From the Ashes (37 page)

Greer turned his mind to the problem immediately at hand: reclaiming the Dossiers and killing Jon and Mara without being detected and scaring his quarry off. He thought back over what Ramirez had told him over the phone. He thought about Rockefeller and his hidden secret. His mind honed in on a brilliant possibility that would all but negate any further betrayals that Wayne might have orchestrated. A wicked smile crawled its way across Greer’s face. Not only would it work, but the revised ending to his plan was decidedly poetic. As well it should be.

Within a matter of hours, the Dossiers would be safely in his hands; Wilkins, Rickner, and Ellison would be dead; and the truth would forever be safe from the scrutiny of the public eye. Seventy years of searching were about to come to a head; and Greer would have a ringside seat. He was director, screenwriter, and lead actor all rolled into one. And after it was all finished, he could retire and live out his final healthy days in paradise with his beloved Lucinda.

As he turned back toward his hotel to gather what he needed for the final showdown, he lifted his eyes skyward.

This is it, Dad, Grandpa. The end to your life’s work. This one’s for you.

Upon arriving at the 145
^th
Street Station, Jon thanked the cab driver, dove into the station, swiped his MetroCard and boarded the southbound train. The guard might have gotten a look at the taxi’s number, a potential problem if he were to call it in to the police, so Jon had opted to just drive to safety, then let the anonymity of public transit ferry him the rest of the way. A nervous train-ride later, Jon emerged into the waning green-filtered sunlight of Central Park. Entering the park, he meandered along the paths, the sense of urgency gone, the fear that he would arrive at their agreed meeting place to find it inexorably devoid of Mara all too real. He tried to call her, but her cell phone went straight to voicemail. If something had happened to her... He couldn’t bear the thought, especially considering how he had abandoned her in the park. Not abandoned, perhaps, but Jon knew he would feel that way if she got captured – or worse.

Eventually, realizing that Mara might end up waiting for
him
in the clearing, going through the same guilty routine he had envisioned himself dealing with, he made his way to the small clearing just off the jogging path. Upon his arrival, his feelings of worry and guilt came rushing back. If enough time had transpired for him to be worried about Mara waiting alone, then surely she should have had time to get here by now. At least, if she hadn’t been detained...

Jon tried to push the thought out of his mind, giving the area a quick visual check to ensure that he was as alone as he needed to be. Satisfied, he fished from his pocket the small stone tablet he had taken from Ermengol’s sepulcher, sat down on the grassy patch beneath his feet, and began to study the next clue, a task he had all but forgotten about in his flight from the museum, a task he felt could distract him from his worry about Mara.

The tablet was small, only about the size of Jon’s index, middle, and ring fingers pressed together. Jon was amazed that it hadn’t broken during his flight, immediately grateful for small blessings. The couplet inscribed on it resembled the one from the Prometheus statue, written in plaintext, presumably because it wasn’t hidden in plain sight like the one at Riverside Church. It read:

Jon unconsciously mouthed the words as he read it a second time. Hughes’ Folly. He knew this one. It was on the tip of his tongue. Why wouldn’t it come? It referred to a church, he remembered, but anyone could have figured that out with the inclusion of words like “penitent,” “pray,” and “saint.” Why couldn’t he remember it?

Jon tilted his head back and looked skyward, a jet drawing its frozen contrails across the stratosphere, a line of white across a once-blue sky, steadily bleeding toward the orange of sunset. He knew why the name of the church wouldn’t come. He was distracted. It would soon be dark, and still no Mara. He gave a little moan, rubbed the heels of his palms against his eyes as though to crush out this reality and wake up in another, one where the government wasn’t plotting against its citizens, where he wasn’t being chased by assassins, where Mara wasn’t in lock-up somewhere. Where Michael was still alive.

As the jet disappeared behind the branches of the trees overhead, Jon found himself staring at the stream of frozen condensation left in its wake. Michael was gone, out of sight, but his memory, his impact on Jon’s life and the lives of countless others, lived on. And Jon wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing right now. His feelings hung suspended in oblivion and numb to their surroundings, like so many ice particles dangling impotently miles above the earth. For the time being though, Jon surmised, a lack of any powerful – and likely overwhelming – emotion was probably for the best. Once the chase was over, once the task was done and the bullseye off of his back, then Jon could mourn his brother’s death, could celebrate the life he had lived and the influence he had had. Then, and only then, could he finally begin to pick up the pieces of his life, to heal the hole in his heart that Michael’s death had left, a hole Jon could not even start to acknowledge right now, for fear of the debilitating effect it would likely have on him. And if he didn’t watch himself, he might end up joining Michael before he’d even had a chance to mourn him.

Saint. That word was key, he felt. But why? Jon’s mind was working in slow motion, as though it had been dipped in tar, addled by some depressant he hadn’t taken. Saint. Sometimes churches were named after saints. Saint of my plight. Rockefeller’s plight. What saint would that be? But “Hughes’ Folly,”
that
pointed to the church, Jon was sure of it, even if the church’s name continued to evade him. So the saint was inside the church? A particular saint. Inside the church. At the church where Jon worshipped, they didn’t have saints in the church. Saints were respected but not revered in Protestant churches. Not in Protestant churches. Which left Orthodox churches and Catholic ones. Catholic churches.

Jon smiled as his brain finally made the connection he was looking for. Hughes’ Folly. Archbishop John Hughes. He had been ridiculed for the site he had chosen in the 1840s for the building of the new Catholic Cathedral of the Diocese. It was way up in the boondocks of what Manhattan was then, and some had derided the choice of location as “Hughes’ Folly.” But today, it was not only one of the most beautiful churches in the United States, it was also right in the middle of Midtown Manhattan. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Archbishop Hughes’s supposed folly, had been built on the outskirts of the town, but less than a century later, the city had moved its epicenter north, putting the church right in the heart of one of the busiest cities on earth.

Right across the street from Rockefeller Center.

Jon leapt to his feet with excitement, wiping the grass and dirt from his jeans. And paused. He couldn’t go yet. Not without Mara. He pulled out his phone again and dialed her number. Halfway through her voicemail greeting, he heard a beep from his earpiece. He looked at it, hoping it was call waiting from Mara. Instead, it was his phone shutting off. The battery was dead.

Jon scrambled for ideas on how to contact her. He could leave her a note, but someone else could find it. Maybe even Ramirez. And she wouldn’t be looking for a note. Or would she? If he wasn’t there, maybe she’d have the presence of mind to... But Jon hadn’t looked for a message when he had arrived to find the clearing empty. Now standing, he peered around the clearing in the deepening twilight, seeing nothing obvious or obscure. She hadn’t been here yet, or at least hadn’t left him a note. And just as he hadn’t looked for one, she likely wouldn’t either.

A jogger ran past, wearing a green sweatsuit and stocking cap, barely visible through the bushes in the dwindling light. Jon thought he saw the jogger turn his head in his direction, but the young scholar couldn’t tell for certain. Either way, the man kept jogging along, and Jon released the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding.

A few moments later, a crack came from nearby, a twig breaking under a furtive footfall. Jon crouched and froze. Whoever it was seemed to be doing their best to avoid being seen or heard, biding their time as the sun sank deeper into the Hudson, as daylight, Jon’s ally and enemy, drowned in the west. Was it Ramirez? The cars below and behind Jon seemed to disappear. The silence hung like ice particles in the stratosphere, unmelting, unmoving, Newton’s first law of motion holding it in place until an external force chose to shatter it. And
how
would it be shattered? A gunshot? A fist flying from nowhere? A shout of “Freeze!” followed by a pursuit that would end poorly for Jon, one way or the other? Jon waited, waited, waited, his feet going numb beneath him, slowly growing conscious of sharp edges cutting into his palm from the tight grip he had on the stone tablet. Slowly, quietly, he relaxed his grip, slid the tablet back into his pocket, and wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans legs.

A rustling from the bushes. Had the moment come? The nearest lamppost was far enough away, through trees and shrubbery, to cast only a nominal glow toward the darkening enclosure where Jon stood. He moved his legs, gearing his muscles to pounce, although in which direction, toward or away from his would-be captor, he hadn’t yet decided. It would all depend on what sort of face emerged from the twilit shadows.

“Jon?” The voice was entirely not what Jon was expecting, and, perhaps, exactly what he should have.

“Mara?” he called back. Mara burst forth from the shadows and wrapped her arms around his neck. “What happened?”

“I... I think I was being followed,” Mara started, only slightly releasing Jon from her embrace, afraid that to let go would be to lose him again. “I’ve been trying to ditch him. I was waiting until I was sure he was gone.”

Jon swallowed. “Was it Ramirez?”

“Could’ve been. I didn’t get that good a look at him yesterday. I was heading back here and just got a strange tingling on the back of my neck, like someone was watching me. I turned around and there was a jogger running a little ways behind me, but not too terribly close. It’s New York and people are everywhere, so I didn’t get too suspicious. But the feeling didn’t go away, so I checked again and again. And though he was never
right
behind me, he was always there, watching. I know he was tailing me. He was just very good at not being obvious. If I weren’t so paranoid I probably never would have noticed him following me. I ducked around the corner of the old dairy up further north in the park here and broke into a run to put some distance between us. I was pretty sure he lost sight of me once I ducked into the bushes, but I wasn’t sure, so I waited until I figured it was safe, then I climbed through the bushes to-”

“Mara,” Jon interrupted, suddenly looking very serious, “what did the guy who was chasing you look like?”

“He was wearing lots of green. Dark green. Sweatshirt, sweatpants, stocking cap. What?”

Jon had frozen, his face etched with fear. “You sure he was following you?”

“Since we split up at the park, yeah, pretty much. But, like I said, I’ve lost him now. Why?”

“We need to go. Now.” Jon grabbed her arm and started pulling her toward the jogging track, heading south, away from the northbound green-clad jogger.

“Jon, what’s going on? And where are we going?”

Jon shot a look in every direction he could think of, staring into the encroaching darkness, daring Mara’s stalker to show himself. No one appeared, and Jon continued to tug.

“I’ll explain on the way, but we can’t stay here. We have to finish this tonight.”

Wayne Wilkins stared at the phone in his hand, contemplating what he’d just done. He’d lied to a superior. He was disobeying orders, subverting a mission. Nothing like the soldier he’d always been.

And he loved it.

His plan mirrored Greer’s – to a point. Point the Rickner brother in the right direction, keep tabs on his progress, and eventually, he finds Rockefeller’s long-lost copy of the Dossiers. And then their paths diverged. Greer’s plan: take the Dossiers, kill Jon and Mara, destroy the evidence, and the pow-ers-that-be could rest easy knowing that the truth of Operation Phoenix was buried forever. Wayne’s plan: exactly what he had told Jon. Free the nation from the guilt of the past, share the truth, work through the pain, and move on. No more killing, no more lies. Ultimately, it’s what Rockefeller would have wanted. It’s what Blumhurst would have wanted. It’s what Ed and Martha Wilkins would have wanted.

Still, he was torn. Nine years he had been the country’s dream soldier. Nine years he had served the nation flawlessly, following orders and obeying mission parameters. Today, he was breaking all the rules. But then, that man, that good-little-soldier, had died in Iraq. For better or worse, Wayne was a different person now, shaped by the very forces that had wanted to harness his cold killing prowess for their own purposes.

This was a difficult path to walk. Even without the niggling doubts in his mind, the battle of what he knew to be right versus what had been drilled into his head, this would prove to be his riskiest mission yet. Unlike the splinter cell missions he had run before, he didn’t have any backup this time. In fact, his backup was now officially the enemy. An enemy he’d spent the last six months learning just how dangerous they could be.

But also, an enemy whose weaknesses he now knew.

Seeing this through, making sure that Jon and Mara found the Dossiers, that they were
not
killed, and ensuring that the truth got out; the odds were stacked against him, even more so than during his Green Beret days. But any time he started to doubt, any time he started to wonder if his own mission of redemption was worth pursuing, he reminded himself of the three innocent faces that he’d fed to the lions in a windswept valley in Iraq, of the four haunting screams that ravaged his ears even now, of the faces of his mother and father, of everything he knew and loved and believed about his country, and he knew he was doing the right thing.