The Seal of Solomon

Op Nine opened one of the overhead compartments and pulled out something that looked like a cross between an elephant gun and a rocket launcher. It had a black strap for hanging it over your shoulder and a telescopic sight.

“Now,” he said. “In the case of a full-blown intrusion event, this is the CW3XD.” He held it high over his head so everybody could get a good look. “Obviously, it has never been field-tested.”

“No time like the present,” the tanned agent muttered.

Op Nine ignored him. “The magazine holds fifty rounds of ordnance.” He pulled an oversized clip of bullets from the same overhead compartment. He ejected one of the bullets and held it up. It looked like an ordinary rifle round, except the tip was larger, about the size of an olive. “Be extraordinarily cautious with these. Loss of one into unfriendly hands could result in complete MISSFAIL.”

“Mission failure,” Ashley translated for me, but I had already figured that one out.

“The CW3XD is designed solely for containment of intrusion agents,” Op Nine said, his tone becoming stern. “Under no circumstances is it to be discharged at the Hyena and his forces.”

“Why?” another agent demanded. He was the biggest one of the lot; his thighs bulged in the shiny OIPEP jumpsuit and his biceps were about the size of my head, which, like too many people have pointed out, was large. “One round from this bad boy and they’ll never find all the pieces.”

“The ordnance is limited,” Op Nine said.

“Extremely limited,” Abigail Smith added, and for some reason she looked across the aisle at me.

“And it is specifically designed for operation against an intrusion agent,” Op Nine said.

“So it’ll kill ’em?” the big agent asked.

Op Nine gave him a cold stare. “What has never lived cannot be killed. Theoretically, the CW3XD will inhibit the IAs, giving us time to retrieve the Seals from the target.”

Op Nine nodded to Abigail, who took a deep breath and rose from her seat with an air of weariness, like she could actually feel the fate of the world resting on her shoulders.

“Let’s gear up,” she said, and I thought her voice shook a little, and that wasn’t encouraging, a senior OIPEP agent, afraid.

16

The agents stood up and popped open the overhead compartments, pulling out these yellow and orange bundles with white harnesses and clinking silver buckles. It took me a second to get it. This plane wasn’t landing. Instead, we were jumping. My stomach did a slow roll.

Ashley touched me on the elbow. “You need some help with yours?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Turn around.”

I turned my back to her and she slipped the harness over my shoulders. I turned again and she proceeded to snap the silver buckles closed. The top of her head was below my chin as she worked on the buckle at my waist, and her blond hair shimmered in the cabin lighting. I smelled lilacs. She gave each buckle a sharp tug before stepping back.

“The chute should automatically deploy after seven seconds,” she told me. She touched a cord hanging over my left shoulder. “Pull the backup if it doesn’t.”

“What if the backup doesn’t work?”

“It’ll work.”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

“Then you hit the ground at five hundred miles per hour.”

She turned away and rummaged in the overhead. Four agents fussed with the big crates in the middle of the hold, unhooking the heavy chains and checking the mattress-sized parachutes tied to them.

“When you say seven seconds, is that seconds like ‘one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi’ or ‘one thousand one, one thousand two’?” I asked.

She turned, holding a gun and holster. She wrapped it around her slim waist and pulled it tight.

“It’ll be all right, Alfred,” she said. “Just don’t stiffen up on the landing. Remember to bend your knees on touchdown; you’ll be okay.”

A bell rang inside the hold and a yellow light began to pulse over the cabin door. All the agents except two lined up for the jump. These two took positions in the rear on either side of the massive bay door; I guessed they were in charge of deploying the crates. I wondered who was in charge of deploying Alfred Kropp.

The agents lined up by the pulsing yellow light were hooking these long metal cords dangling from their chutes to a thin pole that ran the length of the cabin. I was wondering why, when the door swung open and a tornado roared into the plane. The wind kicked my feet out from under me and I would have smacked butt-first onto the hard metal floor, but a pair of huge hands caught me before I hit.

Op Nine shouted into my ear: “Be careful, Alfred Kropp! There may not always be someone near to catch you when you fall!”

He hooked me to the pole. I shivered in the howling wind. The temperature must have dropped about ten degrees when the door swung open.

One by one the OIPEP agents vanished through the opening. One second they were standing there, the next they were gone, like they were being sucked into the maw of an angry, screaming beast. Op Nine put one hand on my shoulder as we edged closer. My knees felt very weak and my throat very dry, but I didn’t have a choice now—I couldn’t turn back or change my mind, and sometimes that’s better.

When my turn came, I put a hand on either side of the opening and stared into the dark Arabian night, unable to look up or down or unclench my cramping fingers from the cold metal. Op Nine bellowed in my ear, “Now! Let go, Alfred!”

That was it, the whole deal. I really had a problem with this letting-go thing. My mom. The truth about my dad. The loss of everybody who was close to me. I suddenly realized that sometimes the toughest thing is getting out of your own way.

I let go.

17

I spun and twisted and flipped as I fell, yowling my lungs out. The big plane appeared to shoot straight up toward the stars, and the world fragmented and refused to arrange itself into any kind of order: stars, earth, earth, stars, stars, earth, earth . . . and my mind fell apart with it. I forgot to count and by the time I remembered, I had no idea where to start—how many seconds had passed? Should I pull my cord just to be safe? Or would pulling my cord mess up the timing mechanism and tangle my chute? And, if my chute got tangled, would the desert sand break my fall? But if desert sand could break someone’s fall, why use a parachute in the first place?

I hadn’t been counting, but I figured I was way past the seven-second window, so I pulled the cord. Nothing happened. Stars, earth, earth, stars—and nothing happened. I yanked the cord again. I should know better than to jump from airplanes. In fact, with my track record, I shouldn’t even indulge in something as commonplace as jaywalking. I pulled the cord a third time.