Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

  Jack slid the rest of the way down the wall in a controlled fall and hit the ground running, pulling Weezy toward the fallen man. He saw them coming and raised his pistol. Jack shot him in the face; his head snapped back as he slammed onto his back.

  “Ohmygod!” Weezy cried and dug in her heels.

  Keeping his pistol raised ahead of him, Jack virtually lifted her off her feet and yanked her around the corner into the backyard. A quick scan showed it empty, but for how long? The guys out front must have heard the shots.

  He used a high-capacity magazine for his Glock 19—fifteen rounds. He’d expended four at the hospital and three more just now. Hadn’t brought a spare mag—a fire fight was the last thing he’d expected today—so that left eight in his main carry. Had eleven rounds in the little Kel-Tec P11 strapped to his ankle. Nineteen rounds should carry him through, but you never knew. Wished he’d thought to bring the Tokarev. He could go back and grab the fallen man’s pistol—probably another Tokarev—but didn’t want to risk it.

  Crouching, he peeked back around the corner—no one coming their way along the south side . . . yet. But they could sneak along the north flank if they chose. Had to get Weezy out of the backyard.

  The fire had reached the rear of the first floor; its light flickered through the windows. At the far end of the overgrown yard Jack made out the stockade fence. He’d seen it earlier in the day and remembered it looking old and weathered, gray wood tinged with green patches of moss. Must have been put up by Weezy’s neighbor because the posts and crosspieces faced this way.

  Had to risk it.

  “Follow me,” he whispered and charged the fence.

  When he closed within a few feet he launched himself at it, aiming his shoulder at a centerpoint between two posts and the upper and lower crosspieces spanning them. The impact hurt like hell but the old wood gave way with a satisfying crack! Jack kicked some of the uprights free until he had a decent-size opening, then pushed Weezy through. His first instinct was to follow her but he didn’t want any pursuit.

  “Find someplace to hide.”

  “But what about you?”

  “Be right back.”

  He hurried back to the house, found a bush near the foundation, and huddled at its base. He knew the first-floor windows were ready to explode into the yard and he didn’t want to be here when they did, but he’d give the guys out front one minute. If they didn’t show by then, they probably wouldn’t show at all, and he’d join Weezy. If they did, he knew exactly what they’d do.

  He rubbed his sore shoulder as he stared at the broken opening in the fence, clearly visible in the firelight from the windows. Yeah, that was where they’d go.

  He began counting. He’d just passed forty-five seconds when they charged into the backyard, one to his left, one to his right, both in a running crouch. They did a quick look-see around the yard but the hole in the fence captured their attention. Both made a beeline for it.

  Jack jumped up and followed, checking to see how they held their weapons. Both right-handed. That meant the one to his left would have to pivot almost ninety degrees before getting off a shot, while the one to his right could fire cross-body in a fraction of the time.

  So he shot the one on the right first, then caught the one on the left in mid-turn. Both center-of-mass hits. He pumped another into each as they tumbled to the ground.

  Fifteen rounds left.

  As he dove through the break in the fence, the first-floor windows exploded, belching flame and smoke and bathing the backyard in fierce yellow light.

  “Weezy! It’s me! Let’s go!”

  She emerged from the shadows. “Ohmygod, Jack! Ohmygod!”

  He wished she’d stop saying that. Lights were coming on in the surrounding houses and people were starting to lean out windows.

  He turned her and propelled her ahead of him, saying, “Get to the street.”

  They ran along the side of the neighboring house. When they reached the sidewalk he turned her toward Roosevelt and laid an arm across her shoulders.

  “Put your arm around my back.”

  She complied. “But—?”

  “Pretend we’re a tipsy couple coming back from a party or something.”

  She leaned against him. “But Jack, I saw you . . . you shot those two men in the back.”

  “Well, that was the part of their bodies toward me.”

  “But . . .”

  “But what? That’s not right, that’s not fair?”

  “Well, I guess.”

  “You really believe you play by rules when someone’s out to kill you? Think about that, Weezy. If you lose, you’re dead. It’s not a game. There’s no reset button. No rules, no ref to toss a flag and call a foul, no ‘fair’ or ‘unfair,’ just live or die.”

  “When you put it that way, I guess—”

  “You guess? They firebombed your house and were waiting outside to make sure you didn’t escape. Should I have yelled ‘Hey!’ to give them a chance to turn around and get off a couple of shots?”

  “No, but—”

  “No buts in this situation. As a guy once told me, ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan properly.’ It’s some of the best advice I’ve ever had.”

  “Okay. Let’s drop it. I feel dumb.”

  “You’re not dumb. Violence gets romanticized and ritualized—boxing, football, jousting knights, whatever. But the truth is it’s ugly and nasty and comes down to survival by whatever means necessary.”

  Weezy sobbed as sirens began to howl. “My house!”

  Jack had wondered when the realization would hit. She’d been running for her life. Now reality was setting in. He tightened his arm around her shoulders.

  “At least you made it out alive.”

  “But all my papers, all my proof, everything I own in this whole world . . . it’s gone! All gone! It took me years to assemble all that hard evidence. Now it’s ash . . . smoke.”

  “But you’re backed up, right?”

  She nodded. “Multiple backups. But I scanned only a fraction of the collection, and I’ll never be able to reassemble it.”

  “So . . . they’ve won?”

  “No.” Her voice took on a hard edge. “No, they haven’t.”

  “Good. Hold that anger. Nurture it.”

  They walked on in silence.

  Finally Weezy said, “How did they find me?”

  Jack had been thinking about that and didn’t like the answer.

  “The van. I think I saw it out front.”

  “But you left it miles away.”

  “Right. But they may have had a GPS tracker in it.”

  “But why? They couldn’t know you’d take it.”

  “Lots of people track their employees. GPS doodads are cheap and let you know if your man is where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there. Someone could have been tailing us from a mile back. And when we stopped at your house so I could check it out, they could have driven by and seen us. Damn. Never guessed. Sorry.”

  “No, that was my fault for wanting you to drop me off.”

  “You were feeling woozy.”

  “Yes, but I could have—should have gone with you.”

  “Hindsight’s great, huh.” They were almost to Roosevelt. “We need to get back to the city and find you a hotel.”

  He could book and pay for it with his John Tyleski identity.

  “No. I need to go to Kevin’s.”

  Jack didn’t like that idea.

  “I don’t trust him. He could have fingered your place.”

  “He could have done that anytime. Why now?”

  “I don’t know. You said yourself, he’s ex-NSA.”

  “Yes, and ‘ex’ is the operative word—or prefix, rather. He’s devoted to finding the truth about this. Much as I don’t want to, I need to see that torture video.”

  3

  Maybe Harris is all right, Jack thought after studying his expression during Weezy’s recounting of the
night’s events. He’d seemed genuinely horrified.

  They’d awakened him by ringing his buzzer in the downstairs lobby until he’d answered. Even though he was a long way from senior status, he lived in a senior citizen high-rise in Coney Island. Jack didn’t care enough to ask how. In sharp contrast to Weezy’s place, his two-bedroom apartment was small, neat, and uncluttered.

  The three of them clustered now in the spare bedroom that functioned as an office.

  “What do we do now?” Harris said.

  Weezy took a breath. “I’d like to just sit and cry, but we need to watch the Sheikh video.”

  He made a face. “You sure? I lasted maybe a minute before cutting it off.”

  She seated herself before the computer, hands poised over the keyboard.

  “It was sent to you for a reason. Now that we know he had prior knowledge of nine/eleven, we have to see it. What’s the URL?”

  “It’s gone. The URL is a no go. The Web site’s still up, but that video is gone.”

  Weezy leaned back and closed her eyes. “Aw, no.”

  “But!” Harris grinned as he held up a finger. “Kevin, who always thinks ahead, downloaded it and burned it to a disk.”

  He turned to a cylindrical organizer atop a bookshelf, popped the top, and pulled out a disk.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing it to her.

  Weezy dropped it into a slot and the three of them waited, Jack and Harris leaning forward, flanking Weezy in the chair.

  What followed was ugly. A bearded guy who could have been Bashar Sheikh—Weezy seemed confident he was—had been stripped naked and strapped on his back to a table. He was bloody, especially in his genital area, and screaming in a foreign language. Jack noticed a date in the lower right corner of the frame: 13/3/04.

  Weezy quickly minimized the screen, removing the video from view but leaving the audio.

  “What language is that?” Jack asked.

  “Some of it’s Spanish,” Weezy said, leaning closer to the speaker. “But some of it’s Urdu.”

  Jack looked at her. “You know Urdu?”

  She nodded. “And Arabic. I decided I’d need to know them if I was going to get serious about this.”

  “So you just learned them?”

  She glanced up at him and shrugged. “I bought some Rosetta Stone programs and learned in no time. It—wait.” She turned back to the computer. “Did you hear that? He just mentioned bin Aswad. Oh, God, this could be important.”

  She grabbed a pen and a yellow pad from a corner of Harris’s desktop, then returned to the video and restarted it. She wrote furiously as she listened to the audio.

  After three passes, she swiveled her chair toward them and studied her notes.

  “Well?” Jack said. “Anything coherent?”

  She nodded. “A lot of it’s pleas for mercy. He seems to be the prisoner of some CNI operatives—sort of Spain’s CIA—because all the questions are in Spanish. The March 13, 2004, date on the video is two days after al Qaeda bombed the Madrid commuter trains. Sheikh was involved in obtaining the explosives.”

  “You’re sure?” Harris said.

  “Well, he admits it, although he seems ready to confess to anything as long as they stop doing whatever they’re doing to him.”

  “And bin Aswad?”

  “He says bin Aswad—and there’s no mistaking who he means because he calls him by his full name: Wahid bin Aswad al Somar. He says it was on bin Aswad’s insistence that the trains were targeted during rush hour—for maximum terror, maximum body count. He claims bin Aswad was at his house for the final planning of nine/eleven and insisted on the same thing for the Towers. Sheikh swears he argued for a weekend strike—they could still make their point but without taking all those innocent lives.”

  “You believe that?” Harris said.

  Weezy shook her head. “Not from a guy who shorted all those stocks, but it’s possible. He says bin Aswad insisted on a midweek strike for, again, maximum terror and maximum body count.”

  Maximum terror . . . maximum body count . . . he got his wish.

  Jack said, “This is the guy who’s been disappearing from the online photos, right?”

  “One and the same.”

  The same big question remained: Why? Jack still could think of only one reason.

  “It’s got to mean he intends to go legit, where his face is going to be out in public. Maybe he’s going to run for office somewhere in the Middle East, or become a UN ambassador or whatever.” Jack scratched his beard. “But then again, all he’d have to do was shave off his beard and no one would recognize him.”

  Harris shook his head. “In that world a beard is important. Growing it fist length or longer shows a devotion to Islam. He must plan on keeping the beard.”

  Jack looked at Weezy. “Anything else about this bin Aswad or what you’re looking for?”

  “Nothing specific, but it convinces me more than ever that he’s a member of the larger conspiracy, the group that manipulated al Qaeda into striking the Trade Towers.”

  “But again: Why?”

  “That’s what we need to find out.”

  “Maybe the fourth man can tell us,” Harris said.

  Fourth man?

  Weezy shrugged. “If he’s even alive, and if we can find him.”

  Harris grinned. “I think I’ve done just that.”

  Weezy straightened in her seat. “He’s alive? Where?”

  “L.A. Looks like I’ve got another trip ahead of me.”

  Jack said, “Anyone care to clue me in on what you’re talking about?”

  “Long story,” Weezy said. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “No offense to Jack,” Harris said, “but don’t you think we should keep this close?”

  Weezy pushed herself from the seat and faced him. “He’s saved my life twice in the past twelve hours. I think we can trust him.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “Just saying.”

  Jack could wait to hear. He already had too much unassimilated data drifting through his brain.

  He pulled out his Tracfone. “I’m going to call Eddie.”

  Weezy frowned. “Why?”

  “You need someplace to stay and—”

  “She can stay here,” Harris said, pointing to the couch against the far wall. “That folds out into a bed.”

  Jack looked at Weezy. “Your call.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “I might as well. I can work things out with Eddie during the day.”

  Jack wondered if she and Harris had ever “snuggled.”

  “Okay. Got a phone?”

  She shook her head. “It’s back at the house.”

  He handed her his.

  “Take it. I’ve got others at home. I’ll call you later. I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  If anyone could make sense out of the Compendium of Srem, it was Weezy.

  4

  Ernst Drexler paced his apartment’s front room. He could not believe what he’d just heard.

  “How does this happen? How does this happen?”

  A few minutes ago the ringing of his phone had ripped him from sleep. The doorman apologized for waking him, but the visitor in the foyer insisted that this was an emergency. Szeto had entered a few minutes later. As soon as Ernst had seen his expression he’d known the news would be bad, but not this bad.

  The man stood stiff and straight a few feet inside the door while Ernst ranged the room.

  “She is some kind of ninja.”

  Ernst stopped and stared at him. “You’re joking, right? Tell me you are joking.”

  “That is only explanation. These were three skilled men. They firebombed her house as directed. A perfect job. The house and everything in it is now ash. But all three are dead. Shot dead just like Max and Josef. Max’s gun was missing. She must have taken it and used it against them. Max would not give up gun easily. She
is ninja.”

  Had the Order bitten off more than it could chew? Five men killed while trying—unsuccessfully—to corral this one woman. What was she?

  “She may be a cold-blooded killer, but she is not a ninja.”

  “She kills, then she vanish. If she kills our men, that means she was not in house when it burns. That means she is still out there.”

  “Then find her.”

  “We do not know where she is.”

  “But you know who she is.”

  “Just barely.”

  “But now you know where she lived. Learn more about her. Find out who she knows. See if she has family. Do I have to do everything myself?”

  He had no time for this. The Fhinntmanchca trumped everything else. And what happened later today was crucial to its creation. He’d backed Thompson into a course of action that would leave Darryl with no place to turn, with no option other than the way out Ernst would offer.

  5

  Darryl was lying on his bed half asleep when he heard a knock. He rose and cocked a fist as he faced the door. If this was that asshole Hagaman . . .

  “Yeah?”

  The door opened and Hank stepped through. Darryl felt his jaw drop. Hank never came to his room. If he wanted to see Darryl, he always sent someone to fetch him.

  “Hey, it’s me. What’s with the look?”

  Darryl got a grip. “Wasn’t expecting you. Thought you might be someone else.”

  “Yeah? Well, you might be wishing it was someone else real soon.”

  Darryl’s gut writhed. “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Like what?”

  Hank walked past him to the window and looked out at the slowly fading day.

  “Not ‘what’—who. And that’d be you.”

  Aw, shit.

  Suppressing a groan, Darryl sat heavily on the bed and jammed his hands between his knees.

  “So you heard.”

  “Yeah. Fuck it all, Darryl. You’re one of my main men. Why’d you have to go and—”

  “I know how it happened,” he said. “I’ve been racking my brain and I finally remembered.”

  He kept staring out the window. “Do I want to hear this?”