The Thirteenth Skull (15 page)

“Ashley,” I whispered.

“Far from it,” Nueve said.

“I know you're not Ashley, you jerk. Is Ashley alive?”

“Why wouldn't she be? She's been touched by an angel.”

I lunged toward him. His cane swooshed through the air and I felt the tip of the knife poking into the soft flesh beneath my chin.

“Inadvisable, Alfred.”

“You won't kill me. I'm a Special Item now.”

“Dr. Mingus believes he may have more than enough material to accomplish our goal. Like most scientists, he possesses an optimism bordering on arrogance. One might say, however, that that is precisely what arrogance is: optimism taken to its extreme. What? You'd rather not discuss philosophy?”

“You tricked me.”

“You asked to be extracted from the civilian interface and Camp Echo could not be farther from it.”

“You know what I mean. You were never going to give me a new identity.”

“My mission was twofold: the immediate concern of obtaining the Great Seal and the long-range one of protecting a Special Item of vital importance to international security.”

“My blood.”

He smiled. “You know what I am, Alfred.”

“That's right. You're a jerk.”

“I am the Superseding Protocol Agent.”

I knew what he meant. What I wanted didn't matter. Even what his boss Abby Smith wanted didn't matter. Only the mission mattered. I wondered how that worked. Normally a boss can tell you what to do or not do, but a SPA didn't have to follow those rules. And if that was true, then what rules
did
he have to follow? I thought I knew the answer, and that made my heart speed up.

“Where is Abby?” I asked.

“As I told you in Knoxville, you should avoid asking questions to which you already know the answers. It creates the false impression of stupidity. Director Smith has returned to headquarters to plead your case personally before the board. The director suffers from a certain sentimentality coupled with a startling naïveté about the dynamics of our organization. The true power of OIPEP, Alfred, does not lie with the director. It lies with the board, and he who controls the board, controls the Company.”

“What about Ashley?”

“What about her?”

“She's my extraction coordinator. You're not going to extract me now, so what's going to happen to her?”

“That, Alfred, you will never know.”

I looked at him. He looked back. He had no expression except one of mild curiosity.

“You have had thoughts of escape,” he whispered. “You may put away such fantasies. You will never leave Camp Echo.”

It took a second for that to sink in. Even after my “examination” by Dr. Mingus the day before, I figured at some point they would take me to the island in Abby Smith's PowerPoint presentation. I assumed at some point they would be finished with me. My heart rate kicked up another notch.

“You're not dumping me on OIPEP Island?”

“You've taken your last dump. Tomorrow morning Dr. Mingus will perform one final procedure: a frontal lobotomy. Do you know what a lobotomy is?”

“I think it's where they cut off part of your brain.”

“Precisely. The thinking part. The human part.”

“You're gonna make me a vegetable.”

“It's quite painless.”

“Really? Is that how yours went?”

He smiled. He picked up a small black box sitting on the little table beside the bed. “Do you recall the good ship
Pandora
?”

“Yes.” The
Pandora
was an OIPEP jetfoil where I had first met Samuel and Ashley, the boat that had taken us to Egypt after Mike Arnold stole the Seals of Solomon.

“It was on that ship that your dear friend, your surrogate father, Samuel St. John, the former Operative Nine, first extracted your wondrous hemoglobin—without your knowledge or consent, I might add.”

“Right, to stick in the bullets to fight the demons. I already know that.”

“Yes, but there is something you do not know. While you were under anesthetic, before you awoke in your cabin aboard that most excellent vessel, he also ordered the insertion of Special Device 1031.”

He waited for me to ask what a Special Device 1031 was. I didn't.

“How does your head feel right now, Alfred? Does it hurt? Have you been suffering from headaches since you returned to Knoxville?”

He didn't wait for me to answer. The black metal box turned over and over between his hands. I saw two buttons, one blue, one red, and some kind of numeric keypad beneath them.

“Do you remember, after we rescued you from the clutches of Jourdain Garmot, asking me how we found you, since he had assured you Vosch had not been followed?”

This time he did wait for an answer. The silence drew out. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the little black box.

“You put something inside my head.”

“Not I. Samuel St. John did. Aboard the
Pandora.
I believe we covered this. Special Device 1031 is no bigger than the eraser of a pencil, Alfred. It has been implanted near the corpus callosum, the structure that connects the two hemispheres of your brain.”

“It's a tracking device?”

“That's one of its functions, yes. It has another. Inside Special Device 1031 is a tiny pellet, no bigger than the lead of our metaphorical pencil.”

He scooted forward in his chair and held the black box about a foot from my nose.

“The blue button arms the pellet. The red button begins the detonation sequence. Thirty seconds.”

“And the keypad?”

“A failsafe. If the correct code is entered before the thirty seconds expire, your headache is nothing that two hundred milligrams of ibuprofen can't handle. If not . . .” Now whispering:
“Boom.”

I watched as the pad of his index finger mashed down on the blue button. The red one lit up.

“You will cooperate, Alfred.” His finger now hovered over the red button. The red light lit up the grooves of his fingerprint. “And abandon any foolish notion of escape.”

He pressed the button. The number 30 popped up in the display window right above the keypad. It seemed to switch to 29—then 28—then 27—faster than a normal second lasted.

“It may seem cruel—even diabolical—but it's really quite humane. Your head will not literally explode, like you're imagining right now. It really takes very little explosive to kill a human being. The only outward sign usually noted is a distinct reddening of the eyes, as blood pours into the ocular cavities.”

15 . . . 14 . . . 13 . . .

“The code,” I whispered. “Punch in the code, Nueve. I know you won't do it.”

He went on like he didn't hear me. “Although some test subjects did bleed profusely through the ears and nose . . .”

8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . .

I lunged for the box—like that would do any good. He scooted back into the chair and his fingers flew over the keys.

I couldn't see what numbers he punched, but the red light went out.

I fell back gasping. My imagination was working overtime; I thought I could really feel it in the middle of my brain, the tiny explosive pellet, red hot and pulsing.

I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath. His voice had no playfulness when he spoke again. It was as hard and sharp as one of Dr. Mingus's diamond-bladed scalpels.

“There is no place on earth you can hide. Run from us, and we'll find you. Try to have it removed, you'll die. Defy us, and we'll literally blow your brains out. No heavenly being holds your fate in the palm of his hand, Alfred Kropp.
I
do. I am your guardian now and, like the angels themselves, I am above the laws of men. Beyond remorse, beyond pity, beyond judgment, beyond all moral consideration. From this moment forward, if you wish to pray to anyone, I suggest you pray to me.”

03:04:01:20

I lay on the bed for a few minutes after he left. I knew I wouldn't be alone for long.

It was probably a good idea bordering on a great one, while I still had a little privacy, to figure a way out of Camp Echo.

I gave myself a little pep talk.

“Okay, okay, the main thing is
don't panic
. This isn't so bad. You've been in worse situations. Fighting against a sword that can't be beaten. Battling sixteen million unkillable demons in the middle of the desert. Falling from thirty thousand feet without even a freakin' parachute. This is nothing. This is cake. Held hostage by ruthless secret agents. Separated from civilization by hundreds of miles of hostile, unfamiliar terrain. A tracking device implanted in your skull. And a bomb that literally blows your brains out with a touch of a button . . . Is that it? Is that the best they got?”

I sat on the edge for a minute or two, holding my head in my hands, rocking back and forth, as if to restore equilibrium to my flip-flopping thoughts.

“What is the mission? What must be done? That's what Samuel would say. What's the thing-that-must-be-done? Samuel, where are you? You're going after the wrong guys. Jourdain just wanted to burn down my house, take all my money, and kill me—these Company guys
really
want to mess with me.

“Forget about him; forget about Samuel. Samuel isn't here. Abby isn't here. Ashley's here. What are they going to do to Ashley? Kill her. But why would they kill her? Because she knows. She knows the plan and she'll rat them out to Abby. But Ashley's not dead yet. If she was, Nueve would have told me. He'd
enjoy
telling me.

“So Ashley's alive. I can't escape without Ashley. But I can't escape anyway. He'll just track me down. Well, I'll have take that chance . . . Maybe if I get a head start on them. . . The transmitter is tiny, the size of an eraser; its range can't be that great. With a good head start maybe . . . maybe . . .

“So I've got to get Ashley. Then we've got to get out of this valley. Then we've got to get out of Canada. Then we've got to get . . .”

Where?

Where in the whole world could I hide from them? Where would be safe?

“I've got to find Sam. He put the thing in my head; he'll know how to get it out.”

I pushed myself off the bed and swayed, holding my arms out from my sides like a tightrope walker for balance. Dr. Mingus must have drained half my blood the day before. What did OIPEP plan to do with my blood? They had taken it before to fight the demons, but they had the Seal now—why would they need my blood to fight demons they could control with Solomon's ring?

“Something else,” I muttered, closing my eyes, but that made the dizziness worse, so I opened them again. “Not demons. Something really evil. Mingus is a genetic engineer. . . . Cloning! They're cloning Kropp to make a . . . make a what? A clone army? Army of the Kropp clones? Man, that's
sick.
”

Sick . . . and senseless. The power of my blood didn't make me invincible. It wasn't like holy armor or anything.

Thinking of armor reminded me of the Knights of the Sacred Order. I never saw one of them in armor, but I did see a suit of it in a closet once, at a little Hansel and Gretel type house in Pennsylvania, where the mother of one of the knights lived. I wasted a few seconds trying to remember her name. I could see her face in my mind's eye, and the house set back in the woods. The house was close to a state park whose name I also couldn't remember near a little town not far from Harrisburg . . .

He flew into Harrisburg two nights ago, where he rented
a car and drove to a tiny hamlet called Suedberg.

Jourdain Garmot went to Suedberg, where the knight named Windimar had lived. Why? What was he looking for?

The last knightly quest . . . for the Thirteenth Skull.

So the Skull must have been connected somehow to the Knights of the Sacred Order. Maybe it was something they kept hidden, like the Sword. Maybe destroying my father's house wasn't about revenge . . . mayb e Jourdain was there looking for the Skull and then set the house on fire to destroy the evidence.

I was losing focus. Jourdain Garmot and the Thirteenth Skull didn't matter now. Medcon had planted the story of my death before I even came to Camp Echo, so Jourdain Garmot thought I was dead.

Maybe if I started moving something would come to me. The plan. The-thing-that-must-be-done. Take a step. Then the next step. Don't think about the 779th step. Just the first one.

I stumbled into the bathroom. That was like fifteen steps already.

Time for an inventory. Shower curtain and those little rings holding it to the rod. The rod? I gave it a shake. Aluminum, too flimsy. A bar of soap. A travel-sized plastic bottle of dandruff shampoo. Why had they given me dandruff shampoo? Was I flaky? I turned to the mirror and was shocked by my reflection. My face was no longer the familiar oval shape I'd had since childhood. I had lost nearly forty pounds since I stole Excalibur from beneath my father's desk. My face was thin and angular, which made my eyes seem very large on either side of my nose, now slightly crooked after being broken by Delivery Dude. I was so shocked by my appearance I forgot to hunt for dandruff. I looked like a vampire—only I was the opposite of a vampire: vampires drink other people's blood to give themselves life; I gave my blood to others to give
them
life.

I opened the medicine cabinet. No razors or other sharp objects, not even a pair of tweezers. A toothbrush, but it was plastic and the end was blunt—I'd have to sharpen it somehow and, even if I had a way to do it, I didn't have the time.

I decided to brush my teeth. God knew when I'd have another opportunity and, besides, brushing your teeth is one of those normal, mundane things that really center you.

A glob of toothpaste fell from my mouth onto the bandage around my hand and I rinsed it off without thinking.

I grabbed a towel and dabbed off the extra water, but the bandage still felt moist. I could feel my heartbeat in the palm. Maybe I should take it off and wash the wound with some soap. The last thing I needed was an infection.