Страница 71 из 85
“Right. Ground Zero.”
Jack shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. You said that for Opus Omega to work, the first pillar—”
“The Orsa pillar.”
“Whatever—it had to go there.”
“It did.”
“Then what . . . ?” Jack didn’t get it. And then with a high-voltage shock, he did. “Goren and his crew caught them removing the pillar.”
Weezy was nodding. “Exactly.”
“They killed thousands of people just so they could dig up an old hunk of stone?”
“It wasn’t stone anymore.”
Jack stared at her a moment, trying to make sense of that. “You’d better explain that.”
“Long story.”
“We’ve got time. But I need a beer. Want one?”
She gave her head half a shake, then stopped. “Got anything stronger?”
“Some single malt.”
“That’ll do.”
On his way to the kitchen Jack decided he’d join her.
10
“Apparently the Orsa is unique among its fellow pillars in a number of ways,” Weezy said.
They sat facing each other across the round oak table, the Compendium and a bottle of Old Pulteney between them. Each held a small glass containing a couple of fingers of the Scotch. Jack felt like tossing his back but forced himself to sip.
“Tell me the not-stone-anymore part.”
“I’ll get to that. Let me lay the groundwork first. I’ve put in a lot of hours on this and I’m still kind of sorting it all out.”
Jack leaned back. “I’m listening.”
“First off, the Orsa must be buried in bedrock—just sticking it in the dirt is okay for all the others, but it won’t do for the Orsa. So whoever figured out the Opus Omega was very lucky that all those lines of force intersected near the lower end of Manhattan rather than in Soho or the Village.”
“Why?”
“Because the Manhattan schist is two hundred fifty feet down there.” She held up a hand. “I know you’re going to ask, so I’ll tell you: Schist is a kind of rock that forms the foundation of Manhattan.”
Jack said, “No schist!” and waited.
She closed her eyes. “I knew, I just knew you’d say that.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t help it. You bring out the adolescent in me.”
She looked at him again, almost defiant. “The schist is near the surface in Midtown, starts dipping in the thirties, bottoms out in the Village, and rises again way downtown. That’s why you don’t see any skyscrapers in the Village and never will: The schist is too deep.” She folded her arms and looked at him. “Go ahead.”
“Go ahead what?”
“Make a comment about ‘deep schist.’ ”
“I’m insulted!”
“You know you want to. You know you’re dying to.”
Jeez, she knew him.
“Just continue.”
“All right. They seemed to think—or maybe they knew somehow—that being sunk in the bedrock at the intersection of all those lines of force would work an astonishing change on the pillar.”
“Like?”
“Like transmuting it from nonorganic to organic.”
Jack stared at her. “How is that poss—? Never mind.”
“Possible” has lost its boundaries.
“Let’s assume they were right,” she said, “and that somehow the minerals of its stone were converted to carbon compounds. But the story doesn’t stop there. Not only is it then composed of organic compounds, but as the mille
“Come on now.”
“Oh, it gets better. Not only will it begin to live, but get this—at a certain point the Compendium says it will awaken.”
Jack’s mouth went dry. “Diana’s Alarm.”
“Right. It all fits.”
“Some of it, yes. But not all. If that was the Orsa under that tarp Goren saw, why wait till 2001 to dig it up? Why not go after it when the city was excavating for the Trade Center?”
“I can’t know for sure,” Weezy said, “but I’ll bet they had to wait until it was alive before they could dig it up. That was why they tried to block the project—not because it prevented them from burying another pillar, but because it would interfere with their digging up the Orsa.”
“So when the time came, they destroyed the World Trade Center to get to it.”
As she nodded, Jack shot the rest of his Scotch and poured himself some more. Weezy was still nursing hers.
He said, “But the thing was buried in the bedrock beneath six stories of basement under the Trade Center foundation. How did they know it had become alive?”
“Maybe they have sensitives who could feel it. Someone like Goren. He’s obviously a sensitive. Look what being in the foundation with the Orsa did to him—gave him a panic attack.”
“When do you think it came alive?”
“My guess is sometime in the nineties. That’s when they began to look around for a way to get to it.”
“No matter what the cost.”
“Right. The 1993 bombing of the North Tower may have been their inspiration. Those fools thought they could topple one tower into the other and bring down both. That wasn’t about to happen, but it may have planted the seed as to whom to contact and facilitate and manipulate into another sort of attack.”
Jack leaned back, letting it sink in. The number of lives lost in the towers was minuscule compared to the mass exterminations of Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot, but still . . . just to dig up a pillar? Even al Qaeda had a more comprehensible—he might even go so far as to say explicable—motive than retrieving a buried pillar, even if it was “alive.”
“Why?”
Weezy finished her Scotch and leaned forward. “Because once the Orsa is alive, it’s only a short while before it awakens.”
“It was years between the attack and Diana’s Alarm.”
“The blink of an eye to something that’s been gestating for mille
“But what’s so important about it that they had to dig it up?”
“Because, according to the Compendium, once awakened, the Orsa can create the Fhi
“That word again. What is it?”
“I don’t know.” Weezy began pounding a fist on the table. “I don’t know and it’s driving me crazy! I keep coming across the word but never an explanation of what it does or what the Opus Omega people hope or think it’s going to do.”
“But considering what they went through to get their hands on it, it’s got to be big.”
Weezy nodded, her expression grim. “Very big.”
11
Ernst studied Darryl within the Orsa. His outstretched fingers were only a half dozen inches or so from the end. Sometime since Ernst’s last visit, the fellow’s flesh had lost its translucency and returned to normal. He now looked just as he had when he’d entered the Orsa.
Had the process failed?
Ernst banished the thought. After all they’d gone through—the time, the effort, the risks, the manipulations—failure was inconceivable.
And yet . . . the thought persisted.
The transformation had to have taken place. No, more than a transformation—a transubstantiation.
Transubstantiation . . . the changing of substance without changing perceivable physical attributes. The Catholic Church believed in transubstantiation. It proclaimed that when one of its priests offered up the consecrated bread and wine at mass, they maintained their outward appearances but literally became the body and blood of Jesus Christ. The bread became holy flesh, the wine became holy blood from the son of the Christian god. Many Protestant sects, on the other hand, considered the bread and wine of the ceremony merely symbolic.
What had happened to Darryl was not symbolic. He maintained the physical aspect of a typical human being, but his substance had been changed—transubstantiated—into something totally Other. He had entered the Orsa a human, but he would emerge as something else.
The Fhi
Or so Ernst hoped.
Darryl . . . simple, insignificant, trivial Darryl would be the Fhi