F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

She typed out a response, telling Harris where to look, and sent it off.

“So, you’ve identified Sheikh,” Jack said. “You think he’s going to lead you to bin Asswi—” Weezy shot him a look. “Okay, okay—bin Aswad?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s one more piece of the puzzle. I—” The computer gave out another ding! “Kevin again.”

Jack watched as the decrypted e-mail appeared on the screen.

OMFG!!! I recognize him now! That’s the guy in the torture video I told you about. We need to talk!

“Torture video?” Jack said as Weezy rapid-fired a response.

Not tonight. Save it for tomorrow .

She straightened and faced Jack. “Years ago someone sent Kevin—via his blog—the URL to a specific video on a site that specialized in torture porn. The sender said he’d find it ‘interesting.’ Kevin told me he’d tried to watch but lasted only a minute or so. Said it was sickening.”

“Why would someone send him that?”

Weezy shrugged. “He has a nine/eleven site and blog—maybe someone thought he’d like to see an al Qaeda suspect being tortured. He said the whole site was devoted to torture videos.”

“A YouTube for sadists.” Jack added that to the long list of things he didn’t understand about his species—before pierced nostrils but after Lou Reed. “You think this Bashar Sheikh might have been the torturee?”

“If I’m reading Kevin right, he was.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I could handle a torture video on a good day. But tonight, with my stomach already rocky . . . no way.”

Jack quaffed the rest of his beer and was reaching for another when he spotted hers, barely touched.

“You’re sure you don’t want it?”

“I’d love it but I’d better not. Don’t let it go to waste.”

“Beer? Never.” He took a sip and said, “Al Qaeda, the Dormentalists, the Septimus Order . . . you’ve got some heavy hitters there. You sure you want to be a ‘person of interest’ to them?”

“I don’t want to be a person of interest to anyone, but it might not even be them. Maybe we’ll get an idea when they identify that blond man.”

“You said you saw him in an Internet café?”

She nodded. “I rotate my sites but maybe they had some staked out. I mean, I’ve used that place before. But I noticed he got a call and then began looking around. They must have traced my IP address after I logged on. He followed me out of the café and I began to run . . .” She touched her scalp. “And that’s all I remember until I woke up today.” She shook her head. “So weird not to remember something.”

“Sometimes forgetting is good.”

Her expression turned bleak. “Sometimes I wish I could.”

Without warning she stepped closer, put her arms around him, and pulled herself against him, pressing her face against his shoulder. She was trembling.

“I get so scared at times,” she said, her voice muffled.

After a few heartbeats, Jack put his beer down and returned the embrace. How could he not? She was Weezy. Not the angular body he remembered from their youth, but this was nice . . . better. They’d kissed a few times growing up, but never anything beyond that, never anything serious. It might have gone further if not for her mood swings, and the medications her doctors tried. They drifted apart, drifted close, then apart again. But always, always remained friends.

“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 .”