“It’s good to see you again, Alfred,” he said.
Then he did something he rarely did.
He smiled.
MOTEL 6
HELENA, MONTANA
01:00:06:14
I walked around the building a couple of times to make sure the coast was clear, then knocked on the door to room 101. The chain lock rattled, the dead bolt slid back, and Samuel opened the door. He tossed the gun onto the bed and took the plastic sack from my hand.
“I was about to come after you,” he said.
He threw the lock and fell into the chair by the little table. I sat in the other chair across from him. He fished a deli sandwich from the bag and dug in, eating with his nose about three inches from the table. I took out my meal and slowly unwrapped the yellow paper.
“Corn dogs,” he said.
“I’m superstitious.”
The TV was tuned to a cable news channel. A car bomb had killed some people overseas. Somebody important was going to speak at the UN tomorrow. A car maker was set to announce record losses for the third quarter.
“Anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“You know that trucker gave a description.”
He shrugged.
“And the taxi driver.”
He shrugged again.
“Those people at the airport.”
He shrugged a third time. What was it with Op Nines and the shrugging?
A pickle slice had fallen from his sandwich and he picked it up and carefully tucked it back in.
I went on. “I’m so popular. Wanted by OIPEP, Jourdain Garmot, and now the feds.”
He shook his head. “The feds won’t get involved until we cross state lines.”
“Oh, okay. What a relief. I was about to panic.”
I scraped the skewer of my dog clean with my front teeth and started on the second one. Deli mustard is best, but the gas station only had packets of regular yellow.
I had brought up the two-ton elephant in the room, but he refused to acknowledge it. So I moved on, reminding myself not to forget to move back.
“It was Needlemier, wasn’t it?” I asked. “How they got you.”
He nodded. “He said he had a meeting scheduled with Jourdain regarding the status of your father’s estate. I should have considered the possibility they were using him—perhaps I would have, but I was eager to remove the threat, driven by emotion . . .”
“Gets you every time,” I said. “Emotion.”
His eyes cut away. “Jourdain Garmot is mad,” he said. Then he started to eat again. “And like all madmen, he fails to see the world as something outside himself. He truly believes that killing you will bring him peace.”
“Like you with Vosch,” I said.
He looked at me hard. “With Vosch gone, there is one less pursuer.”
“But one more gallon of blood on my hands.”
“There is no sin in self-preservation,” he said.
“I don’t care about all the ins and outs of it, Samuel. All the pie-in-the-sky philosophy won’t change the facts. For every Vosch we kill, Jourdain will send five more Vosches to take his place.”
That reminded me. I laid my half-eaten corn dog on the table and went to the telephone by the bed. Samuel shifted in his chair so he could watch me. I got the same recording I got the first time I tried, right after we checked in. I hung up without leaving a message. Samuel shifted again when I sat back down and picked up my corn dog.
“Perhaps Mr. Needlemier doesn’t need us to point out the prudent course,” he said.
“I hope it’s that,” I said. “I hope he’s taken off, gone someplace safe, but what if he hasn’t? What if Jourdain already has him?”
“Then may God have mercy on him.”
I looked at his hands. He saw me looking at his hands. I looked away.
“He doesn’t know where I am,” I said. “Maybe Jourdain will believe him and let him go.”
“He didn’t believe me,” he pointed out.
“Well, one life at a time. One thing I can’t figure out— well, there’s a lot of things—but the biggest thing is how killing me gets Jourdain the Skull.”
He frowned. “ ‘Jourdain the Skull’?”
I nodded. “The Skull of Doom.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me.
“You’ve never heard about the Skull of Doom?” I asked.
“Of course I have. I was an Operative Nine.”
“Well, he told me he was on ‘the last knightly quest for the Thirteenth Skull,’ which everybody knows is the Skull of Doom.”
“That is one of its names, yes. And if that is his ultimate goal, he is doomed to failure.”
“Why?”
“Because the Skull of Doom is a myth. It doesn’t exist.”
“How do you know?”
“I was an Operative Nine.”
“And that means what? You’re all-knowing like God?”
“Far from it.”
“Then how are you so sure it doesn’t exist?”
“Because we could find no evidence of its existence.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s a myth.”
He shook his head and waved one four-fingered hand.
“It doesn’t matter. Jourdain believes it exists, apparently, and that’s all that matters.”
“Which is the point I was trying to make! He somehow thinks killing me is going to help him get it.”
“It may be something far simpler than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like revenge.”
I thought about that. He was right, as usual. The why really didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter if killing me had anything to do with getting the Skull. The only thing that mattered was he wasn’t going to stop until I was dead.
“Right. On one side, a madman chasing a myth and on the other a sociopath on a crusade to lobotomize me. So we slip between them and head straight for headquarters.”
He said, “Headquarters.” His eyes cut away. The elephant was back.
“Only I’m not sure exactly where headquarters is, but you know and that’s where Abby Smith is.”
“Who may or may not be in a position to help us,” he said.
“We don’t have a choice.”
“No choice,” he said. He wadded up the wrapping from his sandwich and dropped it into the bag. Then he took his napkin and carefully wiped off the table.
“Why did you do it, Sam?”
He didn’t need to ask what I was talking about. He knew. “I was the Operative Nine.”