Ground Zero

“I did an image search for bin Laden and collected any in which he appeared to be part of a group photo. Then I traced them as best I could to their origins—almost always online news sources. I bought up a lot of old papers and searched out those photos. I found three more that had been altered. In all instances, a single figure had been removed.”

“Let me guess: Wahid bin Asswipe.”

Weezy frowned. “Oh, that’s mature.”

“I have a wide streak of immaturity, Weez. I nurture it. And I have a big problem showing even a flyspeck of respect toward bin Laden and his buddies.”

“This is serious, Jack.”

“Is it? Why?”

“Because the Internet is becoming the source of record for all but the most serious and dedicated researchers.” She clicked on an icon and the doctored three-shot popped onto the screen. “This is a lie. And it’s a lie that’s being told again and again all over the Web every time it’s copied and posted somewhere else. Tell a lie often enough and it can become the truth. Someone is expunging all photographic evidence of Wahid bin Aswad from the Web. Not mentions of his name—those have remained untouched—just the images.”

She wiggled and clicked her mouse again and started a slide show of photos.

“Look,” she said, tapping the screen over a figure in a group photo. “Here he is at a meeting in Kandahar—I sca

Sure enough, one of the bearded wonders was missing from the second photo. The same was true for the next two pairings.

Jack leaned back. “Now that’s weird. Why just the photos? Why not erase all trace?”

“Obviously he doesn’t want anyone to know what he looks like.”

“Sounds to me like a guy who’s pla

“Maybe not a regular everyday guy. Maybe someone a lot of people are going to see, someone who doesn’t want anyone making the co

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “These photos aren’t the best quality, and one bearded guy looks a lot like another.” He ran a hand over his own short beard. “See what I mean?”

She laughed, then hunched her shoulders and grabbed her head. “Oh!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Need to remember not to laugh.” Whatever it was passed quickly and she looked back at him. “You’ll never pass for an Arab. You’re—” Her computer dinged and she clicked around until . . . “E-mail from Kevin.”

“Harris? You trust him?”

She nodded. “As far as being someone genuinely searching for the truth about this, yes. As for his past, whatever he says about that is a lie—unless he tells you he’s ex-NSA.”

Alarm buzzed down Jack’s spine. “What?”

“Strictly low level, and I believe he was let go because of his nine/eleven beliefs.”

“Swell.”

“You say that a lot.”

“I’ve had lots of cause today. How do you know?”

She pointed at the monitor. “With a little know-how and a lot of patience, you’d be amazed what you can find on the Web. I even found you, the Man Who Isn’t There.”

Jack didn’t like that. If Weezy could find him, so could others. Getting harder and harder to stay under the radar. Why couldn’t people shut up? These goddamn bloggers with their incessant nattering, feeling they have to be saying something all the time just to fill the empty space on their blog page, and so they talk about some guy they heard about from a friend of a friend of a cousin of an uncle who met this guy named Jack once who might be real or maybe just an urban legend.

Yeah. Urban legend. Go with that.

And. Then. Shut. Up.

Weezy leaned closer to the screen. “It’s got a jpeg attached. He must have sca

“That photo kind of bothers me,” he said as she downloaded it. “How did he get it?”

Weezy shrugged. “He still has friends in NSA. Probably got a little help.” She glanced at Jack. “His heart’s in the right place.” She hit a few more buttons. “Now to decrypt it.”

Jack said nothing. Maybe she was right. He’d seemed genuinely relieved to find her alive in the hospital.

“Okay,” Weezy said. “Let’s open the photo.”

A head shot of—surprise!—a bearded guy in some sort of Muslim skullcap popped into view.

“Harris told me he looked familiar but—”

“He does. Let me pop him up in another photo.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised that she recognized him right off, but her perfect memory never ceased to amaze him. One of the undoctored photos she’d run through before appeared and she tapped the screen.

“There he is, standing right next to bin Aswad. He’s never been identified, but was obviously one of the nine/eleven pla

She typed out a response, telling Harris where to look, and sent it off.

“So, you’ve identified Sheikh,” Jack said. “You think he’s going to lead you to bin Asswi—” Weezy shot him a look. “Okay, okay—bin Aswad?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s one more piece of the puzzle. I—” The computer gave out another ding! “Kevin again.”

Jack watched as the decrypted e-mail appeared on the screen.

OMFG!!! I recognize him now! That’s the guy in the torture video I told you about. We need to talk!

“Torture video?” Jack said as Weezy rapid-fired a response.

Not tonight. Save it for tomorrow.

She straightened and faced Jack. “Years ago someone sent Kevin—via his blog—the URL to a specific video on a site that specialized in torture porn. The sender said he’d find it ‘interesting.’ Kevin told me he’d tried to watch but lasted only a minute or so. Said it was sickening.”

“Why would someone send him that?”

Weezy shrugged. “He has a nine/eleven site and blog—maybe someone thought he’d like to see an al Qaeda suspect being tortured. He said the whole site was devoted to torture videos.”

“A YouTube for sadists.” Jack added that to the long list of things he didn’t understand about his species—before pierced nostrils but after Lou Reed. “You think this Bashar Sheikh might have been the torturee?”

“If I’m reading Kevin right, he was.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I could handle a torture video on a good day. But tonight, with my stomach already rocky . . . no way.”

Jack quaffed the rest of his beer and was reaching for another when he spotted hers, barely touched.

“You’re sure you don’t want it?”

“I’d love it but I’d better not. Don’t let it go to waste.”

“Beer? Never.” He took a sip and said, “Al Qaeda, the Dormentalists, the Septimus Order . . . you’ve got some heavy hitters there. You sure you want to be a ‘person of interest’ to them?”

“I don’t want to be a person of interest to anyone, but it might not even be them. Maybe we’ll get an idea when they identify that blond man.”

“You said you saw him in an Internet café?”

She nodded. “I rotate my sites but maybe they had some staked out. I mean, I’ve used that place before. But I noticed he got a call and then began looking around. They must have traced my IP address after I logged on. He followed me out of the café and I began to run . . .” She touched her scalp. “And that’s all I remember until I woke up today.” She shook her head. “So weird not to remember something.”

“Sometimes forgetting is good.”

Her expression turned bleak. “Sometimes I wish I could.”

Without warning she stepped closer, put her arms around him, and pulled herself against him, pressing her face against his shoulder. She was trembling.

“I get so scared at times,” she said, her voice muffled.

After a few heartbeats, Jack put his beer down and returned the embrace. How could he not? She was Weezy. Not the angular body he remembered from their youth, but this was nice . . . better. They’d kissed a few times growing up, but never anything beyond that, never anything serious. It might have gone further if not for her mood swings, and the medications her doctors tried. They drifted apart, drifted close, then apart again. But always, always remained friends.