The wheel spun counterclockwise and the round door swung open. A big man dressed in black, with enormous ears and a face that reminded me of a bloodhound, stepped inside and looked down at me beneath the lavender-smelling sheets.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Alfred Kropp.”
“I know who you are,” he said.
“I know who you are too,” I said. “Well, not your name, but I remember you. You came to my hospital room in London. Where’s Abigail . . . I mean, Dr. Smith?”
As if on cue, Abigail Smith, Special Agent-in-Charge, Field Operations Division, of the Office of Interdimensional Paradoxes and Extraordinary Phenomena, stepped into the cabin and swung the door shut behind her.
“Hello, Alfred,” she said.
She looked just like I remembered, her bright blond hair in a tight bun. But this time her three-inch heels were replaced with black lace-up boots and she wore a black turtleneck and pants.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Aboard the jetfoil Pandora, somewhere off the coast of Oman,” she answered.
“Oh.” I had no idea where Oman was. “Why?”
“There has been a . . . development that has necessitated your extraction from the civilian interface,” the dog-face man intoned.
“Huh?”
“What Operative Nine means is you were kidnapped for your own good, Alfred.”
“Operative Nine?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding toward Mr. Dog-Face. “Op Nine for short.”
“What’s his real name?”
“Whatever it needs to be,” Op Nine said.
Abby said, “Only the director knows his real name.”
“How come?”
“The nature of his work.”
“And that is?”
“Classified,” he said.
“That’s pretty clunky, though, Operative Nine,” I said. “Why don’t you just use a code name like ‘Bob’?”
“ ‘Bob’ would be more an alias than a code name, don’t you think?” Abigail was smiling.
“What’s going on?” I asked, struggling to sit up, but my head was throbbing and the room was spinning, and I decided sitting up wasn’t such a good idea at that moment.
“We don’t know the answer to that question,” Abby said.
“It seems an odd turn of events, given what we know about Mike Arnold’s plans.”
“Maybe that’s something you could share with me,” I said. “Mike’s plans.”
“After he was terminated, Michael Arnold stole two very valuable items from the OIPEP vaults. We are on our way to intercept him before he can put them to use.”
“What did he take?” I asked, and waited for the usual answer: That’s classified.
Op Nine glanced at Abby, who gave him a sharp nod. He looked at me. His eyes were very dark, almost black.
“The Seals of Solomon,” he said in that deep, undertaker-like voice. If he was waiting for some sign of recognition from me, he was going to be waiting for a long time. I just stared back.
“You have heard of King Solomon,” he said.
“From the Bible, right?”
“Yes. In the days of his reign, Solomon possessed two items of great power, immeasurable gifts from heaven. The Great Seal and the Lesser Seal, also called the Holy Vessel. These two charges he jealously guarded until his death three thousand years ago. The Great Seal was lost in antiquity, but the Lesser Seal was recovered from its hiding place in Babylon by an archeological expedition in 1924—”
Abby cut off the lecture. “The Greater Seal, or Seal of Solomon, is a ring, Alfred. The Company recovered it in the 1950s from a now-defunct apocalyptic death cult in the Sudan—” “Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say the Seal of Solomon is a ring? Like a wear-on-your-finger-type ring?”
“Precisely.
“Have you paged Elijah Wood? I think I saw this movie.”
She smiled. “The ring to which you refer is a product of art, a fiction. The Great Seal of Solomon is an artifact of history. It belongs to our world, not an imaginary one. Most significantly, Solomon’s ring is not the creation of evil. Of course, in the wrong hands it could be used to that purpose, and that is precisely why we recovered it and kept it safe for the past fifty-five years—”
“Until Mike stole it.”
“We have since launched a complete overhaul of our security protocols.”
“Boy, that’s a comfort. So Mike stole these two things from you guys . . . and then comes to Knoxville to kill me. Why?”
They looked at each other.
“We don’t know,” Abigail said. “We were hoping you might.”
“Me? OIPEP’s looking to me for answers? We’re in bigger trouble than I thought. What about Ashley?”
Op Nine frowned. “What about her?”
“Why was she spying on me?”
Again they looked at each other.
“The Company often assigns operatives to keep tabs on Special Subjects.”
“ ‘Special Subjects’? I’m a Special Subject?”
“How could the last son of Lancelot not be a Special Subject?” Abby asked tenderly. “Mike’s entrance into your particular interface took all of us by surprise. Fortunately, Ashley was watching your house when Mike made his move.”
“So you knock me out and bring me to this boat off the coast of Oman—where is that, Africa or something?—to do . . . what? ”
“Intercept Michael Arnold before he can use the ring to open the Lesser Seal.”
“Lesser Seal . . .”
“The Holy Vessel,” Op Nine said.
“Why don’t you want the Holy Vessel opened?”
For the third time they exchanged a glance. I was like the little kid in the room while the parents danced around the facts-of-life lecture.
“The ring, the Great Seal,” Op Nine said slowly, “is the key. Without it, the wearer cannot control the . . . agents confined within the Vessel. Indeed, without the ring, the Lesser Seal cannot even be broken. One without the other is useless. With both . . .” He took a deep breath. “Catastrophe.”
The door swung open and a guy in a black jumpsuit like Ashley’s stepped in, carrying a tray with orange juice and two slices of toast.
“Ah,” Op Nine said. “The food is here.” He seemed relieved.
“Not much of it, though,” I said, trying again to sit up. Op Nine bent to help me. The room whirled around my head. I wondered why I felt so light-headed and weak. What was in that shot Ashley gave me on the chopper—and why had she given me a shot in the first place?
I drank the tall glass of orange juice down in three gulps. The toast was cut into quarters and that’s how I ate it, stuffing a whole quarter in my mouth and barely chewing before I swallowed.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me see if I have all this. After you guys fired Mike for trying to take Excalibur, he breaks into your vaults and steals the two Seals of Solomon. I’m still not clear on what they are or what they do, but anyway, after that you assigned Agent Ashley to keep tabs on me because now I’m a person of special interest or something. Mike shows up, kidnaps me, takes me up into the mountains to kill me—only Mike knows why—and Ashley rescues me in the nick of time. Now we’re on a boat on our way to . . . where? ”
“The nexus,” Op Nine said.
“The what?”
“The center. The place of opening.”
“Right. Gotcha. And the plan is to stop Mike before he can pull off this opening.”
“Correct.”
“Or else . . . ? ”
“Catastrophe.”
A bell went off, a blaring sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Op Nine checked his watch.
“It’s time for the briefing,” he said to Abigail.
She nodded, then turned to me and gave my shoulder a little pat.
“We have to go, Alfred.”
“When are you taking me home?”
They both looked away.
“You’re not takin
g me home, are you?” I asked.
“You’ll be safe here, Alfred,” Abby said.
“I’d rather go home and take my chances.”
Abby was looking at Op Nine. She pursed her fat red lips and for some reason I thought of goldfish, those big koi you see sometimes in little ponds outside Japanese restaurants.
He said, “Perhaps we will discuss it, once the Seals have been recovered.”
They left, slamming the big round metal door closed behind them. The wheel turned and I heard a clanking sound, like a dead bolt sliding home. It hit me then that I had traded one kidnapper for another. OIPEP might not want to kill me like Mike did, but I was at their mercy just the same.
12
I don’t know how long I lay there, waiting for them to come back. It seemed a very long time. There was really nothing to do, no magazines or books or a television or a radio, and I still felt light-headed and kind of hollow, like a scooped-out pumpkin. After a while I drifted off to sleep. When there’s nothing to do, I sleep. I’m like a dog that way.
I had a horrible dream. First I was swimming, which wasn’t so horrible, since I couldn’t swim in real life. The sun burned high overhead, the waves rolled gently over my bare back, and the warm water seemed to buoy me up so swimming took hardly any effort. I was in the middle of the ocean, no shore in sight, and the water was this deep forest green and smelled rich, like fertile soil. Then I dived beneath the surface and things started to get freaky. I morphed into this scale-less fish, big-headed, with grayish skin, a white underbelly like a catfish, and a toothless mouth. I changed into this fish, and then I started to grow.
I grew till I was about the size of a whale shark, this gray and white behemoth of the sea, gulping hundreds of gallons into my wide, toothless mouth and shooting them out through my gills. I felt something pricking my fish-skin: hundreds of little silvery fish with suckers for mouths were attaching themselves to me as I swam. More and more of the little sucker fish appeared out of the depths and latched on to me, until thousands carpeted every inch, and I could feel them sucking the life out of me. I began to sink deeper and deeper as my life force waned, and the water began to turn black and very cold.
I shivered. I’m not sure fish are capable of shivering, but in this dream anything seemed possible, even something like a white-bellied Kropp Fish.
I woke up and I was still shivering.
The porthole was shining brightly and light reflecting off the ocean was dancing on the glass. Right beside the porthole, Op Nine leaned against the bulkhead.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“We are two hours from the insertion point,” he said.
“I love your super-secret-agent Tom Clancy lingo,” I said.
“Extreme extraction. Special Subject. Insertion point. What happens after we’re inserted into the point?”
I sat up and a wave of dizziness swept over me. Someone, probably Op Nine, since I had a feeling he had been assigned as my minder, had brought me another big glass of orange juice. I gulped it down.
“Then we have approximately six hours,” Op Nine said.
“Six hours to do what?”
“Stop the Hyena before he can unlock the Lesser Seal.”
“ ‘Hyena’?”
“Mike Arnold.”
“That’s his code name, Hyena?”
“You don’t like it? We thought it most apropos.”
“It’s okay, but my big problem with code names is why use one when everybody knows the real name?”
“Because that would offend our super-secret-agent Tom Clancy sensibilities.”
He motioned toward the foot of the bed.
“Perhaps you would like to dress before we reach Marsa Alam.”
“Huh?” I had no idea I wasn’t dressed. Then I saw I was wearing a hospital gown. Why had OIPEP stuck me in a hospital gown?
I slid out of bed and grabbed the bundle of clothes. He just stood there, staring at me with those dark eyes. I hoped he didn’t plan to stand there while I got dressed.
“Is there someplace I can maybe wash up and brush my teeth?” Running my tongue over them felt like I was licking carpet, and not the thin, worn kind in the Tuttle house, but something with a thicker pile.
“Of course. Left down the corridor, last door on the right at the terminus of the hall.”
Terminus of the hall. He didn’t have any accent that I could detect, but he talked like English was his second language. Who says “terminus of the hall”?
Op Nine opened the round door for me. I turned left, one hand pressing the clothes against my chest, the other clutching the gown closed behind me as I shuffled down the hall. In case you didn’t know, hospital gowns are open in the back with just a little drawstring to tie them, and therefore my naked butt was flapping in the breeze. The hall was packed with agents hurrying up and down, and a few stopped and stared as I passed.
I thought I heard a couple of snickers and once the word “pimple,” though it might have been “dimple,” which made sense too.
I reached the terminus of the hall and went through the last door on the right.
I was in a tiny bathroom, maybe two or three times the size of an airplane bathroom. I barely fit in the shower, but it had one of those removable shower heads on a flexible tube with the adjustable sprayers for regular or massaging.
I stayed in that shower for a long time, leaning against the wall as the water pounded on my dimple, wondering what this dizziness was about and if it had something to do with jet lag. I found a sore spot in my left armpit and worried about that—I knew your lymph nodes were in your pits, and my mom had died of cancer. Cancer ran in families, though hers didn’t start in her armpits.
I grabbed a towel from the peg on the wall and dried off, getting a little dizzy when I bent over to do my legs. I wrapped the towel around my middle, took a deep breath, and sat on the toilet.
I hadn’t cried since this whole thing began back in Knoxville, but I finally had a little time on my hands and some privacy to get some quality crying in, so I started to cry.
Half a world away, kids were piling onto the school bus. Was anybody saying, “Hey, whatever happened to that big kid, Kropp?” Were any teachers looking at the empty desk and frowning, or was Horace camping out at the police station waiting for news? Was Kenny lying in his bunk, whispering in the dark, wondering aloud where Alfred Kropp had gone?
And in the afternoons the parks and practice fields would be packed with players, soccer and football teams wallowing in that sweaty camaraderie of jocks. Geeks would be playing the latest version of Doom and IMing each other with tips. The garage bands would be revving up the amps, moms would be sticking the chicken in the oven, and neighborhood streets would echo with the shouts of kids playing in the fallen leaves and soon it will be Thanksgiving . . .
I tried not to think of all those things, but the more I tried, the more I thought. Once, I thought normal life was boring and I hated it. Now I would give everything to go back.
But Thanksgiving made me think of food and food made me think of my teeth, and that brought me back to my senses. The thought of brushing my teeth calmed me down, I guess because it was an everyday activity that had nothing to do with biblical kings and extreme extractions and secret organizations with vaults filled with deadly artifacts that bring catastrophe if you mess with them.
I found a toothbrush still in its packaging and a travel-size tube of Crest in the cabinet mounted next to the mirror. No floss, but you can’t have everything. I brushed until my gums bled and watched my pink spit swirl down the drain.
I dressed in the black OIPEP-issued jumpsuit. The underwear was boxers and I was a tighty-whitey man, but they were clean, so I wasn’t about to complain. I filed the little fact that OIPEP men wear boxers; it might be useful later, but I doubted it. Most little facts aren’t.
I decided not to go back to my cabin. I probably was supposed to, but the crying had freed up something in me, like a lot of good cries wil
l.
I walked back down the corridor to a stairway that wound upward, went up two flights, and stepped onto the deck, into brilliant sunshine. A stiff breeze blew from the stern, whipping my damp hair back from my face. I wondered if the Pandora had a barber on board.
I walked toward the front of the ship. To my left was the open water, but there was a dark line of land in the distance. Sunlight danced off the pointy tips of the waves, so bright, it left glittering spots in my vision. I passed several people in deck chairs or leaning on the railing, men and women dressed like tourists with cameras hanging from their necks and a dab of white sunscreen on their noses. I looked to my right and saw the upper part of the ship, where a sign was painted in big red letters: “Red Sea Adventures.” There were more letters in another language right beside it; Arabic, I guess, with those funny curlicues and fat dots. So that was OIPEP’s cover: we were happy Westerners on a jaunt before hitting the Pyramids.
I reached the front and leaned against the railing. I couldn’t see any other ships. I looked straight down and saw how fast we were going. When Abigail called the Pandora a jetfoil, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Now, leaning over the rail, I knew. The Pandora rode through the water on two huge fins, its underside about six feet above the surface. With this kind of setup, the Pandora could give a world-class speedboat a run for its money.
Op Nine appeared beside me. I was busted. To distract him, I pointed at the dark line on the horizon and asked, “What’s that?”
“Egypt,” Op Nine answered.
“So this is the Mediterranean?”
“No, this is the Red Sea,” he said. Just five minutes ago I had looked at a sign that read, “Red Sea Adventures.”
“I’m gonna need some shoes,” I said. I’m a pretty tall guy, but this Operative Nine towered over me. Tilting my chin up, I could see the black tangle of his nose hair.
He didn’t say anything, so I asked, “So what happens when we reach the insertion point?”
“We will wait for nightfall. Then the race for the nexus.”
“Nexus—where in Egypt is that?”