Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Well, all sorts of influential people belong, although I can’t see them all knowing about Opus Omega, and especially not nine/eleven.”

  “I know Eddie has no idea about Opus Omega.”

  He stepped back into the room with another beer. “How?”

  “Because he saw a page in the Compendium with the words big as day and he didn’t react. He was more interested in the animation beneath it.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’ve seen those animations. Amazing. But anyway, I’m sure the Order has lots of levels of membership with the folks on the bottom like Eddie knowing nothing about the doings of the guys on top.” His smile was grim. “Pretty much like the whole world.”

  “But in the Order’s case, top would be the High Council of the Seven. As for levels of membership, I’ll bet there’s seven. They’re really into sevens.”

  Jack nodded. “I think the Otherness itself is into sevens—I mean, the way the number keeps popping up.”

  “Well, it’s prime, and it’s versatile, and it’s manageable.”

  She jumped at the sound of the door buzzer.

  Jack frowned as he reached behind him. A pistol appeared as he stepped to the intercom and pressed a button.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s us,” said a woman’s voice. And in the background a little-girl voice said, “Surprise!”

  Jack did look surprised for an instant, then he smiled and pressed the door-release button.

  “Come on up!”

  He opened the closet near the front door and placed the pistol on a high shelf. Before the door closed again she thought she spotted something that looked like a dai katana leaning up there as well.

  He turned to her. “Company.”

  “I gathered that. Is it who I think it is?”

  He nodded. “My ladies.”

  My ladies . . . he said it as if they were royalty. From the look in his eyes they were . . .

  Weezy looked down at herself. Jack’s woman—his lady—would be here in seconds and she was still dressed in the sweats she’d put on for her aborted workout. No time to change. This was awful.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said as he turned the central knob that withdrew the four bolts on the door and pulled it open.

  Seconds later a grinning nine-or ten-year-old girl in shorts and a T-shirt bounded out of the stairwell and leaped into his arms.

  “Jack!”

  “Hey, Vicks!”

  As they hugged, a slim woman with blue eyes and short blond hair stepped through the door and planted a light kiss on Jack’s lips. She wore a white tank top and a short black skirt.

  Oh, God, she’s beautiful.

  Jack said, “Gia, Weezy. Weezy, Gia.”

  The woman’s eyes locked with Weezy’s for an instant, then she smiled and stepped forward, extending her hand.

  “Hi. Nice to meet you. Jack’s told me so much about you.”

  Not too much, I hope, she thought. Like making a fool out of myself the other night.

  “Good things, I hope. He’s told me about you too.”

  Close up, she wasn’t really beautiful—that had been the initial gestalt impression—but she was very, very good looking. Next to her Weezy felt like a total frump.

  “And this is Vicky,” Jack said, easing the child to the floor.

  The child had her mother’s blue eyes but someone else’s dark hair. She wore it back in a single braid.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  Good manners.

  As they shook hands, Weezy said, “My mother named me Louise, but you can call me Weezy.”

  She giggled. “Like Lil Wayne?”

  People usually referenced Louise from The Jeffersons, but . . . “Lil Wayne?”

  “Rapper,” Jack said. “That’s his nickname.”

  She looked at him. “You like rap?”

  “Some. Mostly no. But now and then I get stuck spending time with folks who do.” To Gia, he said, “What’s the occasion?”

  “Well, I heard Weezy was here so I figured we’d stop over and get acquainted.”

  So that was it. Jack had been on the phone while she’d unpacked the few things she’d brought. He must have told her about his houseguest and she’d come for a firsthand look. Weezy could understand that. Completely.

  And now that you’ve seen me, you know you—especially you—have nothing to worry about.

  “Are you hungry?” Vicky said to Weezy.

  She was starved but determined to hold back.

  “Well, um—”

  “I am. Wanna eat?”

  “She’s a stomach with feet,” Gia said. She hefted the pair of plastic grocery bags dangling from her left hand. “And since Jack never has anything to eat—”

  “Just stocked in a brand-new, giant-economy-size box of Lucky Charms,” he said.

  Vicky pumped her fist. “Yes!”

  Gia said, “Ohhhh, no.”

  Weezy could have told her about a study years ago that fed rats a diet of only breakfast cereal and how the ones on Lucky Charms did the best, but decided against it.

  As Jack relieved Gia of the bags, she said, “There’s wine, crackers, and a couple of cheeses in there.”

  “Come on in here and help me unpack,” Jack said to Vicky, “and we’ll check the fridge.”

  “Okay!”

  Weezy watched her run after him.

  “I know he’s going to give her Lucky Charms in there,” Gia said softly, smiling, her eyes on the kitchen door. “I have to take a public stand against it to keep it verboten at home, but it’s Jack’s thing to sneak her whatever she wants. That’s why she loves coming here.”

  “How long since she’s seen him?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Really? I thought from the way she greeted him—”

  “Day, week, month, she’s always that way with Jack.”

  Weezy felt a lump of envy in her throat. Jack had a family . . .

  Raising her voice, Gia turned back to Weezy. “Anyway, as far as edibles go—”

  “I’ve got fairly recent leftover General Tso’s chicken,” Jack announced from the kitchen. “Hey, what’s this stuff? Quinoa?”

  “It’s pronounced keen-wah,” she called back.

  “Well, it’s spelled ‘quinn-oh-ah,’ and you know I don’t eat things I can’t pronounce.”

  “As I was saying,” she continued to Weezy, barely missing a beat, “as far as eating goes, it’s BYO to Jack’s, unless you consider beer a food group.”

  “Hops and malt,” he called. “Malt is a grain, and hops are a vegetable, which makes beer a two-fer.”

  They’d obviously had this conversation before—many times. They were enviably comfortable with each other. She and Steve had shared something like that. They’d been close, but apparently not close enough to keep him from calling it quits on life.

  These two had something more, something else running beneath the surface. She sensed a shared hurt, a shared trial, a fire that had scarred them but also fused them in the process. Weezy could almost see the voltaic arc of love flashing between them.

  And could almost feel her heart break.

  8

  “Well?” Jack said. “What do you think?”

  He was walking Gia toward Columbus Avenue for a cab, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. Vicky ambled ahead, gyrating to whatever was playing on her iPod.

  He’d thought it had gone well. It could have been a bonfire of the ovaries, but they’d got along.

  Gia looked up at him, a faint smile playing about her lips. “I think she’s in love with you.”

  The idea stunned him. Weezy? In love with him? Sure, she’d hopped into bed with him, but that had seemed more like a desperate kind of need than . . . love.

  “No way. We’ve known each other for ages and haven’t seen each other since the eighties. She can’t be.”

  “She might not know it herself, or be in denial. Ma
ybe it’s just infatuation, but something’s there.”

  “Swell. What do you think I should do?”

  “Tell me again why she has to stay with you?”

  “Long story.”

  “Vicky took to her. I could put her up—”

  “No.”

  She paused, then, “You said that way too fast.”

  He thought about what had happened to her house, to Harris, to Harris’s place. Lots of collateral damage around Weezy these days.

  “Did I?”

  “How much trouble is she in?”

  “A bunch.”

  “Do I want to know details?”

  “Probably not. It’s complicated. She’s gotten herself into a situation. It’s better for you and Vicks not to be connected to her.”

  “And a hotel or motel won’t do?”

  “She needs to feel safe while she tries to make sense of the Compendium. It’s a temporary thing.”

  Gia sighed and leaned against him as they walked. “Why isn’t anything ever simple anymore?”

  “Because you’re involved with me, and I’m involved with . . . well, you know. Let’s face it: Life would be so much simpler and better for you if we’d never met.”

  But awful for me.

  He felt her stiffen. “Simpler maybe, but don’t you say ‘better.’ Don’t you ever say ‘better.’ ”

  “You wouldn’t have lost Emma.”

  “Emma wouldn’t have existed without you.”

  “Exactly.”

  ”Let’s not go there, Jack.”

  “Okay.”

  Gladly not. He still hadn’t found a way to tell her that Emma had died, and she and Vicky had almost died, because Emma was his bloodline . . . a branch marring the symmetry and aerodynamics of a spear.

  They reached Columbus just as a cab was disgorging a trio of sweet young things eager for the Upper West Side’s Saturday night bar scene. Jack grabbed the door and scooted Vicky into the back. He took Gia in his arms and she pressed against him.

  “So . . . should I lock my bedroom door?”

  She smiled. “I’ll leave that up to you, but you never know . . . it might avoid an awkward moment.”

  “Think so?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know I like her. She’s got a sweetness about her. I don’t think she has a mean bone in her body. But her mind . . . she doesn’t flaunt it—in fact, I think she tries to hide it—but she reeks of intelligence. I think she’s scary smart.”

  “She is. That’s why we need her to decipher the Compendium.”

  “But as for her feelings for you . . . I feel kind of sorry for her if she does love you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s so shit out of luck.”

  Jack barked a laugh. “You said the s word! I thought four-letter words were unnecessary.”

  She nodded. “A refuge for the inane, the insipid, and the inarticulate.”

  “But—”

  “But sometimes they say it all.”

  He laughed again. “You’re that sure of me?”

  “As sure as you are of me.”

  “Well, then, that’s a lock.”

  They kissed, long and hard. Then he guided her into the cab, closed the door, and watched his two ladies roar off toward the East Side.

  9

  “Jack, ohmygod! Jack!” Weezy cried, running up to him as he stepped through the door. “I found it!”

  “What?”

  “In the Compendium—the Orsa, the Null Site, even the Fhinntmanchca! It’s all there! And it’s . . . awful.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Oh, I hope that page is still there,” she said, leading him to the round oak table where the book lay. “Please-please-please . . . yes!”

  She slammed her hands down on the exposed pages as if trying to keep them from blowing away. It looked like a two-page spread of the Opus Omega crosshatching.

  Jack craned his neck. “What—?”

  “In a minute. Let me tell you what I’ve been able to piece together. I had a fair amount of the picture when I walked in here today but I was missing vital parts. After you and Gia left, I pulled this out for a little more study. Remember I told you that the first pillar had to be placed in a specific spot called the Null Site?”

  “Right, but you didn’t know where or why.”

  “Well, I found out why almost as soon as I opened the Compendium: It’s the spot that’s crossed by the most so-called lines of force running between the nexus points. No locus is intersected by all—that’s impossible—but the one with the most is designated the Null Site, and that’s where Opus Omega was started.”

  “And where was that?”

  “It didn’t say.”

  “Swell. Then what’s all the excitement?”

  She turned back to the Compendium where her hands still pressed against the pages.

  “I found this map. You see, one of the problems with trying to understand Opus Omega has been the lack of orientation. You’re shown these diagrams with all the nexus points and all the lines of force between them and all the intersections that have pillars and those that still need them, but I’ve yet to see one superimposed on a Mercator-type map of the world—until now.”

  She slid her hands to the sides, revealing a two-page spread of the continents overlaid with the Opus Omega grid. He saw the red lines of force connecting the red splotches of the nexus points, and the white dots at the intersections where the pillars had been set.

  “Nice. Where’s the Null Site?”

  “Take a look and tell me where you think,” she said. “I want to see if we come up with the same spot.”

  Jack leaned over the book and studied the network of lines. He found thick intersections in all the continents, but the thickest seemed . . .

  “Here,” he said, pointing to an area in the northeastern United States. “This looks the busiest.”

  “That’s what I thought too. Touch it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Touch the spot.”

  Jack did, and jerked his hand back as the image expanded, bringing the area to the center. The northeastern and mid-Atlantic U.S. now dominated the two-page spread.

  “Touch it again,” she said.

  He did, and it expanded further, bringing the Tri-State area front and center.

  He smiled. “Ancient interactivity.”

  At another, earlier point in his life he might have been awed, but the events of the past couple of years had depleted his awe reservoir.

  He touched it again and the lower half of Manhattan Island filled the spread. But . . .

  “It looks different.”

  “That’s because the map shows the island as it was thousands of years ago. We’ve changed its shape since the Dutch first settled here in the sixteen hundreds.”

  “You mentioned Battery Park City.”

  “Right. And that was just back in the sixties. Three hundred years of filling this and excavating that preceded it. One more zoom-in ought to do it.”

  Jack touched the busy intersection of lines and the image enlarged once more. He saw a symbol at the center of the intersection.

  “Zero?”

  “That’s the mathematical symbol for an empty set, also known as a null set.”

  “The Null Site?”

  “I don’t see what else it can be. Notice where it rests.”

  Even with the vaguely distorted shape of the island, the location was disturbingly obvious.

  “The World Trade Center.”

  “Right. Ground Zero.”

  Jack shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. You said that for Opus Omega to work, the first pillar—”

  “The Orsa pillar.”

  “Whatever—it had to go there.”

  “It did.”

  “Then what . . . ?” Jack didn’t get it. And then with a high-voltage shock, he did. “Goren and his crew caught them removing the pillar.”

  Weezy was nodding. �
�Exactly.”

  “They killed thousands of people just so they could dig up an old hunk of stone?”

  “It wasn’t stone anymore.”

  Jack stared at her a moment, trying to make sense of that. “You’d better explain that.”

  “Long story.”

  “We’ve got time. But I need a beer. Want one?”

  She gave her head half a shake, then stopped. “Got anything stronger?”

  “Some single malt.”

  “That’ll do.”

  On his way to the kitchen Jack decided he’d join her.

  10

  “Apparently the Orsa is unique among its fellow pillars in a number of ways,” Weezy said.

  They sat facing each other across the round oak table, the Compendium and a bottle of Old Pulteney between them. Each held a small glass containing a couple of fingers of the Scotch. Jack felt like tossing his back but forced himself to sip.

  “Tell me the not-stone-anymore part.”

  “I’ll get to that. Let me lay the groundwork first. I’ve put in a lot of hours on this and I’m still kind of sorting it all out.”

  Jack leaned back. “I’m listening.”

  “First off, the Orsa must be buried in bedrock—just sticking it in the dirt is okay for all the others, but it won’t do for the Orsa. So whoever figured out the Opus Omega was very lucky that all those lines of force intersected near the lower end of Manhattan rather than in Soho or the Village.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Manhattan schist is two hundred fifty feet down there.” She held up a hand. “I know you’re going to ask, so I’ll tell you: Schist is a kind of rock that forms the foundation of Manhattan.”

  Jack said, “No schist!” and waited.

  She closed her eyes. “I knew, I just knew you’d say that.”

  “Sorry. Couldn’t help it. You bring out the adolescent in me.”

  She looked at him again, almost defiant. “The schist is near the surface in Midtown, starts dipping in the thirties, bottoms out in the Village, and rises again way downtown. That’s why you don’t see any skyscrapers in the Village and never will: The schist is too deep.” She folded her arms and looked at him. “Go ahead.”

  “Go ahead what?”

  “Make a comment about ‘deep schist.’ ”

  “I’m insulted!”

  “You know you want to. You know you’re dying to.”