'Everything is connected,' Veilleur said. 'Everything.'
'But we still don't know why the One is protecting this baby instead of disposing of it. Because if he wanted it gone, he wouldn't have waited for its birth; he'd have killed Dawn last year and been done with it. Someone's got plans for that baby.'
'Then those plans must include me,' Weezy said. 'Else why would he install the baby's mother across the hall?'
Jack had been thinking along those same lines.
Veilleur said, 'What puzzles me more is the obviousness of the move. The One is devious. He's practiced at the art of misdirection. A blind man could see through this.'
'Maybe that's the point,' Weezy said. 'Maybe we're supposed to see through it. Maybe its real purpose is to cause us to spin our wheels in confusion while the plan to bring down the Internet'-she glanced at the Lady-'and you, goes forward.'
Jack shook his head. 'Well, he's confusing me. Does he want us looking for Dawn's baby or not?'
'Maybe he doesn't care,' Weezy said. 'Maybe he's so confident the Internet will fall that he feels we're irrelevant now, and he's just playing with our heads.'
Veilleur pushed himself up from the chair. 'Weezy is right. If the assault on the Internet succeeds, these questions will be irrelevant. We must find a way to save the Internet.'
If I'd been allowed to find and take out Rasalom, Jack thought, this conversation would never have happened, because it would be irrelevant.
'Yes, please,' the Lady said. 'I like it here. I don't want to leave you. I don't want you to suffer what will befall you if I am taken away.'
Veilleur stared at her a moment, seemingly appraising her, then turned to Jack.
'May I ask you a couple of favors, Jack?'
'Sure.'
'Would you drive me out to Queens tonight?'
'Sure. When?'
'Around midnight or so?'
Jack frowned. 'Where do you want to go at midnight?'
'A graveyard. Would you be so kind as to bring along a two-gallon container of gasoline?'
'Um… okay. Can I ask what you need it for?'
'I'm going to help someone start a fire.'
'Well, as I always say, set a fire for a man and he's warm for a day; set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.'
Weezy punched his arm. 'Jack!'
But Veilleur's expression was stricken. 'How did you know?'
SATURDAY
1
'Bayside?' Jack said as he headed for the Queensboro Bridge. 'What's over there?'
He'd pulled up in front of Veilleur's building in his big black Crown Vic at about 12:10 and found him waiting at the curb. The old guy had given him the destination as he'd settled into the roomy front seat.
'A cemetery.'
Jack felt his gut clench. 'That wouldn't be Saint Ann's, would it?'
'Yes. How did you know?'
'I'm familiar with it. My… daughter is buried there.'
'Oh, yes. You mentioned her. Emma, correct?'
Jack nodded, his throat thick. She'd never been born, never officially lived, but she was far enough along in gestation and might have survived if not for the trauma Gia had suffered.
'I'm sorry,' Veilleur said. 'Had I known, I would have asked someone else.'
He found his voice. 'No, it's fine. Gia and I go out there every so often and visit her grave.'
Veilleur shook his head. 'Terrible thing to have to bury a child.'
'Have you-? Never mind. Of course you have.'
Over the span of the millennia he'd lived, Veilleur must have buried many children. Then Jack realized with a start that he'd lived long enough to bury all his children.
'Too many times. It wasn't so hard with the old ones-the sons and daughters who had lived a full life and eventually became sickly and decrepit with age. But the children who die as little ones… no matter how often you go through it, that ordeal does not get a bit easier.'
They drove in silence for a while, with Jack wondering how many children Veilleur had sired through the ages.
'Do you remember them? All of them?'
A sigh. 'All of them. They ran the gamut from the saintly to the downright evil.'
'Evil? You had an evil child?'
He nodded. 'A number of them. Some people are simply born bad. They grow up bad. There's no accounting for it. A couple of them, well, I had to end their lives myself.'
Jack swallowed. 'Kill your own child?'
'Twice, yes. They weren't children, they were grown men, and they were killers. This was in times without much in the way of civilization, no 'authorities' who could arrest them, no medications to treat them, no jails to lock them up. But they had to be stopped. They couldn't be allowed to go on raping and killing whenever they felt an urge in their loins or became angry. So it fell to their father to stop them.'
Jack tried to imagine…
'There was no one else?'
'How could I let someone else kill one of my sons? I'd brought him into the world. He was my responsibility.' He rolled his shoulders. 'Can we talk about something else?'
'Yeah. Sure.'
Gladly.
Jack said nothing for a while, too dazed by the thought of having to kill your own child. What kind of world had it been between civilizations? Rule by brute force… survival of the fittest…
Veilleur-Glaeken-had survived all that. The stories this man could tell…
In an effort to break the silence and change the subject, he said, 'I'm pretty sure you won't be able to get in Saint Ann's at this hour.'
'I won't need to.'
He remembered the two-gallon can sitting behind his seat.
'I brought the gas.'
'I know. I can smell it. Thank you.'
'Mind telling me what this trip is all about?'
'I'd be glad to if I could, but I'm not sure myself. All I can say is that someone does not rest easy in the soil of Saint Ann's.'
' 'Not easy'… we're not talking a vampire or anything like that, are we?'
Veilleur made an amused sound, not quite a laugh. 'No, nothing so prosaic, I'm afraid. The inhabitant of this unmarked grave is human, or was, but somehow, in some way, it has been infused with the Otherness.'
'You mean oDNA?'
'No. It's something from without. This is the One's doing.'
Remembering something from one of his trips to St. Ann's, Jack said, 'There's a patch of ground there where nothing will grow. I got that from a very frustrated groundskeeper. No matter what he does, nothing will germinate or survive on this oblong patch.'
