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53
One afternoon, about a week before I was to be discharged, the door opened and a dark-suited man came into the room. Tall and stoop-shouldered, with a hound-dog face and very long earlobes, he reminded me of a sad-eyed Basset. He closed the door behind him as I pushed myself up in the bed, thinking, What now?
He didn’t say a word; he barely looked at me. He crossed the room and peeked through the curtains, then strode to the bathroom and looked in there. Then he opened the door and spoke softly to someone in the hallway. He stepped back and a woman came in next, dressed in a tailored pinstriped business suit with shiny black heels that made a clicking sound on the linoleum as she walked. Her bright blond hair was pulled into a tight bun on her head. She carried a bundle wrapped in white satin.
“Abigail?” I said.
“Alfred.” She smiled, and I was impressed by the excellent condition of her teeth. “How good of you to remember.”
She handed the bundle over to the hound-dog man and sat down beside my bed.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Pretty lousy,” I said. “Physically I’m doing okay; it’s the other departments that are bothering me.”
“You have been through a great deal,” she said.
There was an uncomfortable silence. I blurted out, “I don’t have it.”
“Don’t have what, dear?”
“You know what. I don’t have it. And I don’t know where it is, though I have a guess.”
“And where would that be?”
I bit my lip. Her smile didn’t leave her face and her blue eyes were glittering brightly.
“You don’t trust me,” she said calmly. “I don’t blame you, Alfred. We’ve done little to earn your trust. At any rate, you don’t need to tell me. I believe I already know. The gift has been returned to its giver.” I didn’t say anything and she lowered her voice. “The master claims the Sword and, in claiming it, understands that it can never be claimed.”
She was just beaming by this point. “We tore that cave apart, Alfred, and dragged the inlet. The Sword is gone, which is both a great loss and a great boon. Its time on earth has passed, and now there is one less piece of wonder in our world. Perhaps it is the price we must pay for our . . . growing up.”
I stared at her. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I thought you knew, dear.”
“All I know is you guys double-crossed Mr. Samson and his knights, and you double-crossed Bennacio and you double-crossed his daughter and nearly got her killed, and did get me killed and—”
“OIPEP didn’t double-cross them, Alfred, Mike Arnold did.” She made a little sour face, as if just saying the name bothered her. “You of all people can understand the effect the Sword can have on the minds of . . . weaker men. Mike was seduced by it from the beginning. Without our knowledge he contacted the Dragon and gave away Samson’s plans to storm his castle in Spain, and he did agree to sacrifice Bennacio in order to gain the Sword. He also told Mogart where he might find Natalia—all without our knowledge. He was what you might call a ‘rogue agent,’ and he has been terminated.”
“You killed Mike Arnold?”
She smiled. “He is no longer with The Company.”
“The Company,” I said. “What is The Company? What is OIPEP and why does it care so much about the Sword?”
“It cares because its purpose is to care.”
I stared at her for a second, and then I said, because I had learned some things along the way, “That was my fault. I asked two questions, which allowed you to choose which one to answer.”
She laughed one of those gentle trills you associate with very cultivated people or people from England.
“Our organization dedicates itself to the research and preservation of the world’s great mysteries,” she said.
“Really? And all this time I thought you were some kind of supersecret spy outfit dedicated to killing people you don’t like.”
“We are not spies, Alfred. Not in the sense you mean. We are clandestine in that few know of our existence; and we do have certain . . . technologies that have yet to be officially acknowledged, but we are more likely to wear pocket protectors and carry laptops than body armor and guns. OIPEP has more scientists, historians, and theoreticians than field operatives like Mike Arnold. The head of my department is a doctor of thaumatology. And I hold a doctorate in eschatology.”
“What’s that?” I asked. She was being very Bennacian: The more she explained, the more confused I got.
