9

“Jack, ohmygod! Jack!” Weezy cried, running up to him as he stepped through the door. “I found it!”

“What?”

“In the Compendium—the Orsa, the Null Site, even the Fhinntmanchca! It’s all there! And it’s . . . awful.”

“Let me see.”

“Oh, I hope that page is still there,” she said, leading him to the round oak table where the book lay. “Please-please-please . . . yes!”

She slammed her hands down on the exposed pages as if trying to keep them from blowing away. It looked like a two-page spread of the Opus Omega crosshatching.

Jack craned his neck. “What—?”

“In a minute. Let me tell you what I’ve been able to piece together. I had a fair amount of the picture when I walked in here today but I was missing vital parts. After you and Gia left, I pulled this out for a little more study. Remember I told you that the first pillar had to be placed in a specific spot called the Null Site?”

“Right, but you didn’t know where or why.”

“Well, I found out why almost as soon as I opened the Compendium: It’s the spot that’s crossed by the most so-called lines of force running between the nexus points. No locus is intersected by all—that’s impossible—but the one with the most is designated the Null Site, and that’s where Opus Omega was started.”

“And where was that?”

“It didn’t say.”

“Swell. Then what’s all the excitement?”

She turned back to the Compendium where her hands still pressed against the pages.

“I found this map. You see, one of the problems with trying to understand Opus Omega has been the lack of orientation. You’re shown these diagrams with all the nexus points and all the lines of force between them and all the intersections that have pillars and those that still need them, but I’ve yet to see one superimposed on a Mercator-type map of the world—until now.”

She slid her hands to the sides, revealing a two-page spread of the continents overlaid with the Opus Omega grid. He saw the red lines of force connecting the red splotches of the nexus points, and the white dots at the intersections where the pillars had been set.

“Nice. Where’s the Null Site?”

“Take a look and tell me where you think,” she said. “I want to see if we come up with the same spot.”

Jack leaned over the book and studied the network of lines. He found thick intersections in all the continents, but the thickest seemed . . .

“Here,” he said, pointing to an area in the northeastern United States. “This looks the busiest.”

“That’s what I thought too. Touch it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Touch the spot.”

Jack did, and jerked his hand back as the image expanded, bringing the area to the center. The northeastern and mid-Atlantic U.S. now dominated the two-page spread.

“Touch it again,” she said.

He did, and it expanded further, bringing the Tri-State area front and center.

He smiled. “Ancient interactivity.”

At another, earlier point in his life he might have been awed, but the events of the past couple of years had depleted his awe reservoir.

He touched it again and the lower half of Manhattan Island filled the spread. But . . .

“It looks different.”

“That’s because the map shows the island as it was thousands of years ago. We’ve changed its shape since the Dutch first settled here in the sixteen hundreds.”

“You mentioned Battery Park City.”

“Right. And that was just back in the sixties. Three hundred years of filling this and excavating that preceded it. One more zoom-in ought to do it.”

Jack touched the busy intersection of lines and the image enlarged once more. He saw a symbol at the center of the intersection.

“Zero?”

“That’s the mathematical symbol for an empty set, also known as a null set.”

“The Null Site?”

“I don’t see what else it can be. Notice where it rests.”

Even with the vaguely distorted shape of the island, the location was disturbingly obvious.

“The World Trade Center.”

“Right. Ground Zero.”

Jack shook his head. “But that doesn’t make sense. You said that for Opus Omega to work, the first pillar—”

“The Orsa pillar.”

“Whatever—it had to go there.”

“It did.”

“Then what . . . ?” Jack didn’t get it. And then with a high-voltage shock, he did. “Goren and his crew caught them removing the pillar.”

Weezy was nodding. “Exactly.”

“They killed thousands of people just so they could dig up an old hunk of stone?”

“It wasn’t stone anymore.”

Jack stared at her a moment, trying to make sense of that. “You’d better explain that.”

“Long story.”

“We’ve got time. But I need a beer. Want one?”

She gave her head half a shake, then stopped. “Got anything stronger?”

“Some single malt.”

“That’ll do.”

On his way to the kitchen Jack decided he’d join her.