The Thirteenth Skull (20 page)

She laughed. “I wonder why.”

“I'm thinking the board said ‘no.' ”

“Well, my guess would be it's not going too well.”

“I don't get it,” I said. “All this time I thought the director was in charge of OIPEP.”

“We call OIPEP the ‘Company' for a reason, Alfred. It's set up like a multinational corporation. Countries who've signed the Charter send representatives to sit on the board. The board sets the policies and selects a director to implement them and run the day-to-day operations. But any decision the director makes can be overturned by a simple majority vote of the board.”

“Do you think she can convince them to leave me alone?”

“She hasn't been able to so far.”

The server came by to take my order. I ordered a grilled chicken salad and a glass of ice water.

Ashley took a big pull on her chocolate shake and said, “Salad?”

“My tummy feels funny.”

“Did you just use the word ‘tummy'?”

I looked around the room. A man was sitting by himself, talking on a cell phone in a loud voice. Something about the meeting in Denver and what a slam dunk the presentation was. A frazzled-looking woman sat in a booth wrangling two toddlers fighting over a red crayon, their faces smeared with what looked like mashed potatoes. Another man sat at the bar wearing blue jeans and a buckskin shirt with the leather danglies on the sleeves.

“Why did he let us go?” I wondered aloud.

“He thought you were serious about hitting the button.”

“Maybe. But maybe he wasn't bluffing when he said they already had what they wanted. But if they already had what they wanted, why didn't they just let me go after I shot you? Why chase us into the mountains? Why fly in another black box?”

“He's just protecting the Company's investment.”

“Investment in what? OIPEP used my blood to fight demons before, but only because it didn't have the Seal. It has the Seal now, so why does it still need my blood?”

She thought about it. I guessed she was thinking about it. She might have been thinking about her fries as she swirled the end of one in a dollop of ketchup. I remembered when I first met her in Knoxville, when she was posing as a transfer student, the big burger and milk shake she scarfed down without taking a breath. She tapped the fry on the edge of her plate like she had to get the ratio of potato to tomato just right.

“The Company was created to investigate extraordinary phenomenon and preserve items of peculiar and special significance. I guess your blood fits into both categories. Nueve doesn't want it falling into the wrong hands.”

“He's protecting the world from Alfred Kropp.”

“From what Alfred Kropp can do.”

“Right. We wouldn't want some kid with the power to heal the world running amok, healing the world.”

My food came. I picked at it. She grabbed the bread stick off my plate and ate it.

“How do you do that?” I asked. “Eat so much and stay so thin.”

“I'm like a lioness,” she said. “I gorge, but only once a week.”

“If it's true the SD 1031 has a range of only about a mile, then he has no way of finding me,” I said, looking at the guy hunched over at the bar. He was watching a basketball game on the TV mounted on the ceiling. “He's not that stupid.”

“He knows where you are,” she said.

“How?”

“A Company plane dropped us here.”

“And took off again. Do you think we're being watched?”

She shook her head. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. We should have killed the pilot.”

She said it so nonchalantly that for a second I couldn't think of anything to say.

Finally, I said, “So say we aren't being watched. How will he know where I'm going next?”

“Where
we're
going next.”

“Well,” I said. “That's something we need to talk about.”

Her big blue eyes got even bigger. “Oh?”

“Look, Ashley, the last thing I want to be is alone, but facts are facts and everybody who gets close to me or tries to help me ends up hurt, very hurt or dead. My uncle. Bennacio. Samuel. And you've already been stabbed—”

“And shot.”

“Yeah, but I wasn't counting that.”

“You weren't counting my being shot?”

“Because I did that.”

“Still counts.”

“To save you.”

“You shot me for my own good?”

“It was a zagging thing; I thought I explained that.”

“You're cutting me loose.”

“I don't want you to get hurt.”

“I've already been hurt.”

“Hurt worse.”

“Maybe I'm a grown-up and don't need a teenager to make that decision for me.”

“Nueve gets this. You used to be a field operative, so I know you get this. It's why Mingus used you to test me. It's why Nueve threatened to kill you to get me to give up. I can't do that anymore, Ashley. Not to anybody, but especially not to you.”

She angrily slurped the dregs of her milk shake through her straw, if it's possible to slurp angrily.

“And where am I supposed to go, Alfred? I can't go back to the Company—what do you think they'd do to me after I helped you escape? I can't go back to my old life. They took my old life away. God, I wish I knew you were going to do this back at the château; I would have told you to let me bleed to death after Mingus sliced me open. You can't do this to me. I won't let you do this to me. I'm coming with you, wherever you go, until I'm dead or you are or we both are.”

“That's what I'm telling you,” I said. “That's what I'm trying to say. I don't know what's going to happen to me, but if the past proves anything, I'm pretty sure I know what's going to happen to you, and I don't want that to happen to you, Ashley. I'd rather be cut open myself than see something happen to you.”

She tossed her napkin on her plate, leaned over the table, grabbed my face with both hands, and kissed me full on the lips. I tasted chocolate.

“You don't get it,” she said, touching my cheek. “I've been
assigned
to you, Alfred Kropp. You
own
me.”

01:11:57:02

I left Ashley in the restaurant so they wouldn't think we were running out on the check and went to the Western Union office where the money from Mr. Needlemier was waiting for me. I cashed a twenty and used the change to call Samuel's cell phone.

On the third ring someone with a vaguely familiar voice came on the line.

It wasn't Samuel's voice.

“I believe I know who this is,” the man said in a French accent.

“Where's Samuel?” I asked.

“Mr. St. John is indisposed,” Vosch said, echoing the OIPEP operator. “But if you'd like to leave a message, Alfred, I'd be happy to pass it along.”

I fell back against the wall and closed my eyes. I could taste the dressing from my salad and wondered if I was going to be sick.

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“He is, but of course you are not. You should have been at your funeral, Alfred. Quite touching, if ill attended.”

“You didn't buy it.”

“It was a poor sell. Why would St. John need to protect a corpse?”

“I want to talk to him.”

“He's indisposed. I thought we covered this.”

“How do I know you're telling the truth? Maybe you've already killed him.”

“That would make me stupid
and
a liar, like a person who would fake his own death.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“You know what we want.”

“I don't have it.”

“Excuse-moi?”

“I said I don't have it. I never had it and I don't know where it is.”

“Where what is?”

“The Skull. The Skull, Vosch. The Thirteenth Skull.”

He didn't say anything at first. Then he laughed. “Ah, Alfred Kropp, you are a witty one. Tell me where you are and I shall help you locate it.”

The airport was crowded; a plane had just landed, and people were hurrying to make their connecting flights, vacationers mostly, judging by the way they were dressed. Couples and families rushing past with that flushed excitement of travel, chattering and laughing, pulling tired kids along. Where they were going, I could never come. Where they were now, I could never be.
Tell me where you are.

“Outside,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“I said outside Helena, Montana. At the airport. And bring him with you, understand?”

“I'll make the arrangements. Why don't we break with tradition, Alfred? Stay where you are and don't do anything stupid.”

“I'm not going anywhere,” I said. “Can't promise about the stupid part.”

I went back to the restaurant and paid our check. Ashley's eyes were red, and I wondered if she'd had herself a cry while I was gone.

“What took so long?”

“The wire hadn't come in yet,” I lied. “I had to wait.”

We ducked into a store and bought some jeans and sweatshirts with BIG SKY printed on the fronts. I went into the men's room to change.

Ashley gave me the eye when I came out.

“Where are the guns?” she asked.

“Tossed them in the trash,” I said. “Guns and planes don't mix.”

“Plane to where?”

“We're flying to Knoxville,” I lied. That was two lies in about thirty minutes. Lying in general is a bad idea, but sometimes you're shoved between the evil of lying and the thing-that-must-be-done. I pushed that thought away; it was Op Nine thinking.
In another life, you would have made a superb
Superseding Protocol Agent.

“A little obvious, isn't it?” she asked.

“That's what I'm counting on. So obvious its obviousness makes it unobvious.”

“Nueve will have an operative at every gate, in every restaurant, probably in every public restroom. We won't last thirty seconds in Knoxville.”

“I don't have a choice,” I said. “I've got a bomb in my head and there's only one guy who can help me get it out—the guy who ordered it put there.”

“There're neurosurgeons in every major city in America, Alfred,” she said.

“Right, and what do I tell them? ‘Excuse me, Doc, but would you mind pulling this top-secret explosive device from between my hemispheres? It's been bugging me.' ”

“He's a lot of things, but I don't think Samuel is a brain surgeon.”

“Well, I have to start somewhere, Ashley.”

There were no direct flights to Knoxville, so we booked a connecting flight through Chicago, where we would have a two-hour layover. Since landing in Helena, I had the weird sensation of a ticker or clock inside my head, winding down like a timer to some apocalyptic event. I was familiar with apocalyptic events. This time was a little different, though. I wasn't trying to save the world, just two people in it . . . three, if you counted Samuel. But then, as we settled into our seats at the gate, I thought no, it was just me. Not the world this time around, just Alfred.

I looked down at the top of Ashley's head against my shoulder. She was sleeping off her burger and fries. What about Ashley? She had nowhere to go either, nowhere she would be safe from Nueve. The longer she stayed with me, the greater the danger. It wasn't a pleasant fact, but this wasn't the time to dwell on the pleasant ones, like the way she had looked at me in the restaurant and the way the chocolate on her lips tasted slightly salty from my bread stick. This was the time for necessities. This was the time for doing the thing-that-must-be-done.

Taking care not to jostle her too much, I eased a few twenties into her pocket. She murmured something in her sleep, smacked her lips a couple times (what was she dreaming about . . . chocolate sundaes, big happy slobbery dogs, vampires?), and nuzzled my neck.

Sometimes, when I got down, I would remind myself I had saved the world—twice—and that I was a hero, like the firefighter who rushes into a burning building to rescue a trapped kid. But I was no firefighter. I was no hero. Even when I faced Mogart and Paimon, the demon king, it was about me, not the world. The only reason I got stabbed by the Sword was I gave the Sword to Mogart. And I took on Paimon because he was killing me, from the inside out, filling my body with maggots and slowly driving me insane.

It was never for the sake of the world. It was always for the sake of Kropp, and that the world got saved too was a kind of happy by-product.

I leaned my head against Ashley's and after a minute I fell asleep. I was flying again. I came to a towering cliff, and on that cliff rose a castle of sparkling white stone with flags flying from its ramparts and a man in shining armor sitting on a horse before its gates. He drew a black sword from the scabbard at his side and raised it over his head in a salute.

Then I started to fall. I dropped like a stone toward the sea. A monster reared its head above the crashing surf, its mouth stretching open to reveal fangs as tall and glittering as the walls of the castle.

I woke up before I fell into the dragon's mouth.

“Alfred,” Ashley was saying. “Alfred, we're boarding.”

On the plane, I sat down beside her—she took the window seat—and waited, my knee popping up and down, counting off the seconds in my head. This was goodbye, but it was a goodbye without a farewell.

I gave her hand a squeeze and said, “I think I got hold of some bad lettuce—have to go to the bathroom,” the third lie, and then I worked my way toward the front of the cabin with a lot of “excuse me's” and “I'm sorries” as I slid sideways past passengers filling the overhead compartments. At the front of the plane, I risked a glance toward our seats. All I could see was the top of her blond head and for some reason that broke my heart: the last I would see of her would be the top of her head.

I told the lady attendant I'd left my carry-on at the gate. She was distracted, trying to find room in a little compartment for a first-class passenger's coat. She waved me through the hatch but told me I'd better hurry.