Robert left the apartment and walked down the stairs, the Quad in his hand, the earpiece in his ear. The air was thick and humid, and within a minute he was sweating as he paced on Greenwich Street, waiting for the device to pick up the GPS signals from the satellites overhead. It was 3.30 p.m.
The Quad gave an incoming-call chirp, and he hit answer. There was a crackle of static but no voice. He said, ‘Terri?’
Nothing.
He said, ‘I’m leaving the line open. OK?’
Maybe some breathing? He couldn’t tell.
He needed to meet her. Understand what was going on.
The Quad screen showed a small stick man standing on a tiny globe with four blinking satellites overhead. ‘Wait… Tracking…’ it said unhurriedly, and faint dotted lines snaked up from the hand of the homunculus to each of the satellites, growing more solid as connection was established with each one.
‘How long does this take?’ he said into the open air.
He heard a crackle of static but no response.
After four minutes the Quad gave a beep. The screen said: ‘Ready to navigate. Accuracy: 70 feet.’
He selected Go to Waypoint 025. An arrow came up on the screen, and he started walking. It seemed to get a good reading on him and pointed south-east, flashing up: ‘1.6 miles, speed 2.5 m.p.h.’
He jogged along in the shade of the trees on the west side of Greenwich Street, crossed the road and made a left on to Christopher Street, heading for the 1 and the 9 subway station downtown.
Then, without warning, just after he crossed Hudson, a young woman’s voice was in his head, and the street beneathhis feet was full of stars and diamonds.
‘Hello, Robert. Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I’m going to help you. I’ll be watching your back.’
‘How?’
‘This is where it gets hard to explain. Assume I can see where you are, that I can detect what’s around you.’
‘How? Can you read the location of the Quad? Through GPS?’
‘Something like that. It’ll do as a metaphor. I’m… alive to what’s around you.’
‘If someone’s going to follow me, are they going to try to stop me solving this riddle or finding this cache? Are they looking for it too?’
‘I don’t know. They may end up helping you to understand it. They may try to hurt you. It’s an unusual situation. Now go quickly. I’ll contact you when you get out of the subway.’
He walked east, sweating hard now, snatches of neon and impressions of building details seeming to fly at him from the walls and sidewalk. Video. Tattoo. Two spirals in the brick to his left, something compelling and hypnotic about them. In the shop windows as he passed there were action dolls of Freud, Christ. Sex clothing for girls and boys, a Cuban restaurant… crossing Bleecker, there were flowers on the corner, a locksmith half hidden underground in a basement store, an old church with a sign exhorting passers-by to love one another, New York Fetish, Boots and Saddles gay bar. Then Village Cigars, with its strange triangular plaque in the sidewalk, the smallest piece of real estate in Manhattan. He walked down the steps into the subway.
A train arrived almost immediately. As it clattered and rattled along the five stops to Rector Street, they passed through the closed Cortlandt Street Station directly under Ground Zero, built to replace the one destroyed when the 9/11 attacks had sent debris smashing through its ceiling on to the tracks below.
At Rector he turned right off the train and jogged to the exit, out through the curved iron bar gates and up the stairs. He emerged on Greenwich Street, where the waterfront at the edge of Manhattan used to be, outside a topless bar called the Pussycat Lounge. He crossed the street and walked east up Rector to Trinity Place, where the huge mass of the retaining wall below Trinity Church stood. The wall breathed, expanding and contracting by almost an inch with the heat and cold, like a great chest. He’d met Horace for the first time on a walking tour around this very area. Above, the Trinity spire – once the tallest structure in the city – jostled in the deep blue sky with latter-day rivals along Wall Street, Numbers 1 and 40, a fluted off-white Deco tower and a steepling green pyramid.
Robert passed under an overhead walkway linking Trinity churchyard to a building next to the American Stock Exchange, the latter a riot of Neo-Egyptian frontage and 1930s-style carved representations of modernity and progress: a ship, a factory, a steam engine, what appeared to be oil wells, giant earth-movers. It reminded him of the declamatory style of Rockefeller Center. Progress! Industry! Wisdom!
Set into the massive wall of Trinity were several gates. He took the one in the middle called the Cherub Gate.
He walked up some steps, through arches at the top and into the graveyard. Robert held up the Quad, waiting for it to reacquire the satellite signal in the open space.
As he headed east towards Broadway along the path through the graveyard, the Quad came to life again. Terri.
‘Don’t go on. Branch off to your left. Do you see a big monument? There’s a headstone, a grave. Leeson, James Leeson… Crack the code. Use the website. Show you were here and you cracked it. Hurry. You’re being watched.’
‘Code?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘Just do it. Please.’
As he walked, the white-and-gold entrance to the Bank of New York at 1 Wall Street came into view again. The GPS signal returned weakly, pointing him north as it should have, and faded again.
Robert saw the Gothic brown stone monument, ‘sacred to the memory of those great and good men who died while imprisoned in this city for their devotion to the cause of American independence’, looming over the north-east end of the graveyard.
He surveyed the stones around it. The gravestone in question was easily found. ‘Here lies deposited the body of James Leeson who departed this life on the 28th day of September 1794 aged 38 years,’ it read. Along its upper rim, above a winged hour-glass and other mysterious symbols, was a series of markings that reminded Robert vaguely of codes he’d seen in Sherlock Holmes stories. In this case they were not little stick men but dots placed within partial or complete squares.
He squatted in front of the headstone and gazed at the code. Shut out the world. He’d seen something like this before when he was a kid, in a spy story or a puzzle book, or one of those boy-soldier manuals that sometimes came with toys, or Action Man, or Clarks Commandos’ shoes. He remembered those shoes had had animal tracks imprinted on the bottom, so wherever he went playing around the grounds of the estate he was himself and also a bear, a deer, a badger. He cast his mind back to that time, to a special copse he had known, where he used to go to puzzle through things that confused him as a child. There was a smooth stone in the middle of the copse that he would sit on, and lose himself in the birdsong that echoed there, sometimes for what seemed like hours at a time. He remembered now the language of the birds, the endless sea of voices and harmonies, twittering and whistling and singing in a torrent of sound that had seemed to him to be the very voice of the world. He’d never left the copse without an answer to what troubled him. He let his mind roam free in the same way now, lost in the memory of the harmonies he no longer heard.
He was hungry, he noticed. He thought of a diner on Route 3 that he sometimes would go to on the way home, the Tick Tock Diner – neon and gleaming metal cladding. There was another diner called the Tick Tock on 8th Avenue, neon and chrome, at the street level of the hotel New Yorker. Tick Tock. He’d sometimes imagined walking into the Tick Tock in New Jersey and emerging from the Tick Tock on 8th Avenue. Maybe all Deco diners were connected. Maybe they were all just one diner. Tick Tock. Tic-tac. Tic-tac-toe. Noughts and crosses, as the Brits called it back home.
Then he had it. Tic-tac-toe.
He wrote down the letters of the alphabet in a noughts and crosses grid with A in the top left, B in the top middle, C in the top right, and so on. He saw three grids side by side, the first containing the letters A to I, the second J to R, the third S to Z… so on the first grid, E was represented by a closed box, B by a box open at the top, H by a box open at the bottom. How were the grids distinguished from one another? Some boxes on the gravestone bore one dot, some two, some none.
He stared at the grids. If a single dot signified the first grid, and two the second, none the third, then he got: Q… E… L… E… L… B… E… Q… D… E… A… S… H.
It made no sense. Something was off. Wait. Wait. What happened if he treated I and J as the same letter, and U and V, as gravestone lettering often did?
R… E… M… E… M… B… E… R.
The lower word was: D… E… A… T… H.
A chill ran down his spine, mingling with the thrill of cracking the code. ‘Fuck,’ he said out loud, partly to banish the fear.
Robert used the Quad to post it to the website with the pictures.
‘Well done, Robert. Remember that, you’ll need to. Now go north, till you get the GPS signal again. Follow it. Here’s a rhyme. A clue. I just got it by text message. Remember it.’
‘Who is sending you this stuff, Terri? How do they know when to send it?’
‘I told you, it comes from someone called the Watchman. Adam told me to trust him. You’ll need it to find the first cache. I received it as soon as you posted the decoded gravestone message, so it was a response. A reward, perhaps.’
‘This wasn’t the first cache?’
‘No. It’s near by, I think. Take it down, quickly.’
He got his pencil and notebook out.
‘Our zero’s a place for heroes
Ground of being, way of seeing
Don’t have a conniption, seek something Egyptian
Kind of a digit, to find the widget
Our secret cache is where the ashes
And bones of Eire
Aren’t laid to rest. By the star, you’ll go far
To prove your worth, pass the Trial by Earth’
He heard heavy breathing. Then she spoke again: ‘Got it? Go.’
He walked northalong Broadway, stepping on five-pointed stars in the sidewalk honouring an eclectic mix of sports stars, war heroes and foreign dignitaries who had received ticker-tape parades on Broadway in the 1950s.
Hopping and scooting between pedestrians, he passed on his right a large red cube sculpture poised implausibly on a point; and to the west the buildings fell away to reveal the vast absence of Ground Zero. Behind the site loomed the twin solid masses of the World Financial Center, their glass panels ablaze with orange light.
He jogged across Cortlandt Street, looking down to the giant Century 21 Department Store, past the New York Stocking Exchange lingerie shop, crossing Dey and then Fulton. There, right in front of St Paul’s Chapel, the signal came back on the Quad, with an accuracy reading of 43 feet. It pointed west. He headed down the hill towards Ground Zero.
Robert crossed Church Street and leaned his forehead against the metal fencing overlooking the huge pit. There was a cross made of two girders from the site. Holy ground, land laden with hate, yet not heavy with it, not overwhelmingly charged with evil; there was something else, not in the tribal Christian sense of the Cross but still… there was something that felt like the opposite of fear, that felt like the Pentecostal winds that had swept Manhattan on the first anniversary of 9/11, a scouring wind that carried forgiveness. Could that be possible? He looked into his heart, deep into his memories of that day. No, it was not possible. He couldn’t.
‘What the hell, Terri? Am I in the right place?’ he said into the air. Nothing back.
Now the Quad pointed him back towards the chapel. He’d gone too far west. He entered the churchyard through the gate facing Ground Zero and watched it count down: 184 feet, 181, pointing him east, 44 seconds to go, 43, 2.3 m.p.h., 150 feet, 147 feet, counting him down as he walked along the graveyard path parallel to Fulton, 96 feet… 2.5 m.p.h.… The words ‘Arriving Destination’ flashed up on the screen at around 69 feet, and still it counted lower. Then, at 37 feet, the signal blinked out.
Cursing, he got his notebook out and read Terri’s clue. Looking directly ahead of him due east was, most certainly, something Egyptian, and a kind of digit.
A big old pink-grey stone obelisk.
He tramped off the path across the grass to it and surveyed the thing.
Very faintly, on the west face, he saw what looked like a mixture of digits and letters. On the east side, he could barely make out the name of Thomas Addis… something, over lines and lines of faded script.
Standing back from the red and creamy white flowers around the base of the obelisk, he noticed, at the edge of the flowerbed, at foot height, a five-pointed metal star in a metal ring, the letters ‘US’ in the middle, that he had seen before at the graves of Revolutionary War veterans. By the star, you’ll go far, the riddle had said.
Terri came back. ‘There’s a cache. Get it… the secret is in the ground.’
‘Just a minute. Sinking my fingers into the soil of someone’s grave is not doing it for me. When do we meet, Terri? You have to meet me.’
‘There’s no corpse underneath. Trust me. Get the cache.’
‘Explain to me what’s happening here. I’m going to meet you, and you’re going to tell me what’s going on.’
‘Robert, you don’t have the initiative here. You need me to help protect Adam. To help stop this awful act from being carried out. If you think it’s all just a stupid game, hang up right now.’
He stared out over the gravestones towards the great empty pit where the towers had stood. He’d been asked to help stop something even worse happening, in a city he’d adopted as his own. He’d been asked to help his friend. As crazy as it all sounded, good people said they needed him. And, deep down, he was recovering a part of himself that had been cut off, almost exterminated. If he lost Terri now, he might never discover what it was. And if it was all a twisted game of some kind, he wanted to find Adam to beat seven bells out of him.
‘I’m not hanging up.’
‘I didn’t think you would. If I cut the connection, you’ll never find me again. Robert, I swear I want to help you. But you have to do it by my rules. It’s the only way.’
He barked: ‘How?’
‘You’ll see. And I’ll meet you. But first do what I say.’
He knelt before the obelisk and feigned paying his respects in front of it, or possibly catching his breath and buckling his shoe, and, as he did so, sank his fingers into the earth to either side of the small metal star. Nothing. He dug further, sinking his left hand into the earth. Still nothing. And then, deep down in the flowerbed, his fingertips touched something smooth and hard and plastic.
He fished it out and hid it up his sleeve as smoothly as he could. Then he made his way back along the footpath.
He went into the chapel, his earth-covered hand hidden under his jacket, and found a pew. For some reason he felt safer inside. He sat at the Broadway end, facing the altar, and took up a discreet praying position in order to look at what was in the cache. He unplugged the container, which was a clear plastic cigar tube, and felt a hard metal item fall into his hand.
He looked around. No one was paying attention to him. His eyes fell on the altar: the gleaming golden rays representing the glory of the divine presence were above it, the name of God in Hebrew at their centre. Right to left, Y… H… V… H. Yah veh. The greatest puzzle of all.
The altar, he’d heard from Horace, had been designed by the same man who’d gone on to lay out the core streets of Washington, DC: Pierre L’Enfant. Some people thought he’d tried to make the city into a giant sundial, or something similar.
He looked down again. In the palm of his hand he held a spent bullet cartridge.
‘I have it,’ he whispered to Terri.
‘Praise heaven. Keep it safe.’
‘Now what?’
‘Get out. Need your thoughts. Find a place to write. Then report what you’ve done. Post a picture of what you found and what you think about it. Then you’ll need to carry out an action.’
‘What kind of action? We’re going to meet, remember? Terri?’
No answer.
Robert walked out of the churchyard on to Broadway. He looked about him and crossed the street to John, heading for the closest bar he knew, a place called Les Halles.
It was a classic dark-wood mirrored bar with a kaleidoscopic array of bottles and mirrors behind the bartender, and an elaborate display of hard-boiled eggs in a wire holder on the bar in front of him, like a model of the solar system. There was almost no one there. Looking into the restaurant away from the street, he thought the light was almost amber. Yellow-gold lighting fixtures stood out against a dark brown, almost black wooden background. Something stirred in his memory. He couldn’t place it at first. He realized he had been in Les Halles before. Drinks with colleagues after an awards ceremony of some kind, Katherine dressed to the nines, and they’d gone off to the bathrooms at the back, up the stairs, pursued by a waiter saying no, no, ladies only, and she’d lifted her dress, and they’d thought about making love right there in the bathroom but chickened out. They had been the first awards after 9/11, and after drinks they’d walked out and gone down to Ground Zero and wept.
Robert went to the bathroom to wash the dirt from his hands. Then he ordered a beer, trying to gather his thoughts.
After a while, the Quad buzzed. ‘Terri?’
‘Yes. Just listen. Don’t speak. This is where we begin. We are at the foot of Jacob’s Ladder. We build the ladder by climbing it, from darkness to light, from fear to love. Each rung is a trial. Hold that in your mind. Then write what you’re thinking. Post it.’
‘This is not sane or helpful.’
‘Do it. Please.’
‘Meet me.’
‘After you do it.’ Then she was gone.
He rubbed his face with his hands. Should he walk away? He had to meet her. ‘Fuck it,’ he said under his breath.
He took the bullet casing off to the bathroom and photographed it with the Quad, not wanting to do so in a public place.
Then, back at the bar, he tried to look at himself in the mirror panels. Not rational. Oddly emotional, panicked, feelings all over the place, nothing purely digested. But he realized: part of him wanted to be doing this.
He unfolded the portable keyboard contraption he’d found at Adam’s pied-a-terre. He wrote and posted some lines to the website at Bookmark 1.
I am writing this in accordance with your instructions. I can demonstrate that I’ve done the following things:
– I went to the first location you gave me. The coordinates correspond to a churchyard overlooking Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.
– I recovered the cached item. I am posting a photograph of it, as requested. A spent bullet casing, hidden in a clear plastic cigar tube. I don’t know what it means. Should I guess? I have brought it with me.
– Terri, I wish to help you. Are you all right? You sounded as though you were in pain. Who else is looking at this blog? Who set up this website?
He put up the picture of the bullet casing. He stayed online. Within two minutes she had replied, in the comments section.
Robert, please realize what you will be doing. You will receive a series of clues, or provocations, or challenges, and in each case you will have to look within yourself to find your response. It is a scavenger hunt of the soul. It is the only way for you to help. For each inner state there is an outer state. Link the site of the cache to its contents. Write your impressions. Show that you are evolving. It is the only way. I am fine. This is hard. Adam set up the website to help the Watchman, right before he vanished. Write more.
He wrote more. Drank more beer first. He was starving. He ordered a sandwich, dug into himself and wrote again. He put up photos of the grave-marker obelisk and the view of Ground Zero that she’d wanted him to see. He even put up a shot of the view from his bar stool.
Terri
I don’t know how you want me to do this. Connect the cached items and the site, you say. The inner world and the outer.
So: I am getting lots of death, naturally. You sent me to two graveyards, venerated places, one to crack a code about death, one to dig in the grounds of one of the oldest buildings in Manhattan, you sent me back to the beginnings of this city among flowers and stones and grass to gaze upon the great gaping hole at Ground Zero… the church that was somehow spared when the spars and beams of the Twin Towers came hurtling down towards the ground. You had me gaze upon the place that fills me with anger at the primitive emotions it arouses in me, and you had me root around like someone not entirely sane or presentable among the gravestones till I found your cache and, in it, a bullet casing. So, yes, death. Death and survival, and the willingness to lash out and hurt in order to survive. Primal things. Are you going to send me all across the city sinking my fingers into graves? Is this enough? Help me. I don’t understand.
George Washington had his own pew at St Paul’s; you can still see it. He prayed there after being sworn in down the street at Federal Hall as the nation’s first President. Birth of a nation, from war. Now another war. Destruction, survival. Is this where you want me to go?
I had a friend who was downtown when the towers fell, in fact I sent her there. She said those clouds of dust you see on the videos of that morning were full of flying fragments of metal. I drank with her at this bar. It was an act designed to provoke a tribal response. We are all reasonable, civilized people, until someone touches our tribal core. Then we change, or maybe we remember. We will kill and more for our tribe. We are all potential torturers. Some things are impossible to forgive.
Terri, what more do you want of me?
Robert, you have made a good beginning. Dig deeper along the same lines. Learn to look within, and you’ll learn to see without. This is our first step on an arduous road. You are being prayed for. Start to pay closer attention to your surroundings. If something draws your attention, pay heed to it. Photograph it. Post it.
He had to get moving again. He got up and left the bar.
He tried to call Terri back on the Quad, impatiently jabbing the buttons, but the number was masked. He couldn’t get her.
Directly outside Les Halles was a beautiful brown terracotta building, housing both a Christian Science reading room and a Manhattan Muffin store. It was 11 John Street, and in the ornamentation was a kind of half-formed version of that medical symbol he’d seen sometimes, snakes climbing a staff, except they were kind of twisted little lizards snaking up a column. He had never noticed it before. In the same ornamentation were several fierce, bearded heads with vegetation springing forth from their faces. He found them unsettling.
He walked back to Broadway. At the Stocking Exchange across the street, in black-and-gold accents, under the shop window displays of semi-risqué lingerie, strode a line – into the store, naturally – of single gold barefoot female legs. He took a picture, then retraced his steps and snapped the terracotta birds and the foliage heads.
He headed further south, again passing the giant red cube on its miraculous angle at Liberty. This time he noticed a round hole that pierced it through. He looked at it more closely. It was an illusion of a cube. The sides were of different lengths. A true cube wouldn’t look like one, presumably.
Terri was silent.
He walked two more blocks south. Trinity Church was again on his right. He came to the scalloped corner of 1 Wall Street that he’d seen from the graveyard earlier, the Bank of New York Building: glorious Art Deco, white stone and blazing gold, like a cathedral made of draped fabric. As he stood at the main entrance on Wall Street, the sun caught the red-and-gold lobby interior – the fabled Red Room, closed to the public since 9/11 – and made it glow like a brazier. He stood transfixed. Crimson, white, gold.
This was where the wooden wall had once stood at the northernmost end of New York to keep out invaders. The northernmost end, barely a mile from the southern tip. On the Broadway side of the Bank of New York Building, the bronzed windows reflected the spire of Trinity against a deep blue sky, and again the crimson flame of the interior leaped out.
‘Robert.’
‘Terri? Where have you been?’
‘Hell.’
‘What’s –’
‘Head west. Find an angel. Quickly.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t explain. Not now. Do you remember what I’ve been saying?’
‘Terri, I won’t be forgetting any of this for a long time.’
‘Go west.’
‘I am. I’m crossing Broadway, heading along Rector, along the south side of Trinity Church.’
On the railings outside the church he found what she’d told him to look for: a plaque marking the original site, across the street, of Columbia University, when it was still King’s College. It held two oval seals. On the left a sunburst, like the one above the altar at St Paul’s Chapel, shone at the top of the seal, the name of God in Hebrew nestled within it.
‘Yod, heh, vav, heh.’
‘Terri?’
‘Unutterable name… Unknowable… Robert, find the Man of Light.’
On the right of the plaque, in what he took to be the Trinity Church seal, was the most remarkable image. He said out loud: ‘Swirly Man.’
‘Yes,’ said Terri.
One foot in the sea, the other on land, the sun ringing his face: in the centre of the seal stood a figure like a man composed of spinning wheels, or whorls; or it could have been a man wearing a garment of spirals that ascended up his body from groin to head. A line of vortices ran up the centre of his body, while others were off to either side of his spine.
‘Mighty angel, wrapped in cloud… Robert, when you look into yourself, as far and as deeply as you dare, and then further, hold the image of this figure in your mind. This is what you will see. It is what you truly look like, your body of light. You are protected… we are… believe me. Now go west. Further west.’
He photographed the figure of light with the Quad and walked on, along Rector, under the arcades where a Berlitz Language School was, back towards the subway stop, ending up again right opposite the Pussycat Lounge.
‘WHAT? No, no, no, no. I’m going to meet you, right now.’
‘I think the danger is past. You’ve done enough for today. We’ve done enough. Trust…’
Her voice trailed off and the connection died. He stood at the subway entrance, fumbling for something to do, wanting at that exact moment, more than anything else, to hit someone very hard. Anyone.
Was she safe? Had she exhausted herself? She hadn’t sounded at all sure the danger had passed.
The Quad buzzed. It was a text message, saying simply: ‘Take the 1 train north. Meet in the last car.’
He replied: ‘Terri?’
‘If you want to see Terri again, take the 1 train.’
‘Who are you?’
No reply.
Robert stood at the mouth of the subway, feeling it pull him in and down. What would happen if he didn’t take the train?
He had no choice. He strode down the steps.
A cramped ticket area led through low turnstiles down on to the platform. The R of Rector Street was picked out in pleasing purple, blue and green mosaic tile. He hadn’t noticed it before. Everything seemed brighter, sharper.
He walked to the far end of the platform, where the last car would be. He heard distant shrieking and clattering as the train came towards Rector from South Ferry, the first and last stop on the 1 line. The last car was empty.
Robert got on and waited, sitting as far towards the rear as possible.
As soon as the train began to move, the sliding door connecting the car to the rest of the train slammed open. A figure dressed entirely in black, face masked by a balaclava, ran towards Robert so quickly that he barely had time to stand before it was on him. Instinctively Robert lowered a shoulder and leaned into his assailant, trying to hold his ground. With a crunch of bone against bone, he felt himself lifted into the air and slammed against the metal door at the end of the train.
As soon as he hit the floor, Robert felt a knife at his throat, a hand gripping the top of his head. He gasped with pain and fear as the cold metal pressed into his flesh, his ribs and spine screaming. An acrid smell filled his nostrils. Desperation. His assailant might be more afraid than he was. But of what?
‘Give it to me.’
He tried to get a reading on the voice. It was hoarse, dangerous. He knew it. Did he? Brisk, confident, but distorted somehow.
‘You want my wallet?’
‘The cache.’
‘That’s fine. Take the cash.’
‘What you found in the cache. Give it to me. Where is it?’
‘I’ll have to reach into my jacket pocket.’
‘Which?’
‘Inside left.’
It was a lie, but Robert figured his assailant would find it hard to reach into the pocket without moving his knife hand.
Fingers reached into the pocket, found nothing. Robert’s head exploded with pain as it was slammed against the metal door.
The assailant wanted Robert’s link to Adam. No way. Robert chose his moment. A detached calm came over him, and he pushed up violently with his legs, hitting bone. He wouldn’t give it up.
Powerful hands twisted him round. He took punches on the mouth and nose. He went down on one knee, scrambling for footing.
He began to feel dizzy, and the quality of the light around him began to change. A tenuous yellow light, richer and darker with each second, seeped into the air around his attacker. Robert’s face started to go numb, a fist gripped his mind with cold, and he was back in the dream… geometric shapes… lightning bolts… searing pain stabbed behind his eyes. It was evil. He wanted to vomit.
Words came into his head. Terri’s voice: ‘Hide with the child and the Man of Light. Hide with them.’
The picture of the caged-off monument to the child that Terri had sent him sprang into his mind’s eye. He took refuge there. And with Moss. And with the swirling angel figure.
Outside, the pain doubled.
Hands went through his other pockets, found the bullet casing and took it.
Robert felt himself hauled to his feet. Then he was suddenly watching the scene from above, from far away. He thought of Katherine, tried to gauge whether he was going to die. He thought he was. He saw the world shatter like pond ice.
Then, just as suddenly, it stopped. His mind was released. His knees gave way. The man was walking back towards the rest of the train, stashing the bullet casing in a pocket on the sleeve of his jacket.
‘No!’
Robert, with a sheer act of will, launched himself at the man as he slid open the metal door that led to the next car. He forced them both out into the narrow metal and chain-link cage between the cars. The metal platforms shimmied and bucked beneath their feet. Rushing air tore at his skin.
He looked into his assailant’s eyes, and it was like looking into a malignant sun. He was staring again into the face of death from the night of the fire. The face spat hatred, arcing and warping into a single black hole, drawing him in and down. They grabbed each other by the throat, slamming off the doors and metal harnesses that hung between the cars. They roared through the closed subway station at Cortlandt Street, directly under the Ground Zero site, thrown from side to side, their feet slipping on the metal plates. The tracks rushed beneath their feet.
Closing his eyes to block the bilious yellow light, Robert twisted out of the stranglehold and took one of his assailant’s wrists with him, turning it until it was between the attacker’s shoulder blades. He jammed a hand into the zippered arm pocket and grabbed back the bullet. Then he slammed his assailant’s head against metal and forced it over the chains towards the speeding tunnel wall.
‘Who are you?’ he shouted. ‘Who are you?’
No reply.
He forced his assailant’s head and torso further out into the tunnel.
‘Who are you?’
To his amazement, tears of anger filled his eyes. He wanted to kill this creature. He loosened his grip for a moment, disconcerted.
An elbow slammed into his belly, knocking all the breathout of his body. His assailant twisted away from him and tried to open the door back into the rear car as they pulled into Chambers Street.
Doubled over with pain, Robert felt his entire body fill with weight, as though he were being pumped full of lead. It pooled into his legs, rooting him to the earth. Time distended, like poured molasses. Yet, to his astonishment, he was able to stand, feeling the heaviness pour through his body, displacing the pain, filling his lungs and chest with a strengthhe had never felt before.
He slung his weight forward in one mighty step and his torso twisted round like a slingshot, propelling his fist into the back of his assailant as he stepped through the open doorway into the last car. The man flew forward, lifted clean off his feet, as though hit by a shotgun blast. He flew past the metal poles along the midline of the car, hitting one halfway along and rolling and tumbling to the far end, where he slammed into the metal door at the back of the train.
Robert stared at his fist in disbelief. And he recognized something else too: excitement, and pride. He felt molten metal pouring through his veins and muscles, though already now it was beginning to seep back down into the ground, towards the centre of the earth. His attacker picked himself up and fled into Chambers Street Station as the train doors opened.
Strength now flowing from him, his head spinning, Robert stepped from between the cars on to the platform and made straight for a trash can. He threw up into it. Then he staggered to a wall, squatted against it on his haunches and held his head in his hands. For a moment or two he blacked out.
Katherine stared into the mirror, shaking.
She’d seen the fight. She’d seen her husband attacked, seen him survive. The images had come to her unbidden, sensations of anger and pain hitting her like a hurricane as Robert fought for his life. In the depths of the mirror, for just an instant, she’d seen through Robert’s eyes, and stared with him into the seductive, hating eye.
It really was happening, at last. The long chain of events begun more than twenty years ago – perhaps twenty lifetimes ago – was winding into its final, choreographed, elegant form. All the events of the Blackout Day were finally coming to fruition.
What she needed now was the instruction to go ahead with her final assignment.
So many years of waiting for orders, of setting up and carrying out missions, of living in a world of deception and half-truths and betrayal. All of it for nothing, except the tainting of her soul.
And now the only secret mission she had ever really wanted. She awaited the word from the Watchman to go undercover one last time.
She loved Robert. Was she still in love with him, as the cliche ran? Did it even matter after so many years together? Deceiving him was painful. She was ashamed, even when it was for his own good. She was too good at it. Always had been.
She walked out into the backyard and lit a cigarette, her first. There were days when she could barely abide herself, but today she felt she could finally get there. Finally find a form of redemption.
There were costs for having lived for so long in the secret world – a world she’d seemed born to, that she’d been so good at inhabiting.
Today she’d amused herself for an hour with Grief Counsellor Sarah, making all the right noises about knowing the stages of grief, recognizing where she wasinthe process, embracing her pain. She was still in a period of magical thinking, she had been told, when it was quite natural to try to bargain with God, associate bad things she’d thought or done with the terrible loss she’d suffered, as though she had somehow caused it. It was natural to cling to the belief that somehow her little boy wasn’t really gone. Everyone knew it was nonsense, of course. A natural, childish, false response to loss. This is what Sarah had said.
Except Katherine had learned more terrible things than most people. How to deceive, blackmail and extort. How to betray. How to use people up and throw them away like litter.
And she had known for many years that magical thinking was more than just a stage of grief.
The counselling sessions were a crock. She’d been going to them for three months to keep Robert happy, with and without him, biding her time. It had been a way of protecting him. She had always sworn she would shield him for as long as possible, until the moment arrived to call upon his gift. Deception was not always a bad thing.
She listened carefully to the Watchman and hung up.
She stared for a moment into space. The race was afoot, the Watchman had said. Robert had made contact with Terri, embarked on the quest and found the first cache. He’d had to fight to keep the key. Everything was balanced on a knife-edge. If she had any doubts, now was the time to confess them.
Katherine had no doubts. It would be terribly dangerous if she were discovered. But now at least she had the clarity of final marching orders. She had broken one code, and now she had to break another, for the greater good.
There was equipment to locate, a role to prepare.
And, above and beyond her formal mission, she would complete her own secret task. She didn’t know how, but she would make things right.
At last, the quickening had come.
She wrote a note to Robert, explaining her absence in a way that would help him take his next step. Then she left the house.
Dabbing his bleeding mouth on a handkerchief with a shaking hand and feeling thankful that no one was paying much attention, Robert took the subway from Chambers Street to the parking garage where he’d left his car in the morning – it seemed several days ago – and drove slowly across town towards the Lincoln Tunnel.
His mouthand throat were sour with vomit. He wanted very muchto be with Katherine.
He kept the Quad firmly turned off in his pocket. He focused on the robotic tasks of driving a vehicle in close traffic. Everything else he shut out.
This worked well until a Ryder truck cut in front of him, forcing him to brake hard and setting off a barrage of horn-blowing from the car behind. His heart started to hammer, he wanted to urinate, he wanted to weep, he wanted to punch someone in the head and keep punching till their skull cracked. What. The. Fuck. He slammed the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Again. Again.
He breathed out long and hard. Collected himself. Edged into the tunnel lane. Crept forward. Calmed down. Miraculously, he made it across to New Jersey without killing anyone.
Robert stopped off along Route 3 at the Tick Tock Diner, all gleaming chrome and burgundy panelling, for coffee and a sandwichand to try to get cleaned up. The decor around the entrance was patterned like the cracking ice of his dream. He looked like he’d splintered into a dozen versions of himself.
Metabolized alcohol and adrenalin sloshed around in his bloodstream and fought with the coffee and the digestive rush of blood to his stomachas he downed a BLT. He got the Quad out to call Katherine, but closed his eyes first for a moment to think about what he’d say. He didn’t know what to tell her. He called anyway and got voicemail again. He told her he was on his way, not to worry.
Then he crashed: dozed off, right there in the booth, till the waitress nudged him awake so he could pay up. As soon as he sat down in the car, he realized he was no longer fit to drive. He fell asleep again.
When he came through the door he expected Katherine to be aghast at his swollen lip and nose. His mind was running at a hundred miles an hour, shooting off at different tangents. What could he tell her? What had to remain secret?
But she wasn’t there. All he found was a note.
Darling Robert
I need some time to clear my head. I love you, but I know I’m not being the wife you want or need. I feel hopeless, sexless, lifeless. I’ve gone for a drive. I’ll be back late. Don’t worry about me, I just need some time.
Kat
He took a deep breath.
She had done this before, heading off on her own to see a movie or eat dinner or occasionally see a friend. Mostly she said she was alone, and he believed her. She always came back.
He felt bone tired. He didn’t know how to help her return to him.
Should he worry? He dismissed the idea. She wasn’t going to hurt herself, he was sure. But his fear was that one day she just wouldn’t come back at all.
Drained and aching, he cleaned his face up in the bathroom, then poured himself a drink and sat in his study. One thing at a time.
He tried to pull it all together, retracing his steps and interpreting everything that had stuck in his mind since he’d left Adam’s apartment.
Stars beneath his feet: a magical path. A yellow-brick road?
Masks and costumes: disguise and deception. Not all is as it seems.
Spiral designs: ascent and descent.
A breathing wall: things that seem dead coming to life.
Code-breaking: find the deeper reality.
‘Remember death.’ As if he could do otherwise at Ground Zero, a place of deathand hatred, courage and sacrifice.
A grave, a bullet casing, the attack. More death. His desire to survive, to kill. His shame in being ready to kill. His pride in surviving. He had literally seen red. He could still feel the echo in his body of the power he had been able to tap into while fighting for his life.
Trying to still his mind, he plunged into automatic behaviour, which for Robert was research. He started googling, printing out results, making piles of related-sounding findings. He needed to understand. He called Horace. No reply.
He went to the website she’d told him to post to and checked if there were any other responses or comments. There were none.
He took a look at how the website worked. It was a free weblogging service. Very simple to use. He posted the pictures Terri had sent him, and some more of the photographshe’dtakenwith the Quadduring the day. Maybethey had someone else doing the same thing with a different URL to compete withhin. Blog versus blog. A blog-off. The prize? Adam. Or Adam’s life? Everyone’s life?
It occurred to him that Terri might not know his email address. He signed on as Adam on AOL and continued his research.
Then there was a trill, and Terri was online. He messaged her immediately. ‘Are you OK, Terri?’
‘Adam?’
‘No, sorry. Robert here.’
‘I didn’t expect you to pretend to be him again this evening. You must really enjoy it.’
‘There are limits.’
‘Do you know your limits, Robert?’
‘I nearly got killed after you vanished.’
‘I know. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help you. You fought. You survived. You still have the first key. I felt it.’
‘That’s what it is?’
‘Yes. And you still have the core on you, the major key, don’t you? You did well to survive. Protect them now.’
‘I will.’
‘What did you see? If you had to blurt out one thing. Say it.’
His mind flashed back to the moment he’d released his assailant, blinded with tears of rage. He’d wanted to kill the man. Hurt him. He’d made him a nothing, a creature beyond the pale, meriting no human consideration.
‘Something happened to me. My rage stopped, when I saw myself about to grind his face into the tunnel wall. I let him go. Just for a few seconds. Then I was as strong as an ox. Made of steel. I punched the guy into the middle of next week.’
‘But what did you see?’
‘Hate. Fear.’
‘And?’
‘You did well.’
‘I let him go.’
‘You had to.’
‘I would have killed him.’ Robert sighed. ‘This blog… Can Adam see it?’
‘He’s on the run, but I hope so.’
‘It’s not him sending you the GPS waypoints? The little clue ditty wasn’t from him?’
‘I don’t know who they’re from, I told you. All I know is this: Adam doesn’t know where the caches are. They were placed by the maker of the Ma’rifat’.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Explain those trances – or whatever it was you were doing when you were giving me directions. You sounded as though you were in pain.’
‘I’m not guiding you out of full knowledge, Robert. I’m picking up fragments of meaning from your surroundings and passing them on to you. We are both trying to solve the puzzle, you see? I get spatial perceptions – go right, stop here, turn left – and I get images of what is there that is relevant – buried stuff, or a shape, or an emotion, an echo of past activity at the site, or a sense of geometry, of the figure you are making as you go. Sometimes it’s like a set of coordinates, but in time and emotion as well as space. Sometimes it’s shapes, or rhymes… and I can’t remember what I say. I need a record, I need the blog… so I can try to work it all out. You need to ground me and relate what I see to the material world, here and now.’
‘That’s astonishing.’
‘You have greater abilities than I do. In potential. I work with some strong women who’ve taught me how to use it, but you outstrip us all. You’ve always known it. There’s always been part of you that understood what we call the green language, or the language of the birds.’
‘You don’t understand. I was brought up to kill it off in myself.’
‘And you nearly did. I’ve felt the fear around it. I’m going to help you bring it back. I need to, for the sake of us all. You’re a real Unicorn. You’ve no idea what a privilege it is to help you.’
Robert rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, fumbling for the right response. ‘Thank you. What’s so special about a Unicorn, exactly?’
Her response seemed to take several minutes. When it came, he felt his chest fill with a gratitude he had no idea how to share.
‘A Unicorn is the most powerful kind of healer. It is a being who can take the full array of human energies – and I mean the full array, starting with the energies of killing – and channel them all into building a body of light so intense that no evil can penetrate it, or with stand its touch.’
‘Body of light? Like the Swirly Man?’
‘That’s what it looks like. Adam said it’s so intense that even unawakened people can see it. It shines around you. Makes you look seven feet tall. They show up in myths as giants, as luminous teachers, as angels…’
The first line from the letter he had burned over twenty years ago lit up in Robert’s mind: To live well, know death.
He had wanted to kill that man. It had been necessary to want to kill him. And now he had to convert that power.
‘I think I understand. What happens if a potential Unicorn cannot channel these energies, cannot convert them?’
‘They die.’
They were both silent for a while. Robert looked within himself. He would find the strength. He had to.
‘May I ask you a favour, Robert?’
‘What?’
‘Could you stop pretending to be Adam? He might try to contact me. He can’t do that if you’re using his profile… I do know your email address.’
‘Oh…’
‘Please? You need to rest. Gather your strength.’
‘I want to see you tomorrow.’
‘Be at the site of the first cache. Tomorrow at 2 p.m.’
‘Will you be there?’
‘You’ll see me. Now go. I’m going to send you something to listen to tomorrow. It’s part of the puzzle. Till tomorrow. We’ll meet. I’ll explain. You’ll like it. Trust me. Please.’
And she was gone.
He took the bullet casing and the Malice Box to the hidden safe he and Katherine used for their valuables. Then, back at his desk, he continued to look things up, his mind haring in a dozen directions at once.
The image of the Man of Light burned in his brain. Robert found him in the Book of Revelation 10:1–4:
Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He had a little scroll open in his hand. And he set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and called out with a loud voice, like a lion roaring; when he called out, the seven thunders sounded. And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down.’
Seven thunders. Each a sealed secret. Had he just heard the first thunder, in the subway under Ground Zero?
He shook his head, fatigue in every bone. He worked on.
The obelisk at St Paul’s commemorated Irish patriot and former New York State Attorney-General Thomas Addis Emmet, brother of executed Irish patriot Robert Emmet, but it covered no grave. Thomas Addis Emmet’s vault was across town, at St Mark’s in-the-Bowery. Carved into the obelisk was its own location, latitude and longitude, in minutes, degrees and seconds.
None of it made sense. He rubbed his eyes in frustration. Terri’s email landed. It contained nothing but an audio file and the admonition not to listen to it until she told him to. He loaded it on to the Quad. Terri had asked him to dig deeper. He gathered his thoughts, wrote again and posted to the website.
If I look within myself at this place, I return to a memory so painful it still causes me to twist my head away as though ducking a blow. It is the image of a street covered in thick black dust, under thunderclouds, and at the end of the street the still-standing remains of a section of the World Trade Center towers, twisted and blackened and looking like the very mouth of hell, those Gothic arches backlit in the afternoon gloom from the arc lights of the searchers, the damp dust like cinders under my feet and the sheer hatred of the attack reverberating weeks after the towers fell. It caught me by surprise even though I knew it was there, as Katherine and I walked in the rain and held each other, in downtown Manhattan to spend some money to support the local vendors, the only time I could bring myself to go.
There was beauty still: the arches persisted, they were not all thrown down. Something defiant remained in their shattered suggestion of a cathedral entrance, of praying hands, of a portal that said: through these arches lies a womb, beyond this defilement there is rebirth, even here there will be love.
But the overriding pulse in that place was of such anger and hatred that I could not look at it for more than a second or two, I had to walk away, east, towards the South Street Seaport. It will never leave me.
We have been locked in a labyrinth since that day. How do we react, how does anyone react, to an act of such wickedness and still remain ourselves? You cannot be good unless you survive. But there is a monster within us who out of sheer fear says: do anything, hurt anyone, I don’t care: to anyone beyond the bounds of my tribe, anything may be done.
Today I thought I would die. I was so scared that for a moment I wanted anything, anything at all to happen to prevent it. Then suddenly I wasn’t afraid. We were right underneath Ground Zero. I stared into the face of death, and I fought for my life. I saw something in myself I had not seen before, and I came out on the other side. It was the ability, the desire, to kill.
It was dangerous, inchoate, raw energy that poured through me. Blood energy. I know now, with complete confidence, that I can draw on it again, whenever I need it.
Many years ago, someone within my family wrote to me with seven lines of wisdom. The first line was this: ‘To live well, know death.’ I think I understand: these were the first energies I had to tap into on the quest I have embarked upon. Raw, powerful, potentially murderous. If I can’t yoke them, I won’t have the strength to survive. But how to harness them?
At Ground Zero the towers fell and St Paul’s was left intact, not a window broken. A friend of mine, a masseuse, volunteered there for weeks, working on cops and firemen and construction workers, offering real physical compassion as others put together the chapel’s ministry of meals and water, a place to sleep, a place to find some solace for the heart. Yet this was all for ‘our’ people, for those like us who had suffered, those with whom we identified. For ‘identity’ comes from idem, ‘the same’. It is easy to pray for our friends. How many of us can truly pray for our enemies, for those who actively seek our death?
Robert had just finished posting when there was an IM trill from AOL. He figured Terri wanted to respond. But it was from AdamHD 1111.
‘So you’ve met the delicious Terri.’
‘Adam?’
‘She probably means to fuck your brains out tomorrow. Problem with that?’
Then he was gone.
Robert stared at the computer screen, willing him to come back, and praying he wouldn’t. Eventually he could bear it no longer and went to bed.
Adam took a deep breathand slowly exhaled, alone and racked with pain. He walked away from his computer and curled up in a ball on the bed, praying from his most secret inner place. He had taken a hell of a risk in attacking Robert. Either might have killed the other.
Compelled by the Iwnw to carry out the attack, and feigning complete obedience to them to buy time, Adam had prayed the experience would launch Robert on to the Path. It had worked, he felt, though only just. But Robert had passed the Trial by Earth. Drawn on his raw will to survive. Faced down death and fought for his life. And he’d seen its shadow side, known the tribal savage, the executioner, the torturer within. And he’d turned away from it. From pure earthtowards water, whichwashed away the dross.
The pain was growing. Adam steeled his will again to force away the Iwnw’s creature that was eating into his soul, into his very DNA, the Minotaur lodged within him. He recited his mantra of defiance:… death shall have no dominion… death shall have no dominion…
Only one in a thousand survived the road that Robert was taking, he knew. Adam would stay with him until the end. He couldn’t go on muchlonger. A few days more. Just long enough.
I am the maker of the Ma’rifat’.
I am not a hateful man. I love God with every pore, with every atom and breath of my body. I am in love with God. I wish only for everyone to see what I see in God. Please do not think of me as a primitive, tooth-gnashing kind of man. I am educated to a high level. I am almost what you might call a rocket scientist. I studied in the finest halls of Cairo and London, before coming to live in America. I worked at what I like to call the Ring of Gold – its official name is the RHIC, or Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – at Brookhaven, on Long Island. We smashed things there, to see what would happen. Not large things, though a secret part of me has always wanted to smash large things, like all boys, to see what happens. But we smashed together atoms of gold, at very high speeds. At speeds so close to the speed of light that time and space started to warp. My father taught physics and chemistry in Egypt and Iraq, and this would have been his dream. We created such powerful energies in the collider that particles appeared that have not appeared in nature since the first few nanoseconds after Creation. It is a marvel. It is almost like prayer: it gets us that close to the energies of God.
My mother is American, and I am an American.
You may call me Al-Khidr. I take the name of the great instructor and guide in hidden knowledge of God, the one who instructed Musa himself – Moses, as you call him – because I will teach you the greatest lesson of your nation’s history, and the lesson will be in destruction and rebirth, in wiping clean, in making holy once again that which is defiled.
My true name is unimportant. I shrug ged it off long ago. I lived among you, studied in your schools, ate in your homes, slept with your women. I held security clearances. You would not find me a prig or a bore. I know your literature and music. Do you know mine? I know your laws and institutions, your holy books and prayers. Do you know mine? I know your fears and nightmares. Do you know mine? My name is Al-Khidr, the ancient guide, and I am bringing you your lesson, which is the same lesson we must all learn.
I am not filled with hate. I am filled with love. I have come to love freedom, but I love God more. I have come to love America, but I love the earth more.
It seems to me that America must experience submission to the will of God. America must be shattered in order to emerge more whole and humble. America must learn that true freedom is found in submission, not in being the big gest, loudest, dumbest, horniest kid on the block. This is why I chose to destroy New York. But do not say I did it out of hate.