The Thirteenth Skull (8 page)

“Who is Sofia?” I asked. He looked startled, as if I had shouted an obscenity. “You said her name in ICU and I heard you say it again when you were talking to Nueve. Who is Sofia, Samuel?”

He didn't say anything at first. Then he said, “A ghost from the past, Alfred. That's all. A ghost from the past.”

“Another riddle,” I said. “I should have figured.”

He nodded. “Yes. You should have.”

“Goodbye, Samuel,” I said.

“For now,” he said.

No,
I thought.
Forever.

05:04:49:10

In the hallway, Nueve said, “Your mascara's running.”

He handed me his handkerchief. I dabbed my eyes.

“How do I look?” I asked.

“Like an eighty-year-old raccoon.”

I settled into the wheelchair as he pushed me to the elevators. Nueve instructed me to tuck my chin toward my chest. “It will help hide your face,” he said.

“Who is Sofia?” I asked as we waited for the elevator.

“Ah. Finally, a question to which you truly do not know the answer, yes? Or did Samuel tell you?”

“He said she was a ghost from his past.”

“She is many things. A ghost from the past, a promise for the future.”

“Huh?”

“Sofia is the Judeo-Christian goddess of wisdom, Senor Kropp.” His voice had a playful tone. “Have you ever been to the Sistine Chapel?”

“I've been meaning to get there.”

“She is there, under the left arm of God as he reaches with his right to touch Adam. A beautiful woman who represents truth and knowledge and all that is beneficent and worthwhile. She is the source, the font of all righteousness. I am surprised you've never heard of her.”

“Why?”

“Because according to some accounts, Sofia is the Lady of the Lake who brings Michael's Sword to Arthur.”

So that was it. Samuel must have brought up the same point to Nueve that he argued with me: I was Michael's beloved and by running away I was turning my back on heaven. I wondered why he and Nueve had picked that moment to have an argument about religion. Sam used to be a priest, but I doubted Nueve even believed in heaven. He didn't strike me as the religious type. He struck me as someone who really didn't believe in anything at all, except power. Samuel had called being an Operative Nine a burden, but I didn't think Nueve looked at it that way. I had the impression he
liked
being the Operative Nine. He liked it a lot.

The elevator doors slid open. Nueve swiveled the chair around and pulled me backward into the elevator.

A voice called from the hallway outside, “Hey, hold the door!” Nueve stopped the doors from closing with the end of his cane. Two orderlies stepped inside, both a bit out of breath.

“Thanks, man,” one of them said.

They stood on either side of us. Nueve was standing directly behind my chair. The elevator began to descend. The four of us stared straight ahead, like everybody does in elevators.

Then Nueve leaned forward and whispered calmly in my ear, “I shall take the one on the left.”

“Take what?” I asked, because I had no idea what he meant.

His black cane whistled over my head and slammed with a sickening crunch against the orderly's Adam's apple. The blow dropped him.

The one to my right was already on me. I saw a flash of fluorescent light play across the blade in his hand as he brought a black dagger toward my stomach.

Nueve was too quick for him. He caught his wrist and twisted it upward while the cane swooshed again over my head, landing against the side of my attacker's jaw.

As he went down, a gun went off; the report was very loud in the small space. The bullet caught Nueve in the left shoulder. He barely winced. A six-inch tapered blade sprang from the end of his cane.

“Duck,” he hissed.

I ducked, covering my head with my hands, like a passenger going down in an airplane. I heard the cane whistle through the air and then a wet, gurgling noise and the sound of the gun clattering to the floor. An instant later the man to my right went “Huh!” as if somebody had just told him a shocking piece of news. His body thudded to the floor as the elevator jerked to a stop: Nueve must have hit the emergency button.

I sat up. The guy on my left was lying in a pool of blood, clutching his gashed throat. The one on the other side wasn't moving either, so I guessed Nueve had done the Company's standard extreme extraction number on him too.

I looked at Nueve. Besides the saucer-sized bloodstain on the shoulder of his lab coat, you couldn't tell he'd just been in a close-quarters fight to the death. He wasn't even breathing hard. In fact, he was smiling.

“Uninjured, yes? Good! Up, now, Kropp. I need the chair.”

I stood up. My legs didn't feel too steady, even with the help of the orthopedic shoes. Nueve locked the wheels on the chair and climbed onto the seat. I looked down at the dead men.

“How did you know?” I gasped.

“The shoes,” he said.

I looked at their shoes. They were the same white soft-sole numbers all orderlies wore.

“What about them?” I asked.

“They're brand-new. Both pairs. One is understandable, but both?”

“Still, it could have been a coincidence.”

He shook his head. “No such thing in my experience. Yours?”

He popped open the access door in the ceiling with the butt end of his cane.

“I guess we're not riding this to the bottom,” I said.

“Catch,” he said. He dropped the cane and I caught it before it hit the floor. There was a recessed slot in one end where the bayonet nested.

“I wouldn't hold that too close to your face, Alfred,” he said. He heaved himself through the hole and disappeared into the darkness of the shaft. Then I heard him say, “Cane.” I handed it up to him.

“They must have been watching the room,” I called up to him. “I told you this was a lame idea. What are you doing up there?”

“Waiting for you.”

I took a deep breath before stepping onto the wheelchair seat. I hated heights, hated the dark, hated close spaces. On the other hand, I liked staying alive. Nueve reached down, slid his hands under my arms, and pulled me the rest of the way.

The elevator had come to a stop just past the second floor. Nueve hit some hidden button in the handle of his cane and the blade sprang out. He slipped the blade between the doors and then twisted it, forcing the doors open a couple of inches.

He put a hand on either door and slowly forced them open. He laid the cane lengthwise in the track between the doors to keep them open.

At that moment, the elevator motor revved, the big cable behind me began to move, and the whole thing started down.

“We're moving!” I shouted unnecessarily.

He pushed himself through the opening, yanked the cane from the track, and held one end toward me as I began to accelerate away from him.

“Jump!” he called down.

I jumped, my right hand closing around the end of the cane with half an inch to spare. I looked down between my dangling feet at the roof of the elevator as it shot downward.

“Pull me up!” I yelled over the noise.

“Can't! Climb,” he grunted back.

After a couple of hard pulls and kicks against the wall, I managed to grab the cane with my left hand and began to pull myself up. Nueve was having trouble keeping the cane still as my weight shifted back and forth.

“Faster please,” he said.

“I'm going as fast as I can!”

“Not fast enough, I think.”

I was about to ask why not when I heard the elevator motor revving below me. I didn't have to look to know it was coming back up.

“Hand!” he yelled, letting go with his right and stretching it toward me. I let go of the cane with my left and reached toward his wriggling fingers. Not close enough. My fingertips brushed against his.

“Five seconds!” he yelled over the noise. “Pull!”

I pressed the pads of my feet against the concrete wall and pushed as hard as I could while yanking downward on the cane. The force of it nearly pulled Nueve into the shaft with me. His thin fingers entwined with mine and he heaved himself backward through the doors, pulling me up with him. The hurtling car caught the tip of my foot as I flew through the doors, ripping the shoe off my foot.

The doors closed, and we lay side by side on the cold floor, gulping air while a small crowd gathered to gawk at the old lady and the bloody doctor sprawled in front of the elevator, hugging each other.

A nurse finally said, “Can I help you, Doctor?”

Nueve scrambled to his feet and then pulled me up to mine. He scooped up his cane and gave the nurse an icily professional smile. Not a doctor's smile—an Operative Nine smile.

“Elevator trouble,” he said. I started for the stairs. We were on the second floor, only one flight away from freedom. He grabbed my arm.

“No, Alfred—Freda—
Alfreda,
your room is this way.”

He pulled me across the hall to the nearest room. An old man lay in the bed under an oxygen tent.

“Harriet?” he called hoarsely to me. “Harriet—I knew you'd come!”

Nueve ignored him. He strode across the room to the window and pulled aside the curtains. He looked out, nodded, took one step back, and then slammed the gold head of his cane into the center of the glass. The window shattered on impact. Nueve cleared the remaining shards from the frame, then motioned to me.

“Quickly,” he hissed.

“We'll break our legs,” I said, and then I saw we were directly above the overhang for the emergency room entrance on the first floor. Only a half-story fall, but still far enough to snap an ankle if you hit it wrong.

Behind us, the old man called, “Harriet! Harriet, don't leave me!”

Nueve's eyebrow went up. “Well, Harriet?” he asked.

Police sirens wailed in the distance. Somebody must have found the two dead guys in the elevator.

“Jump
down
, not
out
,” Nueve cautioned me.

I put one foot on the sill. The old man got mad.

“Always running out on me, Harriet!”

At that moment the door flew open and three men rushed into the room. They wore black jumpsuits and black bandannas across their faces. Nueve smiled and nodded, as though he had expected them:
Ah, of course, the ninjas have arrived!
The blade leaped from the end of his cane.

“Go, Alfred,” he said softly.

He shoved me through the window. I tumbled into empty space as the old man screamed after me, “Good riddance to you, then, you old witch!”

I hit the roof of the overhang feetfirst, bending my knees at the last second, so I managed to hit without breaking or twisting anything I really might need in the near future. I rolled a couple of times, coming to a stop at the edge, lay on my stomach for a second, then flipped over in time to see one of the ninjas coming through the window.

He landed about three feet away and pulled a tapered dagger from some hidden pocket in his black jumper. I recognized that dagger: thin, black-bladed, with a dragon's head on the hilt, its mouth open in a silent roar. The signature weapon of Mogart's private army, the agents of darkness who had chased me from Knoxville to Canada, from Canada to France, from France to England.

“Okay,” I said to him. “You got me. I give up.”

I raised my hands in the air. He came toward me slowly, the dagger pointed at my gut.

“Just make it quick, okay?” I asked.

He lunged forward with a hoarse yell. I had two seconds before he was on me. I used those two seconds to rip the shawl off my shoulders. I dropped the shawl over his head, twisted the two ends to wrap it tight, and then slung him forward with a shot-putter-like motion. He sailed over the edge of the overhang.

I turned back toward the building—where the heck was Nueve?—and saw another dagger-wielding AOD coming toward me. I got lucky with the first one but, based on the past, my good luck wasn't going to hold.

At that moment sirens screamed to life directly beneath us: an ambulance was leaving on a call. Maybe my luck hadn't completely run out. I sprinted to one side of the overhang. I had a fifty-fifty chance this was the correct side. The AOD's fingers tugged on the back of my dress as I threw myself over the side.

I had guessed right: the ambulance burst into the open the moment we went down, and we tumbled head over heels onto its roof.

The ambulance whipped hard to the right coming out of the parking lot, slinging us against the opposite edge. Then it began to accelerate toward the entrance ramp to I-40.

He rushed me. I scooted backward until my butt smacked against the red spinning lights mounted near the front of the ambulance.

We hit the on-ramp clocking sixty at least, and then he was on me. I drove my shoulder into his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. My momentum carried us toward the rear of the ambulance, where he finally went down, his head falling back over the edge. I landed on top of him and caught his wrist just as he brought the dagger around to the side of my neck.

The tip nicked my skin as he tried to force the blade forward. I could feel the blood trickle down my neck and soak into the collar of my dress.

Nueve's present ... which shoe was it in? The one on my foot or the one lying on top of the hospital elevator? Had all my luck run out or was there still a drop or two left?

I clawed at my shoe as the wind tugged at my wig, pushing it forward until I was looking at him through a curtain of gray curls.

The fingertips of my right hand brushed against the hard casing of the poisoned pen. An inch ... a half inch ... but in a situation like that a half inch might as well be a mile.

He was too strong, too determined, too
focused.
Even if I managed to grab the pen, by the time I got the cap off— assuming I could—the dagger would be slicing my carotid artery and I would be one dead old lady.