The Thirteenth Skull (6 page)

“Untie me,” I said.

“I—I can't do that, Alfred.”

“I'm not crazy,” I said. “They tied me down so I wouldn't hurt anybody—or myself, I guess. But what's really crazy is I wasn't trying to hurt anybody. I was trying to save them.”

“I don't think they interpreted it that way.”

“What have the police found out about the delivery man?”

He shook his head. “I don't know.”

“You know who might be behind this? Mike Arnold.”

“That awful secret agent?”

“He's not a secret agent anymore. He disappeared after Abigail Smith arrested his buddy the director.”

“And you think he might be seeking revenge.”

“The last time he saw me he said, ‘One of these days I'm gonna kill you, swear to God,' or something like that.”

“I spoke with that detective, Ms. Black, and she's agreed to post an officer outside your door.”

“Because whoever did this will try again.”

He didn't say anything.

“Is that why you came, to tell me that?” I asked.

“No, Alfred,” he said. He sighed. “No.”

He opened his briefcase and took out a charred photograph, its edges black and crumbly.

“I found this after the ... well, this morning.”

He held it toward me.

“I can't move my arm, Mr. Needlemier,” I said.

“Oh! Of course, sorry.”

He got up and held the picture in front of my face so I could see it. Something had distorted the image, turning it a sickly, mustard yellow, but I could make out the face of my mother. She was young in the picture. She was smiling. That's how I recognized her. Her teeth. Some big brown blob floated just under her chin.

“What's she holding?” I asked.

“I think it's a child.”

“It's me,” I said. “She must have sent it to Mr. Samson.”

He didn't take the photo away. He stood by the bed and held it in front of my nose until I told him to get it the hell away from me. He set it on the stand beside the bed.

“Why is it all burned up like that?”

He blinked several times and his mouth came open a little. “Oh. I'm sorry, Alfred, I assumed they had already told you.”

“Told me what?”

“Alfred, last night Bernard's house burned to the ground. A total loss.” He pulled out his monogrammed handkerchief and blew his nose. “They haven't made a determination yet, but they suspect that it was arson. And that isn't all. Your father's grave ... it's been desecrated.”

“What do you mean, desecrated?”

“They mutilated his corpse ... left his body by the grave site ... but took his head, Alfred. They took his head!”

He began to cry. Watching a grown man cry is never easy, but Mr. Needlemier's baby face made it seem more natural somehow.

“You know,” I said. “I'm just guessing, but I think somebody's trying to send me a message.”

11:05:29:08

Meredith Black stepped into the room, closed the door, and without saying a word unsnapped the buckles holding my wrists and ankles. I sat up as she sat down.

“I don't have anything to say to you,” I told her.

“That's fine,” she said. “I have something to say to you. Last fall two of my colleagues responded to a homicide in the Halls area just off Broadway. A security guard had been stabbed to death in his living room. There was an eyewitness: the victim's fifteen-year-old nephew, who told them a very odd story about a man named Arthur Myers and a company called Tintagel International and a very valuable sword, which also turned out to be the murder weapon. The victim's name was Farrell Kropp, and he worked for Samson Industries. For Bernard Samson.”

She paused for a breath. I was rubbing my aching wrists and avoiding her eyes.

“It was an odd case. The manner of death, for example. Not too many people in Knoxville—or anywhere else, for that manner—meet their Maker by means of an antique broadsword. The witness's story was odd, too. Secret chambers, saber-wielding monks, a sword that seemed to have a mind of its own. The two homicide detectives who responded to the call that night remember the case very well. They distinctly remember filing the report. Only now there is no report. There's no record anywhere of a murder happening that night. Bernard Samson showed up at that apartment and after that the report vanished. And do you know what happened next? Both those detectives abruptly quit their jobs—one was about six months short of full retirement—and moved to the Caribbean. To an island that is owned by ... wanna guess? Samson Industries.”

“I don't know anything about that,” I said.

She acted like she didn't hear me. “Four months after the murder, the witness—you—vanished into thin air. As did the former head of security for Samson Industries, a man by the name of Benjamin Bedivere.”

“I'm really tired,” I said. “It's hard to sleep when you're tied down, so maybe we could pick this up after I've had a nice little nap.”

“A few days later, a supervisor with the border patrol files a report that two fugitives in a stolen Jaguar try to run the Canadian border.”

“That Jag wasn't stolen,” I said. “Bennacio gave the guy a check for it.”

“The supervisor's report, like the homicide report, later disappears as if it never existed. Three weeks pass, and the FBI issues an alert, adding this same kid to its Ten Most Wanted list for involvement in a plot to blow up Stonehenge. In another month, he will be removed from that list, with no explanation offered by the FBI.”

“Because I didn't try to blow up anything.”

“Now, the company called Tintagel International has not vanished, but there is no one—nor has there ever been anyone—named Arthur Myers affiliated with it. The actual CEO of that company is a man named Jourdain Garmot, and he's quite alive and well. The name itself struck me as a little odd, so I looked it up. Tintagel is the supposed location of Camelot, King Arthur's castle.”

“Okay,” I said. “What's the point? What do you want from me?”

She leaned forward. “You remember the SUV in front of the Towers that morning? The driver fled immediately afterward, but one of the guards got the tag number. It was a rental, charged to a corporate account.”

“Let me guess. Tintagel International.”

“Actually, a company whose major stockholder is a subsidiary to a franchisee of Tintagel International.”

“What's that mean exactly?”

“It means someone is trying very hard to hide their tracks, Alfred.”

“Does it also mean you believe me now and I can go?”

“It means there's one homicide detective who is very confused and the more she looks into this bizarre case, the more confused she gets. This Mogart you told me about, he's Arthur Myers, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“And this man you were traveling with to Canada, he was ...”

“Bennacio, the Last Knight of the Sacred Order. I guess his alias was Benjamin Bedivere.”

“And he died ...?”

“At Stonehenge. I got the Sword and that's when OIPEP set up the whole deal with the FBI to try to catch me and get the Sword from me. I guess they also bought off your detective friends, or maybe Mr. Samson ... did.”

“Well,” she said. “Here's the thing, Alfred. I'm not saying that I believe everything you've told me. All I'm saying is there's some very weird coincidences and connections going on, and it's driving me crazy. Why would someone connected to Tintagel International stage an elaborate assassination attempt on a fifteen-year-old kid?”

“Because Tintagel International is just a front.”

“A front? A front for what?”

“For the AODs.”

“What's an AOD?”

“Agent of darkness. That was just my name for them. It wasn't like their official title or anything. Basically, they were the private army Mogart raised after Mr. Samson kicked him out of the Sacred Order.”

“Mogart was a knight?”

“Sort of a black knight. He left the Order and then decided to steal the Sword.”

“Why did he leave?”

“Because Mr. Samson found out Mogart had a son.”

“Ah,” she said. “Ah.”

“So Mogart raised this private army, some of them I guess still being around wanting a little payback for what I did.”

“What would be the point now, though? You said the Sword was back in heaven.”

“Well,” I said, trying to think it through. “I guess because they're bad guys.”

She laughed for some reason. “Well, that's what I hope to find out.”

She stood up.

“It makes sense,” I said. “They almost had it in their hands, the most powerful weapon on earth, and they didn't get it, all because of me. So they tried to kill me and then torched my father's house.”

“If that's true,” she said, “you'll never be safe, Alfred.” Then she shocked me by kissing my cheek. “But it can't be true, can it?” she asked.

She left. I lay there for a minute, trying to wrestle to the ground at least one coherent thought. So it wasn't OIPEP and it wasn't Mike Arnold, the two likeliest suspects. It was Mogart's former henchmen. But other than revenge, what was the big deal about killing me? It wouldn't bring their boss back and it sure wouldn't bring the Sword back. Then I told myself maybe it was a good thing, my inability to understand evil minds.

Meredith had forgotten—or did she forget?—to strap me back to the bed. I swung my feet to the floor and pushed myself forward, and I nearly crashed into the chair; I guessed I was still pretty dopey. I found my balance and walked toward the window, trying to think it through.

It was like a vendetta or one of those Greek tragedies I'd studied in school. The first killing launches the next and it isn't over until
everybody
is dead. Mogart killed Uncle Farrell, my father, and Lord Bennacio. I killed Mogart and not a small number of his henchmen. Now it was my turn.

I stood at the window and stared at the parking lot six stories below. No, I thought, it went back a lot farther than my uncle dying in our apartment. That was just the most recent chapter in a story that went back a thousand years, to Arthur and his knights and the Sword of Righteousness. Arthur was killed by his own nephew or son (in some stories, Bennacio told me, Mordred was
both
his nephew and son) and that led to the Sword being passed down until it ended up beneath my father's desk, where I found it.

Meredith Black was right about one thing, I thought. They weren't going to stop. I'd gone toe-to-toe with these guys, and Bennacio had warned me how soulless and mean they were. They weren't going to stop until I was dead, and it didn't matter how long I holed up in a hospital. Sooner or later, I was dead.

And maybe that's where it would stop, I thought. Maybe that's where it
should
. You would think Michael taking the Sword back to heaven would put an end to it, but maybe it wasn't about the Sword but about the people whose lives it touched. And since the Sword was gone finally and couldn't touch any more lives, maybe mine was the last.

It seemed the longer I hung around, the more people died—those cops were just the latest victims in my wake. As long as Alfred Kropp walked the earth, people were going to find themselves six feet under it.

Maybe that's it, I thought. Not prison or the asylum—maybe the third way was what Mike Arnold called an “extreme extraction.”

The problem was I didn't want to die. You don't normally consider something like that a problem—Delivery Dude sure didn't consider it one—but my choices had gotten very narrow very quickly and none of them were very pleasant. In fact, they were unacceptable. So that meant there had to be a fourth way and, if there wasn't a fourth way, I'd have to make one up.

So I did. It took a while, but I did.

08:16:26:46

The sixth floor of St. Mary's Hospital had a common room where the nonviolent patients could gather for a game of checkers or cards, with donated furniture and dusty potted plants in the corners, overstuffed sofas and lounge chairs and rockers. The windows faced north, offering a dramatic view of Sharp's Ridge about ten miles away.

Nueve was waiting for me by the windows, sitting in one of the rockers that had been painted the classic orange of the University of Tennessee. The color contrasted nicely with his dark suit. I pulled a rocking chair close to his and sat down.

“Senor Kropp,” he murmured. “You look much better than the last time I saw you.”

Like most winter days in East Tennessee, the light was weak and watery, eking through the dense cloud cover that got trapped between the Cumberland Plateau and the Smokey Mountains, but Nueve was wearing dark glasses. He might as well have worn a sign around his neck that said SECRET AGENT.

“The Seal,” I said, getting right to business. “I have it. You want it.”

“Ah. And your price?”

I took a deep breath. “Twenty-five million dollars.”

He didn't say anything at first, but I could almost feel those dark eyes of his, staring at me behind the dark glasses.

“I must say, that is unexpected.”

“It's not for me. It's for Samuel. I want him taken care of.”

“I see. Well, twenty-five million would do that—and quite nicely!”

“See, here's the thing, Nueve. There's no other way out of this mess. It's me they want. Take me out of the equation and everything's equal again.”

“Equal?”

“Back to normal. Back the way it was. So the first thing to take care of is Samuel. He left the Company for me and I don't think you'd consider hiring him back, so I want to make sure he's taken care of, plus a little extra for his trouble.”

“It's a generous severance, Alfred. But I cannot see how that balances this particular scale.”

“That's the second part,” I said.