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“So it’s just a matter of time before you’re back on your feet.”
She nodded. “As long as the noosphere retains its present intensity, I shall be as new by this time next year.”
Weezy smiled at him, and Jack did his best to return it. But he worried. Many signs pointed to a coming darkness, an endless darkness that would arrive next spring.
A year might be too long.
2
“Success?” Jack said as Russ opened the door.
He’d turned off his phone while with the Lady, and when he turned it back on he’d found voice mail from Russ Tuit saying he had something for him.
Russ shrugged as he stepped back to let him in. “Tough job. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it’s as good as you’re going to get with available software. Better, actually, since I went into the code and added a couple modifications of my own.”
Jack nodded without saying anything. He didn’t doubt that Russ had done exactly what he’d said, but the extolling of his own efforts tended to act as prelude to the pumping of his fee.
“I approached it from every angle I could think of. I shaved each indi—”
“Shaved?”
Russ smiled. “Well, you wanted the beard off, right? So that required me to give him a shave. Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Anyhow, I shaved each individual image, then assembled a composite. I also made a composite of the bearded ones, and shaved that.”
“And the result is?”
Russ’s smile faltered. “Well, they’re not really the same face.”
“How’s that possible?”
He sat before his computer and began attacking the keyboard with machine-gun bursts of taps.
“Just the way the software works. Take a look. This is the one where I shaved the composite and it’s probably the lesser of the two as far as accuracy goes.”
A black-and-white image appeared on the monitor—the face of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, thin-lipped man who looked vaguely familiar, but not enough to trigger recognition.
“Let me see the other.”
Another face replaced the first and sparked a cascade of memories, all of them bad.
“Shit.”
Russ turned and gri
“Yeah.”
Jack couldn’t take his eyes off that face.
“Well? Who is he?”
Jack continued to stare. “You don’t want to know.”
Jack too would have preferred not to know, but he did.
“The son of a bitch,” he muttered. “The lousy—”
“You’re looking a little scary, Jack. Who is he?”
He looked different from when Jack had seen him back in January—the nose was sure as all hell different—but not different enough to prevent recognition.
All so clear now . . .
Back in the nineties, after the Orsa became organic, the Order knew it was only a matter of time before it awakened, so they had to dig it up. To that end he’d infiltrated al Qaeda—probably not so difficult, considering his special abilities—and influenced the decision to attack America. Maybe he gave them the idea to use airliners as guided missiles. Perhaps they would have attacked the Trade Towers anyway—they’d already tried once—but he made sure they did.
He’d soaked his hands in the blood of three thousand i
Because during the attack Jack was sure he’d positioned himself close by, sucking up the terror, the panic, the chaos, the pain, the deaths, the grief and misery of loss. Same with the Madrid train bombings.
Him.
The man on the monitor screen.
The One . . . the Adversary . . .
He’d called himself Wahid bin Aswad. But he had a thing for anagrams, and that name didn’t work as one.
Wait. Weezy had mentioned his full name: Wahid bin Aswad al Somar.
Al Somar . . .
That nailed it. No doubt now.
Rasalom.
“Can you copy that file onto a disk for me?”
“Sure.”
“Good. And after you do that, I advise you to erase the files and anything co
Russ looked worried. “Why? This a bad guy?”
Jack nodded. “Real bad. The worst.”
He didn’t want Russ caught in the middle of anything that Jack might start. And Jack intended to start something.
As Russ made the copy, Jack looked into the eyes of the face on the screen.
So . . . you don’t like your picture out and about? You send your Septimus flunkies around erasing all photographic evidence of your existence. What is it? Some First Age superstition? Afraid they contain pieces of your soul? Nah. You don’t believe in souls. More likely you’re afraid Glaeken will see through your disguises and decide to come looking for you. Yeah. Bet that’s it. You want to stay behind the scenes, pulling strings and playing Dr. Mabuse with nobody the wiser until the Big Day when the Otherness shows up.
I can’t seem to find a way to hurt you, but maybe I can find a way to distract you, a
Where are you now? Brooding and fuming about the failure of your Fhi
I hope to hell so.
3
Ernst watched the One stare at the lifeless husk of the Orsa. Its stink did not seem to bother him. But his silence disturbed Ernst. The command had come to meet him here, yet the One had spoken not a single word since Ernst arrived, when he’d found him standing just as he was now.
Ernst rolled his sore shoulders. Every muscle in his body ached from the Taser shock he’d received yesterday. A terrible experience. So helpless . . . completely at the mercy of that man.
His jaw clenched. Who was he? He knew much more than he should. It hadn’t been Glaeken, he was sure of that. He’d never seen the legendary foe, but he was reputed to be a large man with flaming hair. This bearded stranger had been average in size and looks.
Whoever he was, he had to be found. Thompson hadn’t seen him, but he was savagely intent on finding him. Ernst would add the Order and the Dormentalists to the Kickers numbers in the hunt. They’d find him. And when they did . . .
But that was the future. Ernst hoped the One would allow him a future.
He forced himself to speak, not simply to break the unbearable silence, but because he needed to know.
“How could this happen? How could the Fhi
A protracted silence followed, but finally the One responded.
“The Fhi
And then he turned and walked away, leaving Ernst alone with his thoughts and the remains of the Orsa.
The source . . . Ernst was familiar with the concept of another plane of existence engendered by the sum of human thoughts and interactions. In many circles it was considered a theory or a pipe dream. Ernst knew different. He knew it existed and was the progenitor of the Lady.
In and of itself, the übermind was no impediment to the Otherness. But its creation—its Eve, as it were—was. Through the Lady it trumpeted its existence to the multiverse, and thus to the Enemy. It was powerful and grew incrementally more so with each increase in the sentient population of the biosphere. But it should not have been powerful enough to reconstruct its instrument in a flash. That bespoke enormous power.
What was fueling that power?
And then . . . a flash of insight. He might be right, he might be wrong, but he saw an entirely new avenue of attack.
Excited, he hurried after the One to tell him.