“Their essence—the truth of what they are—has not changed since their creation, Alfred. How could it? No matter how far they have fallen, they are the first fruits of the divine imagination. They have gazed upon the very face of God, the face they will see no more for all eternity—and so I pity them.” Tears welled in his eyes. “Even as I envy them for having seen it.”
34
We landed in Chicago at what looked like an old military base. The flight had lasted about fifty minutes, so I figured at four thousand miles per hour we had traveled maybe three thousand miles. That meant OIPEP headquarters probably wasn’t in North America. Antarctica seemed too far away, so maybe it was somewhere in the Arctic Circle, though I didn’t see any polar bears or walrus or Eskimos, which I figured were plentiful in the Arctic.
A sheet of gray clouds hung low over us, moving rapidly as if a giant unseen hand was pulling it westward. The absence of the sun seemed to bleed all the color from the world; the grass was the same dull gray color as the hangars. I heard thunder rolling deep in the cloud cover.
“The whole world is covered?” I asked Op Nine as we walked toward a blue Ford Taurus parked by one of the hangars.
“Yes.”
He popped the trunk and unzipped a large canvas bag that sat inside. Op Nine took a quick inventory as I looked over his shoulder. The bag contained maps, a couple of wallets, two semiautomatic handguns, socks, underwear, some shirts and pants, a laptop computer, two other pistols that looked like flare guns, the Ars Goetia, and a roll of toilet paper.
“Toilet paper?” I asked.
“One never knows.”
He stuck one of the semiautomatics behind his back. Then he took the flare gun and ejected the clip from the handle to check the bullets. The bullets had a slightly flared head; they looked like a miniature version of the bullets for the 3XDs.
“What is that?” I asked.
“My life’s work.”
He stuck this pistol into some hidden pocket in the lining of his parka, and then turned to me, holding one of each type of gun in either hand.
I would have preferred my sword, the blade of the Last Knight Bennacio, but that was back in Knoxville and I didn’t figure we had the time to get it, although the X-30 could probably get us there in about ten minutes.
He tossed the weapons back into the bag, slammed the trunk closed, and we climbed into the Taurus. He pulled down the visor and the keys fell into his lap.
“Not exactly James Bond,” I said, looking around the ratty interior. The seats were stained, the floorboards crusted with mud, the lining on the roof coming off in one spot and hanging down.
“This is a covert operation,” he reminded me.
“Where’s the button to convert it into a submarine?”
“You’ve seen too many movies, Alfred.”
“You’re right. I’ll try to stay grounded in the real world of demons zipping around Mount Everest plotting the end of human existence.”
He turned off the access road onto a two-lane highway, then jumped on the interstate. Directly ahead I could see the Chicago skyline on the shores of Lake Michigan.
“So why do we think Mike might be in Chicago?” I asked. “I mean, I figured he was from here; he always wears that Cubs cap and he mentioned the Natural History Museum, but if I was going to hide somewhere, I wouldn’t go to the most obvious place people would look.”
“He may not be here, but he may have come seeking his comfort zone, the place with which he is most familiar—and his pursuers not.”
I watched as the speedometer leaped to 110.
“Aren’t you afraid we’ll be pulled over?”
“We won’t be.”
Ten minutes later we were downtown, parked in front of the Drake Hotel. The wind was ferocious, howling like something alive as it roared between the skyscrapers—a beast— not just a beast, though, but a beast that hated you. I pulled the hood of my parka over my head as Op Nine got the bag from the trunk.
At the check-in desk Op Nine went British.
“Good afternoon!” he said in a perfect accent. “Lord Polmeroy and nephew to check in, please.”
I looked over at him, startled. Not only had his accent changed, but everything about his voice: the pitch higher, the modulation a little quiverier. Even his face looked different somehow, as if he had the ability to control his facial muscles to achieve different looks.
We took the elevator to our room on the sixteenth floor.
“Nephew?” I asked.
“Preferable to son. Not enough of a resemblance.”
“Thank God.”
In the suite, he took out the laptop and booted it up on the kitchenette table. I opened the refrigerator, half hoping it would be fully stocked, but it wasn’t. I pulled back the curtains and looked out at Lake Michigan, as gray and drab as the low-hanging sky.
Op Nine was typing something. Maybe an e-mail to headquarters: Arrived at insertion point. Proceeding to acquire target. Kropp still mildly annoying.
I let the drapes fall—the view was too depressing—and turned on the TV. CNN was running a special report called Crisis in the Sky, and two talking heads occupied a split screen, a meteorologist and some guy from the government, arguing whether global warming was responsible for the fact that clouds now covered ninety-eight percent of the planet. That was more depressing than the view, so I flipped to the next channel. Its special was called Recent Storm Terror—The Al-Qaeda Connection. It looked like OIPEP’s MEDCON was executing OP-FOOL’EM. I turned off the TV.
Op Nine was still typing away.
“I feel weird,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Some kind of satellite image occupied the top half of his screen; the bottom half contained the text of whatever he was typing.
“Maybe I’ve got jet lag. You know, flying all the way from the North Pole in an hour . . . that’ll kill you.”
“Hmmm-mmm.”
I was fishing with that North Pole remark, but he didn’t bite. I yawned. Some hunt this was turning out to be.
“Maybe I’ll take a nap.”
He didn’t say anything. I went into the bedroom, kicked off my snow boots, and threw the parka onto the chair beside the bed. The room was stuffy. A radiator hissed under the window. The click-click-click of his typing continued. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again the radiator was still hissing, but the click-clicks had stopped. I sat up and looked at the clock. It was a little after three in the afternoon when I lay down; now it was a quarter past six.