From the Ashes (2 page)

Billy and one of his friends reached a crosswalk, a line of taxis and town cars stopped at the intersection. They waved farewell to the other boy as he continued down the street toward his house. The girls turned the corner and headed in the opposite direction from Billy’s house. And then there were two.

A policeman directing traffic blew a piercing whistle and thrust his palm out to stop the line of vehicles, beckoning to the boys at the corner with his other hand. As the boys crossed behind the policeman, Roger was sure the officer had glanced in his direction.
Why shouldn’t he?
Roger tried to assure himself. A man didn’t have to look suspicious for someone, officer of the law or not, to glance at him. Roger decided not to slow his pace, though. He had to turn the corner before the boys got there, to continue on the path that he knew Billy would take home. To loiter in view of the police officer, waiting until the boys had passed and then following them – that was just asking for trouble. He knew Billy’s route, and walking in front of the boy instead of behind, that just seemed a better way to avoid suspicion. Especially now that it seemed he had no choice. Given, he wouldn’t have a clear line of sight on the target while he walked in front, but his other senses, especially his hearing, would make up the difference. Besides, tricks of the trade he’d learned, like using reflections in storefront windows to get glimpses of the boy, would help fill in the gaps.

Turning the corner, he heard the voices of the boys coming up behind him. He couldn’t tell which was Billy’s, but he knew that for one of the voices, it would be the last conversation it was ever a party to.

The boys were yammering on about God-knows-what. Something from one of their lessons, it sounded like. “Hey guess what?” changed the subject. Now they were talking about... something about –
oh God, no.
Roger almost stopped dead in his tracks, his right leg stiffening with fear before he forced it to continue its downward motion into the next step. The boys were talking about the Operation. Not knowledgeably, of course, but they were poking in the right – or as it were, wrong – direction nonetheless. How in the world had
children
run across this seed of thought? If
they
had discovered something, what hope did the Division have of preventing the mass populace, distracted though they were with the Communist paranoia that still gripped the nation, from probing around and uncovering the truth? Roger’s mind became a freight train of thoughts, both unbearably heavy and unrelentingly fast: Was this a test? He knew the Director and he had had some clashes in the past few weeks, but could this have been some sort of plant or something? Surely children couldn’t have found this out on their own. Surely such a child couldn’t pose any threat to national security. And yet he could hear the boys’ voices floating down the street to him, uttering the very ideas that had proven the death sentence for many a citizen before them. Personal vendetta or not, neither the Director nor any member of the Division would ever risk giving information about the Operation to any member of the public. And this boy, this Billy Yates, aged seven years, forty-seven inches tall, fifty-two pounds, brown hair, brown eyes – this
traitor
was already starting to propagate his subversive truths. With one final burst of politically righteous indignation, Roger’s subconscious pushed the image of the seraphic face – and its accompanying ripples – deep beneath the surface. The boy must die. And now, through his prying senses and loose lips, he had condemned his friend as well.

Roger pumped his right hand, trying to quell the tension and anger that had been sparked inside him. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to eliminate targets other than the ones specifically approved and assigned to him by the Director, but this was different. If Billy had proven anything in these sixty seconds Roger had walked in front of him, it was that children couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. Especially a secret of this magnitude. Roger had to seal off the breach and eliminate the threat before it spread. Now.

Then Roger heard Billy’s voice carry up words that were music to his ears: “Do you want to come over to play?” Moments earlier, this sentiment would have troubled him, bringing that accursed young face back to the forefront of his mind and adding the problem of getting the boys separated so he could eliminate the target without creating a witness in the process. Now, though, it removed the problem of having to eliminate the boys before they separated, which, considering that he had no idea who the other boy was or where he lived, was a huge boon to his mission. And he realized that the alley Billy was wont to take as a shortcut home, despite his mother’s protestations, was just half-a-block ahead. “Come on, I’ll show you a shortcut to my house,” came from behind Roger, followed by an excited acceptance of the offer. Roger quickened his pace as subtly as he could. The alley was usually empty. The few windows that looked down into it were mostly shuttered and vacant. The perfect place for the kill. Both of them.

He turned into the alley about ten adult paces ahead of the boys. Quickly surveyed the area. Empty. Abandoned. A nook in one of the walls would prove a good spot for completing the ghastly deed, a large waste bin for industrial refuse, the perfect dumping spot for the bodies. No bodies, no crime. No crime, no investigation. Just the way the Division wanted it.

He heard the boys’ voices approaching as he tucked himself into the nook, obscuring his body from view. Even as the boys moved down the alley toward him, they paid him no attention, enrapt in their own little conversation. Which was still about the Operation. Roger’s mind began to reel. How many pedestrians had he passed since leading the boys down the sidewalk? How many ears had now heard the dangerous information these
traitors
were spouting? The founts of unthinkable thoughts, small though they were, had to be shut off.

The boys walked past the waste bin, and as they reached the nook, their conversation was cut short as two strong hands reached out from the shadows, gripping their necks and lifting them into the air. Roger shoved the boys against the brick wall of the nook, his eyes burning with rage at the impetuousness of these foolish boys. These vile
traitors.
And all the while, his grip grew tighter as the boys’ struggles grew meeker. No more secrets would fall from their lips; no more treachery would their tongues weave.

And then he made his mistake: he locked eyes with Billy. That damned cherubic face came rushing up from the bowels of his mind, that face of innocence and wonder, of love and trust, of everything that had been so foreign to Roger for far too long. The face of the boy he was now throttling the very life from, twisted and purple in oxygen-deprived agony as it was. Those eyes, so happy and carefree in the photograph, locked with Roger’s and spoke to a part of him deep within his being, the part of him that the Division hadn’t been able to touch: the human part. Those eyes asked him but one word: why? Not accusingly, not in anger or fear, but with a solemn innocence, a quiet sadness that shook Roger to his very core. Then Billy’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his throat stopped convulsing, gasping for oxygen that wouldn’t come. The target, Billy Yates, age seven, forty-seven inches tall, fifty-two pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, bloodshot eyes, sad eyes, innocent eyes, dead eyes, was eliminated.

Mission accomplished.

Roger didn’t remember dropping Billy’s lifeless body to the pavement below. He didn’t remember not disposing of the body as he had always been so meticulous in doing. He didn’t remember leaving behind an eight-year-old witness, coughing and gasping for air, but very much alive, at the scene. All he remembered was running blindly from the alley, chased by a spectral pair of pleading brown eyes.

***

Roger turned east and began ascending the pedestrian section of the Brooklyn Bridge. An American icon, its strong steel cables and massive stone arches standing as a monument of a bygone era. A beacon of ingenuity and bravado, of innovation and work ethic. Everything like the America that stood up to Hitler, to Stalin, to despots and injustice worldwide, the great bastion of freedom she publicly considered herself to be. And nothing like the America he knew. At least, not anymore.

His footfalls echoed in the cold, dry air. It was quiet, but then, at this hour of the night, it should be. His breath came in short bursts, visible as puffs of smoke in the icy air. A haunting pair of sad brown eyes appeared in the mist and stared longingly at the breaths. Trudging onward, he tried to put it out of his mind. But failed.

Billy Yates was dead. The Division would ensure that his nameless friend would meet a similar fate, fixing Roger’s mistake, his breach of conscience. They were perfect at what they did, if not as individuals, then as a unit, killing off any whispers of the truth behind the Operation. Billy and his friend had known enough of the truth to make them a liability. Never mind their age. Never mind their innocence. They had to die. And die Billy had. And die his friend would. But the face of Billy as he’d choked his last, the eyes that had locked with Roger’s, opened the floodgates of the agent’s mind, releasing an onslaught of the faces of the nameless dead, the Division’s
traitors,
Roger’s
victims.

Officially, Roger’s mistake had been leaving evidence, not disposing of the body, not killing the friend. The more faces rushed back into his memory, though, the more he began to wonder exactly what – and when – his biggest mistake really was.

Upon reaching the center of the bridge, the point with the greatest distance between the bridge above and the river below, he stopped and surveyed the area. A series of iron girders extended across the space between the central pedestrian bridge and the sides of the bridge itself. One of these led to a platform that jutted over the river. The intersection of two crossbeams in the vicinity completed the package.

The perfect spot.

Roger swung his body over the rail and onto the girder leading to the platform. He grabbed the briefcase and lugged it over the rail as well, careful not to let its weight throw off his balance and send him tumbling to the automobile section of the bridge some twenty feet below. He went through the motions emotionlessly, thoughtlessly. He was in mission mode, just as he always was before he made a kill.

He clambered across the girder and onto the platform, setting the briefcase down as soon as he got to its relative safety. From the briefcase he withdrew a length of steel cable, a loop at each end. Each loop was held by an apparatus bolted to each end that allowed the loop to loosen or tighten when the catch was released, but only to tighten when it was locked. He tied one loop around one of the supports of the bridge, threading the cable through the hole and pulling the knot tight, the catch set to secure the binding. The other loop he placed around his neck.

He hefted the cable in his hands. Heavy. Thirty-two feet of cable. Thirty-two. A symbolically fitting message, he felt. Thirty-two was where it began. Thirty-two was where it would end.

His suit jacket flapped in the brisk wind, his perfectly shined black shoes catching the light of the full moon above, that watchful orb that condemned him even now, as he stood on his self-prescribed gallows. He stared downriver, the lights of the Lower Manhattan harbors twinkling in the distance, the black expanse of the bay opening up beyond. And beneath him, the icy waters of the East River glimmered in the moonlight, beckoning him downward, calling him toward a descent that he would only be able to make partway. The cable would hold him back from completing the journey into oblivion, just as some uncrushed fragment of his humanity, lying dormant for so many years, numbed into nothingness by training and necessity, had prevented him from continuing his descent into depravity in the name of duty and patriotism. The icy wind bit at the exposed skin on his face, his hands, his steel-encircled neck, the flesh growing numb with the pain that Roger’s occupied mind was already dead to.

The loop around Roger’s neck was not a proper noose. A proper noose would have snapped Roger’s neck the moment it drew tight: a merciful death. And Roger had decided that the monster he had become deserved no mercy. But although his noose would normally lend itself to a slow death by strangulation, in all likelihood, the speed his body would reach by the end of a thirty-foot free fall would more than provide the required force to break his neck. But the cable’s thirty-two feet had more than just a symbolic purpose: that length would also ensure maximum visibility of his body from the city and from the river. Much shorter, and the underside of the bridge would obscure his body from many vantage points. Much longer, and the force of the noose stopping his free fall might decapitate him, his head and body plummeting to the inky depths below, being swept out to sea instead of remaining suspended from the East Coast’s most famous bridge. A ghost dangling from an icon by a symbol. The importance of which most people would never fully grasp. But hopefully someone would. Someday.

A memory came to him as he stood on the precipice, ready to take the final plunge. As a boy, he had attended a Baptist church every Sunday with his family. He remembered Mrs. Booth, the bespectacled, grandmotherly Sunday school teacher who had taught the children about a “new life” in Jesus; a “second birth,” as Christ Himself had put it. The irony was overwhelming. For Roger was not looking at a second birth, but a second death: the killing of a man already six years dead, buried in an unmarked grave in a country seven-thousand miles away. Maybe this would send ripples through someone’s pond. Maybe this would rattle some cages.

That was part of the beauty of the whole operation: they didn’t exist. Not as individuals, not as an organization. They were naught but shadows glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye, ghosts that existed solely in dreamscapes. Dead men begetting more dead men.

Someday, the truth would come out, but not today. Not with the Cold War, as some were starting to call the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, escalating as it was. Just days earlier, the Soviets had launched a man-made satellite into space, broadcasting its ominous beeping as it traced a terrifying line across the night sky. No, the secret he guarded could not be revealed in this day. But by the same token, it would no longer be guarded by his hand.