“Still a little dizzy.”
“That will pass.”
“How do you know?”
“I am a trained medic as well as a cyborg.”
He opened the bulkhead door and jerked his head toward the corridor outside.
“After you, Alfred Kropp.”
Something hit me then, and instead of keeping my mouth shut, which was probably the wisest thing to do at that moment, I blurted out, “I’m the bait, aren’t I?”
“Bait?”
“Or ransom or something. Mike wants you to bring me to him.”
“I doubt that.”
“Then why do I have to go?”
“Because,” Op Nine said calmly, “we say so.”
Dumb, Kropp, dumb, dumb, dumb, I told myself, and walked through the door anyway.
15
We climbed the circular stairs two flights to the top, turned a corner, and suddenly we were in the open air. It was colder outside than I would have guessed, but I think I read somewhere that the desert gets cold at night. The Pandora had anchored about two hundred yards from shore. I could see lights there. Marsa Alam.
A group of agents was waiting on deck. I counted ten besides Op Nine and Abby, so that made me number thirteen, which seemed appropriate and ominous at the same time.
When they saw us come up, the agents turned and stared at me.
“I’m Alfred Kropp,” I said.
“They know who you are,” Op Nine said.
I was about eight thousand miles from home, but some things you never leave behind, no matter how far you go, and right then, I felt like the big awkward dateless dork at the prom.
It was a young group, except for Op Nine. Nobody looked over the age of thirty. The guys were all thick-necked and square-jawed, and their biceps bulged out the arms of their jumpsuits. There were two female agents, both blondes like Abby. They looked like fashion models with their oversized lips and very small chins and boyish hips.
Then I saw Ashley. She gave me a little smile. Op Nine cleared his throat, Ashley looked away, and then Abigail Smith began to speak.
“Well, we’ve come to it, folks. I don’t think I need to remind you of the consequences should the Hyena succeed in opening the Lesser Seal—the greatest intrusion event in a hundred generations. For this reason, the director has invoked the First Protocol.”
She paused to let that particular bit of news sink in with everyone—everyone except me, because I had no idea what she was talking about. The atmosphere got very somber.
“You understand what this means. You no longer exist— in the operational sense, of course.” She took a deep breath. “You still have time to back out.”
Nobody said anything. Abby nodded; I guess she was pleased that nobody was backing out. She asked if anyone had any questions. I had about a hundred. For example, what were an “intrusion event” and the First Protocol? The other ninety-eight were similar in that they were questions I probably didn’t want answered. But the main question was why was everyone else allowed to back out but I wasn’t?
Rope ladders hung over the railings, and we descended on them to the water below, where two speedboats bobbed gently, scraping against the hull of the Pandora. My butt had hardly touched the seat when we leaped forward and whipped hard to the left toward the lights of Marsa Alam.
The Pandora faded into the darkness, the darkest kind of dark, under a moonless sky, though the stars were very bright, much brighter than they appear in the States.
Two Land Rovers were waiting for us at the dock. Op Nine helped me out of the speedboat and I rode shotgun in the lead vehicle as he drove.
The roads in Marsa Alam were not up to American standards, and I was concentrating on keeping my tongue in the center of my mouth so I didn’t bite it off as we jounced along. We didn’t head for the lights of the town. Those lights stayed on our left and kept fading until the desert night closed around us and the only thing I could see were the twin beams of the headlamps cutting into the darkness.