The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(14)

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.

“The Seal,” I said, getting right to business. “I have it. You want it.”

“Ah. And your price?”

I took a deep breath. “Twenty-five million dollars.”

He didn’t say anything at first, but I could almost feel those dark eyes of his, staring at me behind the dark glasses.

“I must say, that is unexpected.”

“It’s not for me. It’s for Samuel. I want him taken care of.”

“I see. Well, twenty-five million would do that—and quite nicely!”

“See, here’s the thing, Nueve. There’s no other way out of this mess. It’s me they want. Take me out of the equation and everything’s equal again.”

“Equal?”

“Back to normal. Back the way it was. So the first thing to take care of is Samuel. He left the Company for me and I don’t think you’d consider hiring him back, so I want to make sure he’s taken care of, plus a little extra for his trouble.”

“It’s a generous severance, Alfred. But I cannot see how that balances this particular scale.”

“That’s the second part,” I said.

“I thought there might be one.”

“I want you to extract somebody from the civilian interface.”

“And that somebody would be ...?”

“Me.”

05:06:01:41

After breakfast, two doctors came in, escorted by the policeman Detective Black had stationed outside my door. At least, the cop thought they were doctors. One carried a stainless-steel valise. The other walked with a cane.

“More tests, huh?” I asked.

“More tests,” the one with the cane said.

The cop left. Nueve leaned his cane against the bed rail and sat in the chair while his buddy got to work. He gently peeled off the bandage over my nose and leaned over me, examining the damage. His breath smelled like cinnamon.

“How bad is it?”

He sniffed. “Seen worse. We’ll make it work.”

He dug into the valise. I glanced at Nueve, who was smiling without showing his teeth.

“We’re stopping by Samuel’s room before we leave,” I told him.

“Unnecessary. It increases the risk.”