“Preferable to son. Not enough of a resemblance.”
“Thank God.”
In the suite, he took
out the laptop and booted it up on the kitchenette table. I opened the refrigerator, half hoping it would be fully stocked, but it wasn’t. I pulled back the curtains and looked out at Lake Michigan, as gray and drab as the low-hanging sky.
Op Nine was typing something. Maybe an e-mail to headquarters: Arrived at insertion point. Proceeding to acquire target. Kropp still mildly annoying.
I let the drapes fall—the view was too depressing—and turned on the TV. CNN was running a special report called Crisis in the Sky, and two talking heads occupied a split screen, a meteorologist and some guy from the government, arguing whether global warming was responsible for the fact that clouds now covered ninety-eight percent of the planet. That was more depressing than the view, so I flipped to the next channel. Its special was called Recent Storm Terror—The Al-Qaeda Connection. It looked like OIPEP’s MEDCON was executing OP-FOOL’EM. I turned off the TV.
Op Nine was still typing away.
“I feel weird,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Some kind of satellite image occupied the top half of his screen; the bottom half contained the text of whatever he was typing.
“Maybe I’ve got jet lag. You know, flying all the way from the North Pole in an hour . . . that’ll kill you.”
“Hmmm-mmm.”
I was fishing with that North Pole remark, but he didn’t bite. I yawned. Some hunt this was turning out to be.
“Maybe I’ll take a nap.”
He didn’t say anything. I went into the bedroom, kicked off my snow boots, and threw the parka onto the chair beside the bed. The room was stuffy. A radiator hissed under the window. The click-click-click of his typing continued. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again the radiator was still hissing, but the click-clicks had stopped. I sat up and looked at the clock. It was a little after three in the afternoon when I lay down; now it was a quarter past six.
I got up and went into the other room. Op Nine reclined on the sofa, long legs stretched out, one arm thrown over his eyes, breathing deeply.
He had left his computer on.
I stared at the dancing Microsoft flag for a few seconds, chewing on my bottom lip. What was the protocol if I got caught? Would Op Nine be compelled to shoot me? I couldn’t picture Op Nine shooting me, but that may have been just a failure of my own imagination.
I could always say the thing was making a funny noise and I was just checking it out, making sure it was okay. Ashley told me they had lied to me and maybe this computer held the evidence to that.
I touched the touchpad and the desktop screen lit up. There were only three folders besides the recycle bin: one labeled “SATCOM Hookup,” another called “Dossiers,” and the bottom one, “Chart.”
I dragged the pointer to the one labeled “Dossiers.” I’d seen enough spy movies to know what a dossier was, and I wanted to see if he had one labeled “Kropp, Alfred.” But after I double-clicked on the folder, a message popped up asking for a password. I closed the box.
Same thing with the SATCOM folder, the one I figured he was working on when I went to bed, since I saw the satellite image on the screen. I closed the password box, and almost didn’t click on the third icon, figuring it would demand a password too.
But I did click on it, and up popped a Word document with this title page:
OFFICIAL CHARTER
OFFICE OF INTERDIMENSIONAL PARADOXES
AND
EXTRAORDINARY PHENOMENON
Copenhagen
19.11.32
[As Amended 05.10.78 & 04.05.01]