He checked in with Gia and gave her a rundown of all the pulse-pounding excitement so far. Then he called Weezy, and sensed the dismay in her tone when he told her about the problem at the airport.
“You lost them?”
“We knew all along that was a good possibility. I’m going to start making the rounds of the revival theaters in a little while. Meantime, how are things going with the Compendium?”
“Jack, it’s just incredible.” He could hear her spirits lifting. “Literally incredible. There’s so much here, and it’s all so . . . so . . .”
“Incredible?”
“Yes! I’m having a hard time believing what I’m reading, and an even harder time wrapping my mind around it.”
“How are you managing with the changing pages?”
”It doesn’t seem to matter. I can somehow remember the pages I’ve read and my brain puts them in sequence no matter what order I see them.”
Remembering his months of frustration trying to make sense of the book, he said, “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Okay, I seethe with envy. Any helpful flashes of insight yet?”
“Not yet. Maybe never.”
His stomach dropped. “Don’t say that.”
“Jack, there’s so much.”
“Keep at it. Got to be something.”
He rang off and headed for the elevators. He figured the House of Blues ought to be as good a place as any to grab a couple of brews and a decent steak.
7
“What do you wish me to do?” Kris Szeto said.
Ernst Drexler watched the man fidget and drum his fingers on the table between them.
“I want you to complete your assignment.”
Szeto glanced away, as if afraid to speak his mind.
“Go ahead,” Ernst said. “Spit it out. I want to hear your thoughts. I want an honest assessment. Don’t worry about telling me what I don’t want to hear. I’ve already had a bellyful of that: You saw her go in, you saw the explosion, you didn’t see her come out so you thought she was dead and you left. But there’s no report of her body in the wreckage. Yes, quite a bellyful.”
“Very well. I wish to say that perhaps assignment has been completed.”
“Oh, really?” Ernst felt a spike of anger but suppressed it. “Five of our enforcers dead and their target still at large . . . how can you possibly spin that into even a subatomic particle of success? Even string theory won’t help you there.”
Szeto shrugged. “The purpose was to get her off line. That is exactly where she is now. She has no house and her computer is slag. She is on run and too terrified to go back online.”
“Terrified? Of what? Us? No one we send against her comes back. We try to blow her up and she survives. We should be terrified of her.”
“Is not her. Is that Jack fellow Harris tell us about. Woman did not steal gun from Max. It was this Jack.”
“An assumption on your part. You told me Harris said he was just an old friend.”
“An old friend with gun.” Szeto straightened in his chair. “whatever the case, the end was to neutralize her. I believe such end has been achieved.”
“The end was to permanently remove this thorn from our side. You cannot guarantee that she’ll stay neutralized. She has proven herself resourceful and dangerous. I sense a core of tenacity within that woman. I have no doubt she will be back. Do you?”
“We have not stopped looking for her. I will be circulating photo to our brothers in the Order and—”
“Where did you get a photo?”
“Hospital took one when she was Jane Doe. They were going to give to police departments.”
Ernst nodded approval. Szeto was resourceful. And to give him his due, he had planned his moves well. His one mistake had been assuming that his men would be the only ones equipped for deadly force. He had erred in that assumption. Ernst was sure he would not err so again.
“A good idea. That will give us extra eyes. I’ll have McCabe contact the Dormentalists. As a measure of our new détente, we’ll have them disseminate her picture as well.”
“And the Kickers?”
Ernst nodded. “Oh, yes. The Kickers most certainly. They’re everywhere. But we will need to offer them a reward as an incentive. They’re devoted to Thompson but cash will ensure more active participation on their part.”
“Our people have located her credit accounts. If Louise Myers uses her MasterCard or AmEx, we will know it.”
“And after you locate her, what then?”
“We take her and whoever is with her. Then we begin erasing all trace of them from planet.”
Once again Ernst nodded approval.
The Order had nurtured the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, sometimes going so far as to plant false evidence or start blogs and Web sites of its own to direct suspicions or start theories of its own creation, the more outrageous, the better. The doubters were looking for the truth and the Order wanted to keep them looking in every direction but the right one, to deflect blame and suspicion from itself. Everything had been working perfectly until this “Secret Historian” had begun asking the wrong questions. Even her username had set off alarms. She obviously didn’t know the truth, but she was pointing in dangerous directions. She had to be stopped.
Or did she?
Ernst was hoping the Fhinntmanchca would make her irrelevant. But it was a nebulous hope. He didn’t know if they could succeed in creating one. He had followed all the ancient lore to the letter, but he was treading terra incognita.
So far the lore had been on the mark. The Orsa had come to life, and then it had awakened. And then it had swallowed Darryl.
But could the Fhinntmanchca—if they succeeded in creating it—accomplish what the One wanted? If so, then chasing down this woman was an exercise in futility. She would not matter. But no one knew how long it would take to create the Fhinntmanchca. And once created, no one, not even the One, could guarantee its success.
And so the search for Louise Myers had to be pressed. She had to be stopped from further interfering in matters she should leave alone—matters everyone should leave alone.
8
Weezy’s eyes burned. She closed them as she leaned back to rub her throbbing temples. After leaving Jack at the airport she’d returned here and had been poring over the text ever since. Usually she could read till all hours with no problem, but this Compendium . . .
Maybe it was the book’s autotranslating feature. She couldn’t imagine how it worked, but perhaps the process of changing all the print to the reader’s native language had an effect on the eyes and brain. That, plus the density of new information on each page . . . Jack said he’d been told that the author was a woman named Srem . . . this must have been her life’s work.
whatever, Weezy needed a break. The fraction of the text she’d absorbed was a mind-numbing jumble of facts that read like fancies . . .
A group of devices called the Seven Infernals . . . she’d come across two of them so far and they were wonderful and terrible in what they could do. Where in the text she’d find the other five—or if she’d find the other five—she had no idea.
A word called The Answer—Jack had been right about Srem’s love of capitals—would not translate, but instead remained an indecipherable tangle of squiggles that she suspected might not make sense even in the Old Tongue. Supposedly when uttered it gave the best answer to whatever question was asked. She had no idea how that could be.
And repeated references to “the Seven.” But the Seven what? Sometimes it sounded like a group, sometimes a single entity. Srem tossed off the references as if everyone should know. And most likely everyone did know about the Seven back in those days, but Weezy hadn’t a clue.