2

“Success?” Jack said as Russ opened the door.

He’d turned off his phone while with the Lady, and when he turned it back on he’d found voice mail from Russ Tuit saying he had something for him.

Russ shrugged as he stepped back to let him in. “Tough job. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it’s as good as you’re going to get with available software. Better, actually, since I went into the code and added a couple modifications of my own.”

Jack nodded without saying anything. He didn’t doubt that Russ had done exactly what he’d said, but the extolling of his own efforts tended to act as prelude to the pumping of his fee.

“I approached it from every angle I could think of. I shaved each indi—”

“Shaved?”

Russ smiled. “Well, you wanted the beard off, right? So that required me to give him a shave. Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Anyhow, I shaved each individual image, then assembled a composite. I also made a composite of the bearded ones, and shaved that.”

“And the result is?”

Russ’s smile faltered. “Well, they’re not really the same face.”

“How’s that possible?”

He sat before his computer and began attacking the keyboard with machine-gun bursts of taps.

“Just the way the software works. Take a look. This is the one where I shaved the composite and it’s probably the lesser of the two as far as accuracy goes.”

A black-and-white image appeared on the monitor—the face of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, thin-lipped man who looked vaguely familiar, but not enough to trigger recognition.

“Let me see the other.”

Another face replaced the first and sparked a cascade of memories, all of them bad.

“Shit.”

Russ turned and grinned up at him. “I did it? You know him?”

“Yeah.”

Jack couldn’t take his eyes off that face.

“Well? Who is he?”

Jack continued to stare. “You don’t want to know.”

Jack too would have preferred not to know, but he did.

“The son of a bitch,” he muttered. “The lousy—”

“You’re looking a little scary, Jack. Who is he?”

He looked different from when Jack had seen him back in January—the nose was sure as all hell different—but not different enough to prevent recognition.

All so clear now . . .

Back in the nineties, after the Orsa became organic, the Order knew it was only a matter of time before it awakened, so they had to dig it up. To that end he’d infiltrated al Qaeda—probably not so difficult, considering his special abilities—and influenced the decision to attack America. Maybe he gave them the idea to use airliners as guided missiles. Perhaps they would have attacked the Trade Towers anyway—they’d already tried once—but he made sure they did.

He’d soaked his hands in the blood of three thousand innocent people and licked them clean.

Because during the attack Jack was sure he’d positioned himself close by, sucking up the terror, the panic, the chaos, the pain, the deaths, the grief and misery of loss. Same with the Madrid train bombings.

Him.

The man on the monitor screen.

The One . . . the Adversary . . .

He’d called himself Wahid bin Aswad. But he had a thing for anagrams, and that name didn’t work as one.

Wait. Weezy had mentioned his full name: Wahid bin Aswad al Somar.

Al Somar . . .

That nailed it. No doubt now.

Rasalom.

“Can you copy that file onto a disk for me?”

“Sure.”

“Good. And after you do that, I advise you to erase the files and anything connected with them.”

Russ looked worried. “Why? This a bad guy?”

Jack nodded. “Real bad. The worst.”

He didn’t want Russ caught in the middle of anything that Jack might start. And Jack intended to start something.

As Russ made the copy, Jack looked into the eyes of the face on the screen.

So . . . you don’t like your picture out and about? You send your Septimus flunkies around erasing all photographic evidence of your existence. What is it? Some First Age superstition? Afraid they contain pieces of your soul? Nah. You don’t believe in souls. More likely you’re afraid Glaeken will see through your disguises and decide to come looking for you. Yeah. Bet that’s it. You want to stay behind the scenes, pulling strings and playing Dr. Mabuse with nobody the wiser until the Big Day when the Otherness shows up.

I can’t seem to find a way to hurt you, but maybe I can find a way to distract you, annoy you. I know how to be really, really annoying.

Where are you now? Brooding and fuming about the failure of your Fhinntmanchca?

I hope to hell so.