Ground Zero Part 52

"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 Compendium and a bottle of Old Pulteney between them. Each held a small gla.s.s containing a couple of fingers of the Scotch. Jack felt like tossing his back but forced himself to sip. and a bottle of Old Pulteney between them. Each held a small gla.s.s 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 knew you'd say that." 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 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 skysc.r.a.pers in the Village and never will: The schist is too deep." She folded her arms and looked at him. "Go ahead." 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 skysc.r.a.pers 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 trans.m.u.ting it from nonorganic to organic."

Jack stared at her. "How is that poss-? Never mind."

"Possible" has lost its boundaries.

"Let's a.s.sume 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 millennia pa.s.s, it starts to live live."

"Come on now."

"Oh, it gets better. Not only will it begin to live, but get this-at a certain point the Compendium Compendium says it will says it will awaken 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 ma.s.s 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 years between the attack and Diana's Alarm." between the attack and Diana's Alarm."

"The blink of an eye to something that's been gestating for millennia."

"But what's so important about it that they had to dig it up?"

"Because, according to the Compendium Compendium, once awakened, the Orsa can create the Fhinntmanchca Fhinntmanchca."

"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.

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 ma.s.s, 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 G.o.d. 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 Fhinntmanchca.

Or so Ernst hoped.

Darryl ... simple, insignificant, trivial Darryl would be the Fhinntmanchca Fhinntmanchca ... the Maker of the Way. What did that mean? What was he expected to accomplish? Only the One seemed to know the nature of the ... the Maker of the Way. What did that mean? What was he expected to accomplish? Only the One seemed to know the nature of the Fhinntmanchca Fhinntmanchca, but even he didn't seem too sure if it would or could accomplish its purpose.

Maybe tomorrow Ernst would know. Maybe tomorrow the world would know.

SUNDAY.

1.

Drifting in the harbor a thousand feet off the Battery, Ernst watched the towers burn in silence.

Nearly ten o'clock. Almost an hour since the Arabs had completed their mission here. They'd also wanted to crash planes into the Pentagon and the White House. Fine. Go ahead. Knock yourselves out, as Americans liked to say, as long as you hit the towers-especially WTC-2, the South Tower.

And they had. Indeed they had.

He watched the boiling black smoke and tried to imagine what it was like in and around those towers.

The One knew. He was there somewhere in the thick of it, perhaps pretending to be an emergency worker. Wherever he was, he was soaking up the pain, panic, terror, fear, grief, anguish, and dismay, feasting on it.

His instructions were to let the initial shock pa.s.s, lull them into thinking the worst was over, then proceed to step two, the real reason for this endeavor. Ernst knew that none of this delaying had anything to do with the ultimate purpose. It was all about the One's hunger and how he would gorge on the emotional fallout of the attacks. And who was Ernst to question the One?

He looked down at the little gray box in his hand-the one marked with an S for the South Tower. WTC-2 was the important one, although not the ultimate target.

All this was happening because of what was buried under WTC-4, the nine-story building directly to the east of the South Tower.

He studied the scene. The South Tower, closer to him, had been hit second. The Arabs were supposed to hit it first, but you couldn't trust those lunatics. So full of hate. Allah this and Allah that, and all worked up about martyrdom while attacking the Great Satan. So many things could have gone wrong but they somehow managed to pull it off, though not without some deviation from the plan.

So the South Tower had been struck second. That was the bad news. The good news was that the impact was lower than on the North Tower-fifteen floors lower, according to the radio. That meant significantly more weight above the structural damage. Which in turn made it plausible that the South Tower would collapse first.

He extended an aerial from the S box, then slid up a little safety cover on its front panel, revealing a black b.u.t.ton. He took a breath and pressed it, then watched and waited. If all went as planned, a sequence of explosive charges would begin detonating. The Order's operatives, posing as building inspectors, structural engineers, and elevator repairmen, had spent the last year and a half setting them in precise locations in the floor joists and perimeter columns. Now ... the proof of the pudding.

Suddenly orange flame and a cloud of gray smoke belched from the wound in the building's flank. The smoke rose quickly, appearing to engulf the floors above it, then spread down toward the ground. Ernst couldn't be sure what was happening. Had the charges failed in their task, leaving the Tower merely sheathed in smoke, or had they succeeded in what had been planned all along?

And then a deep rumble broke the silence and he knew before he saw-or rather didn't see. The Tower was gone. WTC-2 had collapsed, leaving a column of smoke in its place. The charges had worked-perhaps too well. It had looked like what it was-a controlled demolition. That would start tongues a-wagging. He wondered who would be blamed. As long as it wasn't the Septimus Order, who cared?

What really mattered was what had happened to WTC-4. He wouldn't know for a while. The fall of the Tower had been designed to damage the smaller building beyond repair without completely burying it in debris. They had to avoid severe damage to the eastern edge of the Trade Center's foundation. The Order had men ready to move in and break through the slurry wall and foundation floor to get to the Orsa.

Ernst watched the secondary cloud rising from the building's impact with the ground. The builders had only themselves to blame. His father had marshaled highly placed politicians and businessmen who belonged to the Order to dissuade the Port Authority from building the World Trade Center, but no one would listen.

The Order had tried a less destructive course, but found it impossible to break through the WTC foundation and retrieve the Orsa without the world knowing. Certainly not after those Islamic idiots tried that car-bomb attack on the North Tower in ninety-three.

So more drastic measures came into play. It took years of effort and millions of dollars to put everything in place for this moment. And yet, if the PA had simply left well enough alone back in the sixties, none of this would have been necessary.

Ernst put away the S detonator but left the N box in his pocket until he received a call. The One would feed on the fresh panic from the collapse, then let Ernst know when he wanted the North Tower to fall.

No real need to bring down the North Tower. In fact, if its demolition went wrong and it fell the wrong way, it could do more damage-too much damage-to WTC-4 and jeopardize the ultimate purpose of the whole endeavor.

But the One wanted both towers down, and no one-certainly not Ernst-argued with the One.

Ernst awoke stiff and sore on the couch in his office. He had decided to spend the night in the Lodge, to stay close to the Orsa, just in case ...

He threw off the borrowed sheet and sat up in the warm humid darkness. The Lodge wasn't air-conditioned because, as a rule, it didn't need it. The thick stone walls tended to hold out the summer heat, but not tonight. He'd stripped to his underwear but that had helped only a little.

He thought about the dream. He'd lately found himself reliving that day. No surprise why. All the effort, and all the death and destruction that went into making it happen, were coming to fruition. The deaths didn't bother him. The dead were the lucky ones, actually-spared what was to come when the Otherness gained ascendance. A living h.e.l.l for those who had not aided that ascendance. Should it happen in his lifetime-and all signs said that it would-Ernst would be rewarded. The One would rule, but Ernst and the other high-ups in the Order would be compensated not only with immunity from the terrors of the transformed Earth but with a level of power over its inhabitants. And like the One, they'd feed on the global misery.

Ernst often wondered what that would be like. He wasn't sure he'd even like it, but he was certain it would be preferable to being fed upon.

He sat up and rolled his shoulders. Yes, they ached, but not that much. Why was he awake? The dream? Or something else?

2.