“How could it be more complicated than that?”
Abigail coughed.
The door slid open and we made an immediate right out of the elevator into a huge room with a metal floor and a bank of freezer-looking doors along the length of one wall.
Dr. Merryweather was there, and the same guy in the white coat who had examined me. He waved us into the room, a finger pressed against his lips. He then pointed that same finger at the bank of doors.
One of them was open and the shelf that had been slid out held a body bag. Half the bag lay on the shelf; the other half looked as if whoever was in that bag was sitting up.
“What is it?” Abigail whispered, clearly troubled by the sight of a dead body sitting up.
“Listen!” the doctor whispered back.
I couldn’t hear anything at first, but after a second I did, a kind of hissing sound. After another second or two the sound took shape and I could make out a word.
That word was “Kropp.”
“I come in to prep the body for autopsy and that’s what I find.” The doctor’s voice was shaking.
Again, louder this time: “Kropp!”
“Open the bag,” Op Nine said.
“You’re kidding, right?” both the doctor and Merryweather said at the same time.
“Open the bag.”
“Look,” the doctor said. “I’m a civilian, a private contractor . . . I’m not a field operative. I’ve got a wife and family . . .”
“Open the bag.”
“Do as he says,” Dr. Merryweather said.
The doctor bit his lip, then walked over to the bag and slowly drew the zipper up and over the head inside. He stepped back quickly as the bag fell open, the material gathering around the body’s waist.
The first thing I noticed was how ripped this guy was, a real Schwarzenegger type. The second thing was the gaping hole in the middle of his chest. And third, he had no eyes.
His lips barely moved, but the sound clearly came from his mouth, a hiss forming into the same word again.
“Kropp. ”
“Yes,” Op Nine said loudly. “He is here. Kropp is here.”
“Alfred Kropp,” the dead man hissed. He had been a hairy guy, and the contrast between the pale, dead flesh and the coarse black hair was striking.
Op Nine gave me a little nudge and I blurted out, “Yes, I’m here.”
“We know thee. ”
My knees started to give way, but not for the same reason they did back in my cozy, safe little room. I grabbed on to Op Nine’s forearm and held tight.
“As you now know us.”
I recognized its voice. I had heard it before, like a thousand years before, and it came back to me then: the little bedroom in Horace Tuttle’s house, Mike dragging me through the broken window, Ashley rescuing me on the great white stallion, the Pandora, the race across the desert to find Mike before he could release the infernal hordes . . . everything, up to the moment when I looked into the demon’s eyes—and that particular moment was a pit, a lightless hole with no bottom that I leaped across, bringing me here to this morgue deep in the bowels of OIPEP headquarters, where a demon spoke through a dead man’s lips.
“What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?” Op Nine asked.
The body’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dr.
Merryweather leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Perhaps you should ask him, Alfred.”
“Me?”
He nodded to Op Nine, who repeated the question in my other ear.
My voice quivering, I asked, “What do you desire, O Great and Powerful King?”
“The Seal. ”
Op Nine whispered, “But you have the Seal—do you not?”
“But don’t you have the Seal?” I asked the dead guy.
“The Lesser Seal, Alfred Kropp. The Vessel of our imprisonment. Bring it to us, last son of Lancelot. ”
“O Wise and Magnificent One,” Op Nine whispered.
“O Wise and Magnificent One,” I echoed.
“We do not possess the Holy Vessel.”
“We don’t?” I asked Op Nine. I was shocked. He jerked his head toward the body as if to say, Don’t talk to me; talk to the cadaver!
I cleared my throat and said to the cadaver, “We, um, we don’t have it.”
There was a horrific screech like the sound of a car slamming on its brakes, the body on the slide-out tray jerked, and the head snapped forward, casting deep shadows over the empty eye sockets.
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 h*ps 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.”