The Seal of Solomon (15 page)

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 hips 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.

“Everest, ladies and gentlemen,” Dr. Merryweather said. “Unassailable by ground and nearly impregnable by air. Also, I might add, for the literalists among you, the closest place to heaven on earth. Lights, please.”

The image vanished and the light in the room went back to normal. I noticed my leather chair made that farting sound leather chairs make when you shift around in them. I glanced around to make sure nobody noticed and wondered why Alfred Kropp, the big trouble-making kid, was at this meeting cutting farts.

“Op Nine.” The director nodded at him and Op Nine stood up.

“The wearer of the Great Seal commands seventy-two outcasts of varying ranks,” Op Nine said. “Presidents, dukes, princes, counts, kings . . . but these are mortal designations, not their true titles, the hidden names spoken only once, and that by God. Each noble in his turn rules legions of lesser entities, some more, some less, according to his rank within the infernal hierarchy. For example, Paimon, the king to which the ring has fallen, commands two hundred legions.”

“How many legions total?” the agent named Jake asked.

“Two thousand sixty-one.”

Somebody whistled. Another asked, “And how many IAs per legion?”

“Six thousand.”

Dead silence. Then Jake whispered, “Dear God, that's over fifteen million.”

“Sixteen million, five hundred sixty-six thousand, to be precise,” Op Nine said.

“That's twice the population of New York.”

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Merryweather snapped. “Or seventy-four percent of the total forces under arms in the world. Or sixteen times the size of the U.S. military. Or the entire population of New Zealand, including women, children, and sheep. Continue, Nine.” He was pacing around the room, rubbing his forehead. When he passed behind me, I could smell Cheetos. Cheetos have a very unique smell, so I was sure it was Cheetos. The crunchy kind.

“Each Fallen Lord has various powers or abilities at the disposal of the conjurer, some more . . . disturbing than others,” Op Nine said. “Some have healing capabilities, some are builders—others are more destructive. There are givers of wisdom and slayers of reason. Those who control weather and those who are masters of the other earthly elements. Shape-changers, mind-readers, and mind-
benders
, all their myriad powers combine to serve the one who wears the Seal of Solomon.”

“Now in the possession of this King Paimon,” Merryweather added. “Who is Paimon?”

“One of the Firstborn of Heaven,” Op Nine answered. “Second only to Lucifer and the first to join the plot to overthrow heaven's throne. In the literature Paimon rides upon a dromedary, though there are other accounts that put it astride a great winged beast of monstrous appearance. Two lesser kings usually attend Paimon, Bebal and Abalam, with a host of other infernal beings, twenty-five legions or more, and Paimon commands two hundred legions.

“Paimon is a teacher, granting secret knowledge to the holder of the Seal, bestowing all the hidden arts and mysteries of heaven and earth. Paimon controls wind and water and can bind men's minds to the will of the conjurer. In short, of all the seventy-two lords, the Seal has fallen to perhaps the most powerful—and most terrible—of them all.”

“In other words,” the director said dryly, “the inmates have stolen the keys to the prison and for the first time since
before
Time, they answer to no one.”

The whiff of Cheetos reminded me I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a meal. My stomach commenced to growling and continued to growl for the rest of the briefing. I also didn't know what time it was, what day it was, what month it was . . . although I was still pretty sure what year it was. What I needed, besides a meal, was something really ordinary, to remind me that I hadn't fallen down some gruesome rabbit hole where the mad tea party included sixteen million guests, all of whom could make you tear your own eyeballs from your head.

“Let's have SATCOM I-27S,” Merryweather said toward the ceiling. The lights dimmed again and sitting in the middle of the table was the gigantic bowl of glass in the desert. This image was a still shot, and Merryweather directed a laser pointer at a tiny black dot at the edge of the shiny surface.

“This, we believe, is the Hyena, minutes after the Seal was lost. This”—and he moved the tiny red dot to another speck in the scene—“is the altar. Enhance to the third, please.” The image grew, distorting slightly as it did, and now you could see the outline of the altar, though the edges were fuzzy. “The Vessel is gone. We
assumed
”—and here he cast a baleful eye in Op Nine's direction—“that the IAs had absconded with the Lesser Seal as well. Now it appears they did not. The key operational assumption we will make henceforth is that the Hyena took the Vessel in the confusion after the ring was lost.”

“Why?” a lady agent named Sandy asked.

“Why what?”

“Why would Mike take the Vessel?”

“For protection, first,” Op Nine said. “He has a bargaining chip, should they find him before we do. He may also approach us to broker a deal.”

“I don't understand,” Agent Jake said. “Why do they need the Vessel? We can't put them back in it without the ring.”

“It is not a question of what they need,” Op Nine said. “Without the Vessel, there will always be the risk, however small, that somehow they might be returned to it. Having the prison in their hands ensures their freedom from it.”

“Their freedom to do
what
?” the agent named Greg asked.

“I don't know,” Op Nine answered.

“Wait a minute, aren't you the demonologist here? If
you
don't know—”

“We do not need to know what they will do with their freedom,” Abby interrupted. “All we need to know is what they will do if they do not obtain the Vessel.”

She paused. Jake blew out his cheeks. Somebody coughed.

Op Nine was staring at the tabletop. Finally, Sandy blurted out, “Okay, I'll bite. What will they do?”

Abby glanced over at me. So did Merryweather. I looked away. I didn't want to tell them what I saw in Carl's empty eye sockets. I didn't want to talk about it because I didn't want to think about it.

Op Nine spoke up. “Understand their hatred is beyond human comprehension. They abhor the Creator and so also the creation. Whatever brings joy, whatever brings peace, whatever redeems the dark deed or relieves the terrors of the night are their enemies. I do not know for certain what they intend to do, but I suspect it goes beyond our own pitiful comprehension of evil, our childlike notions of heaven's opposite. We must assume their goal has not changed since the beginning of time. What will they do?
They will consume us
.”

29

“I still don't get it,” Jake said. “What's the point of pursuing the Hyena? Say we find him and get the Vessel—then what? We can't use it because we don't have the ring. We should be going after the ring, not the Vessel.”

“Yes, well, we'll put you on that team,” the director said. “You can lead the assault up Everest against the sixteen million fiends.”

Jake ignored the sarcasm. “Maybe that's what we oughtta do. Take it to them!”

“We are still making modifications to the 3XD,” Op Nine said. “As well as other applications for the active agent contained in the ammunition.”

“I'm talking a small team, maybe two or three ops with a couple Sherpas. We draw this, what's-his-name, Paimon out and one shot to the hand does it.”

Op Nine shook his head. “Perversely, the Hyena's instincts to seize the Vessel were correct. Obtaining it strengthens our position. At the very least, our possessing it will give them pause.”