I dressed in the black OIPEP-issued jumpsuit. The underwear was boxers and I was a tighty-whitey man, but they were clean, so I wasn’t about to complain. I filed the little fact that OIPEP men wear boxers; it might be useful later, but I doubted it. Most little facts aren’t.
I decided not to go back to my cabin. I probably was supposed to, but the crying had freed up something in me, like a lot of good cries will.
I walked back down the corridor to a stairway that wound upward, went up two flights, and stepped onto the deck, into brilliant sunshine. A stiff breeze blew from the stern, whipping my damp hair back from my face. I wondered if the Pandora had a barber on board.
I walked toward the front of the ship. To my left was the open water, but there was a dark line of land in the distance. Sunlight danced off the pointy tips of the waves, so bright, it left glittering spots in my vision. I passed several people in deck chairs or leaning on the railing, men and women dressed like tourists with cameras hanging from their necks and a dab of white sunscreen on their noses. I looked to my right and saw the upper part of the ship, where a sign was painted in big red letters: “Red Sea Adventures.” There were more letters in another language right beside it; Arabic, I guess, with those funny curlicues and fat dots. So that was OIPEP’s cover: we were happy Westerners on a jaunt before hitting the Pyramids.
I reached the front and leaned against the railing. I couldn’t see any other ships. I looked straight down and saw how fast we were going. When Abigail called the Pandora a jetfoil, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Now, leaning over the rail, I knew. The Pandora rode through the water on two huge fins, its underside about six feet above the surface. With this kind of setup, the Pandora could give a world-class speedboat a run for its money.
Op Nine appeared beside me. I was busted. To distract him, I pointed at the dark line on the horizon and asked, “What’s that?”
“Egypt,” Op Nine answered.
“So this is the Mediterranean?”
“No, this is the Red Sea,” he said. Just five minutes ago I had looked at a sign that read, “Red Sea Adventures.”
“I’m gonna need some shoes,” I said. I’m a pretty tall guy, but this Operative Nine towered over me. Tilting my chin up, I could see the black tangle of his nose hair.
He didn’t say anything, so I asked, “So what happens when we reach the insertion point?”
“We will wait for nightfall. Then the race for the nexus.”
“Nexus—where in Egypt is that?”
“It is not a name of a place, Kropp. It is the nexus, the core. The nucleus.”
“Oh, sure. The nucleus of what?”
“Reentry.”
“Oh, boy. I don’t guess you’re ever going to tell me what’s going on with these Seals, so I’m going to give it a shot. You don’t have to say anything, just nod or twitch your mouth, some kind of signal I might be on the right track.
“This ring of Solomon’s controls something that’s locked up in the Holy Vessel. Like the name of this boat sort of implies, it’s not something you want to be messing with. Mike got away with both of them, and he’s hightailed it into the Egyptian desert, because he can’t just open the Holy Vessel anywhere and, since we have five hours or so to get there, I’m guessing he can’t just open it whenever he feels like it. Maybe the stars have to be in perfect alignment or there’s some other criteria I don’t know about, like Mars being in Sagittarius or something along those lines.”
He didn’t nod or twitch or move a single muscle. He just stared down at me. If I had some shoes, I’d be a little taller and might not be able to see so much nose hair.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Operative Nine.”
“No, I mean what’s your real name?”
“Whatever it needs to be.”
“I promise I won’t tell anybody.”
He was smiling. It wasn’t a very natural-looking smile. He smiled like smiling hurt.
“I could tell you,” he said. “But then I would have to kill you.”
“That’s a really old joke.”
“I’m not joking.”
He stepped back and motioned toward the bow. “Come, Kropp. We should not tarry. The sea has eyes.”
13
I followed him back to my cabin. I told him my feet were cold and he just looked at me like I’d said something in Swahili, or maybe it was more like he spoke Swahili and I didn’t.
“There are some matters I must attend to,” Op Nine said. He left. I hoped one of those matters included socks and shoes. I sat on the bed. I picked at my toenails, which needed trimming. I was tempted to bite them down, but I hadn’t done that since I was ten, and some things you should move past.
I wondered what happened to Ashley after the helicopter rescue in Tennessee. Was her injury completely healed now? I had mixed feelings about her. She had saved my life, but she had also lied to me about who she was and why she was “attached” to me. I wondered if my feelings were mixed because I thought she was a nice person or if it was because I thought she was pretty.
OIPEP agents fell into two categories, as far as I could tell: the preppie, grad student type, of which Mike Arnold was the perfect example; and the stoic, more menacing type like Operative Nine. That guy was so stiff and precise that I wondered if he was one of those “unacknowledged technologies” that Abigail mentioned back in London.
Maybe he was a cyborg, but that seemed far-fetched. On the other hand, I was chasing after a magical ring that once belonged to King Solomon from the Bible and I didn’t seem to have trouble believing that.
The door swung open and a tall, tanned blonde with blue eyes about the size of quarters walked in, dressed in the standard-issue OIPEP jumpsuit. I stood up and we didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she reached out and hugged me. Ashley smelled good, like lilacs, only I wasn’t sure what lilacs smelled like; it was just the first word that popped into my head. She hugged me and I thought, Lilacs.
“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For saving my life.”
“Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
“And I wanted to apologize.”
“For what?”
“Tricking you like that in Knoxville.”
“Well, that’s sort of your job, isn’t it?”