From the Ashes (41 page)

“Got it!” Jon said triumphantly over his shoulder to Mara.

“Well, get down here already,” Mara returned, her voice a mixture of excitement and fear. Jon slid down from his perch, and the pair of them looked at the cylinder in the reflected light of the illuminated statue. It seemed to be some sort of document tube, a smooth metal cylinder with a metal cap screwed onto each end. In their eagerness and elation, they abandoned their habit of withdrawing to some private quarter to study their latest find, instead opting to open the canister there in the alcove. They were as relatively alone here as they had been in St. Patrick’s, and besides, their quest was all but over. But they had to know now: had they really discovered the Dossiers?

***

Squeezing a cramp out of his trigger hand, Greer maintained his unblinking surveillance of Rickner and Ellison, keeping his eye trained on the metal cylinder Rickner had found under the Atlas statue, analyzing every movement, every breath, the same question running through his head over and over again: had they really discovered the Dossiers?

***

Wayne Wilkins, cursing Ramirez for his interference, hobbled up the street. His arm throbbed, and his ankle injury caused him to limp, and he had to wipe a trickle of blood from his forehead every thirty seconds or so. All his injuries were impeding his progress toward what could be the pivotal moment of his career. But he couldn’t afford to be late to the actual discovery of the Dossiers. His body ached with reminders of what would happen should he not get there in time.

Now, turning south from East 51
^st
Street onto Fifth Avenue, Wayne Wilkins checked Mara’s position on his GPS monitor. Still in the same place. Right across from the Cathedral.
Wasn’t that Rockefeller Center?

A stocky black man in a brown sports coat and khakis was stopped on the sidewalk in front of him, looking south toward the Center, his hand pressed to his ear. An earpiece? An agent? Wayne was new to the Division and didn’t know all of the agents, but-

The man turned slightly, just enough for Wayne to catch a partial glimpse of his face in profile. Wayne cursed his luck. It was Jeff Berenson, another of the Division’s top agents. How many did Greer have swarming the city tonight? Of course, if Greer was here himself, he was definitely pulling out all the stops. Tonight was to be the culmination of his life’s work – and that of his father and grandfather before him. And Wayne needed to make sure that Greer’s plans didn’t come to fruition.

Berenson was an extraordinarily adept agent, but he was intently focused on whatever was happening at Rockefeller Center while attempting to fade into the city’s backdrop and hadn’t yet noticed his fellow agent’s presence behind him. Wayne still had the element of surprise, something that he assumed, had the roles been reversed, Berenson would have already used to kill the rogue agent. If Greer had activated other assets within the city, chances were that they knew about Wayne’s betrayal and that they had received corresponding shoot-to-kill orders. Wayne had one chance, but with the street and sidewalks full of potential witnesses, he had to be careful.

Wayne slunk up behind the man, trying to maintain a balance between stealth and inconspicuousness. In one fluid motion, he gave the man a chop to the back of the neck with the side of one hand, grabbing him with the other hand and walk-dragging Berenson’s now unconscious body to the shadows of a nearby doorway. Wayne placed him on the ground, searched his body, and found a pistol and a small radio transceiver wired to which the earbud was connected. Wayne took them both, ruffled the agent’s coat hem a little, and stood up to survey his work. There were still enough homeless in this city sleeping in doorways and on sidewalks that no one would pay Berenson’s limp body any notice. And thanks to New Yorkers’ propensity to mind their own business on the streets and elsewhere, no one had paid his smooth takedown any mind either. Mission accomplished.

As Wayne left Berenson’s unconscious form behind and continued down the sidewalk, his years of special ops experience kicked in as something caught his attention on top of the Cathedral.

***

Jon turned the end cap as both he and Mara held their breath in expectation. The threads on the cap seemed to be endless, each turn that should have opened the tube leading instead to yet another turn. Finally, the cap popped off, and Jon and Mara locked eyes. She nodded slightly, her lips pressed tightly together.

They both looked at the tube in Jon’s hands as he tilted it upward, the open end angled toward Jon’s palm. Two sheets of paper, held in a rolled-up shape for decades, slid reluctantly from their round metal tomb. One glance at the signatures at the bottom, Rockefeller’s and Stimson’s, told without a doubt that they had uncovered the Dossiers.

After a relentless week of heartache and peril, their quest was finally complete.

***

The bitch had moved in front of the tube. Greer had lost his line of sight on the Dossiers, and he couldn’t change his angle too easily from his high perch. He hadn’t gotten a look at the Dossiers, documents that no one had seen for longer than he had been alive, but the way the traitors were hopping on their toes and hugging each other in celebration was all the confirmation he needed.

Fine, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow with one hand. The girl would be the first to go. A thin layer of sweat had broken out on his palms. Not nerves. Anticipation. The singular goal to which his father and his grandfather before him had dedicated their lives was about to be accomplished.
This is for you, Dad,
he thought as his finger tightened against the trigger.

***

Wayne was walking more quickly now, forgetting the pain in his leg. There was no way he could be seeing what he thought he was seeing on top of the Cathedral. There couldn’t be.

But deep down, as Wayne began to break into a stilted run, he knew that his eyes weren’t deceiving him.

***

“We did it!” Mara exclaimed.

“Not so loud,” Jon cautioned, laughing through his warnings. He was on top of the world. They had finished his brother’s work, could now bring his killers to justice, and would now be able to live without fear of government agents chasing them across the city or murdering them in their sleep. Both of their faces were pictures of exuberance, smiling as though they had never smiled before. Unlike the towering Atlas overhead, a giant weight felt like it had been lifted from his shoulders. From somewhere beyond the grave, both Michael and Rockefeller would be smiling with bittersweet pride.

A sharp report sounded from the street, echoing in the skyscraper canyons. Pedestrians could be heard screaming, seen ducking. Cars screeched as their drivers looked about nervously, trying to ascertain the source of the gunshot.

Jon noticed none of these changes. What he did notice was the change in his and Mara’s happy countenances: Mara’s to one of wide-eyed shock, Jon’s to one of abject horror. A crimson stain appeared on the right shoulder of her jacket, growing with each pump of her heart. Someone had shot her. Someone had shot Mara.

No.
No no no.
They were done. They had found the Dossiers. The good guys had won. And now someone, somewhere, was taking potshots at the victors.

He grabbed her upper arms as she started to lean forward, weakness and shock overtaking her body. She winced as the pressure from his hand sent jolts of pain through her nearby injury. He relaxed his grip slightly, but couldn’t bring himself to let her go. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like this.

They had won. End of story. Game over.

Yet right now, he felt like everything was about to be hopelessly lost.

***

It was what he had feared. Wayne had wished with every ounce of his being that it wasn’t Greer himself that he had spied atop the Cathedral, but the muzzle-flash that had sparked in the night confirmed his fears. A handful of pedestrians were pointing toward the Cathedral’s roof, but just as many were pointing elsewhere. The truth was, aside from that brief spark of the weapon discharging, it was almost impossible to detect Greer’s form hidden among the Gothic crenellations of the Cathedral. Wayne ran faster, closer, into range, exchanging Berenson’s gun in his hand for his own pistol – the only one he trusted for what he was about to do.

***

One down... Greer thought as he ejected the empty shell and chambered the next. Peering through the scope, he could see Rickner trying to drag Ellison behind the statue, the girl writhing in pain.
Damn it.
The wind currents in the urban canyons of Manhattan were different from those in his forest valley shooting range back in Virginia. His shot had only wounded her. In the shoulder, from the look of the crimson stain soaking through her blue sweater.

But ultimately it didn’t matter. She was incapacitated. Berenson would be here any second to finish her off and claim the Dossiers. All that remained was to take care of the one remaining civilian witness to the horrible truth of Operation Phoenix.

He wiped the sweat from his palm on his knee. This was it. The moment of truth. The work of three lifetimes culminating in this one shot. He leaned forward, bracing himself on his knee, perched a hundred feet above the front steps of the Cathedral.

This time his bullet would hit true. This shot would put the final Rickner brother in the grave.

***

It was insane to attempt a shot at this distance with a sidearm, Wayne told himself, but he knew he had to try. He had his pistol at his side as he ran, then he suddenly stopped. Raising the pistol with both hands, he aimed at the figure sitting like a lethal gargoyle atop the Cathedral. Crazy or not, he had to take the shot. It was now or never.

The moment of truth had come.

***

“Mara,” Jon called to the unresponsive face. She was still alive, looking at something far off, far above their heads, above the skyscrapers, above the stars. Her breath had grown short, rapid. She was losing blood fast, probably going into shock.
Oh God,
his thoughts screamed,
what can I do? What in God’s name can I do?
He dragged her behind the statue, praying that the hulking Titan could protect them like it had protected Rockefeller’s darkest secret.

And on the ground to the side, the Dossiers lay next to the metal tube, neglected and forgotten.

***

On opposite sides of the street, pressure was applied to the triggers of two different guns pointed at two different targets. Both men were shooting to kill.

***

Another gunshot rang out across the urban canyon, this one somehow different, as though it had been shot from a different location or from a different type of weapon. Mara’s neck twitched with the sound. Jon’s hand instinctively went to his chest, checking for the wound that he didn’t yet feel. He knew that with serious injuries, you sometimes didn’t feel the pain until seconds after the damage was done, part of the body’s defense against incapacitating levels of pain. But the moments passed, and he felt no pain, found no wound.

But, curiosity getting the better of him and peering out at the street through Atlas’ legs, he did see a strange sight on the roof of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

***

Greer coughed. Something warm and wet sprayed from his mouth, flecking his arms and his rifle with crimson. His eye started twitching, his whole face beginning to contort with pain. Somehow,
somehow
he had been shot.

No, it wouldn’t end like this. It couldn’t. He had an enemy of the state in his sights. He had to eliminate the target. He had to finish the mission.

He put his eye back to the scope, trying to focus through the pain, through the spasms. He was a good marksman. He was a good soldier. He was a patriot. He had to finish his family’s work.

He coughed again, once, twice, three, four times, coating his forearms and knee in blood. He felt his strength ebbing away.

No. This isn’t how it ends. I have to finish this. I can’t quit now. I’m so close.

His knee slipped to one side, the torso it had been supporting toppling forward, over, down, down, down. He didn’t see the horrified pedestrians gaping in terror as he fell, nor did he hear their shouts and screams. All he heard was the cool wind whistling in his ears. All he saw was the large American flag that hung to the left of the Cathedral’s entrance doors, the southerly wind blowing the banner toward Greer, drawing his attention, the last thing he ever saw. But what filled his mind’s eye was that of his father and his grandfather. He had failed them. And he had failed his country.

He whispered two words to the night wind:
I’m sorry.

With generations-old patriotic thoughts in his mind and the stars and stripes in his tear-filled eyes, Harrison Greer fell ten stories to the stone steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his rifle still clutched in his hands. His body made a sickening splat, like a sack of tomatoes smashing against the pavement. The Star Spangled Banner fluttered overhead, two of the white stripes speckled with scarlet, expectorated blood from Greer’s lungs as he fell, his very breath and blood given in defense of the nation he and his family had served for generations.

***

A wall of blurred noise surrounded Jon, screams and shouts that filled the area. He had expected a crowd to gather around the injured Mara, but whoever or whatever had just fallen from the Cathedral seemed to be a bigger draw. That, and the pedestrians’ fear that the shooting might not be over yet.

“Jon!”

Jon looked up at the voice that seemed to cut through the haze. He recognized it. But he couldn’t remember from where he knew it. Then the figure came closer, stepped into the light.

It was Wayne Wilkins.

Jon glanced at Wayne’s pistol, still clutched in his hand. “Did you... ?” he managed to choke out.

“He
shot her. I shot
him,”
Wayne explained, pointing to the bloody heap across the street to emphasize who he was talking about.

“Who was that...?”

“That was Harrison Greer. The Director himself. But even without him, the Division is still a threat. I don’t know how many agents are in the city right now, possibly converging on our position.” Wayne noticed a cell phone lying next to Mara. “Did you call 911?”