From the Ashes (23 page)

“Sorry!” Jon yelled back without turning around or missing a step. Another diversion. Excellent. They needed all the time they could get. Turned right. Back toward 42
^nd
Street.

“Crap!” Jon huffed as daylight poured through the exit doors at the end of the hall. “Where the hell is the subway?”

“There!” Mara shouted, pointing in stride toward a pair of staircases on the left.

Jon shot another look behind him, their pursuer still hot on their heels. He felt his fatigued muscles stiffen, burst forward with renewed drive.

The pair shoved their way down the stairs, drawing the protests and accusatory glares from shoppers, executives, and protective parents. After they finally extricated themselves from the angry mob, Jon glanced back to check on their pursuer. He was already starting down the stairs. How had he caught up with them so fast? Regardless of the desperation that might have been setting in, Jon strove onward, his lungs threatening to explode in his chest. Mara, her chest heaving and eyes wide with fear and exertion, kept right on running with him.

On the other side of the turnstiles, a sign for the Number 6 line to Brooklyn beckoned. The recognizable screech of brakes resounding just beyond told Jon that their train was just arriving – and thus, about to leave again.

“Hang on, I’ve gotta find my MetroCard,” Mara gasped as they approached the turnstile.

“Screw the MetroCard!” Jon yelled, putting both hands on the sides of the turnstile and swinging himself over. A nearby police officer yelled a creative “Hey!” at the pair as Mara swung herself over after Jon.

“Sorry!” Mara called behind her, catching a glimpse of the irritated cop on the other side of the turnstile. And of the black running suit and hate-filled eyes behind him, shoving past the cop, knocking him aside as he hurtled the turnstile with one hand.

“He’s right behind us!” Mara screamed at Jon. He didn’t have to ask whether she meant the cop or their original pursuer. The fear in her voice made it all too evident.

The subway train sat on the platform, waiting. The inviting open doors that Jon knew would close in a matter of seconds. If the doors closed before he and Mara got there, they would be royally screwed.

“Hold the train, hold the train!” he shouted in vain as they tore down the stairs. If anything, the people on the already crowded train wanted
fewer
passengers, not more. And especially not sweaty ones with a crazed look about them, like this pair of youths who were running down the stairs like wild animals.

Jon and Mara swung around the banister and threw themselves into the train, not even attempting to arrest their forward momentum until they were past the threshold and safely aboard. Startled cries tittered about them, followed by a heavy sigh of relief breathed simultaneously by both Jon and Mara. They were aboard.

Glancing out the doors, they saw the legs of their pursuer appear, flying down the stairs. A police officer behind him, gesticulating indignantly at these offenses to the public order he was charged with keeping.

Jon’s eyes widened in fear. Surrounded by people in a subway car, he had reached a dead end from which there was no escape. And then, as though the fates were intentionally waiting until the last minute to grant his thudding heart a reprieve, Jon heard the most beautiful sound in the world.

“Please stand clear of the closing doors.” The pneumonic hiss of the doors closing. Right in the bastard’s face.

The seconds seemed to slow, the doors taking a thousand times longer to close than they should have. The expression on their pursuer’s face tightening, darkening with anger and hate. The useless cries of the cop, the shouts of subway patrons upset by the ruckus the chase had caused, all seeming to slow to a crawl yet being yelled far too quickly for Jon to make any sense of it. His brain had been drenched in molasses, its processing speed slowing to match the scene around him. Rooting him to the spot, little more than an impotent observer, helpless to exact change on his dire circumstances.

And shut. The doors now closed, the airbrake was released and the train started down the tunnel, leaving the scene of chaos behind them. Confusion reigned on most of the faces that could be seen from the window. Except for one face, the face Jon couldn’t seem to take his eyes from.

The face of their pursuer held not a trace of confusion. Only a strengthened resolve, fueled by fury and fanaticism. A freeze-frame in time, where their eyes met and something, some preternatural message, seemed to be passed from the mysterious assassin to Jonathan Rickner. A solemn promise passed from hunter to prey.

This is not over.

Enrique Ramirez cursed himself silently as he pushed his way through the throng and disappeared into the faceless crowds of Grand Central Terminal, shucking off even the Metro cop as he blended and milled with the unwashed masses on their daily commute. Not only had he once again let Rickner catch him by surprise, but he had also caused a scene. So much for being done with fieldwork.

He knew why he had pursued them. It was instinct, pure and simple. Jonathan Rickner was the one that got away. And, even though Greer had other plans for how Rickner’s eventual elimination was to play out, the shock at accidentally running into – and being sighted by – his quarry, combined with his own damaged pride at having been taken by surprise yet again, caused Ramirez to kick into pursuit mode.

And then, while chasing them through Grand Central, Ramirez had realized how to turn this meeting to his advantage. He ran, he chased, he scared the crap out of the young pair, but he did not catch them. On purpose, though they would never know that. And because of his pursuit, Jon and Mara would not rest until they found what they – and the Division – sought. Which moved up everyone’s timetable, just like Greer – a man with a ticking clock of his own – wanted.

Ramirez glanced over his shoulder as casually as possible. Because he was now moving back toward the exit – the last place someone who had jumped the turnstile for a free fare would be heading – the Metro security personnel seemed either to be looking elsewhere, or to have given up the chase altogether. And though Ramirez was well aware of the closed-circuit cameras set into the walls and ceilings of the terminal, he was unworried by the prospect of someone finding him on a grainy black-and-white CCTV monitor. Besides, he had probably been little more than a blur when he’d run past the guards earlier, and he had enough practice blending into a crowd, becoming all but invisible, that he knew he had nothing to fear.

Just to be safe, he avoided the main concourse and instead headed for one of the many alternate exits, emerging into daylight on a street corner a block away from Grand Central. Making his way through the midday pedestrian crowds, he realized that he did have one other option. Even though he’d lost track of Rickner and Ellison, Ramirez did have one way of tracking them. By following the man who would be following them.

Ramirez pulled a small black device from his pocket, slid out the tiny keyboard, and began to punch in a query. He’d taken it from Recon before leaving Division HQ the previous day – he didn’t have authorization, but as the soon-to-be Director of the Division, he didn’t particularly care. It would be used for the benefit of the Division’s goals, as was everything Ramirez did. The object was a GPS tracking device, capable of tracing the signal of any cell phone to within a 10-yard radius. The problem, as Ramirez had already found out, was that Rickner and Ellison had left their phones back in Washington and were now using prepaid disposable phones – ones apparently bought with cash, as neither party’s credit card records showed any such purchases. Thus, Rickner and Ellison’s phones were virtually untraceable, even with the technology and resources Ramirez had at his disposal. But Wayne Wilkins’s phone – invisible to every telecommunications company, government agency, and third party besides the Division – was not. And as the tracking device returned the query with a display of Wilkins’s current position, direction, and speed, Ramirez began to move to intercept.

As he walked purposefully down the sidewalk, Ramirez vowed to himself that he would not be caught unawares a third time. The plan that Greer had devised was terrifyingly ingenious, and with both Ramirez and Wilkins there to make sure it came to fruition, Rickner and Ellison didn’t stand a chance.

The next time Enrique Ramirez’s path crossed with that of Jonathan Rickner, the young scholar would have no idea he was being watched, stalked from the shadows. And by the time he did, it would already be far too late.

Brooklyn, New York

Except for wheezing to catch their breath again, Jon and Mara were silent until they reached their stop in Brooklyn. Partly from shock, partly from exhaustion, partly from embarrassment of the scene they had caused, and partly from fear of who might overhear them. As soon as they were off the train and on the street again, Mara broke the silence.

“That was the guy from Michael’s apartment?” Mara asked in a hushed tone.

“Yeah,” Jon said, his eyes darting around for any sign that,
somehow,
their pursuer had managed to track them here. “I’d say he’s pretty pissed about our little scuffle.”

“Geez, Jon. You think he works for
them
?”

Jon nodded forcefully. “I’m sure of it.”

“Then we’re probably on their hit list by now, huh?”

“Oh God.” His forehead creased with concern as he placed a hand on her shoulder. “Oh, Mara, I’m so sorry to have dragged you into this.”

“Forget it. Let’s just do what we came out here to do,” Mara said halfheartedly, but the concern on Jon’s face was also etched into hers.

A block later they turned onto Higbee Place. Checked the address. It was stownhouse just up the way. The home of Catherine Smith.

The pair spotted the house, climbed the narrow staircase – limestone or some sort of inexpensive masonry – and rang the buzzer. The long-dead husks of what once were flowers sat withered and forgotten in terra cotta pots on either side of the door. The olive-green paint of the door itself was chipped and peeling, faded by the sun and torn away by the relentless march of time.

The screech of a deadbolt sliding across metal sounded from the other side of the door. The knob turned, and the door cracked open, a security chain drawn tight across the opening. A single gray eye, surrounded by wrinkled and weathered flesh, appeared in the aperture.

“Yeah?” asked the eye’s owner in a raspy female voice.

“Ms. Smith?” Jon inquired.

“Who’s askin’?”

“I’m Jonathan Rickner, Michael Rickner’s brother. This is Mara. We need to talk to you.”

“Michael’s brother, huh?”

“Yes ma’am. It’s really important.”

Catherine Smith grunted. “Always ‘really important’ with youngsters,” she mumbled. “Gimme a second. Stand back, stand back.”

Jon and Mara took a step back from the closing door, heard the chain being removed from its slot, and the door opened again. The figure of an old woman, hunched and gnarled by time and a lifelong addiction to nicotine, greeted them. Well, not quite greeted, for the scowl on her face held an entirely different message. Her outfit was a simple, threadbare linen dress that may have once been something close to white, with tiny blue flowers patterned sporadically upon the cloth. Now, the flowers were a sickly green and the dress itself was nearly as yellow as the old woman’s remaining teeth. The cause for the yellowing was likely the smoldering unfiltered cigarette that she held limply between the fingers of one hand, and the thousands like it she had smoked in her sixty-plus years with the habit.

“Well, don’t just stand out there,” she urged. “You’re letting the heat out.”

The pair hurried through the door. Ms. Smith looked outside, her eyes darting around quickly as though expecting to see something that she didn’t
want to
find, then closed the door, locked the deadbolt, and slid the safety chain back into place. When she turned around again, she had her scowl back in place, and she ushered the pair into the living room with such time-honored traditions of hospitality as shooing flips of her wrist and calls of “Livin’ room. G’won!”

The living room would have been a quaint little affair fifty years ago. The sofa where Jon and Mara took their seats was upholstered in flower-patterned fabric, yellow stuffing leaking from holes and entire seams that had ripped over time. A tattered crocheted afghan was draped over the back of the varnished wooden rocking chair where Ms. Smith took her seat. Atop the coffee table sat a half-f pack of cigarettes; an ashtray filled with butts, two of which had a faint trail of smoke still rising from the end; and a soggy, used teabag rested in an otherwise empty teacup, the Lipton tag still dangling from the string over the rim. Hundreds of little Precious Moments figurines with innocent blue eyes in oversized heads stared down from the many shelves lining the walls. At a glance, Jon could see that some were chipped, a few even missing limbs, but there they stood. Watching. It was like a ceramic version of
Children of the Corn,
and it creeped the heck out of Jon. But like everything else in this room, probably like everything else in the whole house, their innocent little white faces and wardrobes were yellowed by the pervasive smoke of their owner.

Jon coughed, no longer able to stifle the reaction his lungs had been screaming for ever since he’d entered the home’s carcinogen-filled air. Mara looked at him, a grimace on her face as she too struggled to deal with the smoky atmosphere.

“So whaddya want?”

Mara nodded to Jon; he nodded back, and began.

“I realize this might be a painful subject, Ms. Smith—”

“Cat.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Call me Cat. Short for Catherine. You know, like a
nickname��

“Yes, ma’am. Cat then. We’re here about your father.”

“My father’s dead.”

“Yes, ma’am, we know—”

“Goddammit, don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel old.”

Jon and Mara traded incredulous glances as Cat pulled another cigarette from the pack on the coffee table, lit it from the stub that she had been smoking, and set the still-smoldering stub on the rim of the ashtray. She took a drag on the new cigarette, gazing with bleary-eyed contentment at its glowing end, and blew the smoke from her lips in one long breath like the fiery exhalations of some mythical dragon.