I broke the awkward silence first.
“You’re a SPA.”
“And what does that mean?” he asked quietly. He didn’t sound sarcastic.
“It means OIPEP’s rules don’t apply to you. Nobody’s rules apply to you.”
“You’re forgetting the natural ones.”
“Natural ones?”
“Gravity, for example. Gravity applies to me.”
“I’m not trying to be funny here, Op Nine.”
“Neither am I.”
“Is that why nobody can know your name? So when you’re done murdering, raping, and pillaging, there’s nothing to hang on you because you don’t officially, like, exist or something?”
“That much is true: I do not officially exist. There is no birth certificate, no hospital record, no valid driver’s license, no passport, no Social Security card, no fingerprint record, no document—or witness, for that matter—of any kind anywhere that establishes or confirms my existence. Whole weeks pass, months even, when I forget what my name used to be, when I forget I even had a name. I am no one, Alfred, and my name is whatever it needs to be.”
I backed up as he spoke, right into the door leading to the hallway—and freedom.
He stood up. “Alfred, listen to me. There is a very old saying: ‘If it is necessary, it is possible.’ Our organization is tasked with an extremely delicate and dangerous mission, making many distasteful things necessary, and I am the designated agent of necessity. I am the one who does that which must be done. That is all Section Nine means. I am the sole operative in the Company fully authorized to do what must be done, even if what must be done falls outside the normal boundaries of acceptable behavior.”
“Oh, well, that’s a nice way to put it!”
“It is the best way. The Operative Nine cannot hesitate to do what must be done to achieve the objective.”
“It’s a rotten job, but somebody’s gotta do it?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s a phrase that applies to garbagemen, Op Nine!
Garbagemen don’t murder people!”
“Neither do I.”
“That’s not what you told me. You told me you murdered somebody in Abkhazia.”
“I never said I murdered them.”
“You said you killed them.”
“So I did.”
“So you said it or so you killed them?”
“Both.”
“Since when is killing somebody not murder? What if I get in the way of the mission . . . you’d kill me too, wouldn’t you? Is that what they did in Abkhazia? Got in your way?”
“I’m not going to talk about Abkhazia.”
“Why not? You said it wasn’t classified.”
“You asked if it was classified and I answered that it was painful. That is not the same as saying it wasn’t classified.”
“So it is classified? Why do you talk in circles like that? Look, I’m going to be honest with you, Op Nine. I’m a little freaked out right now. I’ve been lied to . . .”
“By whom? Who has lied to you?”
“I—I’m not sure, but somebody has.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alfred.”
“Well, of course you’re going to say you don’t know what I’m talking about! Even if you did know what I’m talking about, you’re authorized to say you don’t, and you probably would even if you weren’t.”
“Alfred, I think you still may be suffering from some lingering effects of the—”
“Oh, you bet. I’ve got lingering effects out the yin-yang! Kidnapped, nearly drowned, thrown from an airplane, shot, and my brain scooped out by something I don’t even believe in! From the beginning you people haven’t leveled with me. Mike didn’t and you’re not now. For all I know you lied to me about my mom.”
“About your mom?”
“About her being dead. Maybe she really isn’t dead. Maybe she’s as alive as you and me and King Paimon.”
“Alfred, your mother died when you were twelve years old, before any of—”
“I know that! Or I knew that! I don’t know what I know anymore. I don’t even know what I don’t know! The inside of my head feels all crumbly, like stale birthday cake left out too long.”
“I see,” Op Nine said. He was frowning, staring at me intensely, which didn’t help matters. I wasn’t crying, but his face was distorted, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror; the earlobes looked particularly long and Goofy-like.
I went on. “But one thing I do know is that you people are hiding something. Something doesn’t add up here.”
I rubbed my temples. The room spun around my aching head. Now it was as if my brain were made of broken glass, like the glass in Betty Tuttle’s hand that fell when Mr. Needlemier said I was worth four hundred million dollars, shattered into a thousand pieces, then slapped back together with glue.
“It doesn’t add up. There’s something you’re not telling me, which is a kind of lie even if you’re not telling a lie lie.”
“ ‘Lie lie’?”
“None of it makes any sense. Why am I here? Why did you bring me, a fifteen-year-old kid with no qualifications whatsoever in the covert op department, on your big mission to find Mike and the Vessel? Tell me why I’m here, Op Nine. Give me one good reason and I’ll shut up and we’ll go get Mike, which there seems to be a very mysterious lack of, the getting part, since that was the reason we flew four thousand miles per hour in the first place to get here. Why are we hanging out in this hotel room? That’s my question.”
“We were waiting for nightfall.”
“Well, it’s almost seven o’clock. It oughtta be fallen by now.”
“Then we ought to be going.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You offered to come.”
“I did?”
He nodded. I thought about it. “I don’t remember offering that.”
I slid down the door until my butt hit the carpet, dropped my head into my hands, and closed my eyes. I could smell something foreign, a sickly sweet odor like rotting fruit. I sniffed my hand. It came from me. I smelled like a rotten banana. It wasn’t a stench like BO (though I couldn’t remember taking a shower since that day on the Pandora—not that my not being able to remember meant anything), so what was it? I’d heard gangrene can stink to high heaven as your flesh rots right off your bones. Did I have gangrene? Had one of my long toenails cut into my toe, causing an infection? Why was my flesh rotting off? Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe something was leaking from the splintered glass of my mind, and that leaking something smelled like rot.
I felt him touch my shoulder.
“There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?” I whimpered. “There’s something very bad happening to me.”
“I think so, Alfred.”
“Because I looked into its eyes.” I remembered Carl writhing on the desert sand, screaming gibberish as he tore at his own face.
“It could be.”
“Well, is it or not? Aren’t you the demonologist?”
“Alfred,” he said softly, patting my shoulder. “Alfred, it will soon be over,” he said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”