“Samuel?”
“You know, Op Nine . . . Samuel. Is he okay?”
“Yes, Alfred. We’ve moved him to a safe location.”
“Well, if I’ve learned anything from the past, there’s no such thing.”
Abby laughed.
“I wasn’t making a joke,” I said. “So he’s not here.”
“There’s no reason for him to be, is there?”
I thought about it. “No, I guess not. It’s just, we kind of had an argument the last time I saw him. Can you let him know I’m okay—that everything’s going to be okay now?”
“Of course, Alfred.”
“Who is Sofia?”
She looked at me for a second without saying anything, reminding me of Nueve’s stone-faced stare at the dairy farm.
“Sofia?”
“He said she was a ghost from his past.”
She slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, Alfred, I don’t know any person named Sofia.”
“Nueve said she was the goddess of wisdom.”
Abby gave a weird little laugh. “Did he?”
“What’s the Thirteenth Skull?”
“The . . . what?”
“Thirteenth Skull. Jourdain is looking for it.”
“Is he? How . . . extraordinary.”
“So you know about it?”
She nodded.
“You’re about to tell me it’s classified, aren’t you? You’ve got that ‘it’s classified’ look.”
“I was about to tell you Jourdain is chasing a chimera if he is searching for it. The Thirteenth Skull is a myth.”
“What’s the myth?”
She shook her head. “What does any of it matter now, Alfred? In a few days, none of this”—she waved to indicate the world according to OIPEP—“will be your concern. You’re free now.”
She turned on her cherry-red heels and hurried from the room. I took a quick shower to wash off the mud and cow poo, found a toothbrush by the sink, and scrubbed my teeth, then yanked on a regulation black OIPEP jumper I found hanging in the closet. Using the mirror in the bathroom, I combed my hair with my fingers, thinking I probably wouldn’t be combing my hair if Ashley wasn’t my extraction coordinator. She had quit OIPEP after encountering sixteen million demonic fiends in the Sahara, which totally freaked her out, and I never thought I would see her again. Just my luck when I did I was wearing a dress. But I’d also lost a lot of weight and grown another inch and my hair had those funky, cool gray streaks in it and I was thinking that’s what happens when you go through a big change, the old you lingers in your mind’s eye, like a ghost limb of an amputee.
They were waiting for me in the outer room, Ashley, Abby, Nueve, and Mr. Needlemier. I slid into the empty seat next to Ashley and said, “I’m a guy again.”
“Smooth,” Nueve murmured.
He turned to Mr. Needlemier. “In ten minutes we depart for happier climes. The Company has agreed to extract Senor Kropp in exchange for the item stolen from Company possession.”
Mr. Needlemier nodded nervously. I thought of bobble-heads.
“So,” Nueve said, “do you have the item?”
Mr. Needlemier looked at me. I nodded. He unlocked his briefcase and pulled out the Great Seal of Solomon. I took a deep breath. Now OIPEP would have both the Great Seal and the Holy Vessel with all those demons locked up inside it, able to free them and do whatever the hell they wanted with them. I looked at Abby. If she wasn’t the director now, I thought, I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t trust OIPEP that much— never had—but I trusted her. Abby would keep the Seals safe. She’d make sure nobody ever released the Outcasts of Heaven again.
Nueve reached over and practically snatched the ring from Mr. Needlemier’s quivering fist. His dark eyes shone as he held it up. The Seal glittered under the fluorescent lights.
“Good,” Abby said crisply. She was all business now. “We’re at the edge of the security envelope.” She stood up, Ashley stood up, and then Nueve stood up. Mr. Needlemier and I didn’t stand up.
“Alfred,” Abby said.
“Alfred,” Ashley said.
“Alfred,” Nueve said.
“May I have a few moments alone with Alfred?” Mr. Needlemier asked.
Nueve was immediately suspicious. “For what purpose?”
“For the purpose of saying goodbye.”
Abby looked at her watch. “Five minutes.”
On their way out, I heard Nueve say to Abby, “Sentimentalist!” The door closed. Mr. Needlemier glanced through the window to make sure they weren’t trying to eavesdrop. I could have pointed out they probably had the room bugged. He scooted his chair close to mine.
“Alfred, are you sure about this?”
I nodded. “It’s messed up, Mr. Needlemier.”
“I can’t argue with that. You may call me cynical, Alfred, but money does have a way of fixing things. You understand you are walking away from close to half a billion dollars?”
“Ever since this thing started,” I said, feeling like I was going to cry. “Ever since I stole the Sword, people have been dying. A lot of people, most of them bad, I guess, but a lot of them good, including my uncle and my dad. It’s like a wheel, Mr. Needlemier, a big wheel of death that just keeps turning and I’m like the axle. A wheel can’t turn without its axle.”
He was nodding like he was following me, but I didn’t think he was. I went on. “Samuel won’t take OIPEP’s money, so I want you to make sure he has some of mine. The rest I want you to give away. Orphanages and places like that, although the only places I can think of like that are orphanages. You know what I mean; you’re the lawyer—check into it. I can’t help the dead, but I can the living.”
“Yes, well, Alfred . . . about that . . .”
“About what part of that?”
“The money. There’s been a development.”
“I hate it when you say that. What development?”
“All the money has been frozen.”
“Why?”
“By order of the court. You see, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about privately. There’s been a challenge to your father’s will.”
I was about to ask who when it hit me who.
“Jourdain Garmot,” I said.
“Why, yes. How did you know?”
“His dad used to be Mr. Samson’s heir. Mr. Samson had picked Mogart to take charge of Excalibur if something happened to him. Then he found out about me and cut Mogart out, which led Mogart to use me to steal the Sword and everything else.”
Mr. Needlemier was nodding. “Exactly. Now we can fight this, Alfred. Bernard’s will bequeathing everything to you postdates the will naming Mogart as the heir.”
“So Jourdain won’t get the money.”
“Not without committing a very serious crime,” Mr. Needlemier answered.
“I don’t think that would bother him,” I said. “You know what he does, Mr. Needlemier? He carries his father’s head around in a black leather satchel.”
“Dear God!”
“And that might not be the only one. I think he took my father’s head too. He’s totally whacked. He took his head and blew up his house and now I guess he’s after all the money. I think he wants to wipe everything to do with me off the face of the planet.”
I stood up.
“And the Skull. He wants that too, but I’m not sure what wiping me out has to do with that.”
“The Skull?”
“The Thirteenth Skull. Have you ever heard of it?”
He said, “Why in the world would I?”
“You worked for the head man, the captain of the Order of the Sacred Sword. Maybe it came up.”
He just stared at me with a blank expression. I was getting that look a lot lately.
“It must have something to do with the knights,” I went on. “How else would Jourdain know about it?”
“I don’t know anything about any skulls, Alfred.”
I nodded. “I didn’t think so. Well, it’s like Abby said, it
doesn’t really matter now. Like Sofia.”
He was totally lost by this point. “Sofia? Who is Sofia?”
“A ghost from the past.” I took a deep breath. “This is it,” I said.
And he said, voice shaking, “Yes. It.”
I headed for the door.
“Oh! Alfred, I nearly forgot. There is one more thing.”
I turned and saw him standing there holding a black rapier.
“What should I do with this?”
It was Bennacio’s sword, the sword of the last knight to walk the earth. At a château in France, I had laid my hands on that same sword and sworn a vow to heaven. If I turned my back on it now, was I turning my back on something else, something that called me beloved?
“This isn’t running,” I choked out. “I’m not trying to save myself. That’s not what this is.”
“Alfred, I don’t understand. Are you saying you don’t want it?” He was talking about the sword.
“It’s over for them, Mr. Needlemier. The time for the knights is gone and even if it wasn’t, all the knights are.” I swallowed hard. Talk about ghosts from the past! But weren’t all ghosts from the past? “You should melt it down or smash it and scatter its pieces into the sea.”
He nodded, but then he said, “All the same, I think I shall put it somewhere safe. You might need it one day.”
Fat chance of that. Mr. Needlemier didn’t know it, but in a few hours Alfred Kropp would be dead.
05:01:54:11
Fifteen minutes later I was a couple thousand feet above Knoxville and climbing, looking out the window at the winter-brown landscape, the broad ribbon of the Tennessee River curving through the foothills, knowing I would never see it again.
Beside me, Ashley asked, “What are you thinking, Alfred?”
I cleared my throat. “I was wondering why you decided to come back to OIPEP.”
I looked at her. She was very pretty in a kind of all-American way, with the blond hair and blue eyes, a nicely proportioned nose and very white teeth.
She looked away. “They asked me to,” she said.
“And you said yes, just like that?”
“They said they needed an extraction coordinator.”
“That’s a plush job or something?”
She laughed. I thought of bubble gum. “I said no,” she said. “And then they said it was for you.”
“You came back for me?”
She laid her fingertips on my forearm. “After they told me what happened with the Seals. What you did to get them back. I didn’t see how I could say no. I know how hard it is . . . to leave.”
“Was it? Is it? Did you just pick up where you left off before you got into OIPEP?”
“I tried. It’s hard, Alfred. After seeing what you see there . . . knowing what you know . . . to just go back into the civilian interface as if nothing had happened, when everything had happened. You still feel . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . even though you’re back, you’re still on the outside looking in. Wherever you are, you look at people and think about all the things they don’t know and what it would be like if they did know all the things they can’t know. All the things they don’t want to know.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “The same thing happened to me.”
Five thousand feet below, the interstate snaked through the monochromatic hills, the same road that took Bennacio and me north in our quest for the Holy Sword.
Ashley said, “There’s a saying they teach new recruits: the Company is forever. It doesn’t mean OIPEP will last forever—nothing does. It means what happens to you inside the Company lasts forever. It does things to you that can’t be undone.”
“Doom,” I said softly.
“What?”
“Doom. You know, fate. Destiny. The thing-that-can’t-be-undone. And it doesn’t matter whether you think it’s right or wrong, fair or unfair. You don’t have a choice. Well, I don’t buy it. I won’t buy it. I still have a choice.”
I turned from the window to look at her and saw her looking back at me with a funny expression, almost as if she felt sorry for me.
“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.
“Camp Echo. It’s a Company facility in Canada.”
“Do you know where I’ll eventually end up?”
She shook her head.
“What’s that mean?” I asked. “You don’t know or you know and can’t tell me?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got it narrowed down to a couple possibilities.”
“Do I get any say in it?” She nodded. “Good. I don’t want to end up someplace like Paraguay herding goats.”
She laughed and shook her head again. When Ashley moved her head, her blond hair moved with it but a millisecond later, a swirling effect like a long blond cape: move-swirl, move-swirl.
“Paraguay was just a random country,” I said. “The truth is I’m not even sure they herd goats in Paraguay. I’m not telling you guys how to do this. You’re the coordinator and everything, but if it’s up to me I’d rather stay in America because the idea is to blend in, right?”
Abby and Nueve were sitting in front of us, near the cockpit, and their heads were almost touching as they talked. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the rise and fall of their voices indicated a fierce argument was going on.
“That’s the idea,” Ashley said.
“How far does it go? I mean, I’m guessing this is a kind of ramped-up version of the Witness Protection Program, and I know OIPEP has all kinds of supersecret, James Bond–type technologies . . . What I’m getting at is, do you erase my memories? I mean, can you, like, wipe my slate clean?”
“Nobody can take away your memories, Alfred. Not even OIPEP.”
I thought about that. “That’s too bad.” I looked out the window again. We had climbed into some clouds and the earth was hidden from view. “That’s too bad.”
She reached under her seat and pulled out a laptop. As it booted up, she said, “A Level Alpha Extraction is all about permanence. An LAE is forever, Alfred. When you leave here, you won’t be you anymore. You’ll have a new name, a new past, even a new face. This procedure is sometimes called the ‘Phoenix Protocol,’ because the old you is burned away, metaphorically speaking, and a new you rises in its place. I hope you’ve got a good memory, because there’s an awful lot you’ve got to memorize. We’re going to literally make you into another person, and that means reprogramming you to recognize yourself as someone totally new and different.”
“A new face?”
She nodded. “You wouldn’t believe what our plastic surgeons can do.”
“What if I like my face?”
“An LAE is an all-or-nothing protocol, Alfred. Giving you a new identity would be a waste of time without giving you a fresh appearance to go with it. We may also alter your height.”
“My height?”
“You’re much taller than average. It’s a quality that makes you stick out, and the last thing you want as an extractee is to stick out. We may need to remove a vertebra or two.”
“Oh my God!”
“Don’t panic. That’s still under discussion.”
“You’re going to carve up my face and rip out a chunk of my backbone, and you don’t want me to panic?”
She clicked on an icon labeled “LAE_SUB_KROPP.”
“Check this out,” she said quickly. “It’s pretty neat.”
The program launched into a slide show of computer-generated photographs of someone who seemed vaguely familiar: full-on shots of his face, profile shots, fading into full-body pictures of an average-looking teenager, leaning toward the thin side, with short blond hair and blue eyes.
“Who is it?” I asked, though deep down I knew who it was: “SUB_KROPP.”
“It’s you—or one possibility of you.”
“I have brown eyes.”
“We have a technique to change eye color. I used to have brown eyes too.”
I looked into h
er sparkling blue ones. “You were extracted?”
“Kind of. When I joined the Company . . . well, it was sort of what we’re going to do with you, only in reverse. Everyone who joins the Field Ops division is extracted from their former interface.”
She looked away. There was something she wasn’t telling me.
“So that’s why all you female OIPEPs look alike with the blond hair and blue eyes. Did they change your face too?”
“They changed everything,” she said softly.
Tears welled in her eyes. I couldn’t change that, so I decided to change the subject.
“There’s some things I like about it,” I said, meaning the picture. “Like the nose. Can I see the nose again? Yeah, I never was too happy with my nose. I’m not sure about the blond though. I know you’ll have to get rid of the gray—hard to blend in as a sixteen-year-old with gray hair—but maybe just darken it. Not red. I’d look like a clown and I hate clowns. Though that dude from CSI: Miami is pretty cool. Face looks kind of thin, though, like are you going to chisel my cheekbones or something? I guess you can’t make me too good-looking—good-looking people stand out more than average-looking ones. Not that I turn many heads now, and I guess you wouldn’t want to go too homely either.”
“Oh, they’ll give you input on that. Up to a point.” The tears were gone, and that made me feel good.
“One thing I was wondering . . . I don’t know really how to put it, but once I’m like totally extracted and inserted into this new life, would there be or is there ever a circumstance where I’d see anybody from the, um, don’t know what to call it, the ‘old’ interface? For example, does the extraction coordinator do checkups or follow-ups or anything along those lines?”
She was smiling. “Are you asking if you’ll ever see me again?”
I started to say something and then decided that would be a very bad idea, to even try to talk. So I just nodded.
Her smile went away. “Do you know what’s happening back in Knoxville? They’re cutting the headstone. Alfred Kropp is dead now, and the only place I can visit him is his grave.”
CAMP ECHO
SOMEWHERE IN THE
CANADIAN ROCKIES
04:23:36:47
We touched down at a private airstrip nestled in a narrow valley between the snow-crowned peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Ashley pulled two parkas from the overhead compartment and tossed one into my lap.