The Seal of Solomon (Alfred Kropp #2)(42)

“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.

I got up and went into the other room. Op Nine reclined on the sofa, long legs stretched out, one arm thrown over his eyes, breathing deeply.

He had left his computer on.

I stared at the dancing Microsoft flag for a few seconds, chewing on my bottom lip. What was the protocol if I got caught? Would Op Nine be compelled to shoot me? I couldn’t picture Op Nine shooting me, but that may have been just a failure of my own imagination.

I could always say the thing was making a funny noise and I was just checking it out, making sure it was okay. Ashley told me they had lied to me and maybe this computer held the evidence to that.

I touched the touchpad and the desktop screen lit up. There were only three folders besides the recycle bin: one labeled “SATCOM Hookup,” another called “Dossiers,” and the bottom one, “Chart.”

I dragged the pointer to the one labeled “Dossiers.” I’d seen enough spy movies to know what a dossier was, and I wanted to see if he had one labeled “Kropp, Alfred.” But after I double-clicked on the folder, a message popped up asking for a password. I closed the box.

Same thing with the SATCOM folder, the one I figured he was working on when I went to bed, since I saw the satellite image on the screen. I closed the password box, and almost didn’t click on the third icon, figuring it would demand a password too.

But I did click on it, and up popped a Word document with this title page:

OFFICIAL CHARTER

OFFICE OF INTERDIMENSIONAL PARADOXES

AND

EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON

Copenhagen

19.11.32

[As Amended 05.10.78 & 04.05.01]

I glanced over my shoulder at Op Nine, who hadn’t moved a muscle. I started to scroll through the big blocks of text, single spaced, with all sorts of acronyms and code language so it read like those tiny disclaimers they flash on the screen during car commercials. I looked at the bottom of the screen. The OIPEP Charter ran over two thousand pages.

I wasn’t going to find any lies in this file or, if I did, I wouldn’t be able to tell they were lies. There was one thing I was curious about, though, so using the edit function I searched for these words: “Section Nine.”

And this is what I got: