The Thirteenth Skull (24 page)

Ashley agreed. “It might be possible for our engineers to find a way to disable the SD 1031 without killing you.”

“So we make for headquarters in the morning and pray we stay one step ahead of our enemies,” Sam said.

I started to say no, I couldn't go, not yet, and then it hit me if I said no I would have to say why: I had to save Mr. Needlemier from Vosch. But if I told them that, Sam would do anything it took to stop me. My thing-that-must-be-done wasn't his thing-that-must-be-done, and if I told him my thing, he was going to do his thing, and that would mean Vosch would do
his
thing, and that was torturing Mr. Needlemier like he did Sam, maybe even killing him and his family, all because he had the misfortune of knowing Alfred Kropp. I wasn't going to let that happen.

00:20:56:31

Sam tried reaching Abby Smith twice before we turned in for the night. He had the top-secret number for the cell phone she kept with her at all times, but even that call wouldn't go through.

“She's dead,” I told him. “Or been fired. Or captured by Nueve. We're walking right into a trap.”

“Simply because something is possible does not make it probable, Alfred,” he said.

“Oh. Thanks, Sensei, I feel better now.”

Ashley took the first watch. She pulled a chair in front of the door and sat there with the gun in her lap. I waited until Samuel was asleep, then eased out of bed and sat in the empty chair across from her.

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

“Because I'm an idiot,” she said.

“You're not an idiot,” I said. “Which is why I asked in the first place.”

“I'm in love with someone I shouldn't be in love with,” she said. “It's wrong and I know it's wrong and still I can't help myself.”

I was shocked. It wasn't the answer I was expecting. Ashley began to cry. She slumped in the chair and I came out of mine to catch her. The gun fell to the carpet. She pushed her face into the nook between my neck and shoulder and sobbed.

“Whatever happens, Alfred, I want you to understand something.”

“Sure.”

“I meant what I said about that time machine.”

“And I meant what I said,” I said, though I couldn't remember what exactly I said or when, exactly, I said it.

I pressed my lips into her hair.

00:19:48:05

After she calmed down and told me she was going to be okay, I dragged myself back to the bed and had another dream.

I was walking across a familiar field of tall grass and in front of me was a yew tree, and under the tree sat a beautiful woman in flowing white robes. It was the Lady in White. I hadn't seen her since Mogart killed me with Excalibur. I was crying with joy as I ran toward her.

She turned to me and her beauty took my breath away, the absolute perfection of her.

“You never told me who you are,” I said. “Who are you?”

“You know, Alfred. You have always known.”

A radiant light shone around her face.

“Who am I, Alfred son of Lancelot?”

She smiled and the light around her face began to sear her flesh, burning it away until her skull gleamed white in front of me, wearing the leering, knowing smile of all skulls. Her voice thundered inside my head.

“I AM THE DRAGON AND MY NAME IS SOFIA!”

I woke up. The room was silent except for the humming of the air unit beneath the window. I looked toward the door. Ashley was still sitting there. In the bluish half-light eking through the window, she looked as if she too was part of a dream. I watched her for a couple of minutes, glad and not glad at the same time that she had found me.

If you're going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you
should take the tracking device with you.

I slipped out of bed and padded to the table in my sock feet. Mom always said you should never go barefoot in a hotel room because carpet was a breeding ground for all kinds of nasty germs and contagious diseases. Mom had a thing about stuff like that. Every week she went through about twelve cans of Lysol.

Ashley watched me slide into the empty chair across from her. I thought she looked tired, especially around the eyes.

“Let me take the watch,” I said. “I can't sleep.”

“Why can't you sleep?”

“Bad dreams.”

The black box sat on the table between us. I touched it. She watched me touch it. Her eyes flicked from my hand on the box to my face then back to the box again. She didn't say anything. Box. My face. Box.

“This huge flat-faced dude tried very hard to kill me today,” I told her. “Big. Six five, six six maybe, at least three hundred pounds, with a dagger about the size of my forearm. Came right at me.”

“What happened?” she whispered.

“I took him out.” I drew in a deep breath. “I killed him.”

She ran her hand through her golden hair.

“I'd rather have a hundred Flat-Faces coming at me than this,” I said, stroking the edge of the box. “Nueve said it was no bigger than a pencil lead. It's the little things that kill us faster—sometimes better. Like germs. Or cancer cells. The spot on my mom's temple was the size of a pea when she found it, and six months later she was dead. It's those things you can't see. Like that old story of the blind men and the elephant.”

“I don't know that story,” she said. Her eyes shone in the ambient light coming from the parking lot.

“These guys blind from birth are taken to this elephant and each one touches a different part. One guy feels the trunk, another the tail, another a leg and so on, and someone asks them, ‘What is an elephant?' The one who felt the trunk says an elephant is like a plow; the one who felt the tusk said it was like a tree; the one who felt the leg said it was like column to a temple. All of them got it wrong because they couldn't see it whole, but that didn't change what it was. It was still an elephant.”

“Okay . . .” she said. She was waiting for the punch line.

“See, sometimes it's right there in front of you, only you're too close to see it.”

I pressed the blue button. The red light came on. She jerked forward, her free hand instinctively going for the box. I pulled it away and cradled it in my lap.

“Alfred, what are you doing?”

“Seeing if what I felt was a tree or an elephant.”

If you're going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you
should take the tracking device with you.

“At Camp Echo I asked you about the range of the tracking device,” I said. “You said maybe a mile or two.”

“It's a GPS, Alfred,” she said slowly, carefully. “I didn't know that until I tested it in Knoxville. I really didn't know the range when you asked me.”

“GPS, gotcha.” I ran my fingertip over the glowing red button. “So it doesn't matter how far I run, Nueve and company will always know where to find me.”

She swallowed. “I guess so.”

“You guess so? Don't you know so?”

“Alfred, you're making me very nervous. Why don't you put that down before you do something you shouldn't.”

“I probably should,” I agreed. “I'm not sure what happened next, whether the blind men were told what they really felt and if they got mad because they had it all wrong. Maybe it's better for everybody involved to call an elephant a tree and leave it at that.”

“Give me the box, Alfred.” She was leaning over the table, her left hand extended toward me, her right gripping the butt of the semiautomatic.

I'm in love with someone I shouldn't be in love with. It's
wrong and I know it's wrong and still I can't help myself.

“Nueve let me run off into the woods even though he had no way to find me. I had the only box on the mountain. Then he let me fly off the mountain with both boxes, free to go wherever I wanted and he'd have no way to track me, at least until he could get another box and that would take time, time he really couldn't afford because anything could happen, right? There'd be a huge gap where he wouldn't know where I was and he'd have no way of protecting the Company's investment. That's what I am—the investment—and that's his job: protecting it. So why did he let me go?”

“Why?” Ashley echoed.

“The answer is the elephant, Ashley. The answer is
he
didn't let me go.
I never escaped from the Company, except once, when I gave you the slip on the plane.”

“That's crazy,” she said. “Alfred, you're . . . you're being paranoid. That's understandable, but I told you—”

“Right. I
own
you. I'm your
assignment
.”

“No, not like that. Not that way.” She shook her golden hair and it swirled around her tanned face, which didn't look so tan right then.

“Who assigned you to me, Ashley? Was it Director Smith or the Operative Nine?”

I pressed the red button. Her whole body went rigid as the display sprang to life:
30 . . . 29 . . . 28 . . . 27 . . .

“See, I'm pretty confident I know,” I said. “So confident I'm willing to bet my life on it.”

She lunged across the table at me. I sprang from the chair and it thumped onto the germy carpet.

19 . . . 18 . . . 17 . . . 16 . . .

“Who is it, Ashley? Me or Nueve? Who really owns you?”

I tossed the box at her. She dropped the gun and caught it in both hands. Her shoulders shook as her thin fingers danced over the keypad.

The red light went black.

I picked up the fallen chair and sat down. She slumped into hers in front of the door, the gun lying forgotten at her feet as she cradled the box like a newborn baby in against her chest.

“Now tell me some bull crap about that being a lucky guess,” I said. “In love with someone you shouldn't be. I guess so. Guessed wrong the first time, guessed right this time.”

“It isn't what you think,” she whispered. She wouldn't look at me.

“You don't have to explain anything, Ashley.”

I got up, went into the bathroom, and came back out with a few sheets of toilet paper, which I tried to hand to her. She said, “I won't wipe my face with toilet paper, Alfred.”

I pushed the paper into my pocket. “Okay.”

“I really do want to protect you,” she said. “And I really do—I really do have feelings for you. That's the reason, Alfred. The
only
reason I agreed to any of this.”

“Where is Nueve?” I asked.

“I have no idea—” she started. Then she stopped herself and said, “On his way.”

“How soon?”

“An hour, maybe two—”

“I want a head start.”

“There's nowhere you can go where he can't find you.”

“We,” I said. “Say it.
We.
”

“We,” she said.

“A friend of mine is in trouble. I've got to save him before some very bad people do a very bad thing to him or his family. So I'm leaving, and you're going to let me.”

“I can't let you, Alfred.”

I gently pried the box from her fingers.

“You're not going to wake up Sam. You're not going to come after me. You're going to sit here and wait for your boyfriend and when he gets here you're going to say I took the box and bopped you over the head with it. I'll bop you right now, if you think that'll make it more believable.”

“Don't,” she said. “Don't make me do something I don't want to do.”

“That's what I'm counting on,” I said. “That it's something you really don't want to do.”

I stepped around her and unlatched the door. I heard a clicking sound behind me. Turning around, I saw the gun in her hands, and the gun was pointed at the center of my thick forehead.

“Were you lying?” I asked.

“You know I was.”

“Not about Nueve,” I said. “Not about your assignment. About the right thing still mattering. Were you lying? Does it still matter? I think it does. Sometimes I get confused about what the right thing is, but in all this, in everything that happened since I found Excalibur, I always tried to do the right thing. Like now
my
right thing is trying to save my friend.
Your
right thing is giving me the chance to save him. That's the right thing, Ashley. The thing-that-must-be-done. Sometimes the thing-that-must-be-done and the right thing are the same thing for both people. Sometimes they're not, like Samuel putting a bomb in my skull. Right for him. Wrong for me. But just because something like that happens doesn't mean you stop trying to do the right thing.”

I was feeling a little dizzy and a lot tired. I needed to leave. I said, “So you do your thing and I'll do my thing and maybe in the end everything will turn out just fine.”

I opened the door and cold air poured into the room. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Maybe from the cold, maybe from the fact that Ashley was pointing a semiautomatic at my face.

“At least tell me where you're going,” she said.

“Where it began,” I said, and then I stepped into the night and the door swung closed behind me.

I walked across the parking lot, and the muscles between my shoulder blades twitched, expecting the bullet. I knew she had to be watching me through the window, but I didn't care. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was Mr. Needlemier. The world wasn't in jeopardy this time, just one person in it, and that's just as important.

I walked a half mile down the road to the gas station where I bought the corn dogs. I asked the clerk if I could use her phone.

“Why?” she asked.

“My car broke down. I need to call my dad.”

“You don't have a cell phone?”

“It's dead.” So was my dad, but I didn't want to overload her with too much information.

She clearly didn't believe me. Maybe if I bought something she'd let me use the phone. I bought a Big Gulp and asked again if I could use the phone.