The Seal of Solomon Read online

  I turned my head slightly to get a better look, but the turning took a long time, because we must have been going close to Mach 2 and that makes turning your head a matter of willpower as much as strength.

  The scene outside was breathtaking: the sun above the rim of the horizon, illuminating the solid cloud cover beneath it, painting the ridges gold, the bright unmarred blue of the sky. I thought of those kids playing soccer on that barren snowfield. Don’t forget, Kropp, I told myself. It’s beautiful. Don’t ever forget that.

  The plane climbed until I could see the horizon begin to curve away from us, until I could see the actual curvature of the earth, and the sky darkened from bright blue to smoky violet to glimmering black.

  Op Nine leaned over and raised his voice to be heard over the roar of the engines. “We have reached the edge of the atmosphere, Kropp! Approaching Mach 6!”

  Normally, Op Nine was about as joyful as an undertaker, but now he was grinning like a kid on a theme park ride. We leveled off and the noise settled some, which is more than I could say for my stomach.

  “What is it, Kropp?” Op Nine asked. Maybe he noticed that my face was the color of the snow about a mile below us.

  “I’m not sure this was such a great idea,” I said. “The last time I got on a plane I deboarded the hard way.”

  He reached under his seat and pulled out that same oversized leather-bound book I saw on the flight into the Sahara.

  “What is that, anyway?” I asked.

  “The Ars Goetia . . . The Howling Art.”

  “What kind of art howls?”

  “The title refers to the method with which the conjurer controls the Fallen. Said to be written by King Solomon himself, The Ars Goetia contains descriptions of the seventy-two lords, their symbols and powers, and the incantations to bring them forth from the Holy Vessel and control them. The conjurer is instructed to ‘howl’ the incantations, hence the name.”

  “So it’s kind of a manual for fighting demons?”

  He winced. “No, it is a guide for using them to the master’s purpose. The Great Seal is useless unless the wearer speaks the incantations as written by Solomon, word for word, with no variation.”

  “I get it. That’s why the demons ignored me even though I was wearing the ring. I didn’t know the spells.”

  He grimaced again. “I prefer not to call them demons. It demeans their nature.”

  “But isn’t that what they are?”

  “We should pity more than fear them, Alfred. They were angels once.”

  “Yeah, but didn’t you say they rebelled against God? They got what they deserved.”

  “Perhaps.” He sighed. “Yet do we not all hope and pray that we ourselves escape what we truly deserve? None have fallen as far or as irrevocably as the outcasts of heaven. Did you not find them beautiful?”

  “Well, yes and no. They sure didn’t look like I thought demons or, um, outcasts, would look. But they were . . . it was . . .” I searched for the right words. “Almost like looking too long at the sun.” But that really didn’t come close to describing them. They were beautiful, but their beauty was wrapped in terror and despair, kind of like that sick feeling in your gut when the prettiest girl in school finally notices you . . . but that really didn’t describe it either. A pretty girl doesn’t push you to the point of tearing your own eyes out.

  “Their essence—the truth of what they are—has not changed since their creation, Alfred. How could it? No matter how far they have fallen, they are the first fruits of the divine imagination. They have gazed upon the very face of God, the face they will see no more for all eternity—and so I pity them.” Tears welled in his eyes. “Even as I envy them for having seen it.”

  34

  We landed in Chicago at what looked like an old military base. The flight had lasted about fifty minutes, so I figured at four thousand miles per hour we had traveled maybe three thousand miles. That meant OIPEP headquarters probably wasn’t in North America. Antarctica seemed too far away, so maybe it was somewhere in the Arctic Circle, though I didn’t see any polar bears or walrus or Eskimos, which I figured were plentiful in the Arctic.

  A sheet of gray clouds hung low over us, moving rapidly as if a giant unseen hand was pulling it westward. The absence of the sun seemed to bleed all the color from the world; the grass was the same dull gray color as the hangars. I heard thunder rolling deep in the cloud cover.

  “The whole world is covered?” I asked Op Nine as we walked toward a blue Ford Taurus parked by one of the hangars.

  “Yes.”

  He popped the trunk and unzipped a large canvas bag that sat inside. Op Nine took a quick inventory as I looked over his shoulder. The bag contained maps, a couple of wallets, two semiautomatic handguns, socks, underwear, some shirts and pants, a laptop computer, two other pistols that looked like flare guns, the Ars Goetia, and a roll of toilet paper.

  “Toilet paper?” I asked.

  “One never knows.”

  He stuck one of the semiautomatics behind his back. Then he took the flare gun and ejected the clip from the handle to check the bullets. The bullets had a slightly flared head; they looked like a miniature version of the bullets for the 3XDs.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “My life’s work.”

  He stuck this pistol into some hidden pocket in the lining of his parka, and then turned to me, holding one of each type of gun in either hand.

  I would have preferred my sword, the blade of the Last Knight Bennacio, but that was back in Knoxville and I didn’t figure we had the time to get it, although the X-30 could probably get us there in about ten minutes.

  He tossed the weapons back into the bag, slammed the trunk closed, and we climbed into the Taurus. He pulled down the visor and the keys fell into his lap.

  “Not exactly James Bond,” I said, looking around the ratty interior. The seats were stained, the floorboards crusted with mud, the lining on the roof coming off in one spot and hanging down.

  “This is a covert operation,” he reminded me.

  “Where’s the button to convert it into a submarine?”

  “You’ve seen too many movies, Alfred.”

  “You’re right. I’ll try to stay grounded in the real world of demons zipping around Mount Everest plotting the end of human existence.”

  He turned off the access road onto a two-lane highway, then jumped on the interstate. Directly ahead I could see the Chicago skyline on the shores of Lake Michigan.

  “So why do we think Mike might be in Chicago?” I asked. “I mean, I figured he was from here; he always wears that Cubs cap and he mentioned the Natural History Museum, but if I was going to hide somewhere, I wouldn’t go to the most obvious place people would look.”

  “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:

  SECTION NINE

  9.1 At the director’s discretion, one or more Company personnel may be designated as “Superseding Protocol Agent(s)” (SPA(s)). All Protocols relevant to protection of third parties, signatories, noncombatants, or informants as defined under Section 36.718 of this Charter do not apply to SPA(s).

  9.2 SPA(s) are authorized under this Section to take any means necessary for mission success. For purposes of this Section, “any means necessary” is defined as not only the superseding of Company Protocols, but all law, international as well as the laws of the signatory and nonsignatory nations, including those relating to homicide and other serious offenses as defined in Section 2.34 of this Charter (e.g., theft, willful destruction of property, torture, etc.)

  9.3 The Company and signatories to this Charter agree to hold harmless SPA(s) who commit acts that, in any other circumstances, might warrant the ultimate penalty, as long as those acts were performed with due diligence and in the SPA(s)’ official capacity as Company operatives. No SPA(s) will be prosecuted for any act committed under the auspices of this Section and all signatories agree to harbor and protect any operative acting under this Section from hostile parties or nonsignatories who seek retribution, whether legally or illegally . . .

  There was more; Section Nine ran on for twelve more pages, but I had seen enough. I closed the file, turned around, and saw Operative Nine sitting up on the sofa, watching me.

  35

  I broke the awkward silence first.

  “You’re a SPA.”

  “And what does that mean?” he asked quietly. He didn’t sound sarcastic.

  “It means OIPEP’s rules don’t apply to you. Nobody’s rules apply to you.”

  “You’re forgetting the natural ones.”

  “Natural ones?”

  “Gravity, for example. Gravity applies to me.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny here, Op Nine.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Is that why nobody can know your name? So when you’re done murdering, raping, and pillaging, there’s nothing to hang on you because you don’t officially, like, exist or something?”

  “That much is true: I do not officially exist. There is no birth certificate, no hospital record, no valid driver’s license, no passport, no Social Security card, no fingerprint record, no document—or witness, for that matter—of any kind anywhere that establishes or confirms my existence. Whole weeks pass, months even, when I forget what my name used to be, when I forget I even had a name. I am no one, Alfred, and my name is whatever it needs to be.”

  I backed up as he spoke, right into the door leading to the hallway—and freedom.

  He stood up. “Alfred, listen to me. There is a very old saying: ‘If it is necessary, it is possible.’ Our organization is tasked with an extremely delicate and dangerous mission, making many distasteful things necessary, and I am the designated agent of necessity. I am the one who does that which must be done. That is all Section Nine means. I am the sole operative in the Company fully authorized to do what must be done, even if what must be done falls outside the normal boundaries of acceptable behavior.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a nice way to put it!”

  “It is the best way. The Operative Nine cannot hesitate to do what must be done to achieve the objective.”

  “It’s a rotten job, but somebody’s gotta do it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s a phrase that applies to garbagemen, Op Nine!

  Garbagemen don’t murder people!”

  “Neither do I.”

  “That’s not what you told me. You told me you murdered somebody in Abkhazia.”

  “I never said I murdered them.”

  “You said you killed them.”

  “So I did.”

  “So you said it or so you killed them?”
/>   “Both.”

  “Since when is killing somebody not murder? What if I get in the way of the mission . . . you’d kill me too, wouldn’t you? Is that what they did in Abkhazia? Got in your way?”

  “I’m not going to talk about Abkhazia.”

  “Why not? You said it wasn’t classified.”

  “You asked if it was classified and I answered that it was painful. That is not the same as saying it wasn’t classified.”

  “So it is classified? Why do you talk in circles like that? Look, I’m going to be honest with you, Op Nine. I’m a little freaked out right now. I’ve been lied to . . .”

  “By whom? Who has lied to you?”

  “I—I’m not sure, but somebody has.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alfred.”

  “Well, of course you’re going to say you don’t know what I’m talking about! Even if you did know what I’m talking about, you’re authorized to say you don’t, and you probably would even if you weren’t.”

  “Alfred, I think you still may be suffering from some lingering effects of the—”

  “Oh, you bet. I’ve got lingering effects out the yin-yang! Kidnapped, nearly drowned, thrown from an airplane, shot, and my brain scooped out by something I don’t even believe in! From the beginning you people haven’t leveled with me. Mike didn’t and you’re not now. For all I know you lied to me about my mom.”

  “About your mom?”

  “About her being dead. Maybe she really isn’t dead. Maybe she’s as alive as you and me and King Paimon.”

  “Alfred, your mother died when you were twelve years old, before any of—”

  “I know that! Or I knew that! I don’t know what I know anymore. I don’t even know what I don’t know! The inside of my head feels all crumbly, like stale birthday cake left out too long.”