The Thirteenth Skull (Page 24)

“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.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “The same thing happened to me.”

Five thousand feet below, the interstate snaked through the monochromatic hills, the same road that took Bennacio and me north in our quest for the Holy Sword.

Ashley said, “There’s a saying they teach new recruits: the Company is forever. It doesn’t mean OIPEP will last forever—nothing does. It means what happens to you inside the Company lasts forever. It does things to you that can’t be undone.”

“Doom,” I said softly.

“What?”

“Doom. You know, fate. Destiny. The thing-that-can’t-be-undone. And it doesn’t matter whether you think it’s right or wrong, fair or unfair. You don’t have a choice. Well, I don’t buy it. I won’t buy it. I still have a choice.”

I turned from the window to look at her and saw her looking back at me with a funny expression, almost as if she felt sorry for me.

“Where are we going exactly?” I asked.

“Camp Echo. It’s a Company facility in Canada.”

“Do you know where I’ll eventually end up?”

She shook her head.

“What’s that mean?” I asked. “You don’t know or you know and can’t tell me?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got it narrowed down to a couple possibilities.”

“Do I get any say in it?” She nodded. “Good. I don’t want to end up someplace like Paraguay herding goats.”

She laughed and shook her head again. When Ashley moved her head, her blond hair moved with it but a millisecond later, a swirling effect like a long blond cape: move-swirl, move-swirl.

“Paraguay was just a random country,” I said. “The truth is I’m not even sure they herd goats in Paraguay. I’m not telling you guys how to do this. You’re the coordinator and everything, but if it’s up to me I’d rather stay in America because the idea is to blend in, right?”

Abby and Nueve were sitting in front of us, near the cockpit, and their heads were almost touching as they talked. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the rise and fall of their voices indicated a fierce argument was going on.

“That’s the idea,” Ashley said.

“How far does it go? I mean, I’m guessing this is a kind of ramped-up version of the Witness Protection Program, and I know OIPEP has all kinds of supersecret, James Bond–type technologies . . . What I’m getting at is, do you erase my memories? I mean, can you, like, wipe my slate clean?”

“Nobody can take away your memories, Alfred. Not even OIPEP.”

I thought about that. “That’s too bad.” I looked out the window again. We had climbed into some clouds and the earth was hidden from view. “That’s too bad.”

She reached under her seat and pulled out a laptop. As it booted up, she said, “A Level Alpha Extraction is all about permanence. An LAE is forever, Alfred. When you leave here, you won’t be you anymore. You’ll have a new name, a new past, even a new face. This procedure is sometimes called the ‘Phoenix Protocol,’ because the old you is burned away, metaphorically speaking, and a new you rises in its place. I hope you’ve got a good memory, because there’s an awful lot you’ve got to memorize. We’re going to literally make you into another person, and that means reprogramming you to recognize yourself as someone totally new and different.”

“A new face?”

She nodded. “You wouldn’t believe what our plastic surgeons can do.”

“What if I like my face?”

“An LAE is an all-or-nothing protocol, Alfred. Giving you a new identity would be a waste of time without giving you a fresh appearance to go with it. We may also alter your height.”

“My height?”

“You’re much taller than average. It’s a quality that makes you stick out, and the last thing you want as an extractee is to stick out. We may need to remove a vertebra or two.”

“Oh my God!”

“Don’t panic. That’s still under discussion.”

“You’re going to carve up my face and rip out a chunk of my backbone, and you don’t want me to panic?”

She clicked on an icon labeled “LAE_SUB_KROPP.”

“Check this out,” she said quickly. “It’s pretty neat.”

The program launched into a slide show of computer-generated photographs of someone who seemed vaguely familiar: full-on shots of his face, profile shots, fading into full-body pictures of an average-looking teenager, leaning toward the thin side, with short blond hair and blue eyes.

“Who is it?” I asked, though deep down I knew who it was: “SUB_KROPP.”

“It’s you—or one possibility of you.”

“I have brown eyes.”

“We have a technique to change eye color. I used to have brown eyes too.”

I looked into her sparkling blue ones. “You were extracted?”

“Kind of. When I joined the Company . . . well, it was sort of what we’re going to do with you, only in reverse. Everyone who joins the Field Ops division is extracted from their former interface.”

She looked away. There was something she wasn’t telling me.

“So that’s why all you female OIPEPs look alike with the blond hair and blue eyes. Did they change your face too?”

“They changed everything,” she said softly.

Tears welled in her eyes. I couldn’t change that, so I decided to change the subject.

“There’s some things I like about it,” I said, meaning the picture. “Like the nose. Can I see the nose again? Yeah, I never was too happy with my nose. I’m not sure about the blond though. I know you’ll have to get rid of the gray—hard to blend in as a sixteen-year-old with gray hair—but maybe just darken it. Not red. I’d look like a clown and I hate clowns. Though that dude from CSI: Miami is pretty cool. Face looks kind of thin, though, like are you going to chisel my cheekbones or something? I guess you can’t make me too good-looking—good-looking people stand out more than average-looking ones. Not that I turn many heads now, and I guess you wouldn’t want to go too homely either.”