I dreamed I was sitting on a hilltop with an old man. We leaned against an ancient oak tree, watching workmen on the promontory below stack great white stones, one on top of the other, and when one stone slid into place more workmen filled the cracks with mortar.
I asked the old man what they were building.
“Camelot,” he answered.
The castle was rising three hundred feet above an inlet filled with jagged rocks and razor-sharp outcroppings of stone. I could hear the crash of surf and, just beneath it, a high-pitched wail, like a swift current hidden beneath calm water.
“I’ve been here before,” I told the old man.
He nodded. “So have I.”
“Who’s that crying?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “It is I.”
Then he reached up and unzipped his face. The flaps of skin fell away. He pulled out his skull, white at first, like the stones of the castle beneath us; then it turned clear as glass. Only the eye sockets remained dark, filled with a shadow that no light could chase away.
“Touch.”
I woke up soaked in sweat, still lying on top of the covers in my jumpsuit, my wounded hand throbbing beneath its bandage. Someone was in the room with me. I saw his hiking boots and, resting between them, the end of his black cane.
“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.”