“So it is classified? Why do you talk in circles like that? Look, I’m going to be honest with you, Op Nine. I’m a little freaked out right now. I’ve been lied to . . .”
“By whom? Who has lied to you?”
“I—I’m not sure, but somebody has.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alfred.”
“Well, of course you’re going to say you don’t know what I’m talking about! Even if you did know what I’m talking about, you’re authorized to say you don’t, and you probably would even if you weren’t.”
“Alfred, I think you still may be suffering from some lingering effects of the—”
“Oh, you bet. I’ve got lingering effects out the yin-yang! Kidnapped, nearly drowned, thrown from an airplane, shot, and my brain scooped out by something I don’t even believe in! From the beginning you people haven’t leveled with me. Mike didn’t and you’re not now. For all I know you lied to me about my mom.”
“About your mom?”
“About her being dead. Maybe she really isn’t dead. Maybe she’s as alive as you and me and King Paimon.”
“Alfred, your mother died when you were twelve years old, before any of—”
“I know that! Or I knew that! I don’t know what I know anymore. I don’t even know what I don’t know! The inside of my head feels all crumbly, like stale birthday cake left out too long.”
“I see,” Op Nine said. He was frowning, staring at me intensely, which didn’t help matters. I wasn’t crying, but his face was distorted, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror; the earlobes looked particularly long and Goofy-like.
I went on. “But one thing I do know is that you people are hiding something. Something doesn’t add up here.”
I rubbed my temples. The room spun around my aching head. Now it was as if my brain were made of broken glass, like the glass in Betty Tuttle’s hand that fell when Mr. Needlemier said I was worth four hundred million dollars, shattered into a thousand pieces, then slapped back together with glue.
“It doesn’t add up. There’s something you’re not telling me, which is a kind of lie even if you’re not telling a lie lie.”
“ ‘Lie lie’?”
“None of it makes any sense. Why am I here? Why did you bring me, a fifteen-year-old kid with no qualifications whatsoever in the covert op department, on your big mission to find Mike and the Vessel? Tell me why I’m here, Op Nine. Give me one good reason and I’ll shut up and we’ll go get Mike, which there seems to be a very mysterious lack of, the getting part, since that was the reason we flew four thousand miles per hour in the first place to get here. Why are we hanging out in this hotel room? That’s my question.”
“We were waiting for nightfall.”
“Well, it’s almost seven o’clock. It oughtta be fallen by now.”
“Then we ought to be going.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You offered to come.”
“I did?”
He nodded. I thought about it. “I don’t remember offering that.”
I slid down the door until my butt hit the carpet, dropped my head into my hands, and closed my eyes. I could smell something foreign, a sickly sweet odor like rotting fruit. I sniffed my hand. It came from me. I smelled like a rotten banana. It wasn’t a stench like BO (though I couldn’t remember taking a shower since that day on the Pandora—not that my not being able to remember meant anything), so what was it? I’d heard gangrene can stink to high heaven as your flesh rots right off your bones. Did I have gangrene? Had one of my long toenails cut into my toe, causing an infection? Why was my flesh rotting off? Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe something was leaking from the splintered glass of my mind, and that leaking something smelled like rot.
I felt him touch my shoulder.
“There’s something wrong with me, isn’t there?” I whimpered. “There’s something very bad happening to me.”
“I think so, Alfred.”
“Because I looked into its eyes.” I remembered Carl writhing on the desert sand, screaming gibberish as he tore at his own face.
“It could be.”
“Well, is it or not? Aren’t you the demonologist?”
“Alfred,” he said softly, patting my shoulder. “Alfred, it will soon be over,” he said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
36
Op Nine changed his clothes before we left, putting on a rumpled jacket and a tie with a mustard-colored stain on it. He looked like your typical high school assistant principal or a salesman at a low-end used car lot.
We went downstairs and the valet pulled the Taurus around to the front of the hotel. I saw Op Nine slip him a fifty-dollar bill. That seemed excessive for somebody supposedly traveling incognito and didn’t match his getup or the vehicle we were driving. After getting a tip like that, the valet was sure to remember us.
Op Nine jumped back on the interstate and we headed north. A light, freezing rain was falling and we passed a couple of cars that had spun off the slick road, the flashing of their hazard lights sparkling red and yellow in the frozen condensation on the windshield.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Shaky.”
He just grunted back. His whole being seemed focused on the road or what lay at the end of it.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Evanston, just north of the city.”
“Mike lives in Evanston?”
“His mother does. Everyone, Alfred, without exception, has a . . . vulnerability. A pressure point, if you will. For the Hyena, that point is his mother.”
“What are you going to do to his mother, Op Nine?”
“I didn’t say I was going to do anything to her.”
“I read Section Nine. You’re allowed to do anything you want to her, aren’t you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“You could kill her if you wanted.”
“I would not want that. Alfred, simply because I have certain . . . latitude doesn’t mean I take pleasure in it. It is a great responsibility and burden.”
“Yeah. Playing God usually is.”
“I did not volunteer to be a Superseding Protocol Agent.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is if you had to hurt her or even kill her to get Mike, you would. An innocent old lady. Not that you could, but you would.”