“Dear God!”
“And that might not be the only one. I think he took my father’s head too. He’s totally whacked. He took his head and blew up his house and now I guess he’s after all the money. I think he wants to wipe everything to do with me off the face of the planet.”
I stood up.
“And the Skull. He wants that too, but I’m not sure what wiping me out has to do with that.”
“The Skull?”
“The Thirteenth Skull. Have you ever heard of it?”
He said, “Why in the world would I?”
“You worked for the head man, the captain of the Order of the Sacred Sword. Maybe it came up.”
He just stared at me with a blank expression. I was getting that look a lot lately.
“It must have something to do with the knights,” I went on. “How else would Jourdain know about it?”
“I don’t know anything about any skulls, Alfred.”
I nodded. “I didn’t think so. Well, it’s like Abby said, it doesn’t really matter now. Like Sofia.”
He was totally lost by this point. “Sofia? Who is Sofia?”
“A ghost from the past.” I took a deep breath. “This is it,” I said.
And he said, voice shaking, “Yes. It.”
I headed for the door.
“Oh! Alfred, I nearly forgot. There is one more thing.”
I turned and saw him standing there holding a black rapier.
“What should I do with this?”
It was Bennacio’s sword, the sword of the last knight to walk the earth. At a château in France, I had laid my hands on that same sword and sworn a vow to heaven. If I turned my back on it now, was I turning my back on something else, something that called me beloved?
“This isn’t running,” I choked out. “I’m not trying to save myself. That’s not what this is.”
“Alfred, I don’t understand. Are you saying you don’t want it?” He was talking about the sword.
“It’s over for them, Mr. Needlemier. The time for the knights is gone and even if it wasn’t, all the knights are.” I swallowed hard. Talk about ghosts from the past! But weren’t all ghosts from the past? “You should melt it down or smash it and scatter its pieces into the sea.”
He nodded, but then he said, “All the same, I think I shall put it somewhere safe. You might need it one day.”
Fat chance of that. Mr. Needlemier didn’t know it, but in a few hours Alfred Kropp would be dead.
05:01:54:11
Fifteen minutes later I was a couple thousand feet above Knoxville and climbing, looking out the window at the winter-brown landscape, the broad ribbon of the Tennessee River curving through the foothills, knowing I would never see it again.
Beside me, Ashley asked, “What are you thinking, Alfred?”
I cleared my throat. “I was wondering why you decided to come back to OIPEP.”
I looked at her. She was very pretty in a kind of all-American way, with the blond hair and blue eyes, a nicely proportioned nose and very white teeth.
She looked away. “They asked me to,” she said.
“And you said yes, just like that?”
“They said they needed an extraction coordinator.”
“That’s a plush job or something?”
She laughed. I thought of bubble gum. “I said no,” she said. “And then they said it was for you.”
“You came back for me?”
She laid her fingertips on my forearm. “After they told me what happened with the Seals. What you did to get them back. I didn’t see how I could say no. I know how hard it is . . . to leave.”
“Was it? Is it? Did you just pick up where you left off before you got into OIPEP?”
“I tried. It’s hard, Alfred. After seeing what you see there . . . knowing what you know . . . to just go back into the civilian interface as if nothing had happened, when everything had happened. You still feel . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . even though you’re back, you’re still on the outside looking in. Wherever you are, you look at people and think about all the things they don’t know and what it would be like if they did know all the things they can’t know. All the things they don’t want to know.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “The same thing happened to me.”
Five thousand feet below, the interstate snaked through the monochromatic hills, the same road that took Bennacio and me north in our quest for the Holy Sword.
Ashley said, “There’s a saying they teach new recruits: the Company is forever. It doesn’t mean OIPEP will last forever—nothing does. It means what happens to you inside the Company lasts forever. It does things to you that can’t be undone.”
“Doom,” I said softly.
“What?”
“Doom. You know, fate. Destiny. The thing-that-can’t-be-undone. And it doesn’t matter whether you think it’s right or wrong, fair or unfair. You don’t have a choice. Well, I don’t buy it. I won’t buy it. I still have a choice.”
I turned from the window to look at her and saw her looking back at me with a funny expression, almost as if she felt sorry for me.
“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.
“Camp Echo. It’s a Company facility in Canada.”
“Do you know where I’ll eventually end up?”
She shook her head.
“What’s that mean?” I asked. “You don’t know or you know and can’t tell me?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got it narrowed down to a couple possibilities.”
“Do I get any say in it?” She nodded. “Good. I don’t want to end up someplace like Paraguay herding goats.”
She laughed and shook her head again. When Ashley moved her head, her blond hair moved with it but a millisecond later, a swirling effect like a long blond cape: move-swirl, move-swirl.
“Paraguay was just a random country,” I said. “The truth is I’m not even sure they herd goats in Paraguay. I’m not telling you guys how to do this. You’re the coordinator and everything, but if it’s up to me I’d rather stay in America because the idea is to blend in, right?”
Abby and Nueve were sitting in front of us, near the cockpit, and their heads were almost touching as they talked. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the rise and fall of their voices indicated a fierce argument was going on.