The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(68)

Together we walk toward the golden door.

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FINAL EXTRACTION

INTERFACE REACHED

EPILOGUE:

OIPEP EMERGENCY SAFE HOUSE

(ESH: “KINGFISHER”)

SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE LONDON

That was my second death.

Which brought me to my third life: I didn’t make it through the golden door. Just as I was about to step over the threshold, I heard a woman’s voice calling me back. I didn’t want to go back. I guess that isn’t hard to understand. But the voice kept calling and the door began to recede into the white mist that also wrapped itself around the shapes of my mother and my father, then around me, until I couldn’t feel them beside me anymore but felt something or someone else, hugging me, and then there was this sensation of falling and this being was falling with me. I didn’t have to hear the voice calling me beloved to know who it was. I “pushed” against him. I was hungry and tired and I never wanted to leave my mom again, but I heard Not yet, not yet, my beloved.

I told him I hated him. I told him it wasn’t fair, that some fine guardian angel he was, letting me steal his Sword and letting all the knights get killed and me too—twice now. I wanted to stay with my mom.

Someone kept calling me, though, and that someone wasn’t the Archangel Michael.

That someone was Abigail Smith.

“Alfred . . . Alfred . . . ! Alfred, can you hear me?”

I opened my eyes. I was lying in a bed inside a room with whitewashed walls and a wooden floor, and beside me on a little table was a vase full of flowers. Daisies, I think.

“Oh, crap,” I said. “Extracted again.”

She was sitting beside the bed, smiling, and the white on the walls seemed yellow compared to her dazzling orthodontics.

“More lives than a cat,” she said.

“Two down, seven to go,” I said. “Where am I?”

“A safe house.”

“Am I? Safe?”

“Of course you are.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“He’s here. Would you like to see him?”

“Maybe not right now. Did he tell you what happened after you left Camp Echo?”

She nodded. She took my hand. “I should not have left you there, Alfred.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” I snapped back. “Why did you?”

“I believed the only hope of saving you was a direct appeal to the board.”

“And you didn’t know what Nueve was planning?”

“Of course not. I left specific orders that nothing was to be done without my authorization.”

I thought about that. “It’s hard to find good help these days, isn’t it?”

She gave one of her gentle English trilling-type laughs.

“Dr. Mingus has been terminated. You won’t be seeing any more of him.”

“That’s good. He didn’t have much of a bedside manner. What about Nueve?”

Her smile went away. “The Operative Nine has been suspended pending a full review of his actions upon my leaving Camp Echo.”

“Oh. What’s that mean exactly?”

“It means he’s in deep doo-doo.”

“You got the board to change its mind?”

“I made the board’s mind irrelevant. I’ve taken on emergency powers, Alfred, which I am allowed to do under certain unique circumstances. And this circumstance certainly qualifies as unique.”

“What about Ashley? Is she in trouble too?”

“Don’t you think she should be?”

“So you arrested her.”

She studied my face for a long time before answering.

“What do you think I should do to her?”

I thought about it. “Nothing.”

She seemed surprised. “Really? Nothing at all?”

“I don’t think she ever wanted to hurt me. She was trying to protect me the best she could, but she was in a bad spot, because of Nueve. Because she . . . well, I guess she loves him. And you can’t always choose who you fall in love with, like those girls in vampire stories or in real life when a girl falls for a doper. It’s one of those things that just happen and then you’re kind of trapped in a situation you want to control but can’t. It’s almost like being an Op Nine or a knight like my dad or even somebody really messed up like Jourdain.”

She was looking at me like a mom with a babbling kid who was just learning how to talk.

“The thing-that-must-be-done,” I said. “My father swore to protect the Sword no matter what, even if that what meant the Sword would kill him. When he was the Operative Nine, Samuel had to think the unthinkable, even if the unthinkable meant putting the SD 1031 in my head. See? Even Nueve and Mingus—well, maybe not Mingus, that dude was seriously messed up with a capital mess—thought there was no choice, and Ashley was given one between just abandoning me to Nueve or trying to help me the best she could . . . though I wish she had told me when she had the chance.

“And Jourdain. I think he really believed his dream that the Sword would come back if he took revenge for what I did to his dad. What happened to Jourdain anyway?”

Just like with Ashley, she said, “What would you like to happen to him?”