“What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?” Op Nine asked.
The body’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dr.
Merryweather leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Perhaps you should ask him, Alfred.”
“Me?”
He nodded to Op Nine, who repeated the question in my other ear.
My voice quivering, I asked, “What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?”
“The Seal. ”
Op Nine whispered, “But you have the Seal—do you not?”
“But don’t you have the Seal?” I asked the dead guy.
“The Lesser Seal, Alfred Kropp. The Vessel of our imprisonment. Bring it to us, last son of Lancelot. ”
“O Wise and Magnificent One,” Op Nine whispered.
“O Wise and Magnificent One,” I echoed.
“We do not possess the Holy Vessel.”
“We don’t?” I asked Op Nine. I was shocked. He jerked his head toward the body as if to say, Don’t talk to me; talk to the cadaver!
I cleared my throat and said to the cadaver, “We, um, we don’t have it.”
There was a horrific screech like the sound of a car slamming on its brakes, the body on the slide-out tray jerked, and the head snapped forward, casting deep shadows over the empty eye sockets.
The head fell back, and the scream petered out into a soft hiss.
As I looked into those black holes, the blackness washed over me, and I went under, like a little kid in the surf. The blackness was as heavy as the weight of water all around me, and I could hear children crying, a million voices wailing in hunger and fear. I saw endless rows of bodies stacked like dried cornstalks in the autumn and a sky dark with roiling clouds. I saw the smoking ruins of cities and people scurrying everywhere, their clothes caked in ashes and dust, glass from broken windows crunching under their feet.
I saw the land stripped of green and all the other colors of life, pallid nameless things squirmed in the thick mud where the rivers used to run. And over all of it hung the sickly sweet stench of death.
From very far away I heard Op Nine’s voice calling me.
“Alfred! Alfred, what do you see?”
My mouth opened, but the only sound that came out was a wimpy echo of the hiss escaping Carl’s blue lips.
“Bring us the Seal, Alfred Kropp,” the corpse hissed again, and then it toppled off the tray onto the floor, landing on its bare shoulder with a sickening smack, and lay still.
Op Nine strode over to the body and bent down, examining the face carefully. One of Carl’s hands shot up and grabbed him around the throat. He tried to pull himself free, but the dead man’s grip was too tight. Abby and the doctor rushed over and pried at the fingers until suddenly they relaxed.
Op Nine scooted back, clutching his throat and gasping for breath.
The doctor was staring at the body.
“Impossible!” he breathed.
“Oh, we’re up to our h*ps in impossibilities,” Merryweather said. He turned to me. “What did you see?”
I cleared my throat. It felt raw, as if I’d been screaming.
“The end . . . the end of everything.”
He turned toward Op Nine. “According to your briefing, Nine, the IAs had absconded with the Lesser Seal.”
“That was the operating assumption,” Op Nine answered. “Clearly we must arrive at an alternative theory.”
“The Hyena,” Abby said suddenly. “He’s taken it.”
“Mike got away?” I asked.
“Both he and a sand-foil were missing after the battle,”
Op Nine said. “It is a reasonable assumption he did not perish after Paimon obtained the ring.”
“Oh, another assumption!” Merryweather said crossly.
“Your assumptions and a buck ninety will buy me a tall coffee of the day at Starbucks!”
Op Nine dropped his eyes and didn’t say anything, though his lips tightened.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Alfred,” Merryweather said. “OIPEP is the only organization of its kind in the world, with practically unlimited resources and an intelligence network that spans every country on the planet. We shall do what any powerful, multinational bureaucracy would do in such a crisis: we shall hold a meeting!”
28
The meeting was held in a large conference room on lower level 49 of OIPEP headquarters. Lower level 49 looked just like lower level 24 with the windowless, institutional green walls and gray floor. A round wooden table dominated the room, surrounded by twelve soft leather chairs.
Me, Abby, Op Nine, and nine other Company personnel, five women and four men, sat around a few minutes waiting for Merryweather to come in. Like all OIPEP agents, they had names like Jake and Jessica, Wes and Kelly.
The men wore business suits with perfectly knotted neckties over starched white shirts. The women were in suits too, mostly navy blue, but a couple wore pinstripes, and all of them were blond like Abigail and Ashley, who wasn’t there, and I wondered where she was, if she had been killed during the intrusion event. I remembered grabbing her beneath the tarp as the demons soared over us, the smell of her hair under my nose, and how the tears afterward seemed to make her blue eyes even brighter and more beautiful in a weird, sad way.
The door swung open and François Merryweather strode into the room, hair flying everywhere (if I were him, I’d cut it short or pull it back into a ponytail), carrying a stack of files under his right arm.
He slapped the files onto the glossy tabletop and said, “Well, folks, we’ve crossed the threshold, haven’t we? Not since the signing of the Charter has there been an intrusion event of this magnitude, and so the day we have been waiting for, the day that demanded our existence in the first place, has finally arrived.”
He stopped like he expected someone to say something, but nobody did.
“Whatever we decide today,” he went on, “must be executed with the utmost haste—the United States has gone DEFCON-2, the European Union has activated its reserve, and I’ve just received a communiqué from our ops in China that half the Red Army has been mobilized to its border with Tibet. The world is itching to pull the trigger, which has the potential to be as catastrophic as the intrusion event itself.”
He glanced at the ceiling and said, “Lights to half, please, and let’s have SATCOM I-41.”
The lighting dimmed and a three-dimensional image sprung up in the middle of the conference table. Dark clouds, their bellies full of flickering lightning, swirled over a mountain range, the jagged peaks snow covered and tinted red. The tallest peak was surrounded by a familiar orange glow flecked with bright white light.