“I don’t know anything about any skulls, Alfred.”
I nodded. “I didn’t think so. Well, it’s like Abby said, it
doesn’t really matter now. Like Sofia.”
He was totally lost by this point. “Sofia? Who is Sofia?”
“A ghost from the past.” I took a deep breath. “This is it,” I said.
And he said, voice shaking, “Yes. It.”
I headed for the door.
“Oh! Alfred, I nearly forgot. There is one more thing.”
I turned and saw him standing there holding a black rapier.
“What should I do with this?”
It was Bennacio’s sword, the sword of the last knight to walk the earth. At a château in France, I had laid my hands on that same sword and sworn a vow to heaven. If I turned my back on it now, was I turning my back on something else, something that called me beloved?
“This isn’t running,” I choked out. “I’m not trying to save myself. That’s not what this is.”
“Alfred, I don’t understand. Are you saying you don’t want it?” He was talking about the sword.
“It’s over for them, Mr. Needlemier. The time for the knights is gone and even if it wasn’t, all the knights are.” I swallowed hard. Talk about ghosts from the past! But weren’t all ghosts from the past? “You should melt it down or smash it and scatter its pieces into the sea.”
He nodded, but then he said, “All the same, I think I shall put it somewhere safe. You might need it one day.”
Fat chance of that. Mr. Needlemier didn’t know it, but in a few hours Alfred Kropp would be dead.
05:01:54:11
Fifteen minutes later I was a couple thousand feet above Knoxville and climbing, looking out the window at the winter-brown landscape, the broad ribbon of the Tennessee River curving through the foothills, knowing I would never see it again.
Beside me, Ashley asked, “What are you thinking, Alfred?”
I cleared my throat. “I was wondering why you decided to come back to OIPEP.”
I looked at her. She was very pretty in a kind of all-American way, with the blond hair and blue eyes, a nicely proportioned nose and very white teeth.
She looked away. “They asked me to,” she said.
“And you said yes, just like that?”
“They said they needed an extraction coordinator.”
“That’s a plush job or something?”
She laughed. I thought of bubble gum. “I said no,” she said. “And then they said it was for you.”
“You came back for me?”
She laid her fingertips on my forearm. “After they told me what happened with the Seals. What you did to get them back. I didn’t see how I could say no. I know how hard it is . . . to leave.”
“Was it? Is it? Did you just pick up where you left off before you got into OIPEP?”
“I tried. It’s hard, Alfred. After seeing what you see there . . . knowing what you know . . . to just go back into the civilian interface as if nothing had happened, when everything had happened. You still feel . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . even though you’re back, you’re still on the outside looking in. Wherever you are, you look at people and think about all the things they don’t know and what it would be like if they did know all the things they can’t know. All the things they don’t want to know.”