1

Drifting in the harbor a thousand feet off the Battery, Ernst watched the towers burn in silence.

Nearly ten o’clock. Almost an hour since the Arabs had completed their mission here. They’d also wanted to crash planes into the Pentagon and the White House. Fine. Go ahead. Knock yourselves out, as Americans liked to say, as long as you hit the towers—especially WTC-2, the South Tower.

And they had. Indeed they had.

He watched the boiling black smoke and tried to imagine what it was like in and around those towers.

The One knew. He was there somewhere in the thick of it, perhaps pretending to be an emergency worker. Wherever he was, he was soaking up the pain, panic, terror, fear, grief, anguish, and dismay, feasting on it.

His instructions were to let the initial shock pass, lull them into thinking the worst was over, then proceed to step two, the real reason for this endeavor. Ernst knew that none of this delaying had anything to do with the ultimate purpose. It was all about the One’s hunger and how he would gorge on the emotional fallout of the attacks. And who was Ernst to question the One?

He looked down at the little gray box in his hand—the one marked with an S for the South Tower. WTC-2 was the important one, although not the ultimate target.

All this was happening because of what was buried under WTC-4, the nine-story building directly to the east of the South Tower.

He studied the scene. The South Tower, closer to him, had been hit second. The Arabs were supposed to hit it first, but you couldn’t trust those lunatics. So full of hate. Allah this and Allah that, and all worked up about martyrdom while attacking the Great Satan. So many things could have gone wrong but they somehow managed to pull it off, though not without some deviation from the plan.

So the South Tower had been struck second. That was the bad news. The good news was that the impact was lower than on the North Tower—fifteen floors lower, according to the radio. That meant significantly more weight above the structural damage. Which in turn made it plausible that the South Tower would collapse first.

He extended an aerial from the S box, then slid up a little safety cover on its front panel, revealing a black button. He took a breath and pressed it, then watched and waited. If all went as planned, a sequence of explosive charges would begin detonating. The Order’s operatives, posing as building inspectors, structural engineers, and elevator repairmen, had spent the last year and a half setting them in precise locations in the floor joists and perimeter columns. Now . . . the proof of the pudding.

Suddenly orange flame and a cloud of gray smoke belched from the wound in the building’s flank. The smoke rose quickly, appearing to engulf the floors above it, then spread down toward the ground. Ernst couldn’t be sure what was happening. Had the charges failed in their task, leaving the Tower merely sheathed in smoke, or had they succeeded in what had been planned all along?

And then a deep rumble broke the silence and he knew before he saw—or rather didn’t see. The Tower was gone. WTC-2 had collapsed, leaving a column of smoke in its place. The charges had worked—perhaps too well. It had looked like what it was—a controlled demolition. That would start tongues a-wagging. He wondered who would be blamed. As long as it wasn’t the Septimus Order, who cared?

What really mattered was what had happened to WTC-4. He wouldn’t know for a while. The fall of the Tower had been designed to damage the smaller building beyond repair without completely burying it in debris. They had to avoid severe damage to the eastern edge of the Trade Center’s foundation. The Order had men ready to move in and break through the slurry wall and foundation floor to get to the Orsa.

Ernst watched the secondary cloud rising from the building’s impact with the ground. The builders had only themselves to blame. His father had marshaled highly placed politicians and businessmen who belonged to the Order to dissuade the Port Authority from building the World Trade Center, but no one would listen.

The Order had tried a less destructive course, but found it impossible to break through the WTC foundation and retrieve the Orsa without the world knowing. Certainly not after those Islamic idiots tried that car-bomb attack on the North Tower in ninety-three.

So more drastic measures came into play. It took years of effort and millions of dollars to put everything in place for this moment. And yet, if the PA had simply left well enough alone back in the sixties, none of this would have been necessary.

Ernst put away the S detonator but left the N box in his pocket until he received a call. The One would feed on the fresh panic from the collapse, then let Ernst know when he wanted the North Tower to fall.

No real need to bring down the North Tower. In fact, if its demolition went wrong and it fell the wrong way, it could do more damage—too much damage—to WTC-4 and jeopardize the ultimate purpose of the whole endeavor.

But the One wanted both towers down, and no one—certainly not Ernst—argued with the One.

Ernst awoke stiff and sore on the couch in his office. He had decided to spend the night in the Lodge, to stay close to the Orsa, just in case . . .

He threw off the borrowed sheet and sat up in the warm humid darkness. The Lodge wasn’t air-conditioned because, as a rule, it didn’t need it. The thick stone walls tended to hold out the summer heat, but not tonight. He’d stripped to his underwear but that had helped only a little.

He thought about the dream. He’d lately found himself reliving that day. No surprise why. All the effort, and all the death and destruction that went into making it happen, were coming to fruition. The deaths didn’t bother him. The dead were the lucky ones, actually—spared what was to come when the Otherness gained ascendance. A living hell for those who had not aided that ascendance. Should it happen in his lifetime—and all signs said that it would—Ernst would be rewarded. The One would rule, but Ernst and the other high-ups in the Order would be compensated not only with immunity from the terrors of the transformed Earth but with a level of power over its inhabitants. And like the One, they’d feed on the global misery.

Ernst often wondered what that would be like. He wasn’t sure he’d even like it, but he was certain it would be preferable to being fed upon.

He sat up and rolled his shoulders. Yes, they ached, but not that much. Why was he awake? The dream? Or something else?