F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

Fifteen rounds left.

As he dove through the break in the fence, the first-floor windows exploded, belching flame and smoke and bathing the backyard in fierce yellow light.

“Weezy! It’s me! Let’s go!”

She emerged from the shadows. “Ohmygod, Jack! Ohmygod!”

He wished she’d stop saying that. Lights were coming on in the surrounding houses and people were starting to lean out windows.

He turned her and propelled her ahead of him, saying, “Get to the street.”

They ran along the side of the neighboring house. When they reached the sidewalk he turned her toward Roosevelt and laid an arm across her shoulders.

“Put your arm around my back.”

She complied. “But—?”

“Pretend we’re a tipsy couple coming back from a party or something.”

She leaned against him. “But Jack, I saw you . . . you shot those two men in the back.”

“Well, that was the part of their bodies toward me.”

“But . . .”

“But what? That’s not right, that’s not fair?”

“Well, I guess.”

“You really believe you play by rules when someone’s out to kill you? Think about that, Weezy. If you lose, you’re dead. It’s not a game. There’s no reset button. No rules, no ref to toss a flag and call a foul, no ‘fair’ or ‘unfair,’ just live or die.”

“When you put it that way, I guess—”

“You guess? They firebombed your house and were waiting outside to make sure you didn’t escape. Should I have yelled ‘Hey!’ to give them a chance to turn around and get off a couple of shots?”

“No, but—”

“No buts in this situation. As a guy once told me, ‘If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan properly.’ It’s some of the best advice I’ve ever had.”

“Okay. Let’s drop it. I feel dumb.”

“You’re not dumb. Violence gets romanticized and ritualized—boxing, football, jousting knights, whatever. But the truth is it’s ugly and nasty and comes down to survival by whatever means necessary.”

Weezy sobbed as sirens began to howl. “My house!”

Jack had wondered when the realization would hit. She’d been running for her life. Now reality was setting in. He tightened his arm around her shoulders.

“At least you made it out alive.”

“But all my papers, all my proof, everything I own in this whole world . . . it’s gone! All gone! It took me years to assemble all that hard evidence. Now it’s ash . . . smoke.”

“But you’re backed up, right?”

She nodded. “Multiple backups. But I scanned only a fraction of the collection, and I’ll never be able to reassemble it.”

“So . . . they’ve won?”

“No.” Her voice took on a hard edge. “No, they haven’t.”

“Good. Hold that anger. Nurture it.”

They walked on in silence.

Finally Weezy said, “How did they find me?”

Jack had been thinking about that and didn’t like the answer.

“The van. I think I saw it out front.”

“But you left it miles away.”

“Right. But they may have had a GPS tracker in it.”

“But why? They couldn’t know you’d take it.”

“Lots of people track their employees. GPS doodads are cheap and let you know if your man is where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there. Someone could have been tailing us from a mile back. And when we stopped at your house so I could check it out, they could have driven by and seen us. Damn. Never guessed. Sorry.”

“No, that was my fault for wanting you to drop me off.”

“You were feeling woozy.”

“Yes, but I could have— should have gone with you.”

“Hindsight’s great, huh.” They were almost to Roosevelt. “We need to get back to the city and find you a hotel.”

He could book and pay for it with his John Tyleski identity.

“No. I need to go to Kevin’s.”

Jack didn’t like that idea.

“I don’t trust him. He could have fingered your place.”

“He could have done that anytime. Why now?”

“I don’t know. You said yourself, he’s ex-NSA.”

“Yes, and ‘ex’ is the operative word—or prefix, rather. He’s devoted to finding the truth about this. Much as I don’t want to, I need to see that torture video.”

3

Maybe Harris is all right, Jack thought after studying his expression during Weezy’s recounting of the night’s events. He’d seemed genuinely horrified.

They’d awakened him by ringing his buzzer in the downstairs lobby until he’d answered. Even though he was a long way from senior status, he lived in a senior citizen high-rise in Coney Island. Jack didn’t care enough to ask how. In sharp contrast to Weezy’s place, his two-bedroom apartment was small, neat, and uncluttered.

The three of them clustered now in the spare bedroom that functioned as an office.

“What do we do now?” Harris said.

Weezy took a breath. “I’d like to just sit and cry, but we need to watch the Sheikh video.”

He made a face. “You sure? I lasted maybe a minute before cutting it off.”

She seated herself before the computer, hands poised over the keyboard.

“It was sent to you for a reason. Now that we know he had prior knowledge of nine/eleven, we have to see it. What’s the URL?”

“It’s gone. The URL is a no go. The Web site’s still up, but that video is gone.”

Weezy leaned back and closed her eyes. “Aw, no.”

“But!” Harris grinned as he held up a finger. “Kevin, who always thinks ahead, downloaded it and burned it to a disk.”

He turned to a cylindrical organizer atop a bookshelf, popped the top, and pulled out a disk.

“Here you go,” he said, handing it to her.

Weezy dropped it into a slot and the three of them waited, Jack and Harris leaning forward, flanking Weezy in the chair.

What followed was ugly. A bearded guy who could have been Bashar Sheikh—Weezy seemed confident he was—had been stripped naked and strapped on his back to a table. He was bloody, especially in his genital area, and screaming in a foreign language. Jack noticed a date in the lower right corner of the frame: 13/3/04 .

Weezy quickly minimized the screen, removing the video from view but leaving the audio.

“What language is that?” Jack asked.

“Some of it’s Spanish,” Weezy said, leaning closer to the speaker. “But some of it’s Urdu.”

Jack looked at her. “You know Urdu?”

She nodded. “And Arabic. I decided I’d need to know them if I was going to get serious about this.”

“So you just learned them?”

She glanced up at him and shrugged. “I bought some Rosetta Stone programs and learned in no time. It—wait.” She turned back to the computer. “Did you hear that? He just mentioned bin Aswad. Oh, God, this could be important.”

She grabbed a pen and a yellow pad from a corner of Harris’s desktop, then returned to the video and restarted it. She wrote furiously as she listened to the audio.

After three passes, she swiveled her chair toward them and studied her notes.

“Well?” Jack said. “Anything coherent?”

She nodded. “A lot of it’s pleas for mercy. He seems to be the prisoner of some CNI operatives—sort of Spain’s CIA—because all the questions are in Spanish. The March 13, 2004, date on the video is two days after al Qaeda bombed the Madrid commuter trains. Sheikh was involved in obtaining the explosives.”

“You’re sure?” Harris said.

“Well, he admits it, although he seems ready to confess to anything as long as they stop doing whatever they’re doing to him.”

“And bin Aswad?”

“He says bin Aswad—and there’s no mistaking who he means because he calls him by his full name: Wahid bin Aswad al Somar. He says it was on bin Aswad’s insistence that the trains were targeted during rush hour—for maximum terror, maximum body count. He claims bin Aswad was at his house for the final planning of nine/eleven and insisted on the same thing for the Towers. Sheikh swears he argued for a weekend strike—they could still make their point but without taking all those innocent lives.”