F. Paul Wilson - Ground Zero

He’d related his conversation with Goren as near to verbatim as he could, and Weezy had drunk in every word. She’d been perplexed and dubious about Jack’s conjecture that the Towers had been brought down so an Opus Omega pillar could be buried where they’d stood.

“If you knew Dormentalism like I know Dormentalism,” he said, “you’d think it made perfect sense. Someone has to die in each of those pillars before they bury it. Who knows how many victims Opus Omega claimed before nine/eleven? A few thousand more wouldn’t make any difference.”

“But they had forever before the Towers went up to bury that pillar. Don’t forget, Opus Omega was started millennia ago.”

“But Dormentalism wasn’t. And it didn’t get involved in Opus Omega until Luther Brady took over. And in 2001, Brady was in full command, with a cadre of fanatics willing to do his bidding.”

Weezy nodded. “That’s a point. The Septimus Order had been handling it alone before that. But my question is, why didn’t they bury the pillar before the Trade Center went up?”

“Maybe they tried and couldn’t get to the spot. Or couldn’t get to it in time.”

Weezy bolted up stiff and straight in her chair.

He looked at her. “What?”

“What you said—couldn’t get to it in time.”

She bounded up and headed for another room.

Jack followed. “So?”

She stopped and faced him. “So, a lot of people didn’t want the Trade Center. A number of groups and committees were formed to stop it. They almost succeeded. I had stacks of old papers with articles about it back at the house.”

“I saw them—even the old Journal-Trib .”

She sighed. “Yeah. Gone, but not forgotten. I scanned a bunch of the articles over the years.”

“But aren’t they lost?”

She gave him an annoyed look. “You’re kidding, right? I always back up—the magnetic, optical, and online.”

“Online?”

“Of course. That way I can access it from anywhere.”

“But so can everybody else.”

“Not unless they know the password, and in my case, not unless they know the decryption key. I’ll download the stuff and we’ll go over it together.”

Be still, my heart.

As she headed for the room where he assumed she kept the computer, he said, “Great. I’m going to help myself to another Heinie. You want one?”

She shook her head. “Started myself on a low-carb diet. But I’ll take a diet anything.”

“You got it.”

With a fresh brew and a Diet Pepsi in hand, he found her hunched over a keyboard in a small extra room. Jack noticed the Compendium sitting next to the monitor. What looked like newspaper clippings were flipping across the screen. He pulled up a chair and tried to make sense of them, but they were moving too fast.

“Slow down. I haven’t seen these.”

“Neither have I,” she said, but slowed her progress.

Even then Jack had to struggle to keep up. How she could absorb anything at that speed was beyond him.

“Here,” she said, stopping the parade. “A familiar name.”

Jack stared at the screen. “Where?”

She moved the mouse pointer to the caption under a photo of a group of stern-looking men. Jack squinted to read the fine print.

“ ‘The Committee to Save the Hudson Terminal,’ ” he said, then scanned the names until he got to—“Holy shit!”

Among the committee members shown, the third man from the left was named Ernst Drexler.

Jack searched the photo and zeroed in on that third man. He wore a dark suit and a fedora. He appeared to be in his sixties and had a sharp-featured face that looked vaguely familiar.

“It’s not him . . . but it’s an awful lot like him.”

After a series of deaths at the Septimus Order’s Lodge in Jack’s hometown when he was a teen, a man named Ernst Drexler had arrived and stayed for a few months to get the local chapter back on track—“reorganize” was how he’d put it. Both Jack and Weezy had had contact with him back then.

“It can’t be him. How old do you think he was when we knew him?”

Jack shrugged. “Mid-thirties, I’d guess, if that. Certainly no older.”

“I agree. Now, that was back in eighty-three. This photo was taken in sixty-five. So, unless he was growing younger, this is probably his father.”

Ernst Drexler II flashed through Jack’s head.

“Not probably. Remember I showed you the card he gave me?”

She nodded. “ ‘Ernst Drexler Two.’ ”

“Which means his father had the same name.”

“I remember it said he was an ‘Actuator,’ whatever that is.”

“I got the impression he was some sort of troubleshooter for the Order. But what was his father doing with this committee? And what’s the Hudson Terminal?”

“The long-gone and forgotten terminus of the long-gone and forgotten Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which was bought out by the Port Authority in the early sixties. It sat under the site where the PA eventually built the World Trade Center.”

Pieces were falling together.

“That subway tunnel Goren saw . . . it could have been left over from that railroad.”

“Except he said it was running in from the east. The Hudson and Manhattan lines came in from the west under the river. More than likely what he saw was an aborted or abandoned link to the Hudson Terminal.”

Jack pulled up a chair and sat next to her.

“All right . . . we’ve got the father of the Septimus Order’s ‘Actuator’ trying to stop the PA from digging up the terminal that sat near the spot where Opus Omega needed to plant a pillar. If Ernst Two is in the Order, I think it’s safe to assume that his father was too.”

Weezy nodded. “And maybe an ‘Actuator’ as well.” She turned back to the computer. “Let’s see if he appears anywhere else.”

She began running the scans across her screen. Jack didn’t protest this time. No point in slowing her down.

“Here he is again,” she said after a while. “Another ‘save’ committee.”

Jack saw the same man pictured with a group of five. In this photo he carried a black cane that Jack recognized. No doubt now about lineage—his son carried one just like it, maybe even the same.

“ ‘The Save Radio Row Committee.’ What’s Radio Row?”

“A cluster of stores that sold radio, hi-fi, and stereo equipment. Want to guess where they were located?”

“Right over the Hudson Terminal?”

She nodded. “Right. They were knocked down to dig the Trade Center’s foundation. I’ll bet if we keep looking we’ll find him on the committee to save some of the historic buildings in the thirteen square blocks that were razed along with Radio Row.”

Jack leaned back. “So . . . according to Veilleur, the Order was originally charged with completing Opus Omega. Since the Dormentalist Church didn’t exist in sixty-five, Ernst the First was sent in to keep the PA from interfering with their pillar placement.”

“But he failed. The PA broke ground on the project in sixty-six.” She swiveled to face Jack. “You can see why they were concerned. The plan was to dig down to bedrock, some seventy feet below. A huge hole. They removed a million cubic yards and dumped it in the Hudson. It pushed the river far enough back to create Battery Park City.”

Jack gave a low whistle. All this was news to him. He hadn’t moved to the city till the nineties, long after all this had happened.

“A thirteen-square-block hole, seventy feet down. A lot of dirt—and a lot of new real estate.”

Weezy smiled. “Can you imagine how frantic the Order must have been? They’d probably planned to buy one of the buildings in those blocks, one right over the spot where they planned to bury the pillar. But if the Trade Center was built, they’d be locked out.”