“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?”