From the Ashes (21 page)

“And he didn’t check it out or anything, right? It’s still there?”

“I don’t believe they allow you to check out microfilm. Unless it’s an academic loan through a university in the city or something like that. Either way, no, Michael didn’t check it out. Just made a print of what he found. It should still be there.”

“Thank you so much, Professor.” Jon’s voice was full of enthusiasm and excitement, the restless night and crappy window view now a million miles away.

“Not at all, Jon. You two take care of yourselves out there, alright? Remember, everyone else who has ever tried to do what you’re doing... well, they’re not around anymore. Watch yourselves.”

Jon swallowed hard, exhaling a thick breath from his nostrils. Slowly. “Yes sir. We’ll be careful.”

“And let me know of any developments. Anything I can do for you from this end, you let me know. I’ve got a feeling time may be against us here, so the more hands we have working on this thing, the quicker we should succeed.”

“Will do. Hopefully you’ll hear from us this afternoon.”

“I’ll be looking forward to your call, Jon. Give my best to Mara, and Godspeed to you, son.”

“Thanks, Professor.”
Click.

Mara turned from the suitcase she was digging in toward Jon as he finished the call. “You got something?”

“New York Public Library. The main branch on 5
^th
Avenue. Michael got the article from there.”

She took a deep breath, exhaling in a sigh. “Good. Breakfast first?”

“Yeah.” The pair grabbed their belongings, Jon taking the backpack he was already beginning to think of as his, Mara her purse, and the pair went downstairs to breakfast at Lindy’s, the cafe by the Seventh Avenue entrance to the hotel. After an aptly named “Big Breakfast” apiece, they made their way up Seventh Avenue, across 34
^th
Street to Fifth Avenue, then north eight blocks to their destination. They passed between the famous stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, who stood sentinel at the entrance to the library. More classically sculpted figures looked down at the pair from atop the triple arcade, unflinchingly guarding the repository of information as they had for the past century. Jon and Mara walked up the stairs, feeling strangely secure under the watchful gaze of the stone guardians, and into the historic Beaux Arts-style building.

Just inside the entrance, a dark-haired man in a black suit and blue tie with a briefcase tucked underneath his arm, thumbing through a day planner, bumped into Mara, almost knocking her down.

“Hey!” Jon exclaimed in concern.

“Oh, so sorry,” said the man.

“I’m fine,” Mara said, slinging her purse back over her shoulder. She locked eyes with the man. Briefly. His ice blue eyes made her shiver. He broke eye contact and nodded before continuing on his way out the door.

“You okay?” Jon asked.

“Yeah. I thought he was after my purse at first, but I guess he was just too caught up in whatever he was reading.”

“Your wallet still in there? These pickpockets can be pretty crafty.”

She checked her purse. “Yup, still there. Besides, how many pickpockets patronize the library in a business suit?”

“It’s New York,” Jon said with a sideways glance at her. “I bet there’s at least one.”

They made their way down the hall to the Microform Room – where the library housed its extensive collection of microfilm, microfiche, and other pre-digital age periodical archive mediums – without further incident. A pair of tables stood to their left, and rows of microfilm readers spanned the length of the room. The far end held a series of tall filing cabinets, and an expansive set of large, professional looking volumes filled the bookshelves on the right. Behind the counter to their right, a man in his mid-thirties sporting a stylish goatee, shoulder-length hair, and a green turtleneck, wearing a name badge that identified him as a library staff member, sat in a chair and stared at the clipboard he held. He looked as though he would fit right in with the crowd of beatniks at a Greenwich Village poetry reading.

“Excuse me,” Jon said.

“Mmm?” asked the man, whose name badge identified as Eli, pretending he hadn’t noticed them before.

“Can you help us find a certain newspaper? We’re a little lost in here.”

Eli sighed impatiently as though he had just been asked the most inane question in the world, a question he was far too busy to be expected to deal with. Jon shot a look at Mara, who already had one eyebrow raised.

“Which newspaper would you care to see, sir?’

“The
Brooklyn Herald!

”

“The
Brooklyn Herald,
eh?” said Eli, starting to walk toward one side of the room, apparently intending for the pair to follow him. “That’s an obscure one.”

“Oh, you’ve heard of it?” Jon said, he and Mara falling in next to the library staff member.

“Please. I work in the Microform section of one of the most expansive libraries in the world,” Eli retorted, his voice dripping with haughty indignation. “Of
course
I’ve heard of it. Although I do believe that we are the only institution to archive that particular newspaper. As I said, it’s extremely obscure.”

“Uh huh,” Jon replied, fighting the temptation to slap the man across the face.

“You need to fill out this form.”

Jon looked at the form and thought back to the date on the article Michael had printed and pasted in the notebook: October 10
^th
, 1957.

“Can you do the whole month of October 1957?” Jon asked with an attempt at a friendly smile plastered on his face.

“I imagine so. The dailies were rather short back then. Most rolls have at least a few months on them. And the
Herald
went out of business... You said you wanted October ‘57?” Jon nodded. “Heh. That should all be on one roll then. The paper went belly-up right before Halloween. IRS shut ‘em down or something. Not that they had that much of a readership, of course.”

Jon met Mara’s disbelieving gaze, another piece of the puzzle coming together a little too clearly, although the finished picture on the box was still blurry, amorphous, a continually shifting portrait of phantoms and shadows. The beatnik employee cleared his throat and glanced at Jon, then at the form, motioning with bored eyes that he had better things to do than wait for patrons to fill out forms. Jon turned to finish the form and handed it to Eli. Eli tore off the carbon copy beneath, handed the copy back to Jon, and turned to go in the back.

“Wait here,” Eli said with his back to Jon and Mara, his air of superiority still being laid on thick. “I’ll be right back.” And he disappeared through the door.

Jon spoke first, whispering louder and more quickly than he intended to. “The paper got shut down by the government just a few weeks after they report on the public suicide of a U.S. soldier who had supposedly died in combat six years earlier. The only witness to a murder the soldier seemingly committed just hours before his real death is run down in the streets two days later, and the reporter who dared to cover the stories is mown down in a hail of gunfire just days afterward. Coincidence?”

“Creepy, is what it is, Jon. Downright creepy.”

Jon nodded his solemn agreement. “Michael was certainly right. Something is rotten in the State of Den-”

“Where the hell is it?” Eli demanded in a fury, a split second before the “Staff Only” door slammed against the doorstop. His finger, jabbing in the faces of Jon and Mara, shook with the rest of his hands. Fury and panic warred in his eyes.

“Where is what?” Jon asked in a deliberately hushed tone, more suited to their library surroundings than the tone Eli had just used, eliciting the stares of several patrons throughout the room.

“The— the microfilm is gone.”

“Gone, like checked out?”

“No. Gone, like stolen.
Somebody stole the archives for the whole damn paper
.”

Wayne’s pale blue eyes were now shielded from the sun’s rays by the reflective lenses of the Ray-Bans he had extracted from his suit pocket. A brief reprieve, to be made unnecessary as soon as he set foot in Grand Central Station, just a few short blocks away. He walked east along 42
^nd
Street, squinting into the morning sun despite the added protection of the sunglasses.

He had already had quite a busy morning. Monitoring the targets’ conversations, ascertaining their next move, and staying one step ahead of them. It was something he had been skilled at in war zones. From just a few pieces of information about a man’s character and personality, from just a few minutes of observing him in his natural habitat, Wayne could draw up a fairly accurate profile of the man, a profile that would allow him, more often than not, to figure out what the target’s next move would be even before the mark himself knew.

The game of cat and mouse was far more complex here though. For one, there weren’t millions of potential witnesses in the villages and insurgent strongholds in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sites of his previous missions were in officially declared war zones, not in an iconic American city, the same city that had suffered the attacks that had sparked the “War on Terror.” And this mission couldn’t be accomplished with just a well-aimed bullet. Both the carrot and the stick had to be employed, driving his targets where he needed them to go, to do what he needed them to do.

If you knew the right strings to pull, the marionette would do almost anything.

After leaving his room on the eighteenth floor of the Hotel Pennsylvania, Wayne had walked to the New York Public Library, sneaked into the Microform archives via an “Employees Only” entrance, and absconded with all eight years’ worth of the library’s microfilm collection of the
Brooklyn Herald.
Dumped in a black plastic trash bag and hidden inside the briefcase he carried under his arm. He didn’t want to
destroy
any information just yet. Greer wanted him to, but he had too much of a respect for learning and knowledge to destroy what seemed to be the only remaining copies of the newspaper in any library in the country. Somehow it got missed in the purges, and now he was supposed to finish the job. Well, for all intents and purposes, it
was
purged now. And his purpose for taking the microfilm had nothing to do with information containment; he simply wanted to draw in all the leads so that only one remained: him. Hello, carrot.

Fear remained a good stick for the time being. If that scuffle Jon had had with Ramirez at the apartment didn’t have him looking over his shoulder, he would be soon. In fact, that was probably why Ramirez, Greer’s golden child, hadn’t been given this assignment. He left a witness. The fact that Greer hadn’t ordered Ramirez’s immediate dismissal spoke volumes about their relationship. But if Ramirez had been given any hint of the kind of mission his mistake had deprived him of, and if Greer had told him who was getting the assignment that otherwise should have been his, he surely would have been furious. Thus, in all likelihood, explaining the contemptuous stare he had drilled Wayne with as they passed in the halls.

And so, for whatever reason, Greer had given this mission to Wayne. Perhaps he really did admire his skills; Wayne certainly wouldn’t deny that thus far, his skills had proven more than sufficient. Perhaps it was because New York was Wayne’s backyard, despite all the emotional baggage the city held for him post-9/11; he didn’t need a street map to figure out which streets led where, nor a compass to navigate the more expansive parks of the city. Or perhaps Greer just didn’t have anyone else who
quite
fit the bill. So he settled for the new guy. And even though Wayne told himself he was more than up to the task, the truth was, he was in uncharted waters here. His was a terribly important yet precarious assignment. Made all the more risky by factors of which Greer, seemingly blind to the real world outside his single-minded dedication to the Division’s mandates, hadn’t the slightest inkling.

As Wayne approached the entrance to the world-famous Grand Central Terminal, he looked up at the looming statues of Mercury, Hercules, and Minerva, perched around the clock that read 10:21. Mercury, the fleet-footed messenger of the gods. Hercules, the powerful demigod who used his physical strength, and the gullibility of others, to accomplish his ends. Minerva, the embodiment of wisdom and moral turpitude. Was there some symbolism there? Greer would be Hercules, to be sure. Fierce, manipulative, bloodthirsty, cunning; all the attributes the Greeks and Romans loved in their heroes, a far cry from the selfless valiance that more recent heroes in Western civilization represented – a result of the influence of Christian teachings and values in European society throughout the intervening centuries. Minerva: well, Wayne
hoped that
for once in his life, he was using the wisdom he’d been given – he needed it now more than ever. And Mercury? The instant information relay of the digital age. More precisely, satellites.

Wayne pulled out the pocket-sized GPS receiver he had tucked in his suit jacket. The little red dot near the corner of Fifth and 42
^nd
told Wayne that Jon and Mara were still at the library, probably just now realizing the fruitlessness of their quest there. Unless Mara had discovered that his bumping into her hadn’t been an accident, and she had found the tiny GPS transmitter he had dropped into her open purse. Considering how much stuff women seemed to carry around in their purses, especially the fashionably large ones like Mara was carrying, he seriously doubted the transmitter was in jeopardy of being found.

Indeed, the pair had been careful about not being tracked, even going so far as to ditch their cell phones and buy prepaid ones with cash. But Jon, apparently meticulous about keeping track of his money – a strangely all-too-rare characteristic in today’s world plagued by credit card fraud and identity theft – had held on to the store receipt from the purchase. And even if he did realize that the receipt for the cell phones was no longer with the others in his bag at the hotel, he would have likely thought nothing of it. Besides, he was too busy solving his brother’s murder and uncovering a national secret to do much book-balancing right now. Wayne, on the other hand, had plenty of use for the receipt. With the timestamp on the slip, coupled with the store’s hacked inventory records, he had ascertained the numbers of the three phones the young scholar had purchased, careful observation of Jon and Mara allowing him to figure out which phone belonged to whom. Because, ultimately, he would only need one.