22

The appetizers arrived. Jack leaned against the back of the booth as Eddie and Harris sampled their food.

Hell of a day so far.

Weezy Connell had come back into his life—in a comatose state, yes, but he hoped that wouldn’t be for long.

He felt as if he’d fallen down a rabbit hole. He’d awakened with 9/11 a distant, bitter memory, but very much alive. Now . . .

Eddie sighed. “Nine/eleven . . . it’s been misused and manipulated, and it’s paraded out every time the powers that be think we need a little injection of fear. We need to put it behind us and move on.”

Jack thought about that day. He remembered standing on his rooftop that sunny Tuesday morning with Neil the Anarchist and some of his neighbors from the building, all staring south. The towers themselves hadn’t been visible, but the drifting gray-black plume couldn’t be missed. Some had talked of traveling downtown for an up-close-and-personal look. Not Jack. He found the idea ghoulish. And besides, the city was in full lockdown mode.

And then suddenly the smoke changed—more of it, and a lighter color. Something had happened. They all ran down to the nearest top-floor apartment to watch reruns of the first tower’s collapse. And then the second went . . .

He remembered the gnawing in his stomach. Let the pundits and politicos and preachers argue about whether or not foreign policy chickens were coming home to roost. None of that mattered. This was his city. And some slimeballs had attacked it. Rage had consumed him.

But he’d gotten past that. Or thought he had. Today was dredging up a lot of buried feelings. The rage flooded back.

“I agree with you about the fear,” Jack said. “Yeah, put the fear behind. It’s useless. But keep the rage. Stick it in a back pocket and take it out every so often. A gang of oxygen wasters came into our house and killed some of our family. We never forget that. And we don’t forgive.” He slammed a fist on the table. “Ever.”

He noticed the two of them staring at him. The intensity of his feelings surprised him. He’d dropped out, turned his back, and gone underground. He’d refused to participate in the machine. And yet, on that day he’d felt part of the city, of its gestalt. Felt as if he’d been attacked. He’d taken it personally . . . still did.

That wasn’t like him. But it was the way it was.

Go figure.

“All right. End of speech. Back to Weezy.”

Yeah, Weezy. What had he learned? That she’d been interested in the owner of a Swiss account who, days before the attack, had bet on United and American Airlines’ stock falling and the Tomahawk maker’s stock rising. Obviously Bashar Sheikh had prior knowledge. And if, as Harris said, he’d hosted Atta two months before the attack, that would account for it.

But so what? Yesterday’s news. What could that have to do with some shadowy “them” looking for Weezy, trying to tail Jack and Eddie to her home? No reason for her to want to torch her own house.

He tried a calamari ring. Better than he’d expected—rubbery, but not vulcanized. He wasn’t hungry, though, so he pushed the plate to the center of the table.

“Help yourselves.”

As Harris moved to do just that—his hand descending on the rings like a crane in a toy vending machine—Jack leaned forward. Time to get into tough-guy mode.

“Can I ask you a question, Harris?”

“Depends, but okay.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

He dropped the rings, partially missing his plate.

“What do you mean?”

“Where are you from? What do you do? How are you friends with Weezy? Basic stuff like that.”

“Oh . . . well, I’m a Florida boy—believe it or not, some people are born there; we aren’t all transplants from the north. I went to FSU”—he made a tomahawk chop—“go Seminoles. Majored in computer science. Spent years as a systems analyst for Bear Stearns until they got caught with their suspenders down. Now I write medical-imaging software for a company in White Plains. Mostly I work from home, but if I need to go in I just hop Metro North. It’s a pretty good gig.”

“And how does all this put you in Weezy’s orbit?”

“She came into mine when she began posting comments to my blog on tz9-11truthquest.”

A blogger. Well, why not? Everyone seemed to be a blogger these days.

“The ‘tz’ stands for what? Twilight Zone?”

Harris gave him a sour smile. “Ha. Ha. If I had a dime for every time . . . never mind. It stands for Ted Zawicki.”

“And who’s he?”

“The supposed author of the blog—you don’t think I’d put my real name on it, do you?”

“Silly me.”

Eddie said, “Why did she choose you?”

He looked offended. “Tz9-11truthquest is my site—a sort of clearing-house for Truther info. Not the first, mind you, but the oldest still operating. Nine/eleven sites and blogs come and go, but tz9-11truthquest hangs in there. It’s the Energizer bunny of the field. My blog on the site has become the touchstone for Truther blogs. Everyone who is anyone in the Truther Movement drops in at least once a day.”

“Must get real crowded,” Jack said. This earned a glare from Harris but before he could retort, he added, “She must have said something special.”

“And how. She raised a lot of hackles when she said we were right about conspiracy and the controlled demolitions, but wrong about the who and why. That we had to look deeper. That we were missing something important.”

“What’s the ‘who and why’ in your book?” Eddie said.

“The same people who’ve been running western civilization for centuries. The families and financial interests behind the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.”

Jack felt his eyes roll of their own accord. “The New World Order.”

“Yeah,” Harris said, his tone defensive. “And their head-of-state lackeys. A plan of sorts was sketched out in a book from a conservative think tank just a year before. It’s called Rebuilding America’s Defenses, and you can read it yourself. It called for ‘a new Pearl Harbor’ to get Americans off their asses and start kicking Middle East butt. Well, Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and all the rest listened and gave us nine/eleven.”

“Who does my sister think is behind it?” Eddie said as he poked disconsolately at his Caesar salad. He didn’t seem anxious to hear the answer. Appeared to be dreading it.

“That’s just it. She never said. Her posts teased with comments like, ‘You’ve got the right crime but the wrong criminal’ and ‘It’s much, much bigger than an excuse to send America off to war.’ ” He grinned. “Well, you can imagine how that went over. ‘Secret Historian’ was branded a heretic and a denier and a confuser sent to sabotage the Truther Movement.”

“Did she ever explain the ‘Secret Historian’ name?”

“No, but she used it on my site and others. She was going around to all the sites, pissing them off and acting as a sort of provocateur, but never enough to get herself banned as a troll, because she obviously knew her subject.”

“To what end?” Jack said.

“To nudge them out of their Bush-Cheney-Trilateral Commission obsession and start looking for other villains—the real villains.”

“And what’s her take? What’s she think is the real story?”

“She doesn’t know. At least that’s what she tells me, and I believe her. She knows she’s only one person and can do only so much, so she’s trying to enlist others to help. She’d love to put together a coalition of these groups and guide them, use them as an investigative team, but she doesn’t want to show her face. She doesn’t want to be known.”

Jack thought about trying to organize and lead a group of these paranoid types. Herding cats suddenly became a snap.

“But she’s known to you. She let you see her face.”

Harris smiled. “It took quite a while before we got to that stage—lots of encrypted e-mails passed between us before we got around to meeting.”

“Let me get this straight,” Eddie said, his expression grave. “My sister doesn’t think al Qaeda flew those jets into the Towers?”

“Yes, she does. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Atef orchestrated the whole thing. And she believes the Bush administration and whoever they’re connected to leveraged that into an invasion of the Middle East. But she says that’s not important.”

Eddie’s eyes widened. “Not important!”

“Right. She told me that al Qaeda isn’t the end of the trail and that this is much bigger than we think. That there’s another organization or cabal or camorra whatever pulling al Qaeda’s strings and using it for its own purposes.”

“Who?”

Harris spread his hands. “That’s the zillion-dollar question.”

Eddie looked at Jack. “Can you believe this bullshit?”

Jack said nothing as all the disparate bits and pieces he’d learned over the past few years about the Secret History of the World swirled through his brain.

Yes . . . he could believe it.