The Seal of Solomon (8 page)

“That's his code name, Hyena?”

“You don't like it? We thought it most apropos.”

“It's okay, but my big problem with code names is why use one when everybody knows the real name?”

“Because that would offend our super-secret-agent Tom Clancy sensibilities.”

He motioned toward the foot of the bed.

“Perhaps you would like to dress before we reach Marsa Alam.”

“Huh?” I had no idea I
wasn't
dressed. Then I saw I was wearing a hospital gown. Why had OIPEP stuck me in a hospital gown?

I slid out of bed and grabbed the bundle of clothes. He just stood there, staring at me with those dark eyes. I hoped he didn't plan to stand there while I got dressed.

“Is there someplace I can maybe wash up and brush my teeth?” Running my tongue over them felt like I was licking carpet, and not the thin, worn kind in the Tuttle house, but something with a thicker pile.

“Of course. Left down the corridor, last door on the right at the terminus of the hall.”

Terminus of the hall.
He didn't have any accent that I could detect, but he talked like English was his second language. Who says “terminus of the hall”?

Op Nine opened the round door for me. I turned left, one hand pressing the clothes against my chest, the other clutching the gown closed behind me as I shuffled down the hall. In case you didn't know, hospital gowns are open in the back with just a little drawstring to tie them, and therefore my naked butt was flapping in the breeze. The hall was packed with agents hurrying up and down, and a few stopped and stared as I passed.

I thought I heard a couple of snickers and once the word “pimple,” though it might have been “dimple,” which made sense too.

I reached the terminus of the hall and went through the last door on the right.

I was in a tiny bathroom, maybe two or three times the size of an airplane bathroom. I barely fit in the shower, but it had one of those removable shower heads on a flexible tube with the adjustable sprayers for regular or massaging.

I stayed in that shower for a long time, leaning against the wall as the water pounded on my dimple, wondering what this dizziness was about and if it had something to do with jet lag. I found a sore spot in my left armpit and worried about that—I knew your lymph nodes were in your pits, and my mom had died of cancer. Cancer ran in families, though hers didn't start in her armpits.

I grabbed a towel from the peg on the wall and dried off, getting a little dizzy when I bent over to do my legs. I wrapped the towel around my middle, took a deep breath, and sat on the toilet.

I hadn't cried since this whole thing began back in Knoxville, but I finally had a little time on my hands and some privacy to get some quality crying in, so I started to cry.

Half a world away, kids were piling onto the school bus. Was anybody saying, “Hey, whatever happened to that big kid, Kropp?” Were any teachers looking at the empty desk and frowning, or was Horace camping out at the police station waiting for news? Was Kenny lying in his bunk, whispering in the dark, wondering aloud where Alfred Kropp had gone?

And in the afternoons the parks and practice fields would be packed with players, soccer and football teams wallowing in that sweaty camaraderie of jocks. Geeks would be playing the latest version of
Doom
and IMing each other with tips. The garage bands would be revving up the amps, moms would be sticking the chicken in the oven, and neighborhood streets would echo with the shouts of kids playing in the fallen leaves and soon it will be Thanksgiving . . .

I tried not to think of all those things, but the more I tried, the more I thought. Once, I thought normal life was boring and I hated it. Now I would give everything to go back.

But Thanksgiving made me think of food and food made me think of my teeth, and that brought me back to my senses. The thought of brushing my teeth calmed me down, I guess because it was an everyday activity that had nothing to do with biblical kings and extreme extractions and secret organizations with vaults filled with deadly artifacts that bring catastrophe if you mess with them.

I found a toothbrush still in its packaging and a travel-size tube of Crest in the cabinet mounted next to the mirror. No floss, but you can't have everything. I brushed until my gums bled and watched my pink spit swirl down the drain.

I dressed in the black OIPEP-issued jumpsuit. The underwear was boxers and I was a tighty-whitey man, but they were clean, so I wasn't about to complain. I filed the little fact that OIPEP men wear boxers; it might be useful later, but I doubted it. Most little facts aren't.

I decided not to go back to my cabin. I probably was supposed to, but the crying had freed up something in me, like a lot of good cries will.

I walked back down the corridor to a stairway that wound upward, went up two flights, and stepped onto the deck, into brilliant sunshine. A stiff breeze blew from the stern, whipping my damp hair back from my face. I wondered if the
Pandora
had a barber on board.

I walked toward the front of the ship. To my left was the open water, but there was a dark line of land in the distance. Sunlight danced off the pointy tips of the waves, so bright, it left glittering spots in my vision. I passed several people in deck chairs or leaning on the railing, men and women dressed like tourists with cameras hanging from their necks and a dab of white sunscreen on their noses. I looked to my right and saw the upper part of the ship, where a sign was painted in big red letters: “Red Sea Adventures.” There were more letters in another language right beside it; Arabic, I guess, with those funny curlicues and fat dots. So that was OIPEP's cover: we were happy Westerners on a jaunt before hitting the Pyramids.

I reached the front and leaned against the railing. I couldn't see any other ships. I looked straight down and saw how fast we were going. When Abigail called the
Pandora
a jetfoil, I wasn't sure what she meant. Now, leaning over the rail, I knew. The
Pandora
rode through the water on two huge fins, its underside about six feet above the surface. With this kind of setup, the
Pandora
could give a world-class speedboat a run for its money.

Op Nine appeared beside me. I was busted. To distract him, I pointed at the dark line on the horizon and asked, “What's that?”

“Egypt,” Op Nine answered.

“So this is the Mediterranean?”

“No, this is the Red Sea,” he said. Just five minutes ago I had looked at a sign that read, “Red Sea Adventures.”

“I'm gonna need some shoes,” I said. I'm a pretty tall guy, but this Operative Nine towered over me. Tilting my chin up, I could see the black tangle of his nose hair.

He didn't say anything, so I asked, “So what happens when we reach the insertion point?”

“We will wait for nightfall. Then the race for the nexus.”

“Nexus—where in Egypt is that?”

“It is not a name of a place, Kropp. It is the nexus, the core. The nucleus.”

“Oh, sure. The nucleus of
what
?”

“Reentry.”

“Oh, boy. I don't guess you're ever going to tell me what's going on with these Seals, so I'm going to give it a shot. You don't have to say anything, just nod or twitch your mouth, some kind of signal I might be on the right track.

“This ring of Solomon's controls something that's locked up in the Holy Vessel. Like the name of this boat sort of implies, it's not something you want to be messing with. Mike got away with both of them, and he's hightailed it into the Egyptian desert, because he can't just open the Holy Vessel anywhere and, since we have five hours or so to get there, I'm guessing he can't just open it whenever he feels like it. Maybe the stars have to be in perfect alignment or there's some other criteria I don't know about, like Mars being in Sagittarius or something along those lines.”

He didn't nod or twitch or move a single muscle. He just stared down at me. If I had some shoes, I'd be a little taller and might not be able to see so much nose hair.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Operative Nine.”

“No, I mean what's your
real
name?”

“Whatever it needs to be.”

“I promise I won't tell anybody.”

He was smiling. It wasn't a very natural-looking smile. He smiled like smiling hurt.

“I could tell you,” he said. “But then I would have to kill you.”

“That's a really old joke.”

“I'm not joking.”

He stepped back and motioned toward the bow. “Come, Kropp. We should not tarry. The sea has eyes.”

13

I followed him back to my cabin. I told him my feet were cold and he just looked at me like I'd said something in Swahili, or maybe it was more like he spoke Swahili and I didn't.

“There are some matters I must attend to,” Op Nine said. He left. I hoped one of those matters included socks and shoes. I sat on the bed. I picked at my toenails, which needed trimming. I was tempted to bite them down, but I hadn't done that since I was ten, and some things you should move past.

I wondered what happened to Ashley after the helicopter rescue in Tennessee. Was her injury completely healed now? I had mixed feelings about her. She had saved my life, but she had also lied to me about who she was and why she was “attached” to me. I wondered if my feelings were mixed because I thought she was a nice person or if it was because I thought she was pretty.

OIPEP agents fell into two categories, as far as I could tell: the preppie, grad student type, of which Mike Arnold was the perfect example; and the stoic, more menacing type like Operative Nine. That guy was so stiff and precise that I wondered if he was one of those “unacknowledged technologies” that Abigail mentioned back in London.

Maybe he was a cyborg, but that seemed far-fetched. On the other hand, I was chasing after a magical ring that once belonged to King Solomon from the Bible and I didn't seem to have trouble believing that.

The door swung open and a tall, tanned blonde with blue eyes about the size of quarters walked in, dressed in the standard-issue OIPEP jumpsuit. I stood up and we didn't say anything for a minute. Then she reached out and hugged me. Ashley smelled good, like lilacs, only I wasn't sure what lilacs smelled like; it was just the first word that popped into my head. She hugged me and I thought,
Lilacs.

“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For saving my life.”

“Okay,” I said, because I didn't know what else to say.

“And I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?”

“Tricking you like that in Knoxville.”

“Well, that's sort of your job, isn't it?”

She nodded. “I guess.”

“What's in the Holy Vessel?” I figured if anyone would tell me, it would be Ashley.

“I can't tell you.”

“Do you know why Mike was trying to kill me?”

She looked away.

“Can you tell me why he stole the Seals?”

“We don't know why.”

I was feeling light-headed again, so I sank back onto the bed.

“Is there a doctor on board?” I asked.

“Why, are you sick?”

“I feel really dizzy. Plus I found this sore under my . . .” I didn't feel comfortable for some reason using the word “armpit.” “On my skin. I wouldn't care, you know, I'm a pretty tough guy, played football and everything, plus I've had my share of rough scrapes over the past year, including being killed, but my mom's cancer started with a sore spot and you know that runs in families. Not sore spots. Cancer. Well, I guess sore spots could run in families too . . .”

“Yes,” she said. She was smiling for some reason.

“There's a doctor on board. You want me to get him?”

“Maybe in a little while. It's better when I sit down.”

She sat down next to me as if she needed to feel better too. Her hair fell across her cheek as she leaned forward, swinging her long legs against the bunk.

“I've been thinking about my mom a lot lately,” I said.

“After she died, things got really weird.”

She nodded. She hooked a thick strand of her hair around her left ear and looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

“You probably know all about my mom,” I said. “I bet OIPEP has a file on me and you had to read that when they, um, attached you to me. That's how you knew my blood had the power to heal.”

“That's pretty smart of you, Alfred.”

“So there is a file.”

“The Company keeps files on a lot of people.”

“How many people?”

“Practically everybody.”

“Why practically everybody?”

“Because practically everybody has the potential to be important.” “Well, I never saw myself that way. I mean, I know I'm the last living descendent of Lancelot, and my dad was pretty rich and important, but it was mostly dumb luck how I saved the world.”