I followed him back to my cabin. I told him my feet were cold and he just looked at me like I’d said something in Swahili, or maybe it was more like he spoke Swahili and I didn’t.
“There are some matters I must attend to,” Op Nine said. He left. I hoped one of those matters included socks and shoes. I sat on the bed. I picked at my toenails, which needed trimming. I was tempted to bite them down, but I hadn’t done that since I was ten, and some things you should move past.
I wondered what happened to Ashley after the helicopter rescue in Tennessee. Was her injury completely healed now? I had mixed feelings about her. She had saved my life, but she had also lied to me about who she was and why she was “attached” to me. I wondered if my feelings were mixed because I thought she was a nice person or if it was because I thought she was pretty.
OIPEP agents fell into two categories, as far as I could tell: the preppie, grad student type, of which Mike Arnold was the perfect example; and the stoic, more menacing type like Operative Nine. That guy was so stiff and precise that I wondered if he was one of those “unacknowledged technologies” that Abigail mentioned back in London.
Maybe he was a cyborg, but that seemed far-fetched. On the other hand, I was chasing after a magical ring that once belonged to King Solomon from the Bible and I didn’t seem to have trouble believing that.
The door swung open and a tall, tanned blonde with blue eyes about the size of quarters walked in, dressed in the standard-issue OIPEP jumpsuit. I stood up and we didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she reached out and hugged me. Ashley smelled good, like lilacs, only I wasn’t sure what lilacs smelled like; it was just the first word that popped into my head. She hugged me and I thought, Lilacs.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For saving my life.”
“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“And I wanted to apologize.”
“For what?”
“Tricking you like that in Knoxville.”
“Well, that’s sort of your job, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I guess.”
“What’s in the Holy Vessel?” I figured if anyone would tell me, it would be Ashley.
“I can’t tell you.”
“Do you know why Mike was trying to kill me?”
She looked away.
“Can you tell me why he stole the Seals?”
“We don’t know why.”
I was feeling light-headed again, so I sank back onto the bed.
“Is there a doctor on board?” I asked.
“Why, are you sick?”
“I feel really dizzy. Plus I found this sore under my . . .” I didn’t feel comfortable for some reason using the word “armpit.” “On my skin. I wouldn’t care, you know, I’m a pretty tough guy, played football and everything, plus I’ve had my share of rough scrapes over the past year, including being killed, but my mom’s cancer started with a sore spot and you know that runs in families. Not sore spots. Cancer. Well, I guess sore spots could run in families too . . .”
“Yes,” she said. She was smiling for some reason.
“There’s a doctor on board. You want me to get him?”
“Maybe in a little while. It’s better when I sit down.”
She sat down next to me as if she needed to feel better too. Her hair fell across her cheek as she leaned forward, swinging her long legs against the bunk.
“I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot lately,” I said.
“After she died, things got really weird.”
She nodded. She hooked a thick strand of her hair around her left ear and looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“You probably know all about my mom,” I said. “I bet OIPEP has a file on me and you had to read that when they, um, attached you to me. That’s how you knew my blood had the power to heal.”
“That’s pretty smart of you, Alfred.”
“So there is a file.”
“The Company keeps files on a lot of people.”
“How many people?”
“Practically everybody.”
“Why practically everybody?”
“Because practically everybody has the potential to be important.” “Well, I never saw myself that way. I mean, I know I’m the last living descendent of Lancelot, and my dad was pretty rich and important, but it was mostly dumb luck how I saved the world.”
She reached over and put her hand on the top of my hand.
“You’re very special, Alfred. You have a very unique gift; don’t ever forget that.”
“I don’t have any gifts.”
That was sort of an invitation for her to list my gifts, but she didn’t. For a tiny second I thought about putting my other hand on top of hers, but the second passed. She took her hand away.
“I have to go.”
“You’re on the team going in, aren’t you?”
She nodded. Her expression told me she wasn’t exactly thrilled she was on the team.
“Can I go too?”
She looked at me sharply. “Didn’t they tell you? You don’t have a choice.”