From the Ashes (40 page)

Wayne pulled his head back just as Ramirez wrenched his wrist free. He slammed his already bleeding forehead into Ramirez’s nose. Ramirez cursed, both of his hands flying instinctively to his injured face. Wayne grabbed Ramirez’s gun and ripped it free as he planted the barrel of his own pistol against Ramirez’s temple.

Ramirez’s cell phone began vibrating from where it lay on the floor, the screen’s backlighting casting a crepuscular glow over the room. The look on Ramirez’s face as he stared at Wayne could have curdled milk. His eyes burned with a fiery hatred, but he knew he was beaten. Wayne shoved Ramirez’s gun into his own waistband behind his back, pulling his shirt-tail over the weapon. He reached into Ramirez’s coat pocket, removed his handcuff keys, and pocketed them.

“You know the drill,” Wayne motioned to the handcuffs and pipe that had so recently held him prisoner.

“Go screw yourself,” Ramirez spat, the dim illumination from the floor making his hateful expression look truly demonic.

Wayne increased the pressure of the muzzle on Ramirez’s temple. “Don’t make me say please.”

Ramirez trudged across the room, looking for an opening, a way to turn the tables, but Wayne gave him nothing. He squatted, and, glaring at Wayne, secured the open handcuff around his own wrist.

“Tighter,” Wayne instructed, his weapon still leveled at Ramirez. Ramirez squeezed the cuff tight around his wrist, the clicks echoing in the empty chamber.

The abandoned phone’s vibrations ceased for a moment, plunging the room back into darkness. Wayne took a step back, wary of falling prey to the same move that had gained him his freedom moments earlier. A cacophony of scraping and shuffling suddenly emanated from Ramirez’s direction, but Wayne was powerless to do anything but back away and wait.

The phone rang again, the vibrations skittering it across the floor. Wayne picked it up, answered.

“Ramirez, what the hell happened?”

“Greer?”

A pause. “Wilkins? What the hell are you doing?”

“What has to be done.”

“What are you talking about? You know the mission. Stay the course, son.”

“Sorry, Greer. Mission aborted.”

He hung up the phone to angry protestations from the other end. He switched on the flashlight function, pointed it at Ramirez’s face.

Ramirez spat a bloody glob of saliva onto the floor. “This isn’t over yet.”

“For you it is.”

“You’re a dead man, Wilkins. You and Rickner both.”

“Sorry, Ramirez.” Wayne reached the door, looked back. “I’ve got bigger fish to fry right now.” Wiping the blood from his face, he shouldered open the door and stumbled into an abandoned alleyway, shutting the door behind him and sliding a heavy trash barrel in front of the entry to Ramirez’s makeshift cell. He then staggered out of the alleyway and into the night, immune to the muted shouts and curses echoing behind him.

The dark bronze statue gleamed in the floodlights that shone on its skin from beneath. In Greek mythology, Atlas, condemned by the gods to hold up the heavens in punishment for his rebellion, quite literally had the weight of the world upon his shoulders. In the statue Rockefeller had commissioned, Atlas’ burden consisted of an empty orb constructed of several circumscribed rings, resembling the orbits of the stars around the earth as viewed by the ancients. Again, the symbols of the zodiac made an appearance, as they had around the Prometheus statue, the signs of the ages cast in metal and pressing their eternal weight upon Atlas’ shoulders. His back to the rest of Rockefeller Center, he faced the Cathedral, but his head was bowed, his eyes downcast as though ashamed, as though too burdened by the weight he carried to look at something far holier than himself and the mark of sin that he carried. His left foot was firmly planted on the pedestal, while his right seemed to have slipped off, the knee nearly resting on the statue’s base, although whether it was in a representation of penance or of eternal encumbrance, it was hard to say. For Rockefeller, they seemed to have been one and the same.

Jon and Mara ran across the street to the base of the statue, their eyes darting every which way, anticipating some sort of ambush from the Division – but their search found nothing suspicious. Perhaps the pair truly was several steps ahead of their seemingly omnipotent adversaries. Despite its fame and artistic beauty, no one was around the forty-five-foot tall statue, the passersby preferring the thoroughfare of the Fifth Avenue sidewalk to the recessed alcove, surrounded by the office buildings of Rockefeller Center on three sides, where
Atlas
was positioned. Which made the impossible task Jon and Mara had to undertake a little less impossible.

Upon drawing close to the statue, they immediately noticed Atlas’ eyes. His gaze was fixed on the southeast corner of the base, the spot where his right foot would have been resting if it hadn’t trailed behind him, dangling off the pedestal. His eyes not simply averted from the sight of the Cathedral but fixed on the source of his shame. Rockefeller’s shame.

Jon shivered and noticed Mara was doing the same. And not just because of the chilly night air.

“He hid the Dossiers in the base of the Atlas statue?” Jon whispered to the night. “One of the most famous statues in the country?”

“Well, he did go for places with a good chance of long-term permanence. Sit a beautiful statue on top of it, developers in later generations are less likely to come along and knock apart the hiding place.”

“True, but still... Right here, all along. Alright, so the question is, how do we get to what’s inside?”

“Jackhammer?”

“No, I don’t think so. Everything thus far has been possible for the two of us, with just some minor tools, screwdrivers and our hands.”

“And our minds.”

“Well, that’s the point,” Jon agreed. “It was our minds, our ability to reason, that Rockefeller wanted to test in getting here. Our desire to seek the truth against all odds, our ability to be rational and lateral thinkers. The ability to see and act outside the box of mutual paranoia that Cold War politics had created.”

“Okay, then, let’s use our minds. How do we get to the Dossiers?”

Jon absentmindedly scratched at his chin with his thumb, staring up into the somber eyes of the bronze Titan. He searched those eyes for some answer, some revelation that he might somehow be able to see now that he had proven himself worthy. The statue’s face was an inscrutable symphony of gleaming light and recessed shadow. Jon half-hoped that some heavenly light would shine down from the night sky, the base opening of its own accord, revealing the Dossiers to the noble seeker. But he had no such luck. The statue just held his gaze, simultaneously seeming to wish to turn its eyes from Jon’s and to ask him, plead with him, to free him from the bonds that had held his heart hostage for three-quarters of a century. His true burden was not the heavy, star-adorned metal loops soldered to his back, but the few sheets of paper hidden beneath his feet.

He walked around the sleek marble base, looking it up and down, scanning it for any cracks or crevices, any indication of how one might get to something inside. At the back, there was a small rectangular hole in the base where it met the concrete ground, but upon peering inside, even with the aid of his flashlight, nothing jumped out at him. Even if the hole did lead to the Dossiers, his arm would not fit inside, much less be able to maneuver around whatever final safeguards Rockefeller had placed around the site. And then he realized the significance of the hole.

“There’s another base,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

Jon looked around the area, toward the street and climbed up onto the corner ledge of the shiny marble base. Lifting himself up on his knees, he peered down past the upward-shining floodlights at the center of the base. He had realized that the hole at the bottom was a drain hole, meaning that there had to be somewhere for the rain to get trapped, some opening that ran from top to bottom on all four sides. And there it was. The inner base. The one upon which the statue was actually resting. A smaller, hidden, more secure one – constructed of cinder blocks and shame. The keep inside the fortress, where the king would store his most valuable treasures – and his darkest secrets. Jon looked around again, Mara watching him expectantly as he scanned the area, surprised that, apparently, no one seemed to care – or even notice – that he was climbing around on a world-famous statue.

He looked back into the gap between the two bases, squinting into the glare of the floodlights that shone upward toward the statue. The inner base was composed of concrete blocks cemented together with mortar. How was he supposed to get through that? He began to wonder if a jackhammer might be more practical after all. But of course, they’d be thrown in jail long before they got anywhere near the Dossiers. He was already skirting the edge of the law by just being up here. Taking heavy-duty power tools to national landmarks would be a fatal leap into illegal territory, not to mention shooting up hundred-decibel flares to every law enforcement agent in the area to come and arrest him.

He looked up at the statue. Atlas, looking down at Jon, held his gaze. There was something sad, something mournful in his countenance. Like a guilty man who has been punished beyond his crime. Burdened with a horrible weight. Like the mythological Atlas must have felt, the weight of the sky pressing down for all eternity. Like Rockefeller himself, the ramifications of Operation Phoenix growing more and more dire as Hitler’s Reich grew, conquered, stole, destroyed. The unrelenting guilt from his unspeakable mistake. Knowing that his silence made him all the more culpable. Letting his mark on the city do the speaking for him, sharing a message no one had gotten until now.

Yes,
Jon felt.
This place was special. Something was here.

The Dossiers.

He reached down into the gap between the bases, the heat from the glowing floodlights warming his forearm. He touched the cold concrete blocks, ran his fingers along the rough edges of the mortar. How could they get inside this? It was a solid pillar of load-bearing blocks, bearing a heavy – and important – load indeed. He was so close. They had come so far. Only to be met with an impregnable castle keep.

Jon clenched his jaw. He rapped his knuckles against the concrete cinder block in frustration. Then he paused, his eyes narrowing, widening, his jaw shifting. He rapped his knuckles against the block again. Moved them to the block above and knocked again. To the block below, the block to the left, listening with his fingers, feeling the vibrations and lack thereof, and drawing inferences from what they sensed.

“Mara!”

“Yeah? What is it?” she said eagerly.

“Screwdriver from last night. You still got it?”

“Um...” She rummaged around in her purse. ‘Yeah, I guess I do,” she said, finding the tool and holding it up for Jon to take. “Oh, geez, and I’ve been carrying the mallet around, too. No wonder my shoulder’s been hurting me today. I really need to clean this thing out.”

“Mallet,” Jon said, holding his hand out expectantly like a surgeon asking for a scalpel with a dying patient on the operating table. She handed it to him, asking him what he was doing.

“Getting those Dossiers, I hope,” he answered hurriedly. He reached into the gap with both of his tools in hand, each arm in a different hole, feeling exposed, like a medieval prisoner in the stocks. Staring through the third hole and holding the tip of the screwdriver against the center of the block that had felt a little too hollow under his knuckles, Jon tapped the end of the handle with the mallet. He was conscious of the percussive metal-on-stone sound echoing, but whether it was just inside the outer marble base or in the whole of the U-shaped alcove, Jon couldn’t say. Regardless, no one from the street seemed to be aware of his presence, apparently too caught up in their own little worlds – their rush home, to the hotel, to the show, the mad New York dash to the next thing in their lives – to notice the statue or the man who kneeled at its feet, perched six feet from the ground.

He hammered and hammered, moving the screwdriver in an X pattern in an attempt to weaken the stone before he breached it completely. The half-centimeter hole that a single puncture with the screwdriver would open wouldn’t get the Dossiers out. If indeed they were inside.

A few minutes of tapping later, Jon and Mara both heard the beautiful sound of concrete cracking, crumbling. Mara looked at Jon, wide-eyed in anticipation. Jon glanced backward at Mara, a flicker of joy in his expression, before he turned back to the widening hole. Tap, tap, tap. Within moments, he had created a hole large enough to put his hand through. Feeling around inside the hole, Jon’s fingers found a metal cylinder, closed at both ends with caps larger than the cylinder itself. He gripped it, tried to pull it out, and failed.

***

Across the street, perched on the roof of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Harrison Greer viewed Rickner’s progress through the scope of his sniper rifle. He had climbed up fire escapes, belfries, and long-forgotten ladders on the Cathedral’s periphery to get here. A combination of intuition, cell phone triangulation, and satellite imagery had served to locate both Wilkins and Rickner. This, right across from Rockefeller’s most lasting legacy – Rockefeller Center – was where his family’s quest would end. This was his moment.

Greer was already in position by the time Wilkins overpowered Ramirez – or whatever ended up happening there. It was too late to go back now. And though Ramirez might have been detained or killed by the traitorous Wilkins, they weren’t the only assets Greer had in New York tonight. Jeff Berenson, a six-year veteran of the Division, was on his way to retrieve the Dossiers from where Jonathan Rickner would soon drop them. Greer would strike them down, Berenson would retrieve the Dossiers, Greer would verify them, and using his grandfather’s lighter, Greer would destroy them once and for all. But right now, Greer was waiting, patiently waiting, until he was
sure
that they had located the Dossiers.

***

Jon widened the hole in the concrete with his screwdriver and mallet combo. Deciding that the aperture was sufficiently large, he again thrust his hand into its cold recesses, wrapped his fingers around the cylinder, and tried to extricate hand and dossier-holder together. This time, he succeeded.