From the Ashes (45 page)

Wayne took a knee on the grass at the other end of the grave. “And how’s that, exactly?”

Jon tilted his head quizzically. “What do you mean?”

Wayne motioned toward Jon with an open palm. “I mean how do you figure life will be different without him?”

Jon looked at the grave, furrowed his brow in thought, then turned back to Wayne. “I don’t know exactly. He won’t be there to share it with me, for one.”

“Okay, that’s a given,” Wayne said, looking to one side. “But how will
your
life be different without him?”

Jon shrugged slowly. “I guess it won’t, really.”

“Won’t it?” Wayne creased his brow as he looked intently at Jon. “The death of a loved one is always a tremendous life experience. It almost always has some impact on our lives, but it’s up to us as to how that impact takes shape. For years, I allowed my parents’ death to shape me into someone I wasn’t. I didn’t know you before Michael’s death, but I’d say you’ve already begun changing. From the moment you picked up your brother’s work, sniffing out the conspiracy that had cost him his life to uncover.”

Jon’s mind flashed back to the first time he had picked up Michael’s backpack and worn it as his own, assuming the mantle that had been knocked from his brother’s clutches.

“But I would have done that anyway. Michael and I did this sort of thing... well, not
exactly
this sort of thing, but we explored and tried to solve ancient mysteries and stuff all the time when we were growing up.”

Wayne tilted his head forward, eyes looking upward at Jon. “Had you done that
without
Michael before?”

Jon paused thoughtfully. “No, not quite like this I hadn’t.”

“Well, there you have it. For starters, at least.”

Jon raised his eyebrows and turned his gaze to the freshly turned earth covering his brother’s grave. He thought about the past week: his fears over losing his brother to Mara, actually losing his brother to something much worse, then overcoming his fear and sorrow to quite literally pick up the mantle his brother had left – not just in donning his backpack, but in finishing his work, in looking out for Mara, in
leading
the quest against unspeakable odds and truly gifted foes. And he had come out not only alive, but triumphant. No longer the follower or the sidekick to his brother, the experience had forced him into the Alpha Dog role, and he had managed to succeed where even his brother – his one-time mentor – had failed.

“Yeah,” he finally managed to say. “It’s almost like I... I don’t know, absorbed some part of him into me when he passed.”

“Well, one way or another, mailing the Dossiers directly to the National Security Archive under a false name while sending copies to the news media, Congress, and the Supreme Court was a brilliant move. No matter what happened to you, the story would still get out. Michael’s mission would still be complete.”

Jon smiled. “And I was kind of banking on the fact that I was out of sight right after Greer’s death. If the other Division agents in the city didn’t know for certain if I still had the Dossiers, I figured they were less likely to try to whack me without knowing if I had already passed them or their contents on – and to whom. And thank God, it paid off.”

Wayne returned Jon’s smile. “That it did.”

“So what’s next for you? Are you officially un-dead yet?”

“No, not yet.” Wayne made a face. “And I’m not entirely sure that I want to be. The Wayne Wilkins who, according to the Army, died last year in Iraq, actually no longer does walk this earth. I might just start my life all over again entirely. Not quite sure what that would entail, exactly, but I’ll figure it out as I go. I figure it’ll be an adventure in introspection.”

Jon laughed. “‘An adventure in introspection.’ Sounds like fun. Well, listen, if you ever need anything...”

“I’ll definitely let you know. You too.”

Jon stood up, pulled out his wallet, and gave Wayne a card with his contact information on it. “Keep in touch, alright?”

Rising from his kneeling position, Wayne took it and looked at the card. “Will do. Sorry, but my old job didn’t exactly allow us to carry our business cards, so I’ll have to send you mine when I get it.”

They both laughed, shook hands, offered their respective thanks, and exchanged farewells. Wayne stood and started to leave, then turned back.

“One last thing: I think your brother would have wanted you to have this.” Wayne unzipped his coat and extracted a long, slender object wrapped in green cloth. Jon took it from him and began to unwrap the object. At the first glint of steel catching the light of the setting sun, Jon knew what it was: Michael’s rapier.

“Where did you find it?” Jon asked.

“Ramirez isn’t the only one who can do a little breaking-and-entering. I had seen the police report you tried to file about the incident at your brother’s place, and saw you mentioning the theft of the sword. So I found his car in a parking garage in Manhattan the other night after I’d shot Greer and left you with the Dossiers. I jimmied his trunk, and lo and behold: stolen property. So I confiscated it to return it to its rightful owner.” Wayne squinted into the sunset, a cast of oranges and reds playing off his features. “I’d better go. I’ve still got one last ghost to put to rest before I can move on.” And without waiting for a reply, he left in the direction from which he’d come, as mysterious as ever.

Jon found himself alone with his thoughts again. Wayne’s words weren’t lost on Jon.
Its rightful owner.
The sword had belonged to Michael, but this was yet another part of his brother that was being passed on to Jon. He chuckled to himself, holding his brother’s heirloom with a reverence for all that Michael was, and all that Jon was becoming. He finally returned his gaze to his brother’s grave and kneeled, his mind mulling over Wayne’s encouraging thoughts.

Michael James Rickner was dead in the flesh, but Jon vowed that as long as he drew breath, he would never allow his brother’s spirit – his love of his fellow man and of learning, his unwavering sense of right and wrong, his relentless pursuit of hidden truths and righteous justice – to die.

That would live on through Jon for the rest of his days.

***

Enrique Ramirez was late to the cemetery. He crouched behind a raised marble tomb, using the wing of an angel statuary to steady the barrel of his sniper rifle. Feeling the wind, watching his target, waiting for the right moment to strike.

The last week had been mayhem for Enrique. The two cops who had responded to the scene of his capture – likely tipped off by Wayne Wilkins sometime after he’d made his escape – were dead, shot in the head with their own guns before they’d even gotten him out of the room. But by the time he escaped, all he had fought for had already gone up in smoke. Greer was dead; Rockefeller’s Dossiers on Operation Phoenix had been discovered, then later revealed on national television; and, to top it all off, his car had been towed, the trunk broken into, and the elder Rickner brother’s sword stolen. Ramirez raced back to Division Headquarters at Langley, trying to salvage whatever he could of his charge, but then the State Department goons had shown up, beginning what amounted to a massive cover-up of the cover-up. They confiscated equipment, destroyed records, and rounded up all of the staff and operatives for debriefing – a debriefing Ramirez feared would end not with offers of new government posts or off-the-record bank deposits to buy their silence, but rather an indefinite sentence at some officially non-existent prison in a country that most U.S. schoolchildren couldn’t find on a map. So Ramirez did the only thing he could do: he ran.

After planting false trails to Chicago, Dubai, Vancouver, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo, he made his way to Denver, then took a circuitous route of back roads back to DC. It would never again be safe for him in this country, and his next stop would be somewhere in Central or South America. Perhaps Venezuela or Colombia. Places with constant conflict could always use a man of his talents. But before he could make his last journey south, he had to take care of one last loose end up here. Even though the Division was dead and in the process of being buried by the State Department, Enrique had to put to rights the memory of Greer and all he had fought for.

Ramirez adjusted the scope, Jonathan Rickner’s profile coming into focus. The young scholar was alone, as he had been since Ramirez had first set up his weapon. The entire cemetery was, as far as the eye could see, devoid of any other living souls, and Ramirez would soon snuff out his only other company still residing on this side of the beyond.

A gust of wind threw his aim slightly off-balance, and Ramirez had to stifle a curse. With the wind picking up as it was, any sound he now made could carry for hundreds of yards, alerting Rickner... or worse, any FBI agents that might
happen
to be in the area. But he had done an exceptional job of covering his tracks. So good a job, in fact, that he himself would have had a hard time cutting through the noise and tracking him to this quiet cemetery. Which would prove of paramount importance, since his next move would be to leave the country. Forever.

He got the sight fixed back on Jon’s head, and paused. The young man’s face was one of contentment, of all being right with the world. Or at least, of a resoluteness to get there. His brother had just been killed, and yet he was all but smiling. But then, perhaps it was just the renewed sense of life that surviving near-death experiences can bestow.
How deliriously ironic,
Ramirez mused,
that such should be the last thought he has before dying.

Ramirez brought his body tight to the stock, his finger finding its ideal position on the trigger. His last kill on U.S. soil. He inhaled, slowly started to squeeze the trigger.

A report, muffled by a sound suppressor, echoed from behind him. He tried to turn his head, but his body was already doing that for him as he flopped over on his back, his rifle sliding harmlessly to the ground. He knew he had been shot, but he couldn’t tell where. He felt light.
After surviving battlefields the world over, how horribly ironic to die in a cemetery in my own homeland,
his thoughts floated past, seemingly with no connection to his conscious mind.

The gunman was standing just a few feet away from Ramirez, plenty close enough to go for the headshot, but for some reason, he hadn’t. Almost as though he wanted to confront Ramirez face-to-face, to personally redress some wrong that had been the longtime assassin visited upon the other man. A second muffled report sounded, and then another. A spume of crimson shot upward from his chest. His breaths came as blood-drenched gurgles, and he realized he was drowning in a field on a perfectly clear day. Drowning in his own blood.

For a brief moment, Ramirez focused his vision enough to see the figure standing over him, a mere silhouette against the deepening orange of sunset. The figure’s gun flashed once more, but Ramirez couldn’t hear the report. All he heard now was what sounded like a howling wind, or perhaps just the white noise of brain cells dying en masse. But the flash momentarily illuminated the face of his killer. And, although he no longer trusted his senses any more than he trusted that bright light he seemed to be floating toward, he could have sworn that he recognized that face.

That it belonged to Wayne Wilkins.

And that, for the first time since Ramirez had met him, Wayne was smiling.

In writing a book like this that blends actual history with speculative or fictional elements, an author is has done his job if the reader has difficulty separating what is real from what is not. Now that the narrative is complete, however, I want to set the record straight on what is real, and what is merely a speculative creation.

A word first on my setting: In an effort to be faithful to what is perhaps the most famous city on earth, I made several trips to New York to research the key locations for my novel. Experiencing the world in my characters’ shoes; walking (and, at times, climbing) where they would; seeing, hearing, and smelling the city that is so integral to the heart of this story was a real inspirational treat, a vast living canvas where I could envision where my characters would go and what they would do (and, of course, where I could hide Rockefeller’s secrets). All of the Manhattan locations – including the routes that my characters take through the streets, parks, churches, museums, train stations, and libraries of the city – are accurate and faithful to their real-world counterparts. In addition, all of the historical background about the key locations – including Rockefeller’s associations with them – as well as the sites where Rockefeller hid his codes, are accurate (although the codes themselves are my own creation). If you have never had the pleasure of visiting the city of New York, I urge you to do so. It is a fantastic, vibrant place like no other I’ve seen in my travels, with a culture and soul exclusively its own, and its rich history is evident from every street corner.

Now, on to the history behind the mystery.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., trying to escape the shadow of his eminently famous father (and the bad press that Senior had gotten for his strikebreaking and other actions against his company’s workers), became one of the greatest philanthropists the world has ever seen, donating more than half a billion dollars of his vast fortune to various causes over his lifetime. He helped finance the League of Nations (the predecessor of United Nations, created in the wake of World War I), as well as donating over eight million dollars to finance the site of the UN headquarters in Manhattan. Riverside Church, the Cathedral Church of St. John, and The Cloisters museum, among many others in Manhattan and around the world, were all properties that either received significant funding from Rockefeller, or were at one time owned by the man. He even donated his 54
^th
Street mansion (Chapter 29), which is now the site of the world-famous Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). His philanthropic legacy extends across America to Europe, Jerusalem, and beyond. But, even today, his most remembered contribution to the world, the crowning achievement for his legacy is still his Rockefeller Center.