Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

Harris smiled. “Maybe not an idiot. Maybe just greedy. Isn’t greed amazing? Isn’t it wonderful? Even sucking up to Allah doesn’t immunize you. I love greed. It allows me to cherchez la moolah.”

  Swell, Jack thought. I’m having a beer with Gordon Gekko.

  20

  “Max lost them,” Szeto said.

  Ernst grunted and squeezed the phone as he paced his office. “So we still don’t know where she lives. Why wasn’t I told before?”

  Instead of answering, Szeto said, “They are back at hospital with third man. Josef followed them to restaurant and watches the place now.”

  So . . . he’d delayed reporting Max’s failure until he could report that the quarry had been spotted again.

  “And the woman?”

  “Max watches and—wait.” Ernst heard some muffled conversation in Polish, then Szeto was back. “Max, he overhear nurse say woman is waking up.”

  “Then get her out of there. Immediately.”

  “I will call Josef. We have plan in place. We will move upon his return.”

  Ernst ended the call and put down the phone. When he looked up, the One stood on the other side of his desk.

  “Where will you be taking her?”

  Ernst swallowed. “The Order owns space in the Meatpacking District. They will take her there. They will find out where she lives. She will be a problem no more.”

  The One nodded. “And the Fhinntmanchca? You have a suitable candidate?”

  “Yes. A perfect candidate. I am working on isolating him now. Soon he will have no one left to turn to but me.”

  The One didn’t smile, merely stared at Ernst with those bottomless eyes.

  “And then it begins.”

  21

  Darryl rose from the bed and stepped to the window. He’d tried to nap, but as tired as he felt, sleep wouldn’t come. His mind wouldn’t stop racing, running high and hot but stuck in neutral and not going nowhere.

  He wasn’t thinking about the future because he didn’t have one. He had AIDS, man. Fucking AIDS. What wouldn’t leave his head was the question of how. How-how-how?

  He’d lain there, searching through his past, looking for a way the virus could have gotten into his body. And then it came to him. That one summer years ago . . .

  Stupid! What a fucking idiot he’d been.

  He looked down at the street from his third-floor window. The sun was dropping but still had a good ways to go. He had his window open despite the heat. No air-conditioning in this old building, but he didn’t mind. He chilled so easily these days. The place was built like a fortress with thick stone walls that kept out the heat. The open window let some in.

  How long did he have? He’d have asked the doc but was sure all he’d get was bullshit, any excuse to fill him with drugs that would only make him feel worse and wouldn’t work anyway.

  His bladder started complaining so he headed out into the hall and down to the john. Too bad he didn’t have his own bathroom, but no one did. No one had been living here until the Kickers moved in. The Septimus Order had used it only as an office building and meeting space for a long time, but they’d offered it to Hank for his use. That seemed generous, but Darryl was sure there was something in it for the Order. They’d told Hank that certain of their goals coincided, but hadn’t come right out and said which ones.

  He stepped into the bathroom. It had two urinals, a toilet stall, and a shower. He was bellied up to a urinal, relieving himself, when a burly, bearded Kicker named Hagaman came in. He lived down the other end of the hall.

  “Shit! What’re you doin’ in here?”

  “Drivin’ a cab. What’s it look like?”

  “You shouldn’t be in here, man.”

  Darryl had a sudden bad feeling about what was coming.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you got the sickness, you got the AIDS, and shouldn’t be around, spreadin’ it.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Hagaman’s face got all red. “Hey, I don’t know who you been fuckin’, but it ain’t me and ain’t never gonna be!”

  Darryl tried to hold back, but he lost it.

  “Yeah? Well, how’s this?”

  He turned in a circle, spraying the room with a yellow stream. If Hagaman hadn’t jumped back he’d have caught some.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, raising a fist. “If I wasn’t scared of catchin’ something, I’d break your face!”

  Darryl tucked himself back in and started toward him, pointing to his own chin.

  “Yeah? Let’s see ya try!”

  Hagaman backed out and hurried away. Darryl might have chased after him and told him a thing or two, but his throat felt so tight he didn’t think he could manage a word.

  So instead he hurried to his room and kicked the wall as he fought back a sob.

  22

  The appetizers arrived. Jack leaned against the back of the booth as Eddie and Harris sampled their food.

  Hell of a day so far.

  Weezy Connell had come back into his life—in a comatose state, yes, but he hoped that wouldn’t be for long.

  He felt as if he’d fallen down a rabbit hole. He’d awakened with 9/11 a distant, bitter memory, but very much alive. Now . . .

  Eddie sighed. “Nine/eleven . . . it’s been misused and manipulated, and it’s paraded out every time the powers that be think we need a little injection of fear. We need to put it behind us and move on.”

  Jack thought about that day. He remembered standing on his rooftop that sunny Tuesday morning with Neil the Anarchist and some of his neighbors from the building, all staring south. The towers themselves hadn’t been visible, but the drifting gray-black plume couldn’t be missed. Some had talked of traveling downtown for an up-close-and-personal look. Not Jack. He found the idea ghoulish. And besides, the city was in full lockdown mode.

  And then suddenly the smoke changed—more of it, and a lighter color. Something had happened. They all ran down to the nearest top-floor apartment to watch reruns of the first tower’s collapse. And then the second went . . .

  He remembered the gnawing in his stomach. Let the pundits and politicos and preachers argue about whether or not foreign policy chickens were coming home to roost. None of that mattered. This was his city. And some slimeballs had attacked it. Rage had consumed him.

  But he’d gotten past that. Or thought he had. Today was dredging up a lot of buried feelings. The rage flooded back.

  “I agree with you about the fear,” Jack said. “Yeah, put the fear behind. It’s useless. But keep the rage. Stick it in a back pocket and take it out every so often. A gang of oxygen wasters came into our house and killed some of our family. We never forget that. And we don’t forgive.” He slammed a fist on the table. “Ever.”

  He noticed the two of them staring at him. The intensity of his feelings surprised him. He’d dropped out, turned his back, and gone underground. He’d refused to participate in the machine. And yet, on that day he’d felt part of the city, of its gestalt. Felt as if he’d been attacked. He’d taken it personally . . . still did.

  That wasn’t like him. But it was the way it was.

  Go figure.

  “All right. End of speech. Back to Weezy.”

  Yeah, Weezy. What had he learned? That she’d been interested in the owner of a Swiss account who, days before the attack, had bet on United and American Airlines’ stock falling and the Tomahawk maker’s stock rising. Obviously Bashar Sheikh had prior knowledge. And if, as Harris said, he’d hosted Atta two months before the attack, that would account for it.

  But so what? Yesterday’s news. What could that have to do with some shadowy “them” looking for Weezy, trying to tail Jack and Eddie to her home? No reason for her to want to torch her own house.

  He tried a calamari ring. Better than he’d expected—rubbery, but not vulcanized. He wasn’t hungry, though, so he pushed the plate to the center of the table.

  “Help yourselves.”

  As Harris moved
to do just that—his hand descending on the rings like a crane in a toy vending machine—Jack leaned forward. Time to get into tough-guy mode.

  “Can I ask you a question, Harris?”

  “Depends, but okay.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  He dropped the rings, partially missing his plate.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where are you from? What do you do? How are you friends with Weezy? Basic stuff like that.”

  “Oh . . . well, I’m a Florida boy—believe it or not, some people are born there; we aren’t all transplants from the north. I went to FSU”—he made a tomahawk chop—“go Seminoles. Majored in computer science. Spent years as a systems analyst for Bear Stearns until they got caught with their suspenders down. Now I write medical-imaging software for a company in White Plains. Mostly I work from home, but if I need to go in I just hop Metro North. It’s a pretty good gig.”

  “And how does all this put you in Weezy’s orbit?”

  “She came into mine when she began posting comments to my blog on tz9-11truthquest.”

  A blogger. Well, why not? Everyone seemed to be a blogger these days.

  “The ‘tz’ stands for what? Twilight Zone?”

  Harris gave him a sour smile. “Ha. Ha. If I had a dime for every time . . . never mind. It stands for Ted Zawicki.”

  “And who’s he?”

  “The supposed author of the blog—you don’t think I’d put my real name on it, do you?”

  “Silly me.”

  Eddie said, “Why did she choose you?”

  He looked offended. “Tz9-11truthquest is my site—a sort of clearing-house for Truther info. Not the first, mind you, but the oldest still operating. Nine/eleven sites and blogs come and go, but tz9-11truthquest hangs in there. It’s the Energizer bunny of the field. My blog on the site has become the touchstone for Truther blogs. Everyone who is anyone in the Truther Movement drops in at least once a day.”

  “Must get real crowded,” Jack said. This earned a glare from Harris but before he could retort, he added, “She must have said something special.”

  “And how. She raised a lot of hackles when she said we were right about conspiracy and the controlled demolitions, but wrong about the who and why. That we had to look deeper. That we were missing something important.”

  “What’s the ‘who and why’ in your book?” Eddie said.

  “The same people who’ve been running western civilization for centuries. The families and financial interests behind the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.”

  Jack felt his eyes roll of their own accord. “The New World Order.”

  “Yeah,” Harris said, his tone defensive. “And their head-of-state lackeys. A plan of sorts was sketched out in a book from a conservative think tank just a year before. It’s called Rebuilding America’s Defenses, and you can read it yourself. It called for ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to get Americans off their asses and start kicking Middle East butt. Well, Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and all the rest listened and gave us nine/eleven.”

  “Who does my sister think is behind it?” Eddie said as he poked disconsolately at his Caesar salad. He didn’t seem anxious to hear the answer. Appeared to be dreading it.

  “That’s just it. She never said. Her posts teased with comments like, ‘You’ve got the right crime but the wrong criminal’ and ‘It’s much, much bigger than an excuse to send America off to war.’ ” He grinned. “Well, you can imagine how that went over. ‘Secret Historian’ was branded a heretic and a denier and a confuser sent to sabotage the Truther Movement.”

  “Did she ever explain the ‘Secret Historian’ name?”

  “No, but she used it on my site and others. She was going around to all the sites, pissing them off and acting as a sort of provocateur, but never enough to get herself banned as a troll, because she obviously knew her subject.”

  “To what end?” Jack said.

  “To nudge them out of their Bush-Cheney-Trilateral Commission obsession and start looking for other villains—the real villains.”

  “And what’s her take? What’s she think is the real story?”

  “She doesn’t know. At least that’s what she tells me, and I believe her. She knows she’s only one person and can do only so much, so she’s trying to enlist others to help. She’d love to put together a coalition of these groups and guide them, use them as an investigative team, but she doesn’t want to show her face. She doesn’t want to be known.”

  Jack thought about trying to organize and lead a group of these paranoid types. Herding cats suddenly became a snap.

  “But she’s known to you. She let you see her face.”

  Harris smiled. “It took quite a while before we got to that stage—lots of encrypted e-mails passed between us before we got around to meeting.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Eddie said, his expression grave. “My sister doesn’t think al Qaeda flew those jets into the Towers?”

  “Yes, she does. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Atef orchestrated the whole thing. And she believes the Bush administration and whoever they’re connected to leveraged that into an invasion of the Middle East. But she says that’s not important.”

  Eddie’s eyes widened. “Not important!”

  “Right. She told me that al Qaeda isn’t the end of the trail and that this is much bigger than we think. That there’s another organization or cabal or camorra whatever pulling al Qaeda’s strings and using it for its own purposes.”

  “Who?”

  Harris spread his hands. “That’s the zillion-dollar question.”

  Eddie looked at Jack. “Can you believe this bullshit?”

  Jack said nothing as all the disparate bits and pieces he’d learned over the past few years about the Secret History of the World swirled through his brain.

  Yes . . . he could believe it.

  23

  They found Weezy sitting up in bed sipping water through a straw.

  “Wow,” she said as they gaped at her from the doorway. “Three visitors at once. I must be popular.”

  Jack immediately glanced at Harris to gauge his reaction and saw joy and relief in his eyes.

  All right, so the guy really cared about Weezy. Why didn’t Jack feel he could trust him?

  Eddie rushed forward and embraced her. “Weez! When did you wake up?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  Jack noticed that her IV was still running but her catheter bag was gone. He hung back as Harris moved to her bedside and grabbed her hand.

  “Louise . . . I was so worried.”

  “Kevin.” She looked puzzled. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “When you didn’t answer your calls—”

  “How was . . . Europe?”

  “Everything we hoped for.”

  “Excellent.” She looked past him and smiled as her dark eyes focused on Jack’s. “You look so different, Jack. I never imagined you with a beard.” She held out her hands. “I’d never recognize you except for your eyes. They haven’t changed a bit.”

  Feeling awkward, he stepped forward and grasped her hands. Her skin was smooth and warm. He squeezed. She squeezed back, releasing a flood of childhood memories—school buses, endless bike rides through lazy summers, and the Pine Barrens . . . he could almost smell those trees.

  “You . . . you still look like Weezy.”

  She released his hand. “But more of me than you last saw.”

  “You exaggerate. You look great.”

  No kidding. The extra weight looked kind of good on her.

  She looked at Eddie. “Did Jack find me?”

  Eddie nodded. “Yes, he did.”

  “I knew he would.” She beamed.

  “Do you know what happened to you?”

  “Car accident, I’m told. I have no memory of it.” She pointed to her stitched-up scalp. “But I think I’ll have a nice souvenir.”

  Jack thought her tone seemed a lit
tle too light. Was she putting on a show? Hiding fear?

  “What about leading up to it?”

  She shook her head, then quickly pressed her hands against her temples and closed her eyes. “Note to self: Don’t shake head.” Opening them again, she said, “I remember leaving the house and heading for an Internet café and that’s about it.”

  “Retrograde amnesia,” Jack said. “Happens with head trauma.”

  “Right. You know about that?”

  He winked at her. “I read it.”

  That had been her mantra when they were kids. She’d spout some tidbit of arcane lore and whenever Jack or anyone else would ask how she knew, that was what she’d say.

  But he hadn’t read it. Through experience over the past year he’d learned too much about head trauma.

  “Were you being followed or chased?” Harris said.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Excuse me,” said an accented voice from the doorway.

  Jack saw a lean black man in scrubs pushing a gurney ahead of him.

  “I must take”—he glanced at a yellow slip in his hand—“Louise for an x-ray. Please step aside.”

  They complied and watched him wheel the gurney up to the bedside and pull the curtain. They waited, heard a few grunts of effort from her, then the curtain reopened and Weezy, propped up on pillows, was wheeled toward the door. She waved as she went by.

  “I think I’m going to head home,” Harris told her. “A million things piled up while I was away. Now that I know you’re safe, I can concentrate on other stuff.”

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Do we ever. I’ll be in touch as soon as I get home.”

  When she was gone, Jack turned to Harris. “You might be followed.”

  He grinned. “If so, I’ll lose them. No one’s tailing me home.”

  Jack had said it for effect. He figured if Harris was such a big shot in the Truther movement, whoever was interested in Weezy already knew where he lived. But then again, maybe not.

  After Harris shook hands with both of them and left, Jack turned to Eddie.

  “Did you give the hospital your address?”

  “Not yet, but—”