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.
“I thought there might be one.”
“I want you to extract somebody from the civilian interface.”
“And that somebody would be ...?”
“Me.”
05:06:01:41
After breakfast, two doctors came in, escorted by the policeman Detective Black had stationed outside my door. At least, the cop thought they were doctors. One carried a stainless-steel valise. The other walked with a cane.
“More tests, huh?” I asked.
“More tests,” the one with the cane said.
The cop left. Nueve leaned his cane against the bed rail and sat in the chair while his buddy got to work. He gently peeled off the bandage over my nose and leaned over me, examining the damage. His breath smelled like cinnamon.
“How bad is it?”
He sniffed. “Seen worse. We’ll make it work.”
He dug into the valise. I glanced at Nueve, who was smiling without showing his teeth.
“We’re stopping by Samuel’s room before we leave,” I told him.
“Unnecessary. It increases the risk.”
“I don’t care. I want to say goodbye. I owe him that.”
He shrugged. Cinnamon-Breath was leaning over me again, applying latex prosthetics piece by piece, using a small brush and a foul-smelling adhesive.
“What did you find out about Jourdain Garmot?” I asked Nueve.
“Age: twenty-two. Citizenry: French. Marital status: single. Occupation: president and chief executive officer of Tintagel International, a consulting firm based in England that specializes in the research and development of security-related systems and software.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means its business is war.”
“War?”
“Fighting them, winning them.”
“And it’s big.”
“There is no bigger business than war, Alfred.”
“Hold still,” Cinnamon-Breath scolded me. “Look up at the ceiling and don’t move. I have to do your eyes.”
“The lavender goes better with the outfit,” Nueve said to him.
Cinnamon-Breath rolled his eyes. “Do I tell you how to kill people?”
Nueve shrugged. I said to Cinnamon-Breath, “He shrugs a lot.”
“He’s European,” he said. “They’re world-weary. Close your eyes.”
“Tintagel’s board of directors voted him to the presidency after the untimely demise of our friend Monsieur Mogart,” Nueve said. “Prior to that he was a university student in Prague.”
“Why would a superrich, multinational corporation put a twenty-two-year-old college student in charge?” I asked.
“Watch him,” the makeup man said. “He’s going to shrug.”
Nueve was holding himself very still in his chair.
“He fought it back,” Cinnamon-Breath said. He reached into the valise again and removed a gray wig.
“I don’t know why I have to be so old,” I said.
“Who do you see the most in hospitals? Huh? What’s the demographic?”
He shoved the wig over my head and began tucking my own hair up into it. He gave a soft whistle and said, “Hey, love your hairstyle and I’m really digging the gray—very post-mod radical chic—but we really should shave it off.”