Operative Nine took a deep breath; he was going to go on, but at that moment the door opened and a short man wearing a tweed jacket walked in. He had a round face and pouty lips, with oval, wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his sharp nose. The most striking thing about him, though, was his hair: snow white, very fine, gathered around his round head like a crown of fluffy dandelion seeds. He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and the inventor guy from the Back to the Future movies.
He was talking as he came in. At first I thought he was talking to himself; then I saw the wireless setup in his ear and the microphone dangling by a thin black wire near his mouth.
“Of course, Mr. Prime Minister, but it isn’t my place to tell you what to say to the media. Perhaps you should confer with our MEDCON folks. . . . Media Control, yes. Excuse me, can I put you on hold? I have another call . . .
“Hello, Mr. President. How is the golf game? . . . Yes, it is quite an extraordinary development. . . . Well, that’s very kind of you, Mr. President, but I don’t think we need the U.S. military, not at this juncture. Would you excuse me for a moment? I have the British PM on hold . . . Thank you.
“Are you there, Mr. Prime Minister? . . . I would tell the media the current weather patterns are an aberration due to global warming and leave it at that. They adore global warming, you know. . . . What was that? . . . What’s the size of basketballs? . . . Hail? Well, I would advise the public to stay indoors. Excuse me, can I put you on hold again?
“No, Mr. President, stealth bombers would be quite useless, I’m afraid. . . . Well, that depends on what you mean by the term ‘contained.’ SATCOM has them pegged in one location in the Himalayas. . . . Yes, of course we will keep you posted. . . . Thank you, Mr. President, I will . . . Yes, we do have a plan. . . . Would you excuse me for a moment?”
He stared at me through the entire conversation, tapping one foot impatiently as he talked, running a hand through his frizzy white hair. Maybe that’s why it stood every which way.
“Mr. Prime Minister, are you there? I’m not going to argue with you. . . . Oh, indeed I think the public would accept the global warming cover, even if they are the size of Volkswagens—excuse me, did you say the size of Volkswagens? . . . Oh, dear. Well, it’s rather like the Blitz, isn’t it? Hello, hello? Damn, lost him. Mr. President, are you still . . . ?”
He shook his head in frustration, and the hair whipped about like a white tornado spinning around his head.
He ripped the headset off and shoved it toward Abigail Smith.
“Take this accursed thing, Smith. I’m sick to death of politicians!”
He stood over me, smiling down with teeth not nearly as bright nor as straight as Abigail Smith’s.
“Alfred, this is Dr. François Merryweather,” she said. “Director of OIPEP.”
“I’m Alfred Kropp,” I said.
“I know who you are. And I am more than relieved to know that you know who you are.”
“That’s about all I know,” I said.
“Baby steps, Alfred! Baby steps! How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”
“What’s the matter with the weather?” I asked.
“They have drawn a shroud over the earth,” Operative Nine said.
“Really, must you always be so lugubrious, Nine? Talk about drawing shrouds! My chest always hurts around you, the atmosphere is so thick with melancholy.”
“I will strain to be jollier, Director.”
“Jolliness cannot be strained at, Nine. Look at those abysmal circus clowns. So, Alfred, here you are, quite safe, though not quite sound. However, the doctor assured me we can expect a full recovery. If there is anything you need, anything at all, you must not hesitate to let us know. Is there anything you need right now?”
“Yes,” I said. “My mom. I want my mom.”
He looked at Abigail Smith, who shrugged.
“You said anything at all,” I said.
“I’m afraid we’re fresh out of mothers here. However, perhaps you might like something to eat? What is your favorite food? Pizza? Hamburger? Perhaps a taco? Or ice cream. What is your favorite flavor?”
“I don’t want any of your freakin’ ice cream! I want to go home!” I was starting to lose it again.
“Alfred,” Dr. Smith said.
A loud buzzer interrupted her, followed by a man’s voice from a speaker hidden somewhere in the room.
“Dr. Merryweather, I think you’d better get down here.”
“Down where?” Merryweather asked.
“The morgue.”
He exchanged a look with Abigail Smith and Op Nine.
“Can’t it wait?” he asked.
“Uh, I don’t think so. And I think you’d better bring Kropp.”
“Bring Kropp?”
“Definitely bring Kropp.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for the morgue,” I said.
“I’ll meet you there,” Merryweather snapped at us, and hurried from the room.
Operative Nine and Abigail Smith untied my arms and helped me to my feet. Pain shot up my leg and my knee buckled. Operative Nine caught me before I hit the floor.
“What’s the matter with my leg?” I asked.
“You have been shot.”
“Shot? What about my arm? What happened to it?”
“Shot.”
“Two shots?”
He nodded. We were hustling down the corridor toward an elevator at the end of the hall. The walls were cinderblock, painted lime green, and the floor was gray. Abigail had one side of me and Operative Nine the other.
“What kind of guns do demons use?”
“You weren’t shot by demons; you were shot by Bedouins.”
Abigail punched the Down button.
“Bedouins! What do they have against me?”
“Nothing.”
“So they shot me just for the heck of it?”
The elevator door slid open and they helped me inside. I leaned against the back wall, trying to catch my breath. Abigail pressed the button labeled “LL24” and we started to descend. “They shot you because their master told them to,” Op Nine said.
“Their master? A demon?”
“The Hyena.”
“A hyena ordered some Bedouins to shoot me?”
“It is more complicated than that.”
“How could it be more complicated than that?”
Abigail coughed.
The door slid open and we made an immediate right out of the elevator into a huge room with a metal floor and a bank of freezer-looking doors along the length of one wall.
Dr. Merryweather was there, and the same guy in the white coat who had examined me. He waved us into the room, a finger pressed against his lips. He then pointed that same finger at the bank of doors.
One of them was open and the shelf that had been slid out held a body bag. Half the bag lay on the shelf; the other half looked as if whoever was in that bag was sitting up.
“What is it?” Abigail whispered, clearly troubled by the sight of a dead body sitting up.
“Listen!” the doctor whispered back.
I couldn’t hear anything at first, but after a second I did, a kind of hissing sound. After another second or two the sound took shape and I could make out a word.
That word was “Kropp.”
“I come in to prep the body for autopsy and that’s what I find.” The doctor’s voice was shaking.
Again, louder this time: “Kropp!”
“Open the bag,” Op Nine said.
“You’re kidding, right?” both the doctor and Merryweather said at the same time.
“Open the bag.”
“Look,” the doctor said. “I’m a civilian, a private contractor . . . I’m not a field operative. I’ve got a wife and family . . .”
“Open the bag.”
“Do as he says,” Dr. Merryweather said.
The doctor bit his lip, then walked over to the bag and slowly drew the zipper up and over the head inside. He stepped back quickly as the bag fell open, the material gathering around the body’s waist.
The first thing I noticed was how ripped this guy was, a real Schwarzenegger type. The second thing was the gaping hole in the middle of his chest. And third, he had no eyes.
His lips barely moved, but the sound clearly came from his mouth, a hiss forming into the same word again.
“Kropp. ”
“Yes,” Op Nine said loudly. “He is here. Kropp is here.”
“Alfred Kropp,” the dead man hissed. He had been a hairy guy, and the contrast between the pale, dead flesh and the coarse black hair was striking.
Op Nine gave me a little nudge and I blurted out, “Yes, I’m here.”
“We know thee. ”
My knees started to give way, but not for the same reason they did back in my cozy, safe little room. I grabbed on to Op Nine’s forearm and held tight.
“As you now know us.”
I recognized its voice. I had heard it before, like a thousand years before, and it came back to me then: the little bedroom in Horace Tuttle’s house, Mike dragging me through the broken window, Ashley rescuing me on the great white stallion, the Pandora, the race across the desert to find Mike before he could release the infernal hordes . . . everything, up to the moment when I looked into the demon’s eyes—and that particular moment was a pit, a lightless hole with no bottom that I leaped across, bringing me here to this morgue deep in the bowels of OIPEP headquarters, where a demon spoke through a dead man’s lips.
“What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?” Op Nine asked.
The body’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dr.
Merryweather leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Perhaps you should ask him, Alfred.”
“Me?”
He nodded to Op Nine, who repeated the question in my other ear.
My voice quivering, I asked, “What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?”
“The Seal. ”
Op Nine whispered, “But you have the Seal—do you not?”
“But don’t you have the Seal?” I asked the dead guy.
“The Lesser Seal, Alfred Kropp. The Vessel of our imprisonment. Bring it to us, last son of Lancelot. ”
“O Wise and Magnificent One,” Op Nine whispered.
“O Wise and Magnificent One,” I echoed.
“We do not possess the Holy Vessel.”
“We don’t?” I asked Op Nine. I was shocked. He jerked his head toward the body as if to say, Don’t talk to me; talk to the cadaver!
I cleared my throat and said to the cadaver, “We, um, we don’t have it.”
There was a horrific screech like the sound of a car slamming on its brakes, the body on the slide-out tray jerked, and the head snapped forward, casting deep shadows over the empty eye sockets.
The head fell back, and the scream petered out into a soft hiss.
As I looked into those black holes, the blackness washed over me, and I went under, like a little kid in the surf. The blackness was as heavy as the weight of water all around me, and I could hear children crying, a million voices wailing in hunger and fear. I saw endless rows of bodies stacked like dried cornstalks in the autumn and a sky dark with roiling clouds. I saw the smoking ruins of cities and people scurrying everywhere, their clothes caked in ashes and dust, glass from broken windows crunching under their feet.
I saw the land stripped of green and all the other colors of life, pallid nameless things squirmed in the thick mud where the rivers used to run. And over all of it hung the sickly sweet stench of death.
From very far away I heard Op Nine’s voice calling me.
“Alfred! Alfred, what do you see?”
My mouth opened, but the only sound that came out was a wimpy echo of the hiss escaping Carl’s blue lips.
“Bring us the Seal, Alfred Kropp,” the corpse hissed again, and then it toppled off the tray onto the floor, landing on its bare shoulder with a sickening smack, and lay still.
Op Nine strode over to the body and bent down, examining the face carefully. One of Carl’s hands shot up and grabbed him around the throat. He tried to pull himself free, but the dead man’s grip was too tight. Abby and the doctor rushed over and pried at the fingers until suddenly they relaxed.
Op Nine scooted back, clutching his throat and gasping for breath.
The doctor was staring at the body.
“Impossible!” he breathed.
“Oh, we’re up to our hips in impossibilities,” Merryweather said. He turned to me. “What did you see?”
I cleared my throat. It felt raw, as if I’d been screaming.
“The end . . . the end of everything.”
He turned toward Op Nine. “According to your briefing, Nine, the IAs had absconded with the Lesser Seal.”
“That was the operating assumption,” Op Nine answered. “Clearly we must arrive at an alternative theory.”
“The Hyena,” Abby said suddenly. “He’s taken it.”
“Mike got away?” I asked.
“Both he and a sand-foil were missing after the battle,”
Op Nine said. “It is a reasonable assumption he did not perish after Paimon obtained the ring.”
“Oh, another assumption!” Merryweather said crossly.
“Your assumptions and a buck ninety will buy me a tall coffee of the day at Starbucks!”
Op Nine dropped his eyes and didn’t say anything, though his lips tightened.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Alfred,” Merryweather said. “OIPEP is the only organization of its kind in the world, with practically unlimited resources and an intelligence network that spans every country on the planet. We shall do what any powerful, multinational bureaucracy would do in such a crisis: we shall hold a meeting!”