FROM THE ASHES Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  The Fiction Studio

  P.O. Box 4613

  Stamford, CT 06907

  Copyright © 2012 by Jeremy Burns

  Cover Design by Aaron Brown

  Author Photo by Rachel DiDomenico of Imperial Photography

  Print ISBN-13: 978-1-936558-32-2

  E-book ISBN-13: 978-1-936558-33-9

  Visit our website at www.fictionstudiobooks.com

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by U.S. Copyright Law. For information, address The Fiction Studio.

  First Fiction Studio Printing: January 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Becca,

  Sister, Editor, Friend

  Acknowledgments

  Though it’s been said that a writer’s journey is a lonely one, there are many people to whom I am indebted for their assistance, support, and encouragement.

  Becca Musil, for reading through every revision and offering me consistently useful suggestions that have been invaluable in bringing the novel to where it is today.

  My parents, for raising me with the values and work ethic necessary to see this through, and for believing in me since day one.

  Meredith Curry, for your love and encouragement. You have no idea how much your belief in me has helped to spur me on.

  Debi Bell, Keith Tischler, Kris Ryan, Travis Laffitte, Tim Manson, Martine Forneret, Kritika Lakhani, Pam Ahearn, and Harriet Epstein, whose comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the novel helped shape it into the finished product. Your insight has been invaluable.

  Lou Aronica, for falling in love with my story and taking a chance on an unpublished author. Thanks for sharing your vast reservoirs of experience and knowledge to get my story into the world.

  Jackie Baron McCue, for helping give my book that final layer of polish.

  Aaron Brown, for your friendship, insight, and assistance as we’ve embarked on our writing careers, as well as for the amazing cover design.

  Authors Ethan Cross, Stephen James, Jeremy Robinson, Jon Land, Kathie Antrim, and Greg Mosse, for your encouragement and words of wisdom, as well as everyone who has helped put together ITW’s consistently amazing ThrillerFest conventions the past three years.

  D.B. Lyle, M.D., for his medical expertise.

  Dr. Max Friedman, Dr. Jim Jones and Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus, whose university coursework was invaluable to the novel’s historical backstory.

  All the faculty and students at Universal American School of Dubai, for believing in the dream and cheering me on (as well as creating the first Facebook fan page for my writing).

  And to everyone who has ever asked me “When is your book coming out?” for helping to light a fire under my butt and put in the work to make this dream a reality. You will never know how much your encouragement and support over the past five-plus years has helped make the lonely and often frustrating road from idea-for-a-story to published novel not so difficult. Thank you.

  If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

  ~ Joseph Goebbels

  Prologue – The Fatal Flaw

  Peace visits not the guilty mind.

  ~ Juvenal

  Every guilty person is his own hangman.

  ~ Seneca

  Manhattan, 1957

  The frigid night air should have stung Roger’s face, but it didn’t. Tonight, he noticed very little about his surroundings, operating solely on instinct. All his faculties were taxed to the limit with the battle that was raging within him, a battle that had begun that afternoon, a battle that was steadily marching onward to its inevitable conclusion.

  A child! His weathered face contorted with his thoughts, his natural, carnal self breaking through the years of carefully built-up training, the stoic facade that had somehow come crashing down in one fateful moment. He had killed before. He had killed his fellow Americans before. All under orders, of course. All for the good of the country. But never before had he killed a child.

  What danger could a child really have posed? Roger’s thoughts continued, more a stream of answerless questions than a real quest for understanding. It was obvious which side would win his internal battle. He had decided its end when he left the apartment. He had determined what its outcome would be when he packed the heavy briefcase he carried at his side, its weight hardly noticeable compared to the gravity of its implications for Roger, for the Division, and maybe one day, for the nation.

  The rules were simple. Someone pokes their nose in the wrong place, starts sharing “improper” ideas, ideas that get uncomfortably close to that uncomfortable truth that he was sworn to protect. A red flag goes up at HQ. Recon stakes out the individual – or the “traitor” as the Division liked to call such persons, for, according to Division protocol, anyone who even entertained such ideas, decided years ago to be infinitely dangerous to national security, were considered enemies of the state, regardless of their intentions behind their quest for knowledge – then verifies the extent of the “ideological contamination.” Elimination – or the “Cleaners” as they were sometimes colloquially called, as they removed the stain that the traitor made on the nation’s integrity – moves in and removes the threat. Extra-Division Affairs, or EDA, then ties up any loose ends to make the whole thing disappear. Of course, if the Cleaner did his job properly, there wouldn’t be anything to tie up. And after every one of Roger’s missions, there never was. At least, not until today.

  ***

  He had received the mission from one of the Division’s special couriers this morning, the message itself encrypted to protect against interception. Short, to the point. The traitor’s name, physical description, place of residence, and the like. Personal habits observed by Recon that could be used to help stage the scene. The usual requisite information that would allow Roger to do his job. He had been doing this for six years. For the military in Korea before that. And in the Pacific Theater of the Second World War before that. Death was nothing new to him. It was the same as going to the office for a banker or an executive: it was his job. No thrill of the kill, no sadistic pleasure from taking the life of another human being. Just the cold, stoic orchestration of death, as prescribed by his faceless superiors. Emotion of one kind led to hesitance; of another, sloppiness. The Division could not abide either.

  Roger had thought nothing of the target’s age. Billy Yates. Age: seven years. Forty-seven inches tall. Fifty-two pounds. A child, obviously, but none of this had struck a chord with the veteran assassin that morning. It was just another job. He’d never had to kill a child before, but he faced it as he would any other job: without emotion, without doubt. If the Division had decided the boy was a threat, then Roger would fulfill his duty without a second thought.

  He had arrived outside the boy’s school fifteen minutes before the students were due to be released. Sitting on the park bench across the street, an open newspaper in his lap, Roger stared intently at the photograph of the boy. It wasn’t easy to get a decent photograph of each target taken and printed quickly enough to avoid increasing
the lag time between the Division’s initial awareness of the “traitor” and the actual elimination of the target, but, with the meticulous attention to detail and accuracy that they prided themselves on, it usually proved to be well worth the trouble. Roger, like all of the Cleaners within the Division, had been trained extensively in facial recognition, so that from his close study of this one picture, he would be able to pick out little Billy from a crowd of his peers. His knowing the route the boy would be taking home, as well as having a description of the clothes he wore to school this morning, would also be helpful. There was no room for error. There never was.

  The boy’s face was just a face, like many others he had studied before. Like many others he had seen right before death. A bit rounder, more cherubic, perhaps, but just a face nonetheless. It was just business for Roger. It had to be that way.

  The ringing of the school bell jerked his attention from the picture and back to the park bench. He had allowed himself to lose track of the time, the plan having been to study the immediate area and its denizens at least five minutes prior to school being released. Now he had only seconds to survey the area for any potential interference or witnesses before the students began pouring out the front doors.

  He subconsciously checked himself, something arising inside that had to be pushed back down. Fear about his need to rush? No, fear wouldn’t have made him lose track of the time in the first place. It was something different. Something in the picture. Something far more dangerous than fear.

  Roger sighted the boy. Blue jacket, buttoned up and covering the white shirt underneath, blue jeans, brown shoes, his reading primer tucked under his left arm, his right motioning wildly as he chatted with two other boys his age.

  Roger cursed himself silently. He hadn’t prepared for this possibility, a possibility that he should have treated as a likelihood. Of course the boy would have friends at school. A loner like Roger, a man who dealt in death and had long since left interpersonal relationships behind him – this was an alien world to him.

  A world of universal acceptance and peace. Of wonder.

  Of innocence.

  Roger found the image of the boy’s face, the close-up of his ingenuous countenance weaseling its way back into his mind. His well-trained subconscious went through the required motions to repress the subversive thought. He had made the identification. The picture was now superfluous. That face, that haunting face, was no longer any use to him. But, like the effects of subterranean tremors beneath a body of water, the usually placid surface of Roger’s mind was no longer without ripples.

  Slowly, cautiously, he arose, casually folding the newspaper in his lap and tucking it beneath his arm. Though he was focused on seven-year-old Billy, his senses still took in the rest of the scene: the girl holding her little brother’s hand as they crossed the street to the park; the woman, ostensibly their mother, who awaited them on the next park bench, her youngest child sucking at a bottle in her arms; the middle-aged man – the principal, most likely – at the top of the steps to the school, watching the children disperse toward their respective homes; the elderly couple who sat on another bench in the park, the woman intermittently reaching into a brown paper bag to withdraw birdseed which she scattered at her feet; the young boy who clamored back and forth, whooping and laughing as he tormented the pigeons that had gathered for the free meal. Anything and anyone that could prove useful. Or that could potentially compromise the integrity of his mission.

  Feeling assured that he was aware of all the variables in his scope, he began to follow the boys, walking across the street, just behind them, maintaining a casual pace while studying the children with his peripheral vision. As they walked, groups of students turned down side streets toward their homes. Most of the children came from poorer families that couldn’t get by on just one income, so both parents were at work when the school day ended. Thus, the children walked themselves home. This would have made matters easier for Roger, but there was a caveat: Billy’s mother was home with the flu. With each step homeward, the window of opportunity was closing. And with each passing second, echoes of that innocent face spawned more and more ripples in the long-stagnant waters of a long-forsaken corner of Roger’s mind.

  The crowd was thinning. The boys were alone now, a pair of older girls walking a few paces behind. One of the girls motioned in Roger’s direction. Whispered something to the other girl. They giggled. He forced himself not to wince.

  The cardinal rule: don’t draw attention to yourself. He didn’t exist. He couldn’t. Standing out, being seen, being remembered: that was unacceptable for a Division agent. How had he been so careless as to draw their attention? What had he done that made the girls, children caught in their own little world, notice him? Everything was going awry when nothing could afford to.

  The girls glanced in his direction again. He started to quicken his pace when a stooped-over hobo shambled past him, a tin can in his hand. He was waving the can around in the air, seemingly to attract attention by the clinking of the coins within, but no sound was heard. The can was empty. Thus, the hobo’s relatively silent approach that Roger hadn’t noticed. Thus, the girls’ laughter, confirmed by the outstretched finger of one of the girls, pointing at the hobo who now ambled several paces ahead of Roger. Roger breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t been sloppy. At least, not yet. He had to get his act together though, he told himself, or mistakes would be made. And he never made a mistake.

  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 h
ave 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.