The Thirteenth Skull (10 page)

Two men appeared on either side of me, the guy who clubbed me in the car and the big driver. Each grabbed an arm while Vosch stayed behind me, hands on my shoulders.

“Jordain, listen to me,” I said. “I don't know about any Thirteenth Skull. I don't know about any skulls, period. All I know is all this crap has to stop somewhere and maybe we could agree it stops now, with me and you.”

Jordain nodded to Vosch, who forced me down to my knees.

“It won't work, Jordain—why do you think your goons couldn't kill me before? He won't let it happen ...”

He was standing over me, the black sword shining in his hand, as I knelt at his feet.

“Who? Who will not let it happen?” he asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled that anyone would care.

I almost didn't answer. Did I believe it myself? Did I really believe it the way Bennacio and Samuel believed it?

“Michael,” I whispered. “The Archangel.”

He stared down at my upturned face without expression.

“I'm—um—I'm his beloved.”

They burst out laughing, even Mr. Flat-Face, who didn't strike me as someone with a finely developed sense of humor. Except Jourdain. Jourdain wasn't laughing.

“Yes, the Angel,” he whispered. “It is almost time for Michael's return—and the return of the gift. She has promised me and I believe her. The gift shall be given again to the true heir of Camelot, but not before the Thirteenth Skull is borne home.” He nodded to Vosch, who shoved his knee into the middle of my back, forcing me down. My right cheek smacked against the hardwood.

“I don't understand!” I hollered. Maybe if I kept him talking I could postpone the inevitable. “Who promised you what? What gift? What true heir of Camelot?”

“
Au revoir
, Alfred Kropp,” Jordain Garmot said. He raised the black sword over his head, gripping the dragon-headed hilt with both hands.

“Saint Michael,” I whispered. “Save me.”

As if in answer, every window in the storehouse exploded inward and wide shafts of bright white light shot into the room.

05:03:42:19

It happened very fast.

Black canisters sailed through the broken windows, vomiting thick white smoke as they fell. My captors screamed at one another in French, except for the word “Kropp,” which I guess is “Kropp” in any language.

In seconds the room was filled with a thick, choking fog; it felt like someone was pressing hot matches against my eyes. I couldn't see anything but could hear the sharp
pop-pop
of small-arms fire and the bumping and cursing that always came with people stumbling around in the fog. Someone yanked me to my feet and I instinctively flung my head back to butt him. He blocked my head with one hand and slapped a hood over my face with the other, I guess to protect my eyes from the tear gas.

“I am trying to help you, Miss Alfreda,” a voice purred in my ear.

Nueve.

He whipped me around, only I couldn't see him through the hood. I heard a loud
snap!
and the handcuffs fell off my wrists and clattered to the floor. Then he lifted me right off my feet and slung me over his shoulder. The hood fell off my head.

He sprinted to the wall, grabbed a thick black cord hanging there, and pulled it through a harness he wore around his waist. He gave the cord three sharp tugs. The rope pulled taut and we began to rise toward the broken-out window.

I heard Jourdain screech in a voice filled with rage,
“Alfred Kropp!”
before we were pulled through the window and then straight up. An Apache helicopter was at the other end of the black cord, and soon we were six stories high, swooping over the rooftops of the Old City. Since I was slung facedown over Nueve's shoulder, I had a real bird's eye view of downtown Knoxville.

I shouted, “Why don't they pull us up?”

“Too dangerous!” he shouted back.

Too
dangerous
?

We soared over downtown, past the First Tennessee Bank building and then Samson Towers, where this whole mess started, a dark monolith of glass and glittering steel; then we were over the river and the boats bobbed four hundred feet below my swaying head, anchored in the murky water. And there was the UT Medical Center and the Army Reserve base on Alcoa Highway, which we seemed to be following as it snaked through the foothills. We were heading toward the airport.

I guessed it was finally safe to pull us up, because the helicopter paused over the highway and we began to rise toward the open hold. I heard sirens below and, peering around Nueve's torso, saw the spinning red lights of two motorcycle cops as they barreled around a hairpin curve, coming from the city. I slapped him between the shoulder blades and screamed over the roar of the helicopter:
“Cops!”

Nueve spun us around so he could get a look. One of the bikes raced ahead, passing directly below us before disappearing around the next curve. The rider had something long and black, bigger than a rifle or a shotgun, hanging over his shoulder.

“Hey!” I shouted, hoping Nueve would hear me over the roar, but at the same time wondering what it would matter. “I think he's got a rocket launcher!”

Nueve raised his arm and gave some kind of signal to the pilot. We stopped rising and the chopper took off again, banking to the right, taking us away from the road and over an open field.

The maneuver flung us backward and then into a spin, like a dead yo-yo at the end of its string, and as I spun back in the direction of the highway I saw it: the contrail of a surface-to-air missile rocketing toward the chopper.

My scream was buried in the
wuff-wuff-wuff
of the blades' draft. A second later the chopper erupted into a fireball. For an instant, before gravity took hold, we hung in midair, and then we fell.

Fast.

It hadn't been that long since the last time I fell to earth, except that fall began thirty thousand feet up, not a hundred, and that time I fell with an angel holding me, not an OIPEP agent who didn't even have the good sense to bring a parachute to an aerial-rescue mission.

I didn't look down. I just closed my eyes and waited for the end.

Then I hit water.

The chopper had carried us over a dairy farm, and the explosion had hurled us directly above a pond. I hit the muddy water facefirst, swallowing maybe a gallon of it. I broke the surface choking and spitting and coughing, opening my eyes to find myself face-to-face with a milk cow. The cow looked at me, I looked at the cow, and the cow cried chicken first: it bellowed a warning call to its buddies and whirled away, mud and cow crap flying from its hooves as it took off across the pasture. A big glob of the stinking goop landed smack in my eye.

Nueve appeared in the shallows beside me.

“Those weren't cops,” I gasped. I had a very weird taste in my mouth, and I wondered if I'd discovered the flavor of cow poop.

“Who weren't cops?” a deep voice intoned.

We looked up. Two people on horseback towered over us, an old man and a kid about my age.

“This is a national emergency,” Nueve said to the old man.

The old man glanced toward the burning wreckage of the downed chopper. “Sure looks like some kind of emergency.”

“We need to commandeer your horses,” Nueve went on.

He grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the muddy shallows where I stood, shivering, in my summery frock.

“You need to
what
our horses?”

“Commandeer. Take them,” Nueve said pleasantly. In the distance, over the crackle and pop of the smoldering chopper, you could hear the sirens of the phony cops' bikes, and the sound was getting louder.

The kid barked a laugh. “You and what army, Tinker Bell?”

Nueve answered with a sarcastic echo of the kid's laugh, then pulled a weapon from his jumper. It was shaped like a gun, but it looked more like a blaster from
Star Wars
or those shiny metallic pistols from
Men in Black
. He pointed it at the kid's head.

“I wouldn't do that if I was you,” the old man said, matching Nueve's calm, pleasant tone. A revolver had appeared in his hand, and the revolver was pointed at Nueve's head.

Some of the color returned to the kid's face. I was still a little tense myself, and my mind barely registered the fact that the world had gone very quiet—no more sirens, just the sound of the burning chopper and cows lowing in the distance.

The kid's eyes grew wide as it dawned on him. “Hey, Granddaddy, that ain't no girl—that's some ol' boy in a dress!”

He started to laugh and as he laughed a jagged hole appeared in his jeans, just above his left kneecap. He screamed and fell out of the saddle, clutching his leg and writhing in agony in the poopy mud.

“Sonny!” the old guy cried.

Nueve leaped forward and hurled the grandfather from his saddle. The old man's gun went off as he went down, but the muzzle was pointed toward the sky.

“I told you it was an emergency!” Nueve hissed at him. He swung into the saddle with the grace of an accomplished horseman.

“Come, Kropp!” he cried.

A bullet flung up a clod of mud an inch from my left foot. I felt another rip through the hem of my dress. I heaved myself onto the other horse with a lot less alacrity than Nueve.

“I don't know how to ride!” I shouted.

“An excellent time to learn!” Nueve shouted back and flung the reins into my lap.

And then he was gone at full gallop, riding toward a dense stand of trees fifty or so yards from the pond.

I scooped up the reins and gave one quick snap against the horse's neck while popping his sides with my heels, like I'd seen in a dozen movies. It worked. The horse bolted forward, nearly hurling me over its bouncing rump. I clung hard to the reins, yelling at the top of my lungs, not trying to steer or guide it, just employing the Kropp method of dealing with disaster: hang on for dear life and pray you don't get killed.

I was almost to the trees when I heard the motorcycles. I risked a glance over my shoulder: two of them, coming up fast on big Harleys, wearing the standard-issue black jack boots and tinted visors. Only these weren't cops; they were agents of darkness, and that meant one thing: they wouldn't stop until they were dead—or I was.

I wasn't sure how much horsepower a Harley had, but I figured it was more than what I had. Nueve had disappeared into the trees, leaving me totally defenseless, and what kind of rescue mission was that? A trail snaked through the winter-bare trees, and I hit it at full gallop as bullets hit the trunks on either side, peppering me with five-inch splinters and chunks of wooden shrapnel.

The trail widened and suddenly Nueve was riding beside me. I guessed he had pulled off to wait.

“We'll never outrun them!” I shouted over the thundering of the hooves and the roar of the killers' bikes.

“I'm drawing one off!” he cried. “Here!”

He tossed the shiny weapon he had pointed at the farmer into my lap. “Wait till I'm clear,” he called. “The rounds are heat seeking!”

And then he was gone, whipping the horse off the trail and into the trees, riding with his cheek practically laid on the horse's neck to avoid being knocked off by low-hanging branches.

A bullet whizzed by my ear. I twisted around and pulled the trigger without bothering to aim. The gun kicked in my hand and I saw a tiny contrail stream from the muzzle toward the rider no more than twenty feet back.

There was a soft
whumph!
on impact. The bullet tore through the bike's gas tank. The rider was close enough for me to see my reflection in his visor as the Harley exploded into a fireball, hurling his body forward, a fiery human projectile that came straight at me.

I goaded the horse's flanks and snapped the reins against its neck, and he answered with a burst of speed. The burning rider missed hitting my horse's rump by a foot.

Nueve and the other rider were nowhere in sight, but I didn't pull up and I didn't slow down. The trees were thinning out and I could see open pastureland ahead. Now what? Just keep riding or stay in the trees?

With ten yards between me and the naked sky, I yanked the reins hard to the right, and my horse lunged off the trail. He must not have liked dodging trees at full gallop any more than I did, because all at once we were back on the trail—or it may have been a different trail; I was very disoriented by that point.

Same trail or different trail wasn't the thing that mattered though. The thing that mattered was the dude on the Harley coming straight at me at fifty miles per hour.

I raised my weapon. Even without the heat-seeking rounds, I don't think I could have missed, we were that close.

My finger tightened on the trigger as he spun the bike around, waving an arm over his head frantically before yanking back on the throttle and spraying me with dirt and slimy dead leaves from his back wheels. I noticed then he wasn't wearing a helmet and the back of his head looked awfully familiar, but it was already too late: I'd pulled the trigger.

Spitting smoke, the round took off toward the back of Nueve's head.

The Spaniard had guts, I'll give him that. He waited until the mini bomb was almost on him, then dove off the bike into the trees. He didn't fool the missile though. It veered away from the bike and toward him, hitting the tree trunk he dived behind and exploding on impact. The tree jerked, swayed, then tumbled down across the trail, the sound of its branches cracking and splitting very loud in the cold air.

I dismounted by the fallen tree and walked unsteadily to where Nueve lay curled in a ball. When I bent over to check his pulse, his hand shot up and grabbed me by the throat.

“I told you to be careful, Kropp. You could have killed me!”

I lost it. It really was too much, after all I'd been through that week, to have this jerk scold me like I was some little kid.

I hadn't asked for any of it—in fact, I had wanted the exact opposite, and here he was acting like
I
had dragged
him
into this crap.