The Seal of Solomon (11 page)

This was no sunrise.

Abby Smith was a few steps ahead of me and Op Nine must have heard her coming up, because she was still behind him when he turned his head and spoke.

And now the glow on the horizon looked like a wall of fire coming toward us.

“We are too late.”

18

“How many?” Abby asked Op Nine.

“It's difficult . . .” He shaded his eyes with one huge hand and squinted toward the sparkling light. “Thirty, perhaps forty legions.”

“Legions?” I asked. “What's a legion?”

Abby said to him, “Not all, then.”

He shook his head. “A search party.”

“A search party of what?” I asked.

“Can we outrun them?” she asked.

He said quietly, “ ‘Their horses are swifter than leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat.' ”

“I'll take that as a no,” she said. “Then we engage.” She started to turn away. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

“No!” he said in a fierce whisper. “Our mission is to acquire the target. There is still time.”

“Time for what?” I asked, but I really didn't expect an answer by this point.

Now the orange on the horizon had deepened to a fiery red mixed with bright white sparks. The stars winked out as the burning light advanced, filling the night sky, and a breeze noticeably warmer than the cool desert air began to blow across our faces.

“We must take cover,” Op Nine said. “Immediately.”

Abby turned and started toward the others, making some kind of complicated hand signal as she went, and right away they opened the storage compartments on the foils and began pulling out what looked like brown tarps.

Op Nine had said we needed to take cover immediately, but he didn't move a muscle. He stood stock-still and stared at the flickering lights of white and gold. The breeze had turned into a full-fledged wind that grew hotter with each passing second. The ground started to tremble.

“Uh, Op Nine, didn't you say we had to take cover?”

He shook his head as if rousing himself from a dream.

“Yes. Come, Kropp.”

He threw my arm over his shoulder and helped me back to the foils. The agents had spread the brown tarps over the vehicles and now were crawling underneath them. Ashley crouched beside one, motioning to us.

“Alfred,” Op Nine said. “This is very important: do not look into their eyes. They will know what you fear.”

He lowered me to the ground and I started to crawl under the tarp. He grabbed my arm and pulled my face close to his.

“And what you love.”

He had to shout over the wind, which was howling by this point, spraying us with stinging grains of sand. He let the tarp fall and I felt someone's hand on my wrist, pulling me away from the edge.

“Don't move,” Ashley whispered. “Don't talk.”

The darkness under the tarp faded, or maybe I was getting used to it, because after a minute I could see her bright blue eyes darting back and forth. Ashley's hand was white-knuckled on the CW3XD that lay across her lap, her index finger caressing the trigger. Ashley was afraid.

The tarp rippled and snapped around us as the gale worsened and sand popped against the material, making this strange hissing sound like gas escaping from a bottle. I could hear something else too, as if the wind was a curtain rippling as this sound passed behind it. Voices, or maybe not voices but somehow the echo of voices, and I started to shake as the tarp around us began to glow red.

It was very close now, whatever it was, and the closer it got, the more I shook. It was hot and stuffy under the covering and I was sweating, but I shivered like I had a fever. Op Nine's warning echoed over and over in my head:
Don't look into
their eyes! Don't look into their eyes!
My mind became like a slice of Swiss cheese, stretched thin, full of holes filled with darkness, and that darkness was full of horror.

Dimly, under the howling wind, I could hear someone screaming.
She needs to be quiet,
I thought.
Ashley, be quiet!
But it wasn't Ashley screaming, of course; it was me.

Then, as if it shot through one of those holes in my mind, a hand reached for me in the darkness, soft and warm, and without thinking I pulled her into my arms.

19

“Alfred, it's over.”

She pushed on my chest and I unfolded my arms. Every inch of me ached. In the half-light beneath the tarp, I saw her brush back a strand of hair from her forehead.

“What was that?” I whispered hoarsely. My throat ached from the screaming. “What the heck was that?”

I flipped back the edge of the tarp without asking for permission.
Enough of this,
I thought. I was testy now. I wanted some answers. Everybody seemed to know what we were getting into except one key person.

Sand fell into a heap where I lifted the tarp. The winds had piled the sand all around us, like a snowdrift. I stood up and my knees popped. Twelve mounds of desert sand now stood where the foils used to be. And these twelve mounds were the only feature left in the Sahara. The desert was as flat and featureless as an enormous tabletop; the rolling dunes were completely gone.

But the night had returned and, with it, the brilliant stars and the cool air.

The others had already emerged from their hiding places and gathered in a circle around Op Nine. He saw me crawl out and waved me over. I waited for Ashley. Her cheeks were wet and her eyes red.

I grabbed her hand. She pulled it away.

“I'm okay,” she said.

“I'm not,” I said, and I grabbed her hand again and this time she didn't pull away.

We joined the other agents, who for some reason were kneeling in this circle, even Abby. Their eyes were downcast and their expressions somber, and I wondered why we were having a prayer meeting. Op Nine was the only one upright, standing in the center of the circle, arms folded over his chest, looking very grim. Even the big agent with the cocky, let's-mow-'em-down attitude looked like somebody had gut-punched him.

They adjusted themselves to make room for Ashley and me. Op Nine motioned for us to kneel. I don't know why, but I went down to my knees at once and so did Ashley. She pulled her hand free and this time I didn't take it back.

Op Nine said, “The worst has come to pass: the Hyena has unlocked the Seal. Yet Fortune smiles upon us, for we have escaped his minions' notice. We may assume he has divided his legions to search for us, thus exposing his position. A frontal assault will be the last thing he expects.” He took a deep breath. “So that is precisely what we shall give him.”

He reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit and pulled out a small metal flask. He walked up to Abigail and stopped. He opened the flask, tipped the opening against the pad of his thumb, and then traced the sign of the cross on her forehead, muttering something I couldn't hear. He worked his way around the circle, wetting his thumb, muttering, making the sign.

Finally he came to me. He paused, staring down at me, and his dark eyes seemed even darker in the starlight.

“What?” I whispered.

“Domine, exaudi orationem meam,”
Op Nine murmured, upending the flask.
“Et clamor meus ad te veniat.”
He pressed his thumb against my forehead and I felt the wetness there as he traced the cross.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus
Sancti.
Amen.”

He stepped over to Ashley and I watched him bless her too, as a single drop of holy water (I guessed it was holy water—what else could it be?) trickled down my nose.

He capped off the flask and slipped it into his pocket. Nobody said anything as we pulled the tarps off the foils and folded them up. Ashley would pause every now and then to pull back the strand of blond hair that had fallen from her bun. Her fingers were shaking. I helped her fold the tarp.

“Okay,” I said. “So what was that about?”

She shook her head, almost impatiently, like my question bordered on the cheeky.

“We're too late,” she said. “Mike's unlocked the Lesser Seal. They're free.”

“Who's free? What did Solomon keep in the Lesser Seal, Ashley? Why did Op Nine just bless us? Is he a priest or something?” I blurted out, though it was hard for me to imagine, a priest being an OIPEP agent. “What's his deal anyway?”

She grabbed the bundle and stuffed it back into its compartment on the sand-foil. She looked angry and frightened at the same time.

“Okay, I'll tell you. They brought you here, so you have a right to know. Let them fire me for it; I don't care . . . Op Nine's ‘deal' is demons, Alfred.”

“Demons?”

“He's a demonologist.”

And that's how I finally discovered what had been imprisoned for three thousand years in the Holy Vessel of Babylon, the Lesser Seal of Solomon.

“Demons . . . ?” I said. “Demons. Well, that's great. That's just terrific.”

20

We climbed back onto the sand-foil and soon the speedometer needle was hovering near 110. We made better time now that the dunes were gone. We were crossing the Sahara, but it might as well have been the flats at Death Valley.

The speaker inside my helmet crackled with agent chatter, mostly from Abby as she reviewed the ATTPRO. I guessed it meant “attack procedure.” It could also stand for “attitude problem,” though I doubted it, given the context.

“Two groups!” Abby said. “First group will feint an attack on the Hyena's flank to draw off the IAs. Second group is the targeting force who will take out the Hyena and retrieve the Seal!”

Abby made it very clear that Operative Nine had dibs on Mike, I guessed because he was the expert in the group on handling these demons. It seemed to me what they really needed was an expert on handling Mike Arnold.

Then she called out the names in each group. ASSFOR-1 (“Assault Force One,” I was guessing, though the OIPEP shoptalk threw me for a second) would consist of Sam, Betty, Todd, Bill, Carl, and Agnes. All OIPEP people had names like that, never more than one syllable—unless you were a girl, then you got two or even three, if you were really important, like Abigail Smith.

The rest, Bert, Ken, Yule, Ashley, Abigail, and Op Nine, were ASSFOR-2. I assumed I was ASSFOR-2 too, since my big one was hanging off the backseat of Ashley's sand-foil.

After a while the horizon began to glow that sickening orange color and the chatter inside my helmet died away. My thoughts started to feel like Swiss cheese again, and I wondered how anybody, even a trained OIPEP agent, could fight in these circumstances, when absolute terror ripped through you like a buzz saw.

Ashley slowed the sand-foil and we fell back with the rest of ASSFOR-2. The first group roared straight toward the horizon with its sparks of white light that looked kind of like Christmas lights twinkling. They held the butts of their long 3XDs against their thighs, the barrels sticking up in the air at a forty-five-degree angle.

“Hold until they're engaged,” I heard Op Nine say in my ear.

We came to a stop. Op Nine was right beside me, the visor on his helmet flipped up so I could see his face in the glow of the demon-fire.

“Where's mine?” I asked, nodding at the 3XD in his hand. “What's it shoot anyway—holy water?”

“Something far more powerful, I hope,” he said. Then out of nowhere he added, “It has begun.”

He flipped his visor down. I looked toward the orange glow and now there was red tracer fire from the group ahead arching into it, and when it touched the fire, a black tear or hole appeared, lingered for a few seconds, then closed back up. I didn't get a long look, though, because we leaped forward suddenly and my head snapped back. The needle jumped to 130 after we executed a hard left. Racing toward the battle, I could see over Ashley's shoulder that the orange glow came to a sort of point on the southern edge.

The orange had deepened to red when Abby Smith started yelling something over the speaker and we skidded to a stop. About thirty yards ahead I could see a sand-foil lying on its side and closer, crawling toward us, one of the OIPEP agents, clutching the 3XD in his right hand.

Ashley grabbed a satchel embossed with a red
X
, ripped off her helmet, and ran to the crawling man.

“Ashley!” Abigail called. “There isn't time!”

He had taken off his helmet. It was Carl, the biggest agent, the tough guy who talked on the plane about blowing Mike away. He was crying and slobbering and cursing, his face caked with wet sand. He cried out when Ashley touched him on the shoulder, cringing like a dog that's used to being beaten. As we got closer, I could see Carl had no eyes. There were just empty sockets where his eyes used to be.

Ashley realized it at the same time, I think, because she recoiled suddenly with a startled gasp.