Ground Zero

“Right now, I think you’ve got good cause to be.”

“But it’s not just this. It’s my brain. It catalogs everything. But that’s not where the trouble lies. It’s my subconscious. It’s got all that information at its disposal—there aren’t many brains that can store and retrieve like mine—and as it filters through the jumble, it starts making correlations, spotting patterns, forming possible explanations for what it sees. Sometimes it tells me, sometimes it doesn’t. Most times it’s not important—curious at best—but sometimes it’s . . . terrifying.”

“H. P. Lovecraft once said something about how we’d go mad if we knew the real truth.”

“You mean, ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents’?”

“Is that a quote?”

She nodded against him. “Uh-huh.”

“Exact, I suppose.” He had no doubt.

Another nod. “He also said, ‘The piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ My problem is that my brain can correlate all its contents, and it’s flashing me glimpses of that terrifying reality, and I wish it weren’t.”

“Even as a kid you seemed to have an intuition about this stuff.”

“I knew there was a Secret History—I didn’t know the whole story, or even a fraction of it, but I sensed that much of what people considered true was really an elaborate fiction.”

“And what’s your subconscious say about nine/eleven?”

“That everybody’s wrong. And by everybody, I mean the government, I mean the nine/eleven conspiracy theorists, even al Qaeda—bin Laden himself doesn’t know the whole truth. Probably thinks he does, but he’s been used just like so many others through history.”

“And you do know the truth?” he said, thinking, Please don’t say yes.

“No, I don’t. And neither, I think, does my subconscious. But it knows something is very wrong with the stories out there. It’s a perfect example of the Secret History. Bin Laden says—and believes, I’m sure—that he attacked the World Trade Towers to strike a blow for Islam and because of the U.S.’s meddling in the Middle East. That will go down as accepted history. But the Secret History could very well be that a group, some secret society or cabal—through inspiration, insinuation, manipulation, and whatever other means—used him to bring down those towers for an entirely different reason.”

Jack couldn’t buy it.

“Why on Earth—?”

“I don’t know. But when I noticed bin Aswad being erased from the photographic record, my subconscious clicked into high gear and didn’t like what it saw. It needed more info, so I began gathering it.”

“The papers and magazines . . .”

“Yes. They can’t be changed. They may not be true, they may be packed with errors, but those errors and untruths are the same as the day the ink hit their paper. The Secret History is there, hidden behind that ink. If only someone would write it down and give me a copy, I could figure it out. But I don’t think it’s ever been written down. I think it’s passed from generation to generation through oral tradition.”

Jack flashed on a certain weird and wonderful book.

“What about the Compendium of Srem?”

She pushed away and stared at him. “The Compendium? How does a skeptic like you even hear of that?”

He was tempted to tell her he had the world’s only copy sitting back in his apartment, but she’d drive him nuts to see it. He’d have to tell her eventually, maybe even tomorrow, but better to spring it on her.

“Someone told me a tale about Torquemada—”

“And how he tried to destroy it but couldn’t, so he buried it and built a monastery over it. I’ve heard that one. Well, if the Compendium was ever under that monastery—if the book ever even existed—it’s not there now. Lots of people have searched for it and come up empty-handed.”

“You never know.”

She smiled. “Right. Probably shelved in the restricted section of Miskatonic U—right next to the Necronomicon.”

Jack grabbed his beer and finished it. “Gotsta go.”

“Oh, no.” Her smiled vanished. “You can’t. It’s been so many years and we’ve just reco

“You mean, stay the night?”

“Sure. I’ve got a spare bedroom.”

“Not filled with papers?”

“We can move them. Please?”

He understood her fright, and felt obliged to ease it, but still . . .

“I guess I should ask,” she said, peering at him as he hesitated. “Are you married?”

“Not officially.”

“Then what?”

“Functionally.”

“Monogamous?”

He nodded. “Very.”

She frowned. “Odd. From what I gathered about you, I figured you’d be more the lone-wolf type.”

“Used to be. Spent a lot of years that way after leaving home. It was a blast at first.”

“I imagine so. I sense you became a bad boy, and all the bad girls love a bad boy.”

He experienced a brief torrent of memories, a flash flood of faces.

“Yeah, they do. But then you find a good woman, and she makes you want to become a good man, or at least a better one. And so you try to be.”

She was staring at him. “What’s her name?”

“Gia.”

“You say it like a prayer.”

“I don’t pray. But if I ever did, she’d be an answer.”

Silence lingered briefly, then, “To feel that way about someone . . . to have someone feel that way about you . . . Steve and I had a bond like that. At least I thought we did. I miss it. You’re both lucky. I’d like to meet her someday.”

“No reason why you shouldn’t.”

“So you’ll stay the night?”

Another spasm of hesitation, then . . . why not?

This was Weezy asking. How could he say no?

“Okay, but I’ll have to make some calls.”

WEDNESDAY

1

A door swung open down the hall. Jack opened his eyes in the dark and listened.

Earlier he’d walked down to Roosevelt for some Chinese takeout. He called Gia along the way and told her he’d be out all night. That was enough for her. Most times she preferred not to know what he was into, and that tended to work out well for both of them—she worried less, and he wasn’t distracted by concern that she was worried. He didn’t want to get into the details on the phone; he’d tell her tomorrow.

He and Weezy had talked late into the night about old times, and he revealed some of the schemes he’d worked as a teen in addition to Carson Toliver’s locker, culminating with saving Mr. Canelli’s lawn.

“That was you?” she’d said, wide-eyed. “I never guessed.”

“Good. No one was supposed to.”

His first official fix. Up till then they’d all been personal. Mr. Canelli was the first ever to hire him.

The talk faded and they called it a night. After making sure all the locks were engaged, Jack moved the newspapers off the double bed in the spare bedroom and helped Weezy make it up for him. They hugged good night and went to their separate beds.

Jack lay under the sheet, facing the window, fully dressed except for his work boots. The stolen Tokarev lay on the nightstand, his Glock was a hard lump beneath his pillow. Overkill, perhaps, since whoever was after Weezy didn’t know where she lived. The first floor was secure—steel doors, iron grilles on the windows—and the second accessible only via ladder, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Overkill had its charms.

He heard bare feet on the floorboards, heading for the bathroom, no doubt. But they stopped outside his door. After a few heartbeats he heard it swing open. A weight settled on the mattress behind him and a warm body pressed against his back.