“Let me guess. Tintagel International.”
“Actually, a company whose major stockholder is a subsidiary to a franchisee of Tintagel International.”
“What’s that mean exactly?”
“It means someone is trying very hard to hide their tracks, Alfred.”
“Does it also mean you believe me now and I can go?”
“It means there’s one homicide detective who is very confused and the more she looks into this bizarre case, the more confused she gets. This Mogart you told me about, he’s Arthur Myers, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And this man you were traveling with to Canada, he was ...”
“Bennacio, the Last Knight of the Sacred Order. I guess his alias was Benjamin Bedivere.”
“And he died ...?”
“At Stonehenge. I got the Sword and that’s when OIPEP set up the whole deal with the FBI to try to catch me and get the Sword from me. I guess they also bought off your detective friends, or maybe Mr. Samson ... did.”
“Well,” she said. “Here’s the thing, Alfred. I’m not saying that I believe everything you’ve told me. All I’m saying is there’s some very weird coincidences and connections going on, and it’s driving me crazy. Why would someone connected to Tintagel International stage an elaborate assassination attempt on a fifteen-year-old kid?”
“Because Tintagel International is just a front.”
“A front? A front for what?”
“For the AODs.”
“What’s an AOD?”
“Agent of darkness. That was just my name for them. It wasn’t like their official title or anything. Basically, they were the private army Mogart raised after Mr. Samson kicked him out of the Sacred Order.”
“Mogart was a knight?”
“Sort of a black knight. He left the Order and then decided to steal the Sword.”
“Why did he leave?”
“Because Mr. Samson found out Mogart had a son.”
“Ah,” she said. “Ah.”
“So Mogart raised this private army, some of them I guess still being around wanting a little payback for what I did.”
“What would be the point now, though? You said the Sword was back in heaven.”
“Well,” I said, trying to think it through. “I guess because they’re bad guys.”
She laughed for some reason. “Well, that’s what I hope to find out.”
She stood up.
“It makes sense,” I said. “They almost had it in their hands, the most powerful weapon on earth, and they didn’t get it, all because of me. So they tried to kill me and then torched my father’s house.”
“If that’s true,” she said, “you’ll never be safe, Alfred.” Then she shocked me by kissing my cheek. “But it can’t be true, can it?” she asked.
She left. I lay there for a minute, trying to wrestle to the ground at least one coherent thought. So it wasn’t OIPEP and it wasn’t Mike Arnold, the two likeliest suspects. It was Mogart’s former henchmen. But other than revenge, what was the big deal about killing me? It wouldn’t bring their boss back and it sure wouldn’t bring the Sword back. Then I told myself maybe it was a good thing, my inability to understand evil minds.
Meredith had forgotten—or did she forget?—to strap me back to the bed. I swung my feet to the floor and pushed myself forward, and I nearly crashed into the chair; I guessed I was still pretty dopey. I found my balance and walked toward the window, trying to think it through.
It was like a vendetta or one of those Greek tragedies I’d studied in school. The first killing launches the next and it isn’t over until everybody is dead. Mogart killed Uncle Farrell, my father, and Lord Bennacio. I killed Mogart and not a small number of his henchmen. Now it was my turn.
I stood at the window and stared at the parking lot six stories below. No, I thought, it went back a lot farther than my uncle dying in our apartment. That was just the most recent chapter in a story that went back a thousand years, to Arthur and his knights and the Sword of Righteousness. Arthur was killed by his own nephew or son (in some stories, Bennacio told me, Mordred was both his nephew and son) and that led to the Sword being passed down until it ended up beneath my father’s desk, where I found it.
Meredith Black was right about one thing, I thought. They weren’t going to stop. I’d gone toe-to-toe with these guys, and Bennacio had warned me how soulless and mean they were. They weren’t going to stop until I was dead, and it didn’t matter how long I holed up in a hospital. Sooner or later, I was dead.
And maybe that’s where it would stop, I thought. Maybe that’s where it should. You would think Michael taking the Sword back to heaven would put an end to it, but maybe it wasn’t about the Sword but about the people whose lives it touched. And since the Sword was gone finally and couldn’t touch any more lives, maybe mine was the last.
It seemed the longer I hung around, the more people died—those cops were just the latest victims in my wake. As long as Alfred Kropp walked the earth, people were going to find themselves six feet under it.
Maybe that’s it, I thought. Not prison or the asylum—maybe the third way was what Mike Arnold called an “extreme extraction.”
The problem was I didn’t want to die. You don’t normally consider something like that a problem—Delivery Dude sure didn’t consider it one—but my choices had gotten very narrow very quickly and none of them were very pleasant. In fact, they were unacceptable. So that meant there had to be a fourth way and, if there wasn’t a fourth way, I’d have to make one up.
So I did. It took a while, but I did.
08:16:26:46
The sixth floor of St. Mary’s Hospital had a common room where the nonviolent patients could gather for a game of checkers or cards, with donated furniture and dusty potted plants in the corners, overstuffed sofas and lounge chairs and rockers. The windows faced north, offering a dramatic view of Sharp’s Ridge about ten miles away.
Nueve was waiting for me by the windows, sitting in one of the rockers that had been painted the classic orange of the University of Tennessee. The color contrasted nicely with his dark suit. I pulled a rocking chair close to his and sat down.
“Senor Kropp,” he murmured. “You look much better than the last time I saw you.”
Like most winter days in East Tennessee, the light was weak and watery, eking through the dense cloud cover that got trapped between the Cumberland Plateau and the Smokey Mountains, but Nueve was wearing dark glasses. He might as well have worn a sign around his neck that said SECRET AGENT.