
“Not like we are, certainly.”
“Don’t lump me in with you, Vosch.”
“Why shouldn’t I? We’re not so different, you and I. You grasped immediately my move against the lawyer, just as I discerned your countermove to contact me. Even our motives are similar, Alfred. You would do anything to protect your friends, just as I would do anything to protect my patron Jourdain Garmot. Now we near the end of the game: I bring you to him while you plot your response. What is it? An ambush at Tintagel? Your guardian and this mysterious yet beautiful blonde await our arrival? Or have you enlisted the aid of the saber-wielding Spaniard and his powerful Company?”
“Maybe it’s simpler than that,” I said.
The sun was setting over the Atlantic and the chalkboard-gray had changed to burnished gold. The shining patina hid a world teaming with life, fantastic creatures for whom our world above was deadly. Predators and prey, from the microscopic to the huge—the sea was empty and chokingly full. In my dreams lately, it was full of dragons.
“Like Lancelot upon the Plain,” Vosch said, “he marches to the drumbeat of his sin, toward his certain doom.”
“Who said that?” I asked.
He smiled. “I did.”
TINTAGEL, CORNWALL, U.K.
THE CASTLE CAMELOT
00:06:35:10
The ruins clustered near the cliff’s edge gleamed in the moonlight. You could hear the surf crashing into the rocks three hundred feet below. There was a storm far out at sea; you could see the dark line of clouds on the western horizon and the flicker of lightning, though it was so far away you couldn’t hear the thunder.
The stones were white, worn down from a thousand years of sun and wind and rain. They stuck out from the ground like the huge, discarded teeth of a giant. Here great halls once stood, courtyards and chambers with vast, cathedral ceilings and, somewhere in the rubble, a great hall with a round table in the middle of it, and around that table sat a king and his knights, including the bravest in the kingdom, his best friend and my ancestor, whose disloyalty would lead to the crumbling of the white stones and the death of the king he loved.
It was midnight and Camelot was deserted.
“Where’s Jourdain?” I asked.
“You know where he is,” Vosch answered.
Of course I knew. Flat-Face II and Weasel stayed in the Land Rover while Vosch and I descended the steps cut into the cliff side. On the eastern shore of the inlet the mouth of a cave yawned toward the open ocean and the silent, raging storm.
We entered Merlin’s Cave. Torches burned along one wall, throwing our shadows across the floor and against the opposite wall of the chamber, where a collection of human skulls sat grinning, grouped in a circle on a natural ledge about chest high.
“What are those?” I asked, horrified.
“Can you not guess by now?” Vosch asked.
Shadows danced in the empty eye sockets, creating the illusion that the skulls still had life—that they were looking back at me as I stood still, shivering, looking at them, while the wind whistled and howled through unseen cracks and fissures in the stone.
“They are the Knights of the Sacred Order, Alfred. There is Windimar of Suedberg. There is Bellot of St. Etienne. And that one is Cambon of Sicily. The ones closest to you are the remains of Lord Bennacio and of course, your father, the great Bernard Samson, heir to Lancelot.”
So that’s what Jourdain was doing in Pennsylvania: the same thing he did in Knoxville. Digging up the knights and taking their heads.
I counted the skulls. Twelve. I remember my father’s words, spoken so long ago in Uncle Farrell’s apartment. Only twelve of us are left now . . .
Behind me, Vosch said, “You’ll note there is room for one more in the center, in the place of honor.”
The last knightly quest . . . for the Thirteenth Skull.
“That would be my spot,” I said. “I’m the Thirteenth Skull.”
No wonder Vosch had laughed at me on the plane. I was a lot of things, but one thing I wasn’t was a myth. Jourdain wasn’t searching for a magical crystal skull carved by Merlin. That had nothing to do with this. Just like SOFIA was no goddess at the left hand of God, Alfred Kropp was no Skull of Doom.
Vosch put his arm around my shoulders, as if he wanted to comfort me. The gesture was so over the top and obscene that I felt my stomach do a slow roll.
I shrugged his arm away and said, “I wasn’t part of the Order. I didn’t even know he was my father until after he was dead. I don’t belong with them.”
Plus I was responsible: I took the Sword and gave it to Jourdain’s father and that’s why they died. Putting my skull inside the circle of skulls belonging to the last twelve knights on earth, knights who died trying to right my wrong—talk about obscene gestures!
Vosch faded into the shadows. After a minute he came back holding a long, thin object wrapped in white satin. He tugged on one corner and the fabric fel
l away.
“A parting gift,” he said, offering me the black sword I had left in Knoxville. “From the faithful Alphonso Needlemier.”
I took the sword. The torchlight skittered along the blade. The sword of the last knight, whose skull stared at me now from its stone perch.
“You know,” I said. “It would have been a lot simpler to chop off my head in Montana.”
“Simpler . . . but not nearly as poetic!”
He took me by the elbow and led me toward the back of the cave. Our shadows stretched out in front of us and twisted up the back wall.
He didn’t have to lead me; I knew the way. I had gone down this path before. We reached the fissure in the stone, the opening to the passageway that descended to the hidden chamber where I had first used Bennacio’s sword in defense of the world.
Vosch stopped at the opening. “And now I must say goodbye, Alfred. You won’t be seeing me again.”
I looked over his shoulder at the skulls on the wall. I wouldn’t be seeing him, but he would be seeing me.
He followed my gaze. “Can you think of a more fitting resting place, Alfred? Here, beneath the symbol of all they held dear, in the last refuge of the wizard who seduced a farm boy into believing he could create perfection on earth. And, tonight, the circle comes round: Lancelot brought down the walls there above and now his last son pays for their fall here below. Of course you belong here. Of course you do!”
I stepped into the passageway. Vosch called softly behind me, “Adieu, adieu, Alfred Kropp! ‘An orphan’s curse would drag to hell/A spirit from on high;/But oh! more horrible than that/ Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!’ ”
Rock crunched beneath my feet. The way down was very narrow in places, forcing me to turn sideways and shuffle carefully between outcropping of razor-sharp stone. The walls wept with moisture and the wind whistling from the entrance chamber became a high-pitched wail: the cries of Merlin’s ghost for the kingdom love had lost. I touched the sharp stones with my fingertips and thought of dragons’ teeth. The opening behind me was the lips and I was in its mouth, heading for its gullet.