“And putting a bomb in my head was the thing-that-must-be-done?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The reason was classified.”
“Declassify it. Now.”
He nodded. Swallowed. “I wish I had a drink,” he said softly, as if to himself.
I slid my Big Gulp toward him.
“Not that kind of drink,” he said.
“You’re not the Operative Nine anymore,” I said. “You’re my guardian. You owe me the truth.”
“The price for that is very high, Alfred.”
“Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”
“It won’t be you who pays.”
“Tell me why you did it, Sam.”
He sighed and his voice now barely rose above a whisper.
“Sofia . . . Alfred. Because of Sofia.”
“Sofia. I’ve heard that name before.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I heard you saying it in your sleep at the hospital,” I reminded him. “ ‘Ghost from the past,’ you told me. Then I overheard Nueve and you arguing about her before we left, and Nueve said you were talking about the goddess of wisdom, but somehow I don’t think you were.”
“Hardly,” he said.
“When Mingus had me in his lab, I saw some vials of my blood labeled ‘sofa.’ And I thought that was really weird.
What did my blood have to do with sofas? It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with sofas, does it, Sam?”
“No.”
“So no more hints and half answers and riddles. Tell me who Sofia is and tell me now.”
He nodded. “Sofia isn’t a person, Alfred. Sofia is a thing. An acronym. Special Operational Force: Immortal Army. SOFIA.”
The room was quiet except for the humming of the heater by the window. Suddenly the room seemed very dark. I got up from the table and turned on the floor lamp by the bed.
“Catchy name,” I said. “Who came up with that?”
“The Operative Nine.” He didn’t turn to watch me this time. He sat very still, his back to me.
“The idea being my blood could be used to create some kind of supersoldier . . . ?”
“It was conceivable.”
“. . . An army whose soldiers are instantly healed on the battlefield, whose troops are immune to disease and injuries . . .” I saw it then—the only real use somebody like Nueve would have for my blood. I remembered what I said to Ashley at the airport, We wouldn’t want some kid with the power to heal the world running amok, healing the world, and felt sick to my stomach. “The possibilities are endless, aren’t they, Sam?”
“That it was a possibility made SOFIA necessary.”
“And SOFIA made the SD 1031 necessary.”
He nodded. “Necessary, yes.”
“Because the Operative Nine couldn’t risk the Item of Special Interest falling into the wrong hands.”
“The results could be catastrophic.”
“So he needed a way to keep a thumb on the Special Item—and a way to . . . terminate the experiment if that became—”
“Necessary,” he said.
“Necessary. Right. The Operative Nine didn’t have a choice.”
“No choice,” he echoed.
“Because he’s the Operative Nine. He has to consider the inconsiderable. Think the unthinkable.”
“The unthinkable.”
“Not just the zigs—the zags too.”
“Alfred, I—” He turned around to face me.
“And it didn’t matter this Item of Special Interest was a fifteen-year-old kid.”
He went stiff on me; I was touching a raw nerve. “Your . . . gift was crucial in recovering the Seals— indispensable, in fact. If we had had access to it in previous missions, lives would have been saved, needless suffering avoided . . .”
“Previous missions? What missions? Missions like Abkhazia? Those kinds of missions, Sam?”
“Of course, yes. Of course, missions like Abkhazia.” He cleared his throat. “You have said it yourself, Alfred. An Operative Nine must think the unthinkable, consider every possible application of a Special Item, particularly those scenarios in which it might fall into unfriendly hands.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“You know the answer to that.”
“No, Sam, why didn’t you tell me after you left OIPEP? Why didn’t you tell me when I decided to go with Nueve?”
“Because I thought SOFIA was dead. Dr. Smith told me she killed the project when she took office as director, and I believed her.”
“I guess Nueve overruled her.”
“With the backing of the board,” he said with a nod.
“You still should have told me.”
“Yes. You’re right. I should have.”
“Well,” I said. “Well, okay. All right. Abby’s working on that. Or maybe she isn’t. Can we trust her? Should we trust her?”
“I trust her,” he said. “I always have.”
“Okay. So she’s gonna work on getting the board on our side and we’re gonna work on getting this thing out of my head.”
I slid into the empty chair across from him. He refused to look me in the eye. I should have guessed the reason. I should have figured there was something else he wasn’t telling me, but I still wanted to believe the best. I still wanted everything to be okay. Because after everything I’d been through, I was still a kid. I didn’t know then that my childhood was about to come to a crashing end. That was the ticktock inside my head. Not a bomb, but a clock: the clock of my childhood winding down.
“Alfred, the SD 1031 cannot be removed.”
“What are you talking about? Of course it can. You put it in; you can take it out.”
He slowly shook his head.
“Any attempt to extract it will cause the device to detonate.” His head was bowed, his shoulders rounded, his hands pressed together in his lap, palm to palm, as if in prayer.
“It can’t be removed,” I said.
“No.”
“Or disabled.”
“No.”
“Or the signal jammed somehow.”
“Alfred . . .”
“And OIPEP will always know where I am.”
“It isn’t a matter of . . . yes. Yes, Alfred. Always.”
“And anytime it feels like it, it can hit the red button, and I’m dead.”
“Yes.”
“And there’s not a damn thing you or Abby Smith or any other of the six billion people on the planet can do about it.”