Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

  19

  “No!”

  Glaeken squeezed his eyes shut and jammed the heels of his hands against his temples. He backed away from the window and dropped into one of the thick-upholstered chairs.

  Something had happened, something terrible.

  The Lady . . . it had to be her. He didn’t sense her. Mortality had stripped him of certain abilities . . . awarenesses. The Lady’s existence was like a scent in the air, and now that scent was gone.

  The workaday world out there would not realize what had just happened. They did not know her scent, could not feel her presence, so they would be unaware of what they had lost.

  But the Ally would notice and would turn away from what it perceived as a dead world.

  Glaeken felt a sense of loss, a wave of sadness almost overwhelming in its intensity. She hadn’t been a person, not in a true sense, just a physical manifestation of something much larger and more complex, but she’d been a personality, and thus a person to him. He’d grown fond of her over the millennia, perhaps even grown to love her. Not like he loved Magda, of course. More like a sister, or a dear, dear friend.

  He’d had but two constants in his attenuated existence: Rasalom and the Lady. Now he had only Rasalom. And very soon Rasalom would—

  He started at a crash behind him. He rose and saw a figure slumped facedown across the coffee table. A woman—naked, old, frail. For a moment he thought it might be Magda—it wouldn’t be the first time she’d forgotten to get dressed—but then he saw the marks on her back and knew.

  “You live?”

  She raised her head and looked at him with bleary, pain-wracked eyes.

  “Help me. Please . . . help.”

  MONDAY

  1

  Jack stared at the thin figure slumped in the wheelchair.

  Not that he disbelieved Veilleur, but how could this wizened crone be the Lady?

  Veilleur had called yesterday to give Jack and Weezy the good news, but suggested they wait till morning before visiting. He’d directed them to the furnished apartment below his own. Its floor plan was identical to Glaeken’s, but the windows onto the park weren’t as grand.

  They’d found her propped up in a wheelchair by one of those windows, a frail old woman with tangled gray hair and rheumy, sunken eyes.

  He looked around. “Where’s Mister Veilleur?”

  “Upstairs with his wife,” the old woman said. “Magda is having one of her bad days. Every time he goes out, she suspects he’s with another woman. This morning she found me there and became hysterical.”

  “Poor man,” Weezy said. “Poor woman.”

  “The good thing is, she’ll forget by this afternoon. The bad thing is, he won’t.”

  Jack looked around again. Something else was missing. Then he realized what.

  “Where’s your dog?”

  She shook her head. “He couldn’t make it back.”

  “Oh,” he said, feeling a stab of guilt. “I’m sorry. I did everything I could to stop—”

  She lifted a gnarled hand. “He is not gone. He simply cannot be here. But you . . . you must not feel you failed. You could not have stopped him. No one could have.”

  He knew she was right. He’d done everything possible with the weapons at hand. And even if he’d had a grenade launcher or a surface-to-surface missile, the end would have been the same. But that didn’t make him feel any better. Not after how she’d been there for him, intervening when he’d had nowhere else to turn.

  Weezy stepped forward and laid a hand on her stooped shoulder. “What happened? You disappeared. Where did you go? Where did that strange awful man go?”

  “Mutual obliteration. The three of us died. I was nothingness. I did not exist. And then . . . awareness returned. Somehow, for some reason, the noosphere was able to restore me. But only me. It should not have had the power to do that, but it did. It does.”

  Weezy frowned. “I don’t understand. You aren’t the noosphere, just a manifestation of it. Did your . . . ‘obliteration’ damage it?”

  “No. But don’t forget, I grew as the noosphere grew. When the sentient biosphere was small, the young noosphere initiated my existence. I began as a spark that became an infant, that became a child, and so on. It took millennia for the noosphere to grow, and as it developed, so did I, finally developing into adulthood at the dawn of the First Age. An unforeseen, profoundly tragic consequence of my matured existence was that it signaled the sentience of this world throughout the multiverse.”

  Jack said, “Attracting the attention of the Ally and the Otherness.”

  “Exactly. The Conflict was very much in the open then, much more head-on. After the Ally gained the upper hand and the Otherness caused the Great Cataclysm, more oblique means were sought by the other side—such as shutting down the beacon. Thus I became a target, and Opus Omega was born.”

  Jack took his turn at the window and looked left. He couldn’t see the Turtle Pond from here, but he could make out Belvedere Castle, which had overlooked everything that had gone down yesterday.

  “So yesterday was the culmination of millennia of effort to destroy you. But if eliminating you wasn’t going to hurt the noosphere that created you, why did they think the Fhinntmanchca would accomplish anything? The noosphere would simply re-create you and put you back out there as the beacon.”

  “It is not that simple. Obliterating me should have required the noosphere to re-create me from scratch again—from that spark I mentioned. I can act as a beacon only when I am mature. My development wouldn’t have taken as long as before, but more than long enough for the Ally to turn away and the Otherness to achieve a stranglehold.”

  “Why didn’t it happen that way?”

  “The only possible reason is that the noosphere is stronger and more resilient than I or anyone else ever imagined.”

  “But you’re so . . .”

  “Weak and old? Yes. But that the noosphere could do even this is miraculous. I am here—as an adult. And as such I remain the beacon. That is what is important. In the past, once I matured, I was able to appear at any age I wished. I often chose to be an old woman—no one feels threatened by an old woman. Now I have no choice.”

  “But at least you’re back,” Jack said.

  She nodded. “Yes, I have returned. Barely. But I had to come alone. The noosphere did not have enough to send back my companion. I did not want to return without him, but I had no choice. I had to appear again, had to take human form, even if it is only this. I have just enough strength to keep the Ally aware of the sentience of this biosphere.”

  Weezy went to the window and gazed out at the city.

  “They failed. Nine/eleven . . . the Septimus Order and R brought down the Towers, killed all those innocent people . . . for nothing.”

  “Not entirely for nothing.” She fumbled with the hem of her cardigan, then lifted it to bare her belly. “I have been sorely wounded.”

  Jack saw what she meant: A second tunnel ran through her—this one to the left of her navel. Weezy stepped back from the window for a look.

  “Ohmygod!”

  The Lady lowered the sweater. “I shall not survive another attack.”

  Jack thought of that ruined, leaking, deflated sack of . . . whatever in the Lodge’s subcellar. The “egg” in Diana’s Alarm. Big enough to contain a man and hatch him as something else. But all the king’s horses and lackeys weren’t putting that thing back together again.

  “There won’t be another Fhinntmanchca,” he said. “The Orsa is dead. It’s created its first and last.”

  Weezy said, “But you’ll get stronger, won’t you?”

  The Lady nodded. “With time and an unbroken feed from the noosphere, I will soon return to my former strength.”

  Jack said, “How soon?”

  “A year.”

  That long? pushed toward Jack’s lips, then he realized that a century didn’t qualify as an eye blink in her frame of reference. A year was barely measurable.
>
  “I have never been able to influence the conflict itself,” she added. “The Ally and the Otherness are far too vast. My importance has centered around my function as a beacon.” She looked at Jack. “But as you know, now and again I have been able to intervene and provide assistance in earthly matters involving the Conflict.”

  Jack nodded. He’d never forget how she’d stepped between Rasalom and him during his darkest hour, yanked Gia and Vicky back from the brink of death. He owed her for all that—and for what else? He wondered what she’d done for him without his knowing . . . say, as Mrs. Clevenger.

  “And I will be forever in your debt.”

  She shook her head. “No need. And no more from me for a while. Until I’m fully restored, I can play no part in what goes on about me. Nor can I move so freely among you as I used to. All my focus must be centered on simply existing. The beacon must remain lit.”

  Weezy dropped to one knee beside the wheelchair and gripped her hand.

  “You said you won’t survive another attack. How might they attack you again?”

  “It must be with something from the Other side—like the chew wasps from the cenote at the nexus point, or the Fhinntmanchca. Nothing of this Earth can harm me.”

  Jack watched Weezy give a knowing nod. He’d explained what had happened in Florida last year.

  “But Darryl was of this Earth,” he said.

  “No. He was no longer human. His very molecules had been changed to something Other, something from outside.”

  “What about R?” Weezy said.

  “Even the Adversary himself is powerless in that regard. Though he has become something more than human, he is of this Earth.” She patted the armrest of her wheelchair. “His minions could wire this chair with explosives and set them off, and I would not be scratched. So, unless they come up with something from the Other side—and I don’t think they will—or complete Opus Omega—equally unlikely—I believe I am safe for now.”

  “So it’s just a matter of time before you’re back on your feet.”

  She nodded. “As long as the noosphere retains its present intensity, I shall be as new by this time next year.”

  Weezy smiled at him, and Jack did his best to return it. But he worried. Many signs pointed to a coming darkness, an endless darkness that would arrive next spring.

  A year might be too long.

  2

  “Success?” Jack said as Russ opened the door.

  He’d turned off his phone while with the Lady, and when he turned it back on he’d found voice mail from Russ Tuit saying he had something for him.

  Russ shrugged as he stepped back to let him in. “Tough job. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it’s as good as you’re going to get with available software. Better, actually, since I went into the code and added a couple modifications of my own.”

  Jack nodded without saying anything. He didn’t doubt that Russ had done exactly what he’d said, but the extolling of his own efforts tended to act as prelude to the pumping of his fee.

  “I approached it from every angle I could think of. I shaved each indi—”

  “Shaved?”

  Russ smiled. “Well, you wanted the beard off, right? So that required me to give him a shave. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Anyhow, I shaved each individual image, then assembled a composite. I also made a composite of the bearded ones, and shaved that.”

  “And the result is?”

  Russ’s smile faltered. “Well, they’re not really the same face.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  He sat before his computer and began attacking the keyboard with machine-gun bursts of taps.

  “Just the way the software works. Take a look. This is the one where I shaved the composite and it’s probably the lesser of the two as far as accuracy goes.”

  A black-and-white image appeared on the monitor—the face of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, thin-lipped man who looked vaguely familiar, but not enough to trigger recognition.

  “Let me see the other.”

  Another face replaced the first and sparked a cascade of memories, all of them bad.

  “Shit.”

  Russ turned and grinned up at him. “I did it? You know him?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jack couldn’t take his eyes off that face.

  “Well? Who is he?”

  Jack continued to stare. “You don’t want to know.”

  Jack too would have preferred not to know, but he did.

  “The son of a bitch,” he muttered. “The lousy—”

  “You’re looking a little scary, Jack. Who is he?”

  He looked different from when Jack had seen him back in January—the nose was sure as all hell different—but not different enough to prevent recognition.

  All so clear now . . .

  Back in the nineties, after the Orsa became organic, the Order knew it was only a matter of time before it awakened, so they had to dig it up. To that end he’d infiltrated al Qaeda—probably not so difficult, considering his special abilities—and influenced the decision to attack America. Maybe he gave them the idea to use airliners as guided missiles. Perhaps they would have attacked the Trade Towers anyway—they’d already tried once—but he made sure they did.

  He’d soaked his hands in the blood of three thousand innocent people and licked them clean.

  Because during the attack Jack was sure he’d positioned himself close by, sucking up the terror, the panic, the chaos, the pain, the deaths, the grief and misery of loss. Same with the Madrid train bombings.

  Him.

  The man on the monitor screen.

  The One . . . the Adversary . . .

  He’d called himself Wahid bin Aswad. But he had a thing for anagrams, and that name didn’t work as one.

  Wait. Weezy had mentioned his full name: Wahid bin Aswad al Somar.

  Al Somar . . .

  That nailed it. No doubt now.

  Rasalom.

  “Can you copy that file onto a disk for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. And after you do that, I advise you to erase the files and anything connected with them.”

  Russ looked worried. “Why? This a bad guy?”

  Jack nodded. “Real bad. The worst.”

  He didn’t want Russ caught in the middle of anything that Jack might start. And Jack intended to start something.

  As Russ made the copy, Jack looked into the eyes of the face on the screen.

  So . . . you don’t like your picture out and about? You send your Septimus flunkies around erasing all photographic evidence of your existence. What is it? Some First Age superstition? Afraid they contain pieces of your soul? Nah. You don’t believe in souls. More likely you’re afraid Glaeken will see through your disguises and decide to come looking for you. Yeah. Bet that’s it. You want to stay behind the scenes, pulling strings and playing Dr. Mabuse with nobody the wiser until the Big Day when the Otherness shows up.

  I can’t seem to find a way to hurt you, but maybe I can find a way to distract you, annoy you. I know how to be really, really annoying.

  Where are you now? Brooding and fuming about the failure of your Fhinntmanchca?

  I hope to hell so.

  3

  Ernst watched the One stare at the lifeless husk of the Orsa. Its stink did not seem to bother him. But his silence disturbed Ernst. The command had come to meet him here, yet the One had spoken not a single word since Ernst arrived, when he’d found him standing just as he was now.

  Ernst rolled his sore shoulders. Every muscle in his body ached from the Taser shock he’d received yesterday. A terrible experience. So helpless . . . completely at the mercy of that man.

  His jaw clenched. Who was he? He knew much more than he should. It hadn’t been Glaeken, he was sure of that. He’d never seen the legendary foe, but he was reputed to be a large man with flaming hair. This bearded stranger had been average in size and looks.

  Whoever
he was, he had to be found. Thompson hadn’t seen him, but he was savagely intent on finding him. Ernst would add the Order and the Dormentalists to the Kickers numbers in the hunt. They’d find him. And when they did . . .

  But that was the future. Ernst hoped the One would allow him a future.

  He forced himself to speak, not simply to break the unbearable silence, but because he needed to know.

  “How could this happen? How could the Fhinntmanchca have failed?”

  A protracted silence followed, but finally the One responded.

  “The Fhinntmanchca did not fail. It did exactly what it was designed to do. But what happened after its success . . . that is troubling. Her source recreated her almost instantly. It should not have been able to do that. In fact, it was considered an impossibility. Something has changed, something unforeseen has taken place within her source, enhanced its power. You must learn what that is and reverse it. Soon.”

  And then he turned and walked away, leaving Ernst alone with his thoughts and the remains of the Orsa.

  The source . . . Ernst was familiar with the concept of another plane of existence engendered by the sum of human thoughts and interactions. In many circles it was considered a theory or a pipe dream. Ernst knew different. He knew it existed and was the progenitor of the Lady.

  In and of itself, the übermind was no impediment to the Otherness. But its creation—its Eve, as it were—was. Through the Lady it trumpeted its existence to the multiverse, and thus to the Enemy. It was powerful and grew incrementally more so with each increase in the sentient population of the biosphere. But it should not have been powerful enough to reconstruct its instrument in a flash. That bespoke enormous power.

  What was fueling that power?

  And then . . . a flash of insight. He might be right, he might be wrong, but he saw an entirely new avenue of attack.

  Excited, he hurried after the One to tell him.

  www.repairmanjack.com

  THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD

  The preponderance of my work deals with a history of the world that remains undiscovered, unexplored, and unknown to most of humanity. Some of this secret history has been revealed in the Adversary Cycle, some in the Repairman Jack novels, and bits and pieces in other, seemingly unconnected works. Taken together, even these millions of words barely scratch the surface of what has been going on behind the scenes, hidden from the workaday world. I’ve listed these works below in the chronological order in which the events in them occur.