Ascendant

by Sean Ellis

  DiLorenzo seized the opportunity to brandish his pistol. “Freeze!”

  The big man ignored the threat as he advanced on Mira. He raised a foot to stomp on her, but she rolled underneath him, driving her foot into the back of the mercenary’s knee. His supporting leg folded, and he pitched backward like a felled tree, crashing into the dining room table. The nearest legs of the table snapped under the sudden load, and the man was buried in an avalanche of musty-smelling speculative literature.

  Thunder roared in the small room as DiLorenzo’s weapon discharged a split-second too late to hit his target. The bullet passed through the space where the man had stood and smashed impotently into the kitchen wall. DiLorenzo spat a curse, lowering the barrel and taking aim again. As he was about to fire, Mira popped up directly in the line of fire.

  The mercenary had lost his baton when he fell and made the mistake of looking for it. He was still fumbling through the scattering of books when Mira’s gloved palm slammed into the bridge of his nose.

  At the proper angle, with sufficient force, the blow might have been fatal. Mira, however, did not want the man dead. She knew what he was: a hireling for somebody with greater resources and a more dangerous agenda. As a soldier of fortune, he might be compelled to see that the path of greatest reward lay in cooperating with the police, but to do so, he would have to be physically subdued. The brute obviously wasn’t afraid to take a bullet, and Mira suspected DiLorenzo wasn’t afraid to give him one. That meant it was up to her to bring him down.

  She heard the cartilage in the man’s nose pop as she made contact. The faint protrusion beneath the fabric of the balaclava was now visibly asymmetrical. Moisture soaked through the fabric, dripping crimson onto the scattered pages.

  The mercenary howled in frustration, but if he felt the pain of his broken nose it in no way slowed him down. He swung at Mira, striking her on the left side with his forearm. It was a reflexive blow, without any real purpose behind it, but it knocked her flat a second time.

  The mercenary came to his feet, roaring and waving his arms like an angry ape. DiLorenzo did not hesitate. His pistol roared three times in quick succession, drowning out Mira’s cries of protest. The .38-caliber rounds punched into the mercenary’s chest and knocked him back onto the wreckage of the table.

  “No!” Mira was up in an instant, hurling accusations at the detective. “We needed him alive.”

  DiLorenzo’s eyes were blazing with unexpected emotion. “I needed you alive.”

  She opened her mouth, but found his simple answer too compelling to argue against. She turned and took a step toward the fallen man. “Call an ambulance,” she said, unable to muster the urgency she wanted. She had seen the fabric of the man’s shirt erupt as the lead missiles struck home. DiLorenzo’s rounds had struck dead center over the man’s heart. “Maybe there’s time to save him.”

  The detective reached her side a moment later, staring down at the motionless figure. A sprinkling of blood had fallen around the man’s head, but there was less than Mira would have expected to see. She turned to comment on this, but was stopped by the expression on DiLorenzo’s face. In a sudden rush of comprehension, she intuited that the detective had probably never killed a suspect before, that he had probably never even fired his weapon in the line of duty.

  She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly to calm her racing heart. “Thank you.”

  DiLorenzo’s pained eyes caught her own, and for a moment, there was a silent connection between them.

  A heartbeat later, their legs were swept from beneath them as the fallen giant arose from the dead. Protected by an undergarment of woven Kevlar fibers, he had been hammered hard by the bullets, but they had not penetrated his chest cavity.

  They fell into each other, a tangle of limbs, each struggling to help the other stay upright. Mira glimpsed the mercenary, pulling himself erect and scrambling across the room. He made no further attack, focusing all his energies on escape. She could tell from his gait that he was hurting, but he reached the window where she had made her entrance before she could regain her feet and pursue him.

  DiLorenzo was still struggling to rise as she reached the windowsill to stare out into the alley where she had made her ascent. The mercenary was free rappelling down the vertical surface on the rope she had set. She looked down and made eye contact with him, just as he reached the end, still a good 15 feet above the pavement. The excess rope she had earlier gathered in and tied off now delayed his flight.

  He gazed back up at her, hesitant to surrender to what would surely be a painful drop to the ground, and curious to see how she would respond. There was only one way down for the man. It was just a matter of how long he would dangle helplessly before surrendering to the fall. Once he recovered from the drop, providing he broke no bones, there would be no preventing his escape.

  Mira stared at the taut rope, wondering how she might use the situation to her advantage. The section she had gathered up had pulled tight into a hopeless Gordian knot. Eighteen inches higher, the line threaded through the bars which now formed the fulcrum from which the mercenary hung like a pendulum.

  Inspiration dawned. Without hesitation, she swung into the window frame and braced her boot heels against the steel cage. The first two-footed blow sent a shiver down the climbing line. She could hear the man shouting for her to stop in between the percussive sounds of her heel strikes. On the fourth, the bolt securing the upper righthand corner tore free with an eruption of masonry shards. The entire steel frame then flipped forward, dropping the mercenary a few feet lower and slamming him against the wall of the building. The steel eyehole, through which the remaining bolt was threaded, seemed to quiver as the load placed on it strained it to its breaking point.

  In that moment, the mercenary might have escaped without any further injury. He was within safe falling distance of the pavement, and the threat from the steel grating was not yet imminent. Nevertheless, acting on the instinct of a falling man to cling to whatever safety was available, he passed up his chance to let go of the rope and get away.

  Mira leaned out the window. The full weight of the giant was now pulling on that single bolt. Even without further action on her part, the bars were going to break free at any moment. When they did, the rope she had secured around the steel rods would prevent them from falling to the alley below. That was the part of Mira’s plan that required some adjustment.

  She slipped a thin, fixed-blade knife from her right boot and held it at the ready. A final kick caused the framework of steel to break free with a tortured shriek. In that instant, she slashed the blade of the knife across the rope. The fibers parted with a whispered popping noise, followed by a clatter of steel on brick as the frame plunged down the side of the building.

  The mercenary hit the ground hard, flat on his back, driving the breath from his lungs in a gasp. He could only stare as the rope coiled haphazardly onto his chest, followed about one second later by the tumbling steel grid. The heavy frame impacted with a muted thump, followed by a jangling of metal on stone. When Mira next saw her assailant, he was motionless beneath the grating, his head lolling to one side.

  She whirled to find DiLorenzo at her shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get down there before he comes to.”

  “Hang on a sec,” DiLorenzo was shouting, as if standing still would somehow help him to grasp all that had transpired in the space of a few seconds. Mira was already moving.

  She burst through the front door into the hallway and was suddenly confronted by her unfamiliarity with the building. Her intuitive gift did not translate into instant knowledge, but in tandem with a logical appraisal, she determined to head for the center of the corridor.

  The door to the stairway was just opposite the entry to the elevator shaft. She darted into the stairwell and hopped down three steps at a time.

  She reached the front lobby on the ground floor less than thirty seconds after leaving the apartment and did not slow down as she flew into the lobby.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man in a generic uniform standing in one corner, speaking urgently into the telephone. The doorman was probably summoning the police after hearing gunfire from the upstairs apartment. Mira was already on the sidewalk before her brain had begun to process that information. She turned right and raced for the corner of the building, and the entry to the alley where she had made her covert ascent.

  As she rounded the corner, she was suddenly bathed in the harsh glare of twin halogen headlamps and brought up a hand to shield her eyes. The roar of a revved-up engine and squealing tires told her a vehicle was driving straight at her. She leapt backwards, swinging her arms to get the most distance out of the hasty maneuver, and reached the cement sidewalk as a white van, with windows only in the cab end, raced by. The van turned right in a screech of rubber on pavement, then accelerated away down the street.

  Mira’s blind jump had almost sent her sprawling backward. She caught the edge of the building with her right hand and steadied herself for a moment before chasing back into the alleyway. She was not surprised by what she discovered there. The metal grating lay more or less where she had seen it fall, but there was no sign of the mercenary. His comrades in the van had swooped in for the rescue in the half-minute it had taken her to reach the ground floor. She muttered useless curses as she gazed up at the window of Aimes’ apartment.

  She heard the noise of labored breathing in the alley and turned to find DiLorenzo running toward her. His face was strained by the exertion of following her down the stairs. In the back of her mind, she wondered why the detective wasn’t in better shape; didn’t policemen routinely chase suspects on foot? It was a passing thought that owed more to her irritation at having failed to capture their prey, and she let it slip from her mind as he drew close. She now saw that in addition to his sidearm he held a cellular telephone.

  He paused at her side to catch his breath, gesturing silently to the place where their assailant had lain only a minute before.

  “His friends showed up,” she explained. “They took off in a delivery van. And no, I didn’t get a license number or a good look at the driver, but I’ve a fair idea of who it was.”

  “Rachel . . . Aimes,” he wheezed. “I’ll put . . . an alert out.”

  A few moments later, the distant noise of police sirens became audible and steadily drew closer. Patrol cars, summoned either by the doorman or by DiLorenzo, were responding, too late, to the scene of the crime. Mira gazed back up at the window, wondering what she was forgetting.

  DiLorenzo took a final deep breath then let it out slowly, after which he attempted to breathe normally. “You took a big risk,” he accused.

  “What was he after?” she wondered aloud, disregarding the statement.

  “I thought that was obvious. He was after you.”

  She shook her head. “Then why didn’t his friends stick around to finish the job? No, I don’t think that’s it. Come on.”

  DiLorenzo’s expression fell. “Where?”

  “Back up there,” she shouted over her shoulder, already breaking into a jog. “Don’t worry. I’ll send the elevator for you.”

  DiLorenzo scowled, then willed up the energy to chase after her.

  Mira saw what had changed almost right away. The wall map, opposite the dining room table, had been taken. A rectangle of white, a shade lighter than the smoke-darkened paint of the wall, exposed its absence. In each corner of the outline, a tiny hole revealed where a thumbtack had fastened the paper to the wall.

  She stared at the emptiness for a moment, trying to recall details about the map, and wondered how the mercenary had known of its presence and importance. The answer to that was obvious; Rachel Aimes had doubtless supplied that information.

  She could hear DiLorenzo’s voice speaking into his cell phone in the other room. “Well, why can’t they transfer him tonight?” he was asking, his tone one of disbelief. “Still no idea who he is? . . . No. But they hit us here— . . . Mira— . . . I don’t think I’d go that far. . . . Well, she’s a lot easier on the eyes than you are.”

  Mira chuckled at the turn the conversation had taken, then focused her attention on the task at hand. In her mind’s eye, she could see the map of the earth. It was the kind of thing one could purchase in any bookstore. Aimes had probably bought his in the museum’s gift shop. With closed eyes, she could not recollect any sort of modification. There had been no marks on the map to suggest that it held the key to some hidden secret. Why, then, had the mercenary taken it? She opened her eyes and looked again.

  There it was.

  In what would have been the lower left quadrant of the map, there was another tiny hole, identical to the tack marks in the corners.

  “Well?”

  It took a moment for Mira to realize that the detective was addressing her. She turned to face him. “There was a map here. A map of the world that Walter had used to mark a specific location. That’s what he was after.”

  “Do you know where?”

  She turned back to the blank wall, trying again to summon a mental picture of the map. She extended a finger, seeing it in her mind, and placed it where she would have imagined South America to be. When she opened her eyes, the pinhole was scant centimeters from her fingertip.

  “Somewhere in the South Pacific. Or possibly the tip of South America.”

  “South Pacific? Do you think he figured out where that Lemur place was?”

  “Lemuria was probably an ancient name for Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.” Mira shrugged. “The map could mean almost anything. But whatever it was, they have it now.”

  “And they’ve got a head start. But the question is a head start on what?”

  “Hopefully, I’ll find out when I get there.”

  DiLorenzo coughed in disbelief. “Just like that? You’re going to jet off to the South Pacific?”

  “That’s where the answers are.” She turned to face him again. “You know, I almost wish Walter had faked his own death and was secretly orchestrating all of this.”

  “Why?”

  “Then, at least, I would know who the bad guys are”—she looked down at the chaos of books scattered on the floor—“and what they’re looking for.”

  FOUR

  Although the austral spring was in full bloom, carpeting the lowlands in lush verdant foliage and vibrant multi-hued blossoms, a harsh wind off the Pacific Ocean was Mira’s constant companion from the moment she began descending the western slopes of the Andes.

  Her route led her either head on into the tempest or presented her for a broadside hammering as she negotiated switchbacks on the mountain roads. She was burning through her supply of gasoline much faster than she had anticipated and was forced to refill both the tank on the Harley Davidson and the twin 20-liter jerricans in panniers slung over the front wheel at every outpost of civilization. Such outposts were few and far between, especially after her unheralded crossing of the Argentine border with Chile.

  She had fixed her destination before leaving Aimes’ apartment that night, now four days in her past. Though she had not had access to a map at the time, she had taken accurate measurements of the distance from the pin mark to the perimeter of the outline of the map utilizing a string and a paperclip to form a plumb line. She had then made an assessment from the point where the string intersected that imaginary line to the corner of the map. Utilizing those two distances, she had purchased an identical map early the following morning and plotted her next move. The tiny pinhole represented an area of the earth’s surface of several square kilometers, but there could be no disputing that it fell squarely on the Chilean coast, just to the south of the Gulf of Penas. In a remote fjord, somewhere between Wellington Island and Hanover Island, Walter Aimes had determined that a secret lay, and his murderers had judged that secret more valuable than his life. Mira had pledged to discover it first.

  The long journey by motorcycle had given her plenty of time to ponder the significance of Aimes’ research. It seemed unli
kely that the map coordinates could be anything but connected to Atlantis; Aimes had appeared to be interested in little else. Yet, this location was far too remote to have been an Atlantean outpost. While it was true that the refugees of Atlantis had indeed brought the Trinity to the Americas, the location of the temple ruin was thousands of miles away on the Central American isthmus. Two days of hard riding, during which there had been plenty of time to ponder the mystery, had brought her no closer to answering the question of how she would even begin her investigation.

  Her meditations on the subject were not the only matter to occupy her mind during the long trip. There had been reports of bandits and armed revolutionaries inhabiting the mountain regions away from civilization, and extreme vigilance had been required. With her intuition safeguarding her, she had made contacts in the Argentine underworld who had been able to equip her to face the dangers of the road. The Beretta nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol had cost her more than double its market value, but the added expense insured that there was no paper trail.

  She wore her pistol in a shoulder rig, which also contained two spare magazines. The reason for the open display was two-fold; not only did it afford easy access to the firearm, it also served as a warning that she was not toothless prey. And while it was true that anyone lying in ambush would get the first shot, she was confident that her intuition would give her the advantage. That said, throughout the long journey she had not experienced the slightest hint of impending danger.

  Mira had not spoken with DiLorenzo since they’d gone their separate ways following the arrival of police patrol units at Aimes’ apartment. He had been caught up in official procedures, and she had been focused on determining the map coordinates. Though she occasionally felt a pang of regret that circumstances had not allowed her a moment to relax and enjoy his company, she was already relegating the experience to the archives of distant memory. She recognized that her path would not have ever crossed the detective’s if not for Aimes’ murder that night at the museum and, as such, saw it as no great loss that the encounter was already behind her. Both of them deserved better than a fling based on a chance encounter.