The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(29)

“It’s over for them, Mr. Needlemier. The time for the knights is gone and even if it wasn’t, all the knights are.” I swallowed hard. Talk about ghosts from the past! But weren’t all ghosts from the past? “You should melt it down or smash it and scatter its pieces into the sea.”

He nodded, but then he said, “All the same, I think I shall put it somewhere safe. You might need it one day.”

Fat chance of that. Mr. Needlemier didn’t know it, but in a few hours Alfred Kropp would be dead.

05:01:54:11

Fifteen minutes later I was a couple thousand feet above Knoxville and climbing, looking out the window at the winter-brown landscape, the broad ribbon of the Tennessee River curving through the foothills, knowing I would never see it again.

Beside me, Ashley asked, “What are you thinking, Alfred?”

I cleared my throat. “I was wondering why you decided to come back to OIPEP.”

I looked at her. She was very pretty in a kind of all-American way, with the blond hair and blue eyes, a nicely proportioned nose and very white teeth.

She looked away. “They asked me to,” she said.

“And you said yes, just like that?”

“They said they needed an extraction coordinator.”

“That’s a plush job or something?”

She laughed. I thought of bubble gum. “I said no,” she said. “And then they said it was for you.”

“You came back for me?”

She laid her fingertips on my forearm. “After they told me what happened with the Seals. What you did to get them back. I didn’t see how I could say no. I know how hard it is . . . to leave.”

“Was it? Is it? Did you just pick up where you left off before you got into OIPEP?”

“I tried. It’s hard, Alfred. After seeing what you see there . . . knowing what you know . . . to just go back into the civilian interface as if nothing had happened, when everything had happened. You still feel . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . even though you’re back, you’re still on the outside looking in. Wherever you are, you look at people and think about all the things they don’t know and what it would be like if they did know all the things they can’t know. All the things they don’t want to know.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “The same thing happened to me.”

Five thousand feet below, the interstate snaked through the monochromatic hills, the same road that took Bennacio and me north in our quest for the Holy Sword.

Ashley said, “There’s a saying they teach new recruits: the Company is forever. It doesn’t mean OIPEP will last forever—nothing does. It means what happens to you inside the Company lasts forever. It does things to you that can’t be undone.”

“Doom,” I said softly.

“What?”

“Doom. You know, fate. Destiny. The thing-that-can’t-be-undone. And it doesn’t matter whether you think it’s right or wrong, fair or unfair. You don’t have a choice. Well, I don’t buy it. I won’t buy it. I still have a choice.”

I turned from the window to look at her and saw her looking back at me with a funny expression, almost as if she felt sorry for me.

“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.

“Camp Echo. It’s a Company facility in Canada.”

“Do you know where I’ll eventually end up?”

She shook her head.

“What’s that mean?” I asked. “You don’t know or you know and can’t tell me?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got it narrowed down to a couple possibilities.”

“Do I get any say in it?” She nodded. “Good. I don’t want to end up someplace like Paraguay herding goats.”

She laughed and shook her head again. When Ashley moved her head, her blond hair moved with it but a millisecond later, a swirling effect like a long blond cape: move-swirl, move-swirl.

“Paraguay was just a random country,” I said. “The truth is I’m not even sure they herd goats in Paraguay. I’m not telling you guys how to do this. You’re the coordinator and everything, but if it’s up to me I’d rather stay in America because the idea is to blend in, right?”

Abby and Nueve were sitting in front of us, near the cockpit, and their heads were almost touching as they talked. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the rise and fall of their voices indicated a fierce argument was going on.

“That’s the idea,” Ashley said.

“How far does it go? I mean, I’m guessing this is a kind of ramped-up version of the Witness Protection Program, and I know OIPEP has all kinds of supersecret, James Bond–type technologies . . . What I’m getting at is, do you erase my memories? I mean, can you, like, wipe my slate clean?”

“Nobody can take away your memories, Alfred. Not even OIPEP.”

I thought about that. “That’s too bad.” I looked out the window again. We had climbed into some clouds and the earth was hidden from view. “That’s too bad.”

She reached under her seat and pulled out a laptop. As it booted up, she said, “A Level Alpha Extraction is all about permanence. An LAE is forever, Alfred. When you leave here, you won’t be you anymore. You’ll have a new name, a new past, even a new face. This procedure is sometimes called the ‘Phoenix Protocol,’ because the old you is burned away, metaphorically speaking, and a new you rises in its place. I hope you’ve got a good memory, because there’s an awful lot you’ve got to memorize. We’re going to literally make you into another person, and that means reprogramming you to recognize yourself as someone totally new and different.”