Ground Zero

Ernst gave a sage nod. “Yes, I suppose that is true.”

“But why’s it doing that to him?”

“Well, it stands to reason,” he said, fabricating on the fly, “that if the Orsa is going to purge Darryl’s body of all disease, it must penetrate his cells. The transparency is simply part of the cleansing process.”

“Yeah? Makes sense I guess. I mean, as much as any of this makes sense.”

Ernst repressed a satisfied smile. A brilliant ad lib, if he said so himself.

Thompson shook his head. “It’s just that he looks so weird and dead with that bug-eyed stare.”

“But he’s obviously not dead.” Ernst pointed to Darryl’s wrist where his throbbing radial artery was clearly visible. “See? He’s got a pulse.”

“I guess that’s good.”

Good? Ernst thought. It’s wonderful.

6

Weezy shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Jack leaned back and rubbed his burning eyes. He’d taken the first flight he could out of LAX. It had brought him in late—five hours or so in the air but more than eight hours on the clock.

Eddie had offered him a Heineken, which Jack had gratefully accepted. Then, saying it had been a long day, he’d hit the hay.

Jack envied him. He felt unaccountably tired. He hadn’t done much of anything today but talk to Goren and Weezy and sit in a flying sardine can. Couldn’t be the time change because he hadn’t been out west long enough. Maybe it was the plane. Maybe the proximity to all those people had sucked the juice out of him.

He’d related his conversation with Goren as near to verbatim as he could, and Weezy had drunk in every word. She’d been perplexed and dubious about Jack’s conjecture that the Towers had been brought down so an Opus Omega pillar could be buried where they’d stood.

“If you knew Dormentalism like I know Dormentalism,” he said, “you’d think it made perfect sense. Someone has to die in each of those pillars before they bury it. Who knows how many victims Opus Omega claimed before nine/eleven? A few thousand more wouldn’t make any difference.”

“But they had forever before the Towers went up to bury that pillar. Don’t forget, Opus Omega was started mille

“But Dormentalism wasn’t. And it didn’t get involved in Opus Omega until Luther Brady took over. And in 2001, Brady was in full command, with a cadre of fanatics willing to do his bidding.”

Weezy nodded. “That’s a point. The Septimus Order had been handling it alone before that. But my question is, why didn’t they bury the pillar before the Trade Center went up?”

“Maybe they tried and couldn’t get to the spot. Or couldn’t get to it in time.”

Weezy bolted up stiff and straight in her chair.

He looked at her. “What?”

“What you said—couldn’t get to it in time.”

She bounded up and headed for another room.

Jack followed. “So?”

She stopped and faced him. “So, a lot of people didn’t want the Trade Center. A number of groups and committees were formed to stop it. They almost succeeded. I had stacks of old papers with articles about it back at the house.”

“I saw them—even the old Journal-Trib.”

She sighed. “Yeah. Gone, but not forgotten. I sca

“But aren’t they lost?”

She gave him an a

“Online?”

“Of course. That way I can access it from anywhere.”

“But so can everybody else.”

“Not unless they know the password, and in my case, not unless they know the decryption key. I’ll download the stuff and we’ll go over it together.”

Be still, my heart.

As she headed for the room where he assumed she kept the computer, he said, “Great. I’m going to help myself to another Heinie. You want one?”

She shook her head. “Started myself on a low-carb diet. But I’ll take a diet anything.”

“You got it.”

With a fresh brew and a Diet Pepsi in hand, he found her hunched over a keyboard in a small extra room. Jack noticed the Compendium sitting next to the monitor. What looked like newspaper clippings were flipping across the screen. He pulled up a chair and tried to make sense of them, but they were moving too fast.

“Slow down. I haven’t seen these.”

“Neither have I,” she said, but slowed her progress.

Even then Jack had to struggle to keep up. How she could absorb anything at that speed was beyond him.

“Here,” she said, stopping the parade. “A familiar name.”

Jack stared at the screen. “Where?”

She moved the mouse pointer to the caption under a photo of a group of stern-looking men. Jack squinted to read the fine print.

“ ‘The Committee to Save the Hudson Terminal,’ ” he said, then sca

Among the committee members shown, the third man from the left was named Ernst Drexler.

Jack searched the photo and zeroed in on that third man. He wore a dark suit and a fedora. He appeared to be in his sixties and had a sharp-featured face that looked vaguely familiar.

“It’s not him . . . but it’s an awful lot like him.”

After a series of deaths at the Septimus Order’s Lodge in Jack’s hometown when he was a teen, a man named Ernst Drexler had arrived and stayed for a few months to get the local chapter back on track—“reorganize” was how he’d put it. Both Jack and Weezy had had contact with him back then.

“It can’t be him. How old do you think he was when we knew him?”

Jack shrugged. “Mid-thirties, I’d guess, if that. Certainly no older.”

“I agree. Now, that was back in eighty-three. This photo was taken in sixty-five. So, unless he was growing younger, this is probably his father.”

Ernst Drexler II flashed through Jack’s head.

“Not probably. Remember I showed you the card he gave me?”

She nodded. “ ‘Ernst Drexler Two.’ ”

“Which means his father had the same name.”

“I remember it said he was an ‘Actuator,’ whatever that is.”

“I got the impression he was some sort of troubleshooter for the Order. But what was his father doing with this committee? And what’s the Hudson Terminal?”

“The long-gone and forgotten terminus of the long-gone and forgotten Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which was bought out by the Port Authority in the early sixties. It sat under the site where the PA eventually built the World Trade Center.”

Pieces were falling together.

“That subway tu

“Except he said it was ru

Jack pulled up a chair and sat next to her.

“All right . . . we’ve got the father of the Septimus Order’s ‘Actuator’ trying to stop the PA from digging up the terminal that sat near the spot where Opus Omega needed to plant a pillar. If Ernst Two is in the Order, I think it’s safe to assume that his father was too.”

Weezy nodded. “And maybe an ‘Actuator’ as well.” She turned back to the computer. “Let’s see if he appears anywhere else.”

She began ru

“Here he is again,” she said after a while. “Another ‘save’ committee.”

Jack saw the same man pictured with a group of five. In this photo he carried a black cane that Jack recognized. No doubt now about lineage—his son carried one just like it, maybe even the same.

“ ‘The Save Radio Row Committee.’ What’s Radio Row?”

“A cluster of stores that sold radio, hi-fi, and stereo equipment. Want to guess where they were located?”

“Right over the Hudson Terminal?”

She nodded. “Right. They were knocked down to dig the Trade Center’s foundation. I’ll bet if we keep looking we’ll find him on the committee to save some of the historic buildings in the thirteen square blocks that were razed along with Radio Row.”