He shook his head. "No one knows the future, Alfred, save one, and that secret is safe with him."

"You know what I'm going to say, don't you? You already know what my choice is going to be."

I pushed myself off the bed, wincing as my right foot hit the floor and the pain shot all the way up my leg.

"Okay," I said. "Where's my parka?"

32.

I followed Op Nine through a maze of corridors, into two separate elevators, past unlabeled doors with security keypads, some with armed guards stationed next to them, struggling to keep up with my bum leg as he strode down the lime green hallways, silent for most of the way, but sometimes, like in one of the elevators, he would turn to me and say something.

"Do you know you are the first civilian to set foot inside headquarters since its founding? Few know of its existence and none know its location, but these are extraordinary times, Alfred Kropp."

And, while we marched down yet another corridor, he said, "You are in an underground city roughly the size of London.

And, like a city, there are shops and restaurants, a postal center, movie theaters, places of worship for all the major religions. Lecture halls, research facilities and a library that would be the envy of the world-if the world knew of it."

"Sort of like OIPEP University," I said.

He frowned. "There is no university here."

"I was making a joke."

"I see."

"You know, only about two percent of the human population lacks a sense of humor, Op Nine."

"Indeed. Then I am in a select group, yes?"

My stomach was bothering me before my feast because it was empty; now it bothered me because it was full. Next time, I promised myself, I wasn't mixing pepperoni pizza, Cheetos, and a pint of double-chocolate-fudge ice cream.

We finally stopped at an unmarked door. Op Nine swiped the pad of his thumb over a sensor and the door swung open. We stepped inside a room that looked like a dry cleaners, with clothes hanging on poles that ran the entire length of the room. A round little man wearing a tweed vest appeared.

"Yes? What do you want?"

"Something appropriate for him," Op Nine said, nodding at me.

The little guy stared at me.

"Hi," I said. "I'm Alfred Kropp."

"I know who you are," he said. He looked at Op Nine. "Define 'appropriate.' "

"Private school, weekends in the Hamptons, old money," Op Nine said.

The little guy looked at me, pursed his fat lips, and said, "If you say so, but it's gonna be a stretch. Nationality?"

"American."

He disappeared into the couture forest.

"We're going undercover?" I asked.

"We've ruled out running ads and printing flyers," Op Nine said. His eyes sparkled. "No humor."

The little vest-wearing man came back with a stack of clothes-sweaters, shirts, pants, mostly khakis. For the next twenty minutes I tried on different combinations. Op Nine finally settled on a blue pullover sweater with khakis and brown loafers.

"It would work except for the hair," vest-man said. "The hair's all wrong, and the face."

"What's the matter with my face?" I asked.

"Pores too big. You're supposed to be rich. Rich kids get dermabrasion and those zit pills."

"We'll risk it," Op Nine said.

"Teeth are nice, though."

"Yeah," I said. "But you should see my toenails."

"I don't want to see your toenails."

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 digitalized-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.

"The 'Nine' doesn't refer to a sequential number."

"I'm no math whiz, but I thought nine was a sequential number."

"It refers to a section of the OIPEP Charter."

"Lemme guess. Section Nine."

He nodded. I asked, "So what is Section Nine?"

"I can't tell you that."

"And if you did . . ."

"I would have to kill you."

"I think we're really bonding here. Establishing a rapport. Have you ever had to? Kill somebody, I mean."

"Only once. In Abkhazia."

"Abkhazia. Ashley mentioned you were in Abkhazia.

What happened in Abkhazia-or can't you tell me that either?" "I shouldn't tell you."

"It's classified?"

"It's painful."

"Well, maybe you should tell me to get it off your chest. You know, to help with the bonding, since we're partners now and everything."

"I do not need it off my chest."

" 'And we're not partners.' You were about to say that."

"I was about to say Abkhazia is something you may want to hear now but would regret hearing afterward."

"I can take it," I said. "I'm tougher than I look."

"Oh, you are many more things than how you appear, Alfred Kropp."

"You're talking about the whole Lancelot thing, I guess, and the fact that Bernard Samson is my dad. But the thing with that is it's not anything I did. I mean, it didn't require anything special on my part."

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His eyelids were the color of charcoal. He must have been one of the homeliest people I had ever seen, with those long flappy earlobes, the droopy cheeks, and raccoon eyes that reminded me so much of a hound dog. But you shouldn't judge people by appearances-the credo I lived by.

"Padre," I said softly. Then louder: "Back in the desert, you blessed us with holy water and later on Mike called you 'Padre' . . ."

His eyes stayed closed. "I was a priest-once."

"What happened?"

"My particular theological views made the church uncomfortable."

"I guess they would," I said. "I mean, not even the church buys into demons these days, does it?"

He didn't answer. So I went on. "So that's the deal with the holy water and all the Latin and praying. I haven't been to church since my mom died. You think that's part of it, Op Nine . . . um, Father?"

"Do not call me that, Kropp."

"Well, what do I call you then?"

"Operative Nine."