“We don’t know,” Abigail said. “We were hoping you might.”
“Me? OIPEP’s looking to me for answers? We’re in bigger trouble than I thought. What about Ashley?”
Op Nine frowned. “What about her?”
“Why was she spying on me?”
Again they looked at each other.
“The Company often assigns operatives to keep tabs on Special Subjects.”
“ ‘Special Subjects’? I’m a Special Subject?”
“How could the last son of Lancelot not be a Special Subject?” Abby asked tenderly. “Mike’s entrance into your particular interface took all of us by surprise. Fortunately, Ashley was watching your house when Mike made his move.”
“So you knock me out and bring me to this boat off the coast of Oman—where is that, Africa or something?—to do . . . what? ”
“Intercept Michael Arnold before he can use the ring to open the Lesser Seal.”
“Lesser Seal . . .”
“The Holy Vessel,” Op Nine said.
“Why don’t you want the Holy Vessel opened?”
For the third time they exchanged a glance. I was like the little kid in the room while the parents danced around the facts-of-life lecture.
“The ring, the Great Seal,” Op Nine said slowly, “is the key. Without it, the wearer cannot control the . . . agents confined within the Vessel. Indeed, without the ring, the Lesser Seal cannot even be broken. One without the other is useless. With both . . .” He took a deep breath. “Catastrophe.”
The door swung open and a guy in a black jumpsuit like Ashley’s stepped in, carrying a tray with orange juice and two slices of toast.
“Ah,” Op Nine said. “The food is here.” He seemed relieved.
“Not much of it, though,” I said, trying again to sit up. Op Nine bent to help me. The room whirled around my head. I wondered why I felt so light-headed and weak. What was in that shot Ashley gave me on the chopper—and why had she given me a shot in the first place?
I drank the tall glass of orange juice down in three gulps. The toast was cut into quarters and that’s how I ate it, stuffing a whole quarter in my mouth and barely chewing before I swallowed.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me see if I have all this. After you guys fired Mike for trying to take Excalibur, he breaks into your vaults and steals the two Seals of Solomon. I’m still not clear on what they are or what they do, but anyway, after that you assigned Agent Ashley to keep tabs on me because now I’m a person of special interest or something. Mike shows up, kidnaps me, takes me up into the mountains to kill me—only Mike knows why—and Ashley rescues me in the nick of time. Now we’re on a boat on our way to . . . where? ”
“The nexus,” Op Nine said.
“The what?”
“The center. The place of opening.”
“Right. Gotcha. And the plan is to stop Mike before he can pull off this opening.”
“Correct.”
“Or else . . . ? ”
“Catastrophe.”
A bell went off, a blaring sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Op Nine checked his watch.
“It’s time for the briefing,” he said to Abigail.
She nodded, then turned to me and gave my shoulder a little pat.
“We have to go, Alfred.”
“When are you taking me home?”
They both looked away.
“You’re not taking me home, are you?” I asked.
“You’ll be safe here, Alfred,” Abby said.
“I’d rather go home and take my chances.”
Abby was looking at Op Nine. She pursed her fat red lips and for some reason I thought of goldfish, those big koi you see sometimes in little ponds outside Japanese restaurants.
He said, “Perhaps we will discuss it, once the Seals have been recovered.”
They left, slamming the big round metal door closed behind them. The wheel turned and I heard a clanking sound, like a dead bolt sliding home. It hit me then that I had traded one kidnapper for another. OIPEP might not want to kill me like Mike did, but I was at their mercy just the same.
12
I don’t know how long I lay there, waiting for them to come back. It seemed a very long time. There was really nothing to do, no magazines or books or a television or a radio, and I still felt light-headed and kind of hollow, like a scooped-out pumpkin. After a while I drifted off to sleep. When there’s nothing to do, I sleep. I’m like a dog that way.
I had a horrible dream. First I was swimming, which wasn’t so horrible, since I couldn’t swim in real life. The sun burned high overhead, the waves rolled gently over my bare back, and the warm water seemed to buoy me up so swimming took hardly any effort. I was in the middle of the ocean, no shore in sight, and the water was this deep forest green and smelled rich, like fertile soil. Then I dived beneath the surface and things started to get freaky. I morphed into this scale-less fish, big-headed, with grayish skin, a white underbelly like a catfish, and a toothless mouth. I changed into this fish, and then I started to grow.
I grew till I was about the size of a whale shark, this gray and white behemoth of the sea, gulping hundreds of gallons into my wide, toothless mouth and shooting them out through my gills. I felt something pricking my fish-skin: hundreds of little silvery fish with suckers for mouths were attaching themselves to me as I swam. More and more of the little sucker fish appeared out of the depths and latched on to me, until thousands carpeted every inch, and I could feel them sucking the life out of me. I began to sink deeper and deeper as my life force waned, and the water began to turn black and very cold.
I shivered. I’m not sure fish are capable of shivering, but in this dream anything seemed possible, even something like a white-bellied Kropp Fish.
I woke up and I was still shivering.
The porthole was shining brightly and light reflecting off the ocean was dancing on the glass. Right beside the porthole, Op Nine leaned against the bulkhead.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“We are two hours from the insertion point,” he said.
“I love your super-secret-agent Tom Clancy lingo,” I said.
“Extreme extraction. Special Subject. Insertion point. What happens after we’re inserted into the point?”
I sat up and a wave of dizziness swept over me. Someone, probably Op Nine, since I had a feeling he had been assigned as my minder, had brought me another big glass of orange juice. I gulped it down.