The Thirteenth Skull (18 page)

“Talk to me, Alfred,” she said suddenly. “We c-c-can't fall asleep . . .”

“Okay,” I said, and immediately my mind went blank.

“What's the plan?”

“Plan?”

“The plan you're working on.”

“We can't hike out,” I said. “So we're flying out.”

“You saw a show about making a glider out of tree branches, deer droppings, and spit?”

“They've got one chopper here already and probably more on the way,” I said. “And only one place to land and take off. Can you fly one?”

“What makes you think I can fly one?”

“It's a key part of my plan.”

“I can't fly one.”

“It's also a key flaw in my plan.”

She laughed. It felt good to feel her laugh.

“I keep trying to decide if meeting you was the best thing that happened to me or the worst,” she said.

“Maybe both. Why did you come back to help extract me, Ashley?”

“Because I knew what it felt like,” she said after a pause. “To lose everything. I went into Field Operations right after college, Alfred, and a field operative can't have a past . . . family . . . friends . . . Medcon took care of it . . . OIPEP ‘kills' all its field operatives, fakes their deaths . . . Ashley isn't even my real name. And when I left, I couldn't go back to my old life. Everybody from it thought I was dead . . . They gave me a new identity after I resigned, a new place to live, but it was like I was nobody. I couldn't be who I was before and I couldn't be ‘Ashley' either. I was totally alone. I was . . . no one.”

“Ashley's not your name?”

“No.”

“What is your real name?”

“Gertrude.”

I thought about that.

“Can I still call you Ashley?”

I felt her smile against my neck.

“Sometimes I think of her as a different person,” she said. “Gertrude. Someone I used to know a long time ago, like another person who really had died.”

I nodded. “Me too—the old me before the Sword came along. I miss him sometimes. The old me. Like I was wondering if OIPEP has a time machine. Does it?”

“I don't think it does.”

“Be great if it did.”

“If it did, I would go back and be sixteen again.”

“Really? Why?”

She sighed against my neck and we didn't say anything for a while.

“You're not talking,” she said.

“Vampires,” I said.

“Vampires? That's random.”

“Well, this morning I was thinking about vampires,” I said. “I never understood why people were so fascinated by them, girls especially—I guess because they're usually good-looking guys with all these superhuman powers, plus the fact that I guess they're sort of tragic and girls feel sorry for them. Maybe it's because they're blessed with immortality but cursed with death.”

“Maybe it's the way they dress,” she said. “You never see a vampire in dorky clothes.”

“And they're always handsome and fit. You never see a fat, ugly vampire.”

“Maybe it's just the fact that love is blind.” Her voice got soft and lazy, as if she were drifting off to sleep. “You can't help it, you know? Who you fall in love with. Sometimes you want to help it. You would do anything not to be.”

“Not to be what?”

“In love!”

She gave my shin a light tap with the toe of her boot, one of those girl kicks that isn't meant to be taken as a kick.

“What about you?” I asked. “Have you ever been?”

“I thought I was—once. We broke it off.”

“How come?”

“I decided to leave the Company and he became the new Operative Nine.”

“Nueve?” I was floored. “Nueve was your
boyfriend
?”

“My taste in guys has never been that good.”

“Ashley, he was going to shoot you!”

“I know, can you believe it? The jerk. But being the Operative Nine means never having to say you're sorry.”

“I am,” I said. “For shooting you. For pulling you into this. And you don't believe me right now, but I'm going to pull you back out of it. We're getting off this mountain, I swear, Ashley, and we'll go somewhere they can't find us.”

She didn't say anything for a long time.

“There is no such place,” she finally said, pressing her lips against my neck, and I thought of vampires again and how their kisses brought life to you, through death's doorway.

01:17:58:54

We crawled from our cave at dawn, sore, stiff, and very cold. Thick clouds marched overhead; it looked like more snow was on the way.

We began the morning with an argument. I wanted to make for the landing pad to commandeer a helicopter.

“It'll be heavily guarded,” Ashley said. “Exactly where they expect us to go. It's a zig, Alfred. We've got to zag.”

“But zag where?”

“The château. There's food, shelter, clothing—”

“Right. Along with Nueve and Mingus.”

“And a secure satellite hookup. If we can get to it, we can SOS Abby.”

“And she says to him, ‘Back off, buddy. Give them a cup of hot chocolate and a blanky,' and then Nueve puts an extra log on the fire.”

“Okay. Then you tell me how we're going to get past fifty armed agents and an Operative Nine who's got no problem with putting a bullet through his girlfriend's head.”

I opened my mouth to answer, closed it, opened it again, and said, “I'm working on that.”

Behind us, from somewhere in the woods came the sound of barking.

“Well, you better work fast,” Ashley said. “Because they've brought in the bloodhounds.”

I listened to the braying of the hounds for a couple seconds. They were getting closer.

“You're working, right? Not just panicking?” she asked.

“A little of both. We could make a run for it.”

“We're both dehydrated and weak from hunger. I don't think we'll get very far.”

“Okay, then we wait for them to find us,” I said. I offered her Nueve's gun. She didn't take it.

“Well,” I said. “Those are the options, Ashley. Fight or flight.”

“There's a third,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

“Huh?”

“Strip.”

“Right now?”

She began to unbutton my jumper. Her cheeks were red from the cold. Mine were red from being stripped.

Fifteen minutes later two men in heavy parkas with AK-47s slung over their shoulders came into the clearing, pulled along by two massive bloodhounds. The dogs didn't hesitate: they made straight for the figure in the OIPEP jumpsuit slumped against a tree at the far edge of the clearing. Once they passed our cave, Ashley and I burst from the snow and were on them in five steps, mine very exaggerated knees-up-to-the-chest steps, the kind of running you see in cartoons. Somehow that feels more natural when you're wearing just boxers and boots in subzero weather. I put Bullet-Foot's gun against one guy's head and Ashley put Nueve's against the other's.

“Hi, Pete,” Ashley said to her guy, pulling the AK-47 from his hand. To mine, she said, “How's it going, Bob?”

“Hi, Ashley,” Pete and Bob said.

“We'll take your parkas and walkie-talkies, too.”

“And the gloves,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “And the gloves.”

Ashley ordered them to sit on their bare hands while I shook the snow out of my jumpsuit and got dressed. Maybe I should have taken Pete or Bob's jumpsuit, too, since theirs were dry and mine was wet from stuffing it with snow. We slipped on the gloves and parkas. Ashley tied their hands behind their backs with the ends of the leashes and the bloodhounds watched us, tongues lolling from their blubbery mouths, with the happy attitude of all dogs. At that moment, I envied their obliviousness. I knelt beside one and he slobbered all over my face. His spit was warm and thick and under any other circumstances I would have been grossed out, but now my heart pounded with joy. It's hard to think of a single thing that can bring you more happiness than a good dog.

We hiked west, keeping the ravine on our left, so we wouldn't end up walking in circles. Occasionally we could hear the steady
thumpa-thumpa
of a helicopter over the trees to our right, louder, then fainter, then louder again. Ashley walked in front of me, the AK-47 slung over her back, the walkie-talkie pressed against her ear as she monitored the chatter.

It started to snow. Flinty little flakes at first, then fat wet balls the size my thumbnail. The ground began to rise and the trees thinned out.

Ashley stopped suddenly, one gloved finger pressed against her ear while she held the walkie-talkie against the other. Snow and ice clung to the fur of her parka, framing her round face in shimmering crystals. She wore no makeup and her cheeks were bright pink from the cold and her lips slightly blue, but I don't think she ever looked prettier.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Shh!” She listened for a few more seconds.

“They're talking about a package . . . on its way . . . This sounds like Nueve . . . All units to rendezvous at the helipad . . . Nueve's en route . . .”

“Package?”

She looked at her watch. “Thirty minutes.”

“What package?”

She was walking again, quickly now, back into the trees and up the slope. Our boots crunched in the fresh snowfall.

“I'm guessing it's a replacement for the SD 1031 in your pocket,” she said.

“He gets his hands on that and we're toast,” I said.

“What's the plan?”

“We have to stop him before he takes delivery.”

“That's more of a goal than a plan,” I pointed out.

“I'm open to suggestions.”

I tried to come up with one. We were two against OIPEP's full force on the mountain. Ashley was a trained field operative and I wasn't exactly a novice by this point; still, there were only two of us and a lot of them, plus Nueve who wouldn't let niceties like keeping casualties low stand in his way. Even if we took a hostage, Nueve wouldn't care. A frontal assault was suicidal, but how could we sneak in? They knew Ashley and they sure as heck knew me.

“We have to create some kind of diversion,” I said. “A fire or explosion—and while they're distracted . . .”

“And what are we going to blow up, Alfred? The only bomb we have is inside your head.”

I stopped walking. She didn't notice at first, she was so focused on making it to the helipad before the chopper landed. When she did, she turned and stared at me.

“What's the matter?”

“I've got it,” I said. “The one thing he wants that we have.”

“I know, but he's getting another one.” She had a concerned look on her face, like she was worried I had finally cracked.

“No,” I said. “There might be a hundred little black boxes, but there's only one Alfred Kropp.”

01:17:04:39

Twenty-five minutes and a hard hike through dense woods and heavy snow later . . .

A helicopter hovers over a landing pad nestled in a valley in the Canadian wilderness . . .

While forty heavily armed men encircle the perimeter . . .

. . . and a dark-haired man with a lean face and piercing black eyes waits, leaning on a black cane, thinking, maybe, that the kid should have killed him when he had the chance because it's done now, the game's over . . .

. . . as the kid lies on his belly a dozen yards away, hidden in the trees, sweating despite the bitter cold that's caused icicles to form on his eyebrows, praying he still has one move left in the game that the Operative Nine assumes is over . . .

Beside him, the girl whispers, “Now?”

“Not yet.”

Must move before Nueve reaches the chopper. Timing was everything in this game and up to this point the kid's had none. Events have controlled him and the kid is now at the point where he either takes control of events or the events overwhelm him. Dr. Mingus waits at the château with his scalpel and his vials.

So when the skids of the chopper brush the icy concrete, the kid is up and running, straight for the pad, tossing his AK-47 to the ground, both hands over his head, one empty, the other holding the black box, his thumb resting on the blue button.

The foot soldiers don't get it. They swing their rifles toward the kid, fingers quivering on the triggers, centering his tall, lanky frame in their scopes.

The Operative Nine gets it though. He gets it immediately, because that's his job—to get it before anyone else does; in the time it takes for most people to realize a new move's being played, he's already absorbed the play and all its repercussions, and he's making his countermove.

He shouts for them to lower their weapons, but they can't hear him over the roar of the chopper, so he makes a slicing motion across his throat as the bird settles to the ground. The pilot cuts the engine.

The kid keeps walking, up to the line of the men standing between him and the chopper and the place inside the circle of guns where Nueve stands.

Hands high.

Thumb on the button.

If he's wrong about this, he's dead. The girl, too, probably. Nueve would kill her because alive she serves no purpose. And it doesn't matter that she loves him—or used to love him—and his feelings—if he has them—don't matter either. He is the Operative Nine, and nothing matters but the mission.

The kid prays there's a purpose to Mingus and the vials. He doesn't know what that purpose is, but he prays he's still a Special Item in OIPEP's eyes.

“Lower your weapons,” Nueve said in a calm voice. “Let him through.”

I walked through and their line closed around me. I held the box, Nueve held his cane, and the men behind us held their assault rifles.

“This is the moment when I say, ‘Ah, Alfred Kropp, we meet again,' ” Nueve said.

“We're checking out of Club OIPEP,” I told him. “Me and Ashley.”