From the Ashes (36 page)

The detour that Jon had yanked Mara on, the route that flashed in his memory like a photograph from his cursory examination of the map just minutes before, avoided the back entrance altogether, instead taking them down the stairs, past the bag check, and through a tunnel before finally exiting into the sunlight. They slowed down right before reaching the bag check desk, sure that a pair of young people running out of the museum at full tilt might throw up some red flags, even if their dark clothing was miles away from the description Jon had offered them.

After powerwalking past the bag check station – only now aware of his luck at coming in the side entrance and not being forced to check his backpack with the attendant when entering the museum, an oversight on the staffers’ part that now seemed like a godsend – and down the long hallway of stairs, Jon pushed the door to the outside open and breathed deep the cool spring air, the air of freedom. Almost.

They picked up the pace again, jogging at a reasonably fast clip, when they heard the door behind them fly open, slamming against the doorstop as the red-faced guard, Carl, shot into the daylight. Blinking once, twice, he swiveled his head around quickly as though it had three settings: left, right, and forward, jerking between each in a split second. Over his shoulder, Jon could see that the guard had sighted them, shouting unintelligibly from behind and starting after them.

“Crap! He’s still on our tail,” Jon said as he accelerated across the street, Mara following his example. She had a fearful look in her eyes that reminded Jon of a cornered animal, the feral survival instinct that all the civilization in the world couldn’t drive from the human race. And he wasn’t sure that his expression was any more comforting.

Jon chanced another look over his shoulder. Thankfully, Carl didn’t yet seem to have the rest of the guards rallying behind him, perhaps because the rest of the museum still needed guarding – and this could have theoretically just been a distraction so a second party could abscond with a greater prize – or perhaps because Jon’s theft of the guard’s radio had robbed him of the ability to describe the situation and the nature of the incident, something which Jon knew no one, save he and Mara, had any real idea of. But despite the apparent reluctance of the rest of the guards to join in the chase, it wouldn’t take them long to begin their own pursuit. Now, though, Carl was on Jon and Mara’s heels – keeping pace with them, not gaining, not falling behind, but the stitch in Jon’s side told him that this wouldn’t end well unless they mixed things up a bit.

“We... need to split up,” Jon huffed between deep breaths of much-needed air. “Meet back... at the same spot... in Central Park?”

Mara nodded quickly, nervously as they approached an immediate fork in the path. “Be careful.”

“You too,” Jon said. They hit the fork, Mara turning left, back toward Fort Tryon Park, Jon turning right toward the road. He slowed his pace slightly, hoping to entice the guard to follow him and leave Mara to escape unharassed. A few seconds after the pair had parted ways, Jon chanced a look over his shoulder. The guard hesitated briefly, unsure, then turned to his right to follow Jon. Jon sighed between breaths, immediately wishing he hadn’t, as his cramp worsened.

The path headed downhill. Steep, almost treacherously so. A makeshift stairway with narrow, uneven steps led down, down to his salvation, to his getaway.

The street.

A taxi waited at a traffic light. The flashing
Don’t Walk
signal indicated that the light would change soon, that the taxi would be driving away, that his window of opportunity, of escape, was closing fast. And each step he took, trying to clear as many stairs as possible without breaking his ankle with a poorly aimed landing, each step required him to slow down, to navigate, to be careful. Given, Carl had to slow down, too, but Carl had backup. Carl wasn’t on the run. Jon was alone and in flight. And his only ticket out of there seemed to be taunting him, the precarious descent preventing him from reaching his destination in time.

The light turned green. The traffic was too light to expect another taxi to come by in time. The taxi began to move south.

Jon saw his chance. The stairs continued down the hillside to the street. But so did the hillside itself, now running adjacent to the stairs. Jon chose the hillside, leaping off the path and scrambling down the dirt slope to the street.

Feet hitting asphalt, he ran in front of the yellow car and threw his palms in front of him, beseeching the taxi to stop. The vehicle screeched to a halt just inches away from Jon’s kneecaps, the driver leaning out of his window to yell at him in typical New York cabbie vernacular. Jon ran around the side of the cab and hopped in the back, greeted with continued abuses about his mental capacity and the night-time profession of his mother. Jon responded by tossing three twenties over the front seat.

“145
^th
Street Station, and step on it!” Jon shouted.

The cabbie eyed the money lying where it had fallen on the seat, snatched it up, and put the car back into gear.

“You got it, boss,” said the instantly congenial driver as he gunned the engine, leaving behind an irate Carl, who was just breaking through the trees and stepping onto the sidewalk, empty-handed.

All the way to the 145
^th
Street Station, Jon worried about Mara, about the repercussions of their actions even
if
they both got away. With each breath that he took to refill his starving lungs, he felt increasingly grateful for each ounce of precious oxygen. Like a terminal patient savors the taste of each meal, each moment of his family’s company, Jon didn’t want to take a single breath for granted. His last could be just moments away.

Especially considering the sinister-purposed man who was trailing Mara at that very moment, trusting her to lead him to Jon, the Dossiers, and their inevitable deaths.

Harrison Greer surveyed the city from the 102
^nd
story observation deck of the Empire State Building. He was alone, the chilly weather and constant winds at this height keeping most of the tourists at bay. He surveyed the city, a city built by powerful men, men with names like Woolworth, Chrysler, Vanderbilt, Morgan – and Rockefeller. Men with more money than any one man would ever need. Men who thought they were above the law of the land. Somewhere in this city, Rockefeller had hidden something that was rightfully the property of the United States Government. It was a national security threat, and he, Harrison Greer, was about to find it and destroy it. With the threat of the Dossiers eliminated, Greer would have completed the overriding goal of his father and grandfather. He could leave the running of the Division – if the Secretary of State decided that there was a need to continue the Division’s mandate – to Enrique Ramirez, a man who had proven his zeal for the ideological security of this country many times over. It was almost a shame that Ramirez couldn’t be alongside him in these final hours, finishing the mission together and passing the torch of the Director’s office on to him. But that was not Ramirez’s fate. He was not a man for subtle subterfuge; he was a prime killing machine. And that was why Greer had had to rely on a new recruit, Wayne Wilkins, to be his counterpart here, to drive their quarry into the trap that the Director had set.

Greer sighed as he caught sight of the skyscrapers of the Rockefeller Center complex stabbing into the twilit sky. It was almost over now. All that remained was for Wilkins to finish his mission, and the fruit that his family had been working toward for seventy years would be ripe for the picking.

As though by some sort of telepathic link, Greer’s phone began to ring, the Caller ID identifying it as Wilkins’s Division-issued cell phone. Greer glanced around to ensure that he was still completely alone, and answered the phone in the middle of the second ring.

“Greer.”

“Status report, sir.”

“Wilkins. What’s the news?”

“They’re making headway, sir. It looks like your hunch was right. They might be the ones to lead us to it after all.”

“I thought as much,” Greer said. “So when they find the Dossiers, they’re going to give them to you as an employee of the National Security Archive, right?”

“Right. They think I’m a fellow truth-seeker who has the connections to get the Dossiers into the right hands to stop the killing and bring Michael Rickner’s killer to justice.”

“Excellent. And they don’t suspect that the reason you know about the Operation is because you’re one of us?”

“No sir. In fact, I told them that Michael and I crossed paths in our research, that I was sorry to hear about his death.”

Greer guffawed into the mouthpiece. “Brilliant! Tug at their friggin’ heartstrings, Wilkins. Great thinking, kid.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’ll hear from you again as soon as anything new develops?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent work, son. I look forward to great things from you.”

A pause, almost imperceptible. Then Wayne said, “Thank you, sir.”

The line disconnected, and Greer stared out at the horizon, the daylight slowly giving way to the oncoming night. Wayne had nearly completed his mission. Everything was going swimmingly. He leaned toward the railing, his eyes shut in silent contemplation, soaking up the cool wind on his face. And then his phone rang again.

He pulled back from the railing and looked at the Caller ID.
Ramirez.
Curious.

“Yes?” Greer answered.

Ramirez’s voice was tense. “Director Greer, we’ve got a situation.”

Greer blinked. “I just heard from Wilkins, and he said everything was going according to plan. What’s this situation you’re worried about?”

“The situation
is
Wilkins, sir. He’s turned.”

Greer shook his head in disbelief. “Ramirez, what the hell are you talking about? There’s no way one of my agents would turn traitor. I make sure of that personally.”

“Well, Wilkins slipped through the cracks somehow. He fooled you. Apparently, sir, he’s fooled us all.”

“That’s a hell of an accusation to be throwing around, Ramirez. What on earth would make you think that he’s turned on us?”

“He’s already found a journal page from Rockefeller himself.”

Greer paused. “Who did? Rickner?”

“No, sir. Wilkins. He didn’t tell you about that, did he?”

Greer swallowed, his forehead growing warm despite the cold breeze that blew against it. “No, he didn’t. Does he still have it, or has he sent for someone to retrieve it?”

“Neither. He gave it to Rickner.”

Greer’s eyes grew large.
“What?”
Depending on what it said, the journal entry could have put the ball back in the Division’s court, perhaps even removing the need to use Rickner. To have this new development and not even report in about it was suspicious at best, treasonous at worst. This was Greer’s operation, and keeping him in the dark about finding a direct piece of evidence from the magnate himself was beyond unacceptable.

“Secondly, his cover story wasn’t a cover story at all. He told them he was an agent with the Division. Named names and everything. I’ve overheard them say both your name and mine since they met with Wilkins.”

“This can’t...” Greer wanted to curse and fling the phone off the railing, but that would serve no purpose. He needed to stay in control. He always stayed in control of himself. And he desperately needed to understand and control this situation.

“And finally, the GPS transmitter you gave him. It’s active?”

Greer tried breathing through his nose. “Yeah. He
said
he dropped it in Ellison’s purse.”

“Where does it say they are right now?”

“Hang on a second.” Greer pulled his GPS monitoring device from his coat pocket. “Washington Square, in Greenwich Village.”

“Then why am I staring at her right now in
Fort Tryon Park.
Six miles from there.”

Greer pulled the phone from his face, as though the device itself were as loathsome as the words coming from it. His world began to tilt on its axis. He wasn’t afraid of heights, but right now, he had the worst sense of vertigo, as though every pillar he had built his life’s work upon was crumbling as his plan crashed down around him. He put the phone back to his ear and replied, “No. How’s that possible?”

“I figure he dropped
your
GPS transmitter in the purse of some third party who’s still tooling around the city. It would appear that Wilkins is tracking Rickner and Ellison through a transmitter of his own. He’s gone rogue, sir. I’m sorry.”

He grabbed the railing to steady himself. Everything had been going so right, and then...

“How do you want to play this, sir?”

Greer wished it weren’t true. He prayed it weren’t true. And yet, Greer trusted Ramirez’s judgment over anyone’s other than his own. If Ramirez wasn’t one-hundred percent sure Wilkins had turned, he never would have phoned in his suspicions. And, Greer realized as he stared at the GPS tracker in his hand, the proof of something terribly amiss was staring him in the face. If Ramirez said Wilkins had turned, then by God, it had to be taken care of.

“Sir?”

“It sounds like Rickner and Ellison have been given enough of a push to find the Dossiers on their own now. You take care of Wilkins. I’ll take care of the Dossiers myself. Contact me on my cell when you’ve gotten what you can out of Wilkins.”

“Consider it done, sir.”

Greer hung up and gripped the railing again, glaring out into the gathering dark. He was seething. He wanted to smash something. But he had to control himself so he could regain control of the mission. He had to channel that anger toward his all-important goal.

All of his plans for the endgame now lay in ruins. The betrayal had changed the whole setup. Wilkins could have described Greer’s appearance, perhaps even shown them a picture. If they spotted him, or anyone they might suspect was him, the whole enterprise could be for naught. All his carefully-laid plans, the brilliant opportunity that fate had given him in the Rickner brothers, the decades of trying to finally conquer Rockefeller’s last secret; all of it was now at risk, because he trusted the wrong man. Greer had never had an agent turn before. Nor had the Division itself. The closest it had come was Roger Blumhurst, who had, like Rockefeller himself, taken the coward’s way out, neither having the strength to do what was required of him, nor the traitorous balls to go all the way and make public what he knew. But if Ramirez was to be believed, then Wayne Wilkins had not only fallen off the path and protocols that Greer had dictated, he had also chosen to ally himself against the Division and all that it stood for. Including the protection of this great nation from the horrible truth of Operation Phoenix. Wilkins was now an enemy combatant in this war, and Ramirez was better suited than anyone to tie up this very loose end.