From the Ashes (35 page)

He pushed the thought out of his head as he led the way out of the building and into the afternoon sunlight. He had arrived in one of the five cloisters for which the museum was named, the enclosed pavilions housing gardens, fountains, and other landscaping elements designed to inspire and encourage quiet reflection of the soul. But with a bullseye on their backs and their own goal nearly within reach, neither Jon nor Mara could summon either the quiet of mind or the reflection of spirit that the admittedly beautiful cloister attempted to evoke.

The pair reentered the building after crossing the cloister, the blanch of the stone hallway draining something from their eyes that the lively green and blue of the outside had stirred. Jon motioned with his head, and they continued toward the chapel, steering around other patrons without missing a step. A few moments later, they caught their first glimpse of the chapel through the colonnade before them, the upper walls rising into view, the floor of the chapel itself a story below. The columns edged the balcony that overlooked the somberly reverent room, an air of spiritual mystery present despite the fact that the chapel was technically an architectural and artistic museum, not a house of worship, although most of the artifacts within had originally been constructed for ecclesiastical purposes. The stonework was darker, more somber, more sobering. The sun’s rays illuminated the room through ancient stained glass, the windows lining the right-hand wall and forming a semicircle around where the altar would be. But no altar graced this chapel. Save for a few statues keeping watch at the far end of the room, the hollowed sanctuary was full of tombs. Sepulchers of lesser nobility from medieval Europe lined the walls, with more positioned down the center of the room. No velvet cordons or green carpet to distinguish this as a museum; this was, to all accounts, a crypt. The perfect place to lay one’s darkest secrets to rest.

Almost immediately, Jon caught sight of what looked to be the tomb they were looking for, set into a shallow alcove on the left-hand wall and distinctly recognizable from the guidebook. It consisted of three tiers: at the top, an elaborately detailed relief depicting the decedent’s funeral service; in the middle, the sarcophagus lid itself, was an effigy of the deceased count wearing stone robes and looking pious, surrounded by a sea of mourners; and below, the twelve Apostles stood in a line on the side of the coffin itself – six on each side of the centrally enthroned Christ, each in his own separate compartment like miniature altars to the beloved saints. It was almost as though the Apostles were laying claim to the precious soul that once resided in the corporeal form entombed within. Or perhaps guarding something else, something that the artisan centuries back never could have fathomed would be hidden inside. While the whole monument was beautifully and artfully carved, the ravages of time were apparent: surfaces worn dull by the elements and by the oils of countless hands, missing fingers, obscured letters, even saints whose heads had been broken off. Broken, but beautiful.

“There. C’mon,” Jon said with an excited wave of his hand as he started to descend the stairs to the side. He and Mara reached the bottom floor and doubled back into the room, passing a middle-aged Arabic couple and their teenage son who were just leaving the chapel. They were now alone in the room.

“‘Sepulchral monument of Ermengol VII, Count of Urgell,’” Jon read from the display next to the stone coffin. “Sounds like we’ve got our tomb.”

“‘Ermengol’?” Mara repeated. “I would’ve hated to be him in school.”

Jon stared at the tomb, at the stone angels and saints who watched over the deceased Count. Actually, many of them were headless, casualties of the ravages of time, abuses of war, and recklessness of humanity. Jon squatted next to the monument and began to inspect the carvings along its side. “Entombed within, right? But how do we get in? Surely we’re not just supposed to take a crowbar to the lid right here in the museum?”

“Maybe there’s some sort of secret lever or something?”

Jon looked at her. “I think you’ve been hanging out with Michael and me too much.”

Mara shrugged. “Hey, government conspiracies, military cover-ups, Rockefeller’s codes hidden all around Manhattan, I don’t think a good old-fashioned secret lever is too much of a stretch.”

Jon laughed. “No, I suppose not. Alright then, if I were a secret lever on this puppy, where would I be hidden?”

“This is a priceless piece of art, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So it would have to be hidden so not even the curators would suspect anything.”

“Good point. So maybe the cracks and gaps left by your secret lever have been... My God, Mara.”

“What?” she asked, squatting down next to him.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” he said, pointing to what looked to be some sort of stone-colored cement filler around the edges of one of the foot-tall Apostles that lined the sepulcher’s side. He wouldn’t have noticed it had he not been looking for this exact Apostle: Peter, the disciple who had so infamously denied knowing or being associated with Christ three times at the Crucifixion – out of the same fear of the horrible consequences that Rockefeller himself must have felt. And, like Rockefeller must have dreamed of for himself, Peter was granted forgiveness for his hiding the truth out of fear and cowardice. Peter was easily recognizable by the keys he held – the keys to heaven that tradition dictated had been given to him, spurring the notion that the first person one meets when arriving in heaven is St. Peter as the realm’s gatekeeper. “You want to do the honors of pushing the secret button?”

Mara beamed. “Sure.” She placed her fingertips to the cold stone chest of the figure, took a deep breath, and pushed. It gave a fraction of an inch and stopped. When she released the pressure, the saint clicked back into place. “Well, crap,” she said.

“Maybe it’s supposed to be pushed in conjunction with something else. Otherwise it might be too easy for someone studying it or whatever to push it in without knowing what they were doing.”

“Like what?”

Jon studied the line of saints again. “Like another saint. Like this guy,” he said, pointing to another stone effigy that had a similar dusting of the filler around its exterior, the dusting once again so fine and close to the original color that Jon wouldn’t have noticed it had he not been looking for a seam around this exact Apostle – the one holding his traditional symbolic emblem of a carpentry square, indicating his pre-calling profession as a builder. Thomas, the disciple whose famous demand to put his hands in the wounds of the resurrected Christ before he would believe that Jesus had truly risen – a request that he was soon afterward granted before he fell on his knees before Christ in penitence and was also granted forgiveness and more – had given the English language the idiomatic “Doubting Thomas.” Jon chuckled softly to himself. These would be the disciples Rockefeller would have sympathized with: men who were endowed with a great privilege, screwed up royally, and were offered a second chance.

“On three?” Mara said, her fingertips already placed on the chest of her stone figurine.

Jon nodded.

“One, two, three.” Jon and Mara pushed against the ancient stone, the filler crumbling with their efforts, the sound of stone grinding against stone resonating from within the monument. After the figures had tilted backward about two inches, a loud click, like the cocking of a gun, emanated from the tomb as the saints locked into their reclined positions. Half a second later, another click sounded, accompanied with another sound of stone rubbing stone, this one high-pitched and quick.

Jon and Mara’s eyes met, speaking surprise, excitement, and triumph. Then they both started looking for what had changed, what “hidden chamber” had opened up, revealing the clue they sought. Mara checked one end of the tomb, Jon the other, both coming up short. He peered underneath the tomb, between two of the three recumbent stone lions that held the tomb off the ground. Just behind the depressed effigies of the saints, a small panel had opened, just large enough for Jon to fit his hand inside. He plunged his eager fingers into the aperture, fumbling around until his hand found a small tablet of stone, loose and resting inside the hollowed interior of the compartment. Withdrawing it, he looked at it and recognized the now-familiar couplet style of clue-leaving Rockefeller seemed to have favored.

“Got it,” Jon said with a satisfied smile, looking up at Mara from his position on the ground. Then looking past her, to the columned balcony above. To the uniformed security guard who was glaring at them, two-way in hand.

“Hey, you two!” he shouted down at them. “Stay right where you are.”

Mara’s eyes widened as they met Jon’s. The jig was up.

Jon leapt to his feet and tucked the piece of stone in his pants pocket. They couldn’t be detained. Not now. Not when they were so close. Not when they were on the hit list of a squad of government assassins. A night in lock-up could be their last night alive. They had to get out of here, alive and free.

The guard had briefly disappeared from view when descending the stairs, but was now approaching them, calling in his position – and the possible vandalism of the artwork by the two patrons he was currently approaching – on his walkie-talkie. He was about Jon’s height, but with a slightly heavier build, a heavy born not of donuts and neglect but of hard work at the gym. His eyes held a determination that those of the beleaguered Rockefeller Center guard had not. And there was enough staff on duty in the museum to verify – or blow holes in – any story Jon might try to concoct. He couldn’t take any chances with trying to bluff his way out of this one, but what he would have to do instead would be taking an even greater chance.

One shot. Make it count.

“I dropped my cell phone,” Mara started, stopping her fabrication when she saw the guard’s eyes flit to the monument, widening in surprise as they registered the depressed saints, flitting back to Jon and Mara under furrowed brow. Then he started to move the walkie-talkie back up to his mouth, and Jon leapt into action.

“Hey!” shouted the guard as Jon slammed his shoulder into the guard’s chest, his hand grappling for the radio. The guard fell backward onto the floor, landing hard on his backside, wincing in pain as the impact with the cold stone floor shot up his spine. Clutching the guard’s walkie-talkie, Jon ran up the stairs, Mara following close on his heels. Shouts of
Stop them!
from behind, out of sight, went largely unheeded, as most of the tourists and non-security museum staff were neither equipped for nor desirous of a potentially violent encounter with the two fugitives. Also working in Jon and Mara’s favor was the fact that the facility seemed to be short staffed today, perhaps owing to the strand of flu that seemed to be making its way through the northeast the past few weeks. But, Jon realized, those lucky breaks didn’t guarantee their escape; it only made the seemingly impossible slightly less so.

Once up the stairs and out of sight of the Gothic Chapel, Jon became conscious of every security camera that he saw, and many more that he didn’t, the all-seeing vision of some thousand-eyed mythological beast from whose stone belly he and Mara were desperately trying to escape.

Pushing through a set of doors, they found themselves back outside in the sunlight, the columned porticos on all four sides of the cloister looking far too much like prison bars. Like the ranks of some impenetrable army come to hold them captive until Ramirez or whomever else the Division saw fit to send their way could come take their potshot at them, sitting ducks as they would be. Jon shoved the oppressive thought from his mind, using it to drive him onward and discarding it before his fear could paralyze him, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Turning the corner, they nearly bowled over a tour group being told about the columns, fountains, and other items of historic and artistic significance, treasures to which the two fugitives didn’t even give a second glance as they cut a path through the crowd.

The pair darted across the plaza, through another set of doors and into the stone interior of the building, the arched hallways evoking more images of the intestinal tract of the great all-seeing rock beast whose labyrinthine bowels presented enough of a challenge without the guard who now pursued them through these corridors, without the shouts of fear that echoed inside Jon’s head. As the doors were closing behind them, Jon caught a glimpse of the guard, red-faced with exertion and with anger, entering the cloister, looking left, right, then seeing the still-closing doors. He ran through the pavilion after them, alerting his colleagues as he shouted
Stop,
a cry Jon and Mara didn’t care to heed.

“Keep going,” Jon said, his breath trying to catch in his throat as he forced the words out. He and Mara picked up the pace, their brisk run turning into a full-fledged sprint. They slid and nearly fell into one another as they rounded the corner in front of the entry hall. Then they consciously slowed their pace as they passed between the two solidly built guards waiting on either side of the hall.

The walkie-talkie in Jon’s hand squawked as a voice came through. “What’s the ten-twenty on those vandals, Carl?” Damn. Somebody was looking for them. He glanced at the guards he’d just passed. They seemed oblivious to the sound coming from his radio – probably assuming it had come from their own units. To the right of the front desk was the back entrance they’d arrived through. Left led to the main entrance. Jon decided to take a risk. He grabbed Mara’s wrist and yanked her to the left, using his eyes to ask for her trust, which the resigned expression in hers said she understood. He knew what he was doing. Or at least, he hoped he did.

“I’ve just sighted them,” Jon huffed into the walkie-talkie in his best imitation of Carl’s voice once he was halfway down the stairs, praying that his winded breathing wouldn’t give away his bluff. “Heading out the back entrance. The girl’s wearing a white sweater, guy’s in a light green windbreaker.” Mara shot Jon a look, her parted lips smiling even as they sucked in all the oxygen they could. The wardrobe he had falsely reported was a far cry from Mara’s vibrant red long-sleeved blouse and Jon’s navy blue jacket. Their footsteps on the stone beneath them produced an impressive clamor, echoing nowhere louder than in their own ears, each reverberation another footstep of the guards who were surely closing in on them. Unless they went for the bone Jon had thrown them.