From the Ashes (43 page)

Weary and broken, Jon dropped the backpack from his shoulders and placed it next to his bed, kicked off his shoes, and hit the lights. Still in his clothes, bloodstained jacket and all, he lay down in bed, tucking Ramirez’s pistol under his pillow. He was asleep within seconds, plunged into dreams of cathedrals with fallen angels and of Mara dying in his arms, his hands drenched in crimson as the remorseful eyes of Atlas bore down on him from above.

Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
Thursday

The next morning, Jon went by St. Luke’s Hospital again. Mara, though out of surgery, was in a drugged sleep in the Intensive Care Unit. Her breathing was labored, assisted by oxygen tubes stuck in her nostrils, and her face was ashen. Jon squeezed her hand, hoping that she could feel his touch and realize how much he appreciated all she had done. Though they had never brought the subject up again, the assumptions he had taken from their argument at Del Frisco’s – that she wouldn’t have the mettle to see this through, that she had completely misunderstood Michael’s passions – now seemed not only petty, but completely off-base. Her assistance in finding the Dossiers and her determination to accomplish their mission, even to the point of nearly dying at the Atlas statue, had more than proven that. It was with no small twinge of sadness that he reflected on what a great married couple Michael and Mara would have made had things turned out differently.

He left Mara’s bags at the hospital and, after making a few last minute stops in the city and calling the professor with his arrival time, Jon boarded his flight to Washington. His sleep the night before had been a restless one, tossing and turning while chased by phantoms of the past and specters of what was to come, dreaming of missed appointments with Death and bullets with his name on them. Yet despite his lack of real rest, despite everything he had endured in the past week, his mind was sharp, focused. His plan was brilliant, and he couldn’t afford to miss a step.

During the short plane trip, Jon kept his eyes open, alert, but refusing to read the novel he had in his bag. He focused solely on the task at hand, going through the details in his mind, over and over and over again. The ever-changing landscape below, the puffy whiteness that sailed past the window hardly registered. His world was in his mind, the unfolding of the near future that would be perhaps one of the most important junctures in American history, and, certainly, in Jon’s life.

Professor Leinhart had warned Jon about trusting anyone once he and Mara had been thrust into a world of subterfuge and double-crosses, of government conspiracies and buried secrets worth killing for. But Wayne Wilkins, by all accounts weaving a tale that was almost too outlandish to believe, had proven true, his motives apparently in line with Jon’s own. How differently the previous evening could have gone if he had
not
truly been an ally. Even if he had not arrived when he did. Just a few seconds later, and Greer’s next bullet would have ensured that Jon and the Dossiers disappeared forever. Thankfully, at least in that instance, trusting someone else hadn’t blown up in his face.

When the plane finally landed in Washington, the passengers gathering their belongings in anticipation of their imminent disembarkation, Jon was confident that his plan would work. From the plane to the terminal, from the terminal to Dr. Leinhart’s car, from the car to the National Security Archive’s headquarters at George Washington University. Barring a suicide bomber at the airport or a deadly car crash orchestrated by the Division en route to the university, there were few gaps between here and the end of his ordeal, the fruition of his quest – and his brother’s.

Waiting for the aisles to clear somewhat before pressing toward the exit, Jon finally grabbed his belongings and left the plane, carrying his backpack on one shoulder and keeping his hand over the zipper as he walked through the crowded terminal. He kept a wary eye on everyone around him, studying their faces and their body motions for anything that might warrant suspicion – a furtive glance or a bulge inside a jacket. No one stood out. In studying their faces, however, he realized that behind their impassive expressions, their minds focused on families, work, relationships, bills to pay, the mundane and commonplace ordeals of life. In contrast, Jon, like Rockefeller before him, felt the weight of a nation’s future upon his back. But, while Rockefeller merely refused to destroy the truth, Jon refused to let the lies live on at all.

Continuing his surveillance of the people bustling through the airport, Jon’s eyes finally lit upon one face that
did
mean something to him, a face whose burden was equally less mundane, whose grave ordeal held implications that reached far beyond vacation plans and college funds. As Professor Leinhart caught sight of him and began to draw near with a tense smile upon his face, a nervous anticipation gripped Jon’s stomach. The planning he had been going over in his mind for the past few hours was no longer simply a plan; it now had to be put into action.

“Jon,” Leinhart said, placing his hand upon Jon’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort. His eyes were tinged with red, as though his night had been restless, filled with worry, and the occasional tear. He sucked at his bottom lip, nervously nibbling the chapped skin between his teeth. His unshaven jowls sagged mournfully and his rumpled clothes looked as though he had slept in them. Jon realized that he was going to have to take the helm here also, but that was just as well. It was his plan, and he knew how to enact it. Leinhart just had to get him in the door. That, and drive him across town.

“Professor, you look like crap,” Jon quipped. “No offense.”

“None taken. I feel like crap. But the sooner we finish this, the sooner we can both rest easy.” Despite his ragged demeanor, Leinhart moved to help Jon with his bags. “So we’ll go to the university to get the Dossiers into the National Security Archive’s system for starters?”

“That sounds good. You know how the system works better than I, so I’ll trust your judgment there.”

“Yes, I think that’s best. I’ve already begun drawing up the paperwork to start processing it based on what Wayne told you. Background and whatnot. I haven’t told anyone else at the university or at the Archive just yet. You never know where they might have spies.”

Jon grimaced. “Too true. ‘Reds in every closet,’ huh?”

The professor laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah.” He swallowed hard, his stubble-covered Adam’s apple leaping, diving in his throat. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Leinhart led Jon through the parking lot to his car, the silver Audi shining bright in the sun. He unlocked and opened the passenger’s side door for Jon, holding it open while he climbed in.

“I’ll put your suitcase and backpack in the trunk,” Dr. Leinhart offered.

“You sure?”

The professor nodded.

“Thanks. I’ll hold on to the backpack, though,” Jon said, setting the bag in the floorboards between his feet.

“As you wish.” Leinhart closed the door, and Jon watched him in the rear view mirror as he unlocked and opened the trunk, heard bags moving around in the back as he shuffled around whatever else he had back there to make room. Jon buckled his seatbelt and closed his eyes, going over his plan in his mind once more. The calm before the storm, a storm that hopefully would never come. The last pep talk before the big game. The last meal before... no, that was a bad metaphor to use. His nerves were on edge enough as it was.

Jon heard the back door open behind him. He slowly opened his eyes, turned his neck slightly.

“Sorry. I’ve been meaning to clean out the trunk, but it keeps slipping off my to-do list. I couldn’t fit your suitcase back there,” Leinhart explained as he slid Jon’s carry-on into the back seat. Jon grunted in understanding and closed his eyes again. A silent pause, as though Leinhart were thinking about something. Then Jon’s eyes shot open as a strong hand wrapped a sickly sweet-smelling wet cloth around his nose and mouth. He could see the edge of the cloth at the bottom of his vision as he struggled against Leinhart’s grip, wishing that, just this once, he hadn’t buckled up.

As the too-empty parking lot began to fade to a chemical black, Jon found himself wishing he had taken the professor’s advice against trusting anyone.

Even the professor himself.

Rockville, Maryland

The first thing Jon noticed when he blinked open his eyes was his inability to properly focus, as though he were sobering up after a long, hard bender. The second was that he could not move his arms or legs, his wrists and ankles being bound to the chair he was seated in. He was powerless to stop the itching injection site where, Jon surmised, his captor – or captors – had administered a secondary sedative designed to keep him unconscious until he was securely bound and transported to his current location. Once his senses began to sharpen back toward normal, his brain began to register details about the room he was in, his surroundings both familiar and foreign to him. Oak paneled walls. Forest green couch. Black leather recliner. Coffee table. Old TV. Bookshelves filled with tomes whose title-embossed spines were still a blur to Jon’s impaired sense of sight. He could tell it was the living room of a home somewhere, but he had never seen this particular room, been in this particular house, before. The room was windowless, although two hallways leading elsewhere in the house were visible: one to the left, one to the right.

He could recognize his bags on the floor across the room, their contents ripped from within and strewn about the floor by someone searching for something, but exactly what they were doing there, he couldn’t say. Exactly what
he
was doing here, wherever this was, also remained a mystery to him. A mystery that started to gain some illumination, a weak wind beginning to dispel the miasmatic fogs clogging his semi-drugged mind, when Dr. Richard Leinhart, still wearing his rumpled clothing and looking more haggard than ever, came back into the room from the left-hand hallway, two sheets of Xeroxed paper clutched in his fists.

“Where are they, Jon?” the professor demanded in a weary, but urgent, voice.

“Where are what?” Jon asked, his head pounding as he forced the words.

“The original Dossiers,
Jon!” the professor shouted, shaking the Xeroxed copies Jon had hidden in the pages of Michael’s notebook. Leinhart grabbed Jon’s immobile forearms and stared into his face with desperation. “Where are the Dossiers?”

Jon smirked, blew a puff of air through his nostrils in a private laugh. “They’re safe.”

“Safe where?”

Jon ignored the question. “You’re working for the Division?”

“Yes. No. I’m working to stop the Division from killing anyone else. They contacted me right after you and Mara left for New York. I don’t know how they found me, but they did. Look, the guy told me that they don’t want you, they just want the Dossiers. They get the Dossiers, the killing stops. I don’t help them reclaim the Dossiers – through you, of course – they kill you, they kill Mara, and they kill me. And who knows how many others until they
do
get them.”

“And you believed them?” Jon spat on the floor, his dry mouth providing almost no saliva for his expectoration. “They shot Mara just seconds after we discovered the damned things. Would’ve shot me too, if Wayne hadn’t taken the bastard out when he did.”

“The man I talked to assured me that no harm would come to any of us if we delivered the Dossiers to the Division and kept our mouths shut.”

“Bull. Their whole purpose is to kill, to protect this skeleton in the nation’s closet. They’ve been going strong longer than either of us has been alive, and you really believe they’ll stop once they’ve destroyed the one thing that could bring them down? Hell, that’ll just embolden them further. Professor, the
only
way to stop the killing is to expose the Dossiers. You know that’s the truth.”

Leinhart’s brow creased even further, his troubled eyes betraying the tumult of warring thoughts raging in his mind.

“No,” he finally said. “Perhaps what you’re saying is true, but we can’t bring them down. Not anymore. They know about me. They know about you. They’ve probably got the National Security Archive under wraps, ready to pounce on anything we try to push through the system.”

“We’ve at least got to try!” Jon exploded, leaning toward the professor as much as his restraints would allow. Leinhart backed up in defense, but only a little. “Mara and I have been out here busting our asses hunting down the truth, putting our lives on the line every step of the way, and you just want to roll over and play dead. Is that how you work, Professor?”

“Not usually,” Leinhart said, his face hardening as he straightened up to his full height and stared down at Jon, “but in this case, I’ll make an exception.”

“Well, you knew my brother well enough to know he would never do that. And neither will I.”

The professor stood there glaring for a moment, his eyes narrowed in frustration.

“Fine,” he huffed, and turned to walk off to some other part of the house, disappearing down a hallway to the right. Jon sat there, racking his chemical-addled brain for what to do next, what he
could
do next. His brother would have been proud of his courage, his integrity in the face of stalwart opposition. Jon just hoped that it wouldn’t land him in a premature grave like it had Michael.

The professor returned with a pistol, its black metal shining dully in the interior lighting. He didn’t look like he had much experience handling a gun. Which potentially made him even more dangerous, especially when coupled with the visible nervousness that had seized the professor’s demeanor.

“We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” the professor said, brandishing the pistol and making sure Jon was aware of its presence, and Leinhart’s readiness to use it. “It’s your choice.”

Jon had to stifle a groan. The professor sounded like a walking movie cliche, his stereotypical bad guy line ringing hollow. The man wasn’t a villain, Jon knew. He was just like Jon, a good person put in an impossible position. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be just as dangerous to Jon’s survival.