F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

“Your memory came back.”

“Right. Happened in a flash. Suddenly I found myself reliving the whole thing. I was back at Ground Zero, in WTC-four’s foundation, peeking around the edge of the hole. I was barely aware of Lukach, Ratner, and Alfieri standing about twenty feet away, talking to half a dozen workers wearing dark coveralls and respirators. I couldn’t pay any attention to them because my eyes became glued on this . . . thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“I don’t know. It was big, maybe a dozen or more feet long and, say, half that wide.”

“Cylindrical?”

“Could have been. Hard to tell under that tarp.”

Jack had once seen an Opus Omega pillar with those dimensions . . . a concrete column . . . and it had contained the body of a woman he knew.

“Was it upright, like a column?”

“No. It was on its side on a dolly attached to a backhoe.”

“A backhoe? How’d they get one down there?”

“Through a tunnel. And I don’t mean a hole shoveled through the dirt. This was big and wide with an arched ceiling all done up in brickwork.”

“A subway tunnel?”

Goren nodded. “The only thing it could be.”

“Well, the E train had a World Trade Center stop.”

“But that was under building five.”

“The PATH then?”

“The PATH comes under the Hudson from the west. This tunnel was heading east.”

Jack shook his head. He knew the subway system backward and forward.

“There’s no other line down there.”

“Right. And I didn’t see any rails in that tunnel, just a dirt floor.”

“Then . . . ?”

“I’ve done a lot of research since then. A number of subway lines were started down that end of the city and never completed. I think that was a branch of one of them, but I’ve never been able to find a record of it.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Jack said, thinking of the disappearing Aswad.

“But none of that mattered at the time. I don’t remember wondering about the tunnel, or the backhoe or much of anything else. All I could see was that . . . thing. My eyes were glued to it, I couldn’t look away . . . I felt this roaring in my ears, this buzzing in my head . . . my vision was fading in and out . . . I felt like all the energy was being sucked out of me.” He looked at Jack with a tortured expression. “I was sure, I mean I just knew I was dying.”

“But you were wrong.”

There I go, he thought. Master of the obvious.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. I realize now that I was just passing out. But as everything was going black, I heard shouting. I looked over to where I’d seen my guys and saw them being clubbed to the ground with pry bars and such. That was the last thing I saw. After that I was out.”

Jack wanted to know what happened next but didn’t bother asking. Goren couldn’t remember things he hadn’t seen. He resumed his pacing.

Bizarre . . . bizarre . . . bizarre . . .

“That thing under the tarp,” Goren said after a while. “It was an alien artifact, wasn’t it.”

Jack looked at him. Goren was obviously a sensitive, and if his frame of reference was UFOs, it would be natural for him to think that. Jack knew the truth and had no doubt Goren had seen an Opus Omega column. But he didn’t have time to get into that. And besides, the guy wouldn’t believe him anyway.

So he played dumb.

“What makes you think I know?”

“Just a suspicion.”

“What makes you think aliens were involved?”

“The way it affected me. The other guys didn’t notice a thing, but me . . . I sensed it right away. It was causing my panic attack.”

Jack continued his impression of a psychiatrist. “Why do you think that was?”

He looked away. “I’ve always suspected that I was abducted by aliens when I was a kid. I’m sure of it now.”

“Oookaaay.”

Goren’s head snapped around, his expression angry. “Go ahead. I’m used to it. But I was out camping with my folks when I was six. They woke up and I was gone. They found me a mile away, naked, turning circles till I threw up and passed out.”

Using Occam’s razor, Jack could come up with a half dozen explanations off the top of his head, none of them involving space aliens.

“Do you remember the aliens?”

“Of course not. You never do. Or at least you’re not supposed to. But they either implanted something in me or added some of their own DNA to my system. whatever the case, something inside me, something they inserted in me, responded to whatever was under that tarp.”

Jack knew it had been the Otherness he’d responded to, not aliens. But he wasn’t about to open that can of worms.

“Can you remember anything else?”

Goren shook his head.

“Think,” Jack said. “Picture the scene. You’ve got your three friends, you’ve got half a dozen bad guys, you’ve got the . . . the artifact under the tarp . . . what else?”

Goren squeezed his eyes shut. After a moment, he said, “As I picture the artifact, I can see someone standing in the background. They’d strung lights along one wall of the tunnel and he was as far back as anyone could be and still be visible.”

“What was he doing?”

“Just watching, I think. I remember him because he looked like he didn’t belong.”

“Why not?”

“He wasn’t dressed like the others. They were in dark clothing, he was in a much lighter color. The light wasn’t good, but he seemed to be in white.”

Probably one of the Dormentalist bigwigs, possibly even Luther Brady himself overseeing the operation.

“Anything else?”

Another moment of deep concentration, then, “The guys were standing around a hole in the bedrock. It was five or six feet across. They must have pulled the artifact out of that.”

No, Jack thought. They’d come to bury a pillar. Opus Omega was all about inserting them in specific locations.

Goren shot to his feet. “Oh, Jesus! Do you think . . . ? I’ve heard talk about the government being involved in the Trade Center attack, but could they possibly have done it just so they could dig up an alien artifact?”

The idea stunned Jack. Not because he believed Goren had seen government operatives digging up something. More likely he’d seen a group of Dormentalists preparing to bury another of their damned Opus Omega columns.

“Sweet Jesus,” Goren was saying in a hushed, awed tone. “All these years I’ve been thinking what monsters they were to collapse the tunnel on those guys. Now . . . I mean, the truth is so much worse. They brought down the towers and killed thousands just so they could get to that artifact. I’d heard Majestic-twelve was ruthless, but I never dreamed . . .”

Majestic-12 . . . the UFO crowd’s name for the government’s secret, alien investigation unit. But Jack knew who was in charge of Opus Omega—the Dormentalist Church.

Could it be? Could the Dormentalists have been behind 9/11?

Jack hated to think so, but he’d seen what they were capable of, so it was possible. With their international membership, they had global reach. But could they have infiltrated al Qaeda? Could Wahid bin Aswad, Weezy’s Man Who Wasn’t There, be a Dormentalist?

Goren said, “That would mean my own government killed Marilyn!”

Where’d that come from?

“Monroe?”

“What? No, my wife.”

“Tell me how that happened.”

“Marilyn had gone to bed—she was a secretary at the high school and had to get up in the morning. Me, I couldn’t sleep so I went out for a walk. I got a coffee at the 7-Eleven and as I was on the way home it hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean, suddenly it was all back, everything I’d seen. I ran home and called Detective Volkman.”