The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(30)

“A new face?”

She nodded. “You wouldn’t believe what our plastic surgeons can do.”

“What if I like my face?”

“An LAE is an all-or-nothing protocol, Alfred. Giving you a new identity would be a waste of time without giving you a fresh appearance to go with it. We may also alter your height.”

“My height?”

“You’re much taller than average. It’s a quality that makes you stick out, and the last thing you want as an extractee is to stick out. We may need to remove a vertebra or two.”

“Oh my God!”

“Don’t panic. That’s still under discussion.”

“You’re going to carve up my face and rip out a chunk of my backbone, and you don’t want me to panic?”

She clicked on an icon labeled “LAE_SUB_KROPP.”

“Check this out,” she said quickly. “It’s pretty neat.”

The program launched into a slide show of computer-generated photographs of someone who seemed vaguely familiar: full-on shots of his face, profile shots, fading into full-body pictures of an average-looking teenager, leaning toward the thin side, with short blond hair and blue eyes.

“Who is it?” I asked, though deep down I knew who it was: “SUB_KROPP.”

“It’s you—or one possibility of you.”

“I have brown eyes.”

“We have a technique to change eye color. I used to have brown eyes too.”

I looked into her sparkling blue ones. “You were extracted?”

“Kind of. When I joined the Company . . . well, it was sort of what we’re going to do with you, only in reverse. Everyone who joins the Field Ops division is extracted from their former interface.”

She looked away. There was something she wasn’t telling me.

“So that’s why all you female OIPEPs look alike with the blond hair and blue eyes. Did they change your face too?”

“They changed everything,” she said softly.

Tears welled in her eyes. I couldn’t change that, so I decided to change the subject.

“There’s some things I like about it,” I said, meaning the picture. “Like the nose. Can I see the nose again? Yeah, I never was too happy with my nose. I’m not sure about the blond though. I know you’ll have to get rid of the gray—hard to blend in as a sixteen-year-old with gray hair—but maybe just darken it. Not red. I’d look like a clown and I hate clowns. Though that dude from CSI: Miami is pretty cool. Face looks kind of thin, though, like are you going to chisel my cheekbones or something? I guess you can’t make me too good-looking—good-looking people stand out more than average-looking ones. Not that I turn many heads now, and I guess you wouldn’t want to go too homely either.”

“Oh, they’ll give you input on that. Up to a point.” The tears were gone, and that made me feel good.

“One thing I was wondering . . . I don’t know really how to put it, but once I’m like totally extracted and inserted into this new life, would there be or is there ever a circumstance where I’d see anybody from the, um, don’t know what to call it, the ‘old’ interface? For example, does the extraction coordinator do checkups or follow-ups or anything along those lines?”

She was smiling. “Are you asking if you’ll ever see me again?”

I started to say something and then decided that would be a very bad idea, to even try to talk. So I just nodded.

Her smile went away. “Do you know what’s happening back in Knoxville? They’re cutting the headstone. Alfred Kropp is dead now, and the only place I can visit him is his grave.”

CAMP ECHO

SOMEWHERE IN THE

CANADIAN ROCKIES

04:23:36:47

We touched down at a private airstrip nestled in a narrow valley between the snow-crowned peaks of the Canadian Rockies. Ashley pulled two parkas from the overhead compartment and tossed one into my lap.

“Doesn’t OIPEP have any bases in the Caribbean?” I asked her.

I pulled the hood of the parka over my head as we descended the stairs to the tarmac. About a hundred feet away sat a helicopter, engine throbbing, blades slowly turning. The only building I saw was a one-room log cabin, smoke rising and curling from the chimney before being ripped away by the frigid wind. Two men wearing helmets and OIPEP jumpsuits emerged from the building as we walked toward the helicopter, Nueve and Abby Smith in front, me and Ashley taking up the rear.

The two guys from the cabin conferred with Abby before we piled into the chopper. They sat up front, one riding shotgun beside the pilot. We took our seats behind them and, with no warning at all, the engine roared, we shot straight up and then banked sharply to the left, the face of a mountain coming straight at us. We cleared it with maybe ten feet to spare.

It was a cloudless day. For as far as I could see were row after row of mountains, the snow on their peaks glistening in the bright sunlight. I saw ravines and deep river gorges lost in mountain shadow and once, in the distance, a solitary bird soaring, its dark body sharply outlined against the white backdrop of snow.

Thirty minutes later we descended into a wide cleft between two ranges. I could see a lake below, maybe three and a half football fields’ long and two wide, and a cluster of cabins the color of Lincoln Logs, connected by trails to a three-story château on the shores of the lake. The land behind the château was heavily wooded and dropped steeply toward a ravine.