The Seal of Solomon (Alfred Kropp 2)

I also got a fur-lined parka identical to Op Nine’s and big snow boots that fit over my loafers.

Vest-man called after us as we were going out the door.

“I’d take him over to Cosmetics if I were you. Get something for those pores!”

On the way to the elevator, I said, “You know, I never would have guessed headquarters looked like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like a very old high school or hospital ward. I thought it would be all glass and shiny metal and people-movers like at airports and di

gitalized—you know, monitors and gadgets all over the place.”

“There is all of that,” Op Nine said. “We just have cleverly disguised it all to look like an old high school or hospital ward.”

“This is about the humor remark, isn’t it? You’re trying to prove you have some.”

We stepped into the elevator. We were on LL56. He pressed the button labeled “S” and the elevator started up. I had the sensation of great speed as we rocketed upward, I assumed, fifty-six stories.

“And a logo,” I said.

“Logo?”

“Sure. The OIPEP logo. Every big spy outfit—well, every spy outfit period, even the small ones—has a logo. Where’s your logo? I didn’t see one in the conference room or anywhere else.”

“We have no logo.”

“How come?”

“Why would we need one?”

“Well, logos aren’t something you absolutely need, I guess. They’re just something you have.”

“Like a name,” he said.

The doors opened into a tiny space about the size of a hall closet. Stepping out, I realized it was a hall closet. The elevator doors opened just behind a row of winter coats. Op Nine parted them, opened the closet door, and we came into a small, sparsely furnished living room.

An old couple was sitting on the ratty sofa watching a television with a screen about the size of a postage stamp. They didn’t look up or move when we stepped out of their closet. It was like we weren’t there. It was cold in that little living room and I thought what a lousy job that would be for a super-spy, bundled up in old clothes watching television, providing cover for agents coming and going on exciting missions. Maybe they took turns taking the old-couple-just-watching-TV duty.

We stepped outside into a world of gray sky and white earth. The clouds hung low over a landscape of clapboard houses hunkered in four-foot-deep snowdrifts. Past the cluster of houses, the land was flat, featureless, a desert of ice for as far as the eye could see.

“Where are we?” I asked, pulling the hood of my parka over my head with its too-shaggy-to-be-rich haircut. There was nothing substantial in this winter wasteland to block the wind blowing directly into my face, so cold, it made my snot freeze.

“The entrance to headquarters,” he answered, which was no answer at all, of course, but what did I expect by this point? A black Land Rover idled at the end of the frozen walkway. A big man in a gray overcoat opened the back door for us and I slid in first.

We drove for about thirty minutes, first down the narrow streets that wound between the little houses, then onto a larger road, where we picked up speed, but too much speed, in my opinion, for the conditions. I looked up at the clouds and saw lightning flickering deep within their dark bellies.

At the edge of town I saw a group of kids playing soccer on a solid sheet of ice, which must make for some interesting bounces and slide tackles. I would remember them when I came to that place my father had written about, the spot between desperation and despair.

I turned to Op Nine and said, “I’ve been working on a theory that this whole thing with the Seals and the demons and OIPEP and all that is just a dream. You see it in movies and books all the time. You know, where the main character has all these awful things happen to him and then he wakes up and realizes none of it was real.”

He stared at me and didn’t say anything.

“It’s just a theory,” I said.

The kids and the soccer field without the boundary lines, which kind of made the whole world their field, were far behind us by this point. There was just gray sky, white earth, and the black ribbon of the road between the two.

“If you’re Operative Nine, what happened to the first eight operatives?” I asked.