From the Ashes (8 page)

Jon tilted his head at Mara, fixing her with a compassionate gaze. “There still is you, Mara.”

“Yeah, I know. I know.” Mara raised her eyes to Jon, looking as though she were on the verge of tears. “Geez, Jon, how in the world are you holding up like this?”

“I’m not. My jet lag is probably disguising how I’m feeling. Believe me, I’m pretty screwed up right now. I haven’t really lost anyone that close to me since Mom died. I was thirteen, Michael was fifteen, and the four of us – Dad, Mom, Michael, and I – were down in Mexico working on a Mayan dig site. Mom was the ancient linguistics specialist, and some mysterious glyphs had been discovered at some ruins a few miles away from our site. So she went off into the jungle with a pair of guides and a grad student of my Dad’s who was kind of serving as her assistant. Michael and I were content to explore our site and help Dad out with some of the less mundane aspects of the dig – we were teenagers after all – and...” Jon stopped and gave Mara an apologetic look. “Sorry, you’ve probably heard all of this before from Michael.”

“Not all of it. Michael didn’t like to talk about it very much.” She gave him an encouraging smile. “And, please, let it all out. I’m sure it’s good for the healing process.”

Jon exhaled a shuddering breath and nodded. “Okay. So Michael and I are exploring the main ruins while Mom’s a few miles off in the jungle to decipher these new glyphs. She’s gone for a several hours, and when sunset arrives, and we still haven’t heard anything from Mom’s party, we start to worry. Just as Dad, Michael, and I start grabbing our flashlights and machetes to go looking for her, one of the guides stumbles out of the jungle, wide-eyed with fear. Dad grabbed him as he collapsed. The guide shivered violently, as though wracked with bone-chilling cold, even though the temperature was well into the nineties.”

Jon stopped for a moment to gather his thoughts. Mara waited patiently.

“‘
Muerto
.’” He shook his head at the table.
“‘Todo muerto.’
That was all the guide would say. He repeated it over and over again, like a mantra.
All dead.
The three of us all spoke Spanish, but the man wouldn’t elaborate on what happened. He died a few minutes later, still muttering his fearful mantra, still shivering violently, still wide-eyed in mortal terror.

“Michael was the first to call for a search party. Dad and I were also thinking it, but Michael beat us to the punch. Dad wanted to wait ‘til the light of morning. Said the jungle was too dangerous at night. And though the evidence of the danger of the jungle was lying dead at our feet, Michael insisted on beginning the search right then. I sided with Michael, partially because I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, and partially because... well, it was Michael.”

Mara smiled a little. She knew what Jon meant. Michael’s influence on his brother, and the esteem Jon held him in, were no secret.

“So we searched through the night, past sun-up, and all through the next afternoon. I don’t know how many miles we trekked through the jungle that day, but I do know what we found. Nothing. No trail to follow. No scrap of clothing or drop of blood or anything that might explain what happened. Dad called in a favor to the Director of the INAH – the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History who oversee archaeological sites and whatnot – who in turn managed to get a squad of Mexican troops to help comb the jungle for Mom and her group. The search party turned up absolutely nothing. Death certificates were drawn up, but Dad never lost hope that, somehow, Mom was still alive out there somewhere.

“And that, until now, was the worst moment of my life.” Jon looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. “Dad immersed himself in his work and got through each day solely on the blind hope that Mom was alive and would some day find her way back to him. And Michael and I were left predominantly to our own devices, forced to mourn our mother in a foreign country with no body, with no support from our father. So Michael was my rock, and I was his. We talked. We cried. We helped to distract each other from the pain. We explored and adventured and forced ourselves to do the things we knew we loved. Because we knew that’s what Mom would have wanted. She would have wanted us to keep on living all the more.” He stopped and bit his lip. “Michael and I wouldn’t have gotten through that without each other. And now that someone else has died, the one guy I relied on to get me through it the last time isn’t there anymore.”

Mara placed her hand on Jon’s arm. “Well, I’m here now, Jon. And vice versa, I think.”

“Yeah,” he said, thinking guiltily of the jealousy he’d felt toward her just a few days before. And of the way he’d abandoned his brother when, apparently, he’d needed him most. “Definitely.” A brief pause, a silence that seemed to echo the emptiness they felt, the void Michael had left, the absence of any sense of the future.

“So what was so interesting that he ran across?” he said, trying to change the subject to something more productive than wallowing in grief. He took another bite of his biscuit before continuing. “I mean, the Mafia of the 1950s is great fodder for Hollywood, but I don’t see how shedding new light on the relationship between the press and the mob half a century ago could have the implications he hinted toward over the phone.”

“He said he backdoored into something. In his research, he stumbled across a mob-blamed shooting that didn’t add up. And it led him to the threads of something much bigger. A government cover-up or something.”

Jon put the remains of his biscuit down. “A government cover-up? And what, some G-men killed Michael because he was the man who knew too much?” He shook his head. “C’mon Mara, this is real life, not a Robert Ludlum novel. The government goes around spending money they don’t have and covering up sex scandals, not murdering their own citizens to keep some grad student from publishing his allegations about a sixty-year-old murder charge.”

Mara’s face flushed. “Well, Michael’s dead, isn’t he? So we’re left with two options: he killed himself, or someone else killed him.”

Jon cocked an eyebrow. “But the government?”

“I never said the government killed him.
You
said that. I was just telling you what he was working on. Like you asked.”

Jon looked at her hand, which was caressing her pendant again. A comfort object, he supposed. A fitting choice for someone who had majored in Religious Studies like Mara had. “You’re right. I’m sorry. My mouth got away from me there.”

“It’s alright.” Mara gave him a crooked half-smile. “We’re both a little messed up right now. I think an extra dose of patience might be in order.”

Jon nodded. “Sounds good. So did he say exactly what this government cover-up or whatever was supposed to be?”

“Not to me. I think he might have been a little afraid... for me, at least. He didn’t want the ideas to get out before he could back them up.” She chuckled softly. “I thought it was kinda cute. Nice and chivalric and all, defending me from enemies unknown.” Then she fixed him with a gaze that seemed curiously cold. “He was really excited to tell
you
about it though. Figured you’d be proud of him. His adventuring buddy.”

Jon blinked, cocked his head querulously, but the look in her eyes was gone just as soon as it had appeared. Or maybe it had never been there at all. He sat quietly, looking pensive as he furrowed his brow and stroked the stubble on his chin.

“What?” Mara asked. No trace of the coldness.
Must’ve been my imagination,
Jon thought.
Too much, too soon.

“Can I borrow the key to Michael’s place?” he asked.

“Sure, but why?”

He pointed a thumb toward the door. “I wanna go over there and check it out. See what he was working on. Research-wise.”

“Okay...” Mara reached into her purse and withdrew her keys. “The cops cleared out pretty quick. Declared it a suicide, took the... took
him
to the morgue, and cleaned up the scene. Shouldn’t be any issues.”

“Do you want to come with? You’ve been there since I have... you could show me around and stuff.”

Mara shook her head vigorously. “Not yet, Jon. I can’t go back there just yet.”

“That’s fine.” He nodded and patted her hand. “I understand.”

“Michael’s research should be on his laptop and in a red notebook he keeps either on his desk or in his backpack.”

“The old beige one?”

Mara smiled a little. “That’s the one.”

“Ha! He’s still using that... oh,” he said, suddenly realizing that he’d used the wrong verb tense. Across the table, Mara frowned.

“Alright,” Jon said, “I’ll meet you back at your apartment, then? Say in an hour-and-a-half?”

“Yeah, that works.” The pair disposed of their trash and headed for the exit. Stopping just outside the restaurant, Mara grabbed his arm and gave him an anxious look.

“What?” he asked.

“Just...” She looked away briefly, then met his eyes again. “Be careful, all right?”

Langley, Virginia

Harrison Greer tightened his grip on the receiver, his palms beginning to sweat. He was pacing his office aimlessly, too nervous to stand still, too full of pent-up rage to sit down.

“I want a second opinion,” he bellowed into the phone.

“I
am
the second opinion, Mr. Greer.” The doctor’s voice was calm and measured. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a conversation like this. And it wouldn’t be the last. “Several of my colleagues have looked at the results, and the conclusion is, sadly, indisputable. I’m very sorry, sir. But there are options for cases such as yourself.”

Greer tried to swallow away the growing lump in his throat, but to no avail. “You say it’s inoperable and chemo and radiation therapy won’t do any good. What the hell options are there, in your
esteemed
second opinion?”

The doctor’s voice remained measured as he ignored Greer’s sarcasm. “Well, sir, we can put you in touch with a very good hospice service-”

Greer cursed at the man through the receiver and hung up. He flung the phone onto his desk, cursing again as he punched the side of one of the filing cabinets, leaving a large dent in the metal. He stopped when he realized he was damaging Division property. Took a deep breath, exhaled, slowly wobbled over to his desk, and sank into the seat.

Cancer. He was forty-eight years old, as fit as most college athletes, and he was about to be killed by an invisible mutation in his own body. He felt fine. But, as his father found out the hard way, cancer could seem dormant until it reared its ugly head all at once, striking down even the healthiest with shocking speed. But Greer would not be caught with his pants down. And he wouldn’t be caught dead whiling away his final days in some old folks’ death camp filled with nurses who couldn’t cure and patients who never checked out. No, he would choose his own way.

Unlike his father and grandfather before him, Harrison Greer had no progeny to pass the mantle of Director on to. He and his wife, Lucinda, had never had children. Once, shortly after they were married, Lucinda had gotten pregnant, but she had miscarried three months in. The doctor said that there was something wrong with the way her uterus was set up – Greer had cared less about the medical mumbo-jumbo and more about the bottom line – and told them that she would never have children. And, sad though Greer was not to be able to have any children of his own, he refused to consider adoption, primarily because that would entail agencies not privy to the secrets of the Division poking around in his life and background. That, and with the advances of DNA testing these days, you never knew when the kid you adopted was going to try to find his birth parents, stage some sort of reunion, and... again, it was way too much potential headache for Greer and his commitment to secrecy.

But one of the perks of being Director instead of a field agent was that he could have some semblance of a life. His death had never been staged; hence, the doctors knew his real name. But not, of course, his profession. Officially, he just worked for some top secret division of the government, one for which the line “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” was actually appropriate.

And he had Lucinda. He swiveled in his chair and opened one of his desk drawers. A framed portrait of his wife lay inside. He kept it inside his desk so as to always have it accessible, but to keep his love for her separate from the work he did at the Division. The task of defending the nation’s integrity could often get ugly – as any soldier could attest – and Greer didn’t want the image of his beautiful wife to be tainted by the horrors that performing his duties required.

The portrait had been taken years ago, back when they were both younger, back before the news about their inability to have a baby. He had taken the photograph himself, a vacation Polaroid that had turned out to be his favorite picture in the world. The way the sunlight sparkled in her eyes, the way a beach breeze made the tips of her curly black hair dance around her tanned, slender face.

The Bahamas. That’s where they would go. He had some money saved up. A lot of money, actually. He had never been much of a vacationer; the Division had always been his number one priority. The fate of the free world always seemed a more noble purpose than riding roller coasters in Florida or sipping Mai Tais on some bikini-laden island. But he would make up for that now. He would take the money and his wife to the Bahamas, where they would live out the rest of his days in tropical bliss. The doctor had said weeks, maybe months – who could tell – but Greer certainly wouldn’t see another Christmas. He would have to be sure to take a gun with him. Or perhaps just buy one there so as to circumvent Customs authorities. He was looking forward to spending some time away, with his beloved wife, but when his health started to deteriorate... Well, he’d been there when his dad had started crashing, seen the misery and dehumanization that comes with the long slow death of cancer. Greer didn’t want any part of that. When
his
health started to deteriorate, when he actually saw the end upon him, he would choose his own way to end things.

But before his vacation, he had one last thing to take care of. A rather big thing, actually. His legacy. The legacy of his father and grandfather before. He would complete their work and find what they had been searching for since day one of the Division’s existence. Though Greer had chosen his replacement already, he would not entrust this great task to someone else. He had to see it through, for his father and for his father’s father. He had been trying for years, but to no avail. And now time was running out for him. But fate, with its curious sense of irony, had also just dropped a wild card into his lap. A piece to the puzzle that had previously remained hidden, a key that could unlock everything Greer needed to know, a map that could lead them right to the prize he sought. It all depended on what was on Michael Rickner’s laptop.