The Ascendant

by Peter Parkin

  He looked up at Judy, and grimaced. “Time for you to leave the room.”

  She pointed her index finger at him. “No goddamn way. I’m listening to that tape.”

  Sandy shook his head. “That wasn’t John’s wish. His last will and testament was that you give this tape to me and that you weren’t to listen to it. We have to respect that.”

  “He doesn’t deserve my respect. He took his own life. That act made any last wish null and void.”

  Sandy lowered his eyes. “I have a suspicion as to what this tape is about, Judy. I know some things you don’t know. John wanted to protect you. If what I think is on this tape, it might make you sick to your stomach.”

  She shook her head defiantly. “He was my husband, and I’m not some delicate flower that you have to protect. I can handle whatever is on there. Do this for me.”

  Sandy paused for a few seconds. Then, he just nodded his head forlornly, made the sign of the cross, and pushed the Play button.

  17

  “Calm down. Be a man. You’re pathetic.”

  (Sound of sobbing.)

  “I’m…trying. But…I can’t…get her…out of my mind.”

  “She was a slut. No one gives a shit about her.”

  (More sobbing. The sound of a slap against flesh.)

  “Oh, now you’re hitting me just like you hit that little girl? The all-powerful Lincoln Berwick, hitting a child. Proud of yourself?”

  “Hey, John, you thought she was older too. Wasn’t just me. And you didn’t hesitate to stick your dick in her mouth, did you?”

  (Something hard slamming down on the floor.)

  “Sure, but only your cum is inside her, Linc. That could tie you to her.”

  (Another slap.)

  “It’s just cum, you jerk. Doesn’t prove anything. They can’t prove whose cum it is.”

  “They could—you never know.”

  “No, they can’t, John. So shut the fuck up. Why the hell are you crying over a little slut? What was she to you?”

  “Her name was Monica Harwell, Linc. She was a little girl, and you killed her. Why the fuck did you have to hit her so hard? Or, at all? She wasn’t hurting you. So, why?”

  (The sound of a punch.)

  “Because she tricked us. Made us think she was older. That’s why. She deserved it.”

  (More sobbing.)

  “Deserved to die? And to be dumped like a sack of garbage in a ditch? Is Orange County Road Number Six the grave site she deserved just for being fourteen?”

  (A softer tone of voice.)

  “John, you were the brave one. You tried to save her. The rest of us didn’t know what to do. You can’t take any blame for this. You’re right. I hit her, and I dumped her. I did it out of panic. But, we can’t ruin our lives over her. We have to be together on this, all five of us. Buds forever.”

  “What if the police come here, Linc? They’re going to find her body, and where you dumped her isn’t that far from campus. They might assume West Point guys were involved.”

  “So what? There’s nothing connecting us to her. Except my cum—and my cum doesn’t exactly have my signature on it. If they come here, they’ll ask some questions of the staff and some of the boys, and if they ask us we just deny. That’s the secret to freedom, John. Denial. Deny, deny, deny. Don’t crack. And, I’m your leader. I’m the Commander of the Honor Guild. I have your back. Just follow my lead.”

  (A deep, fitful sigh.)

  “I just don’t know, Linc. I’m scared.”

  (A rustling noise, then what sounded like a body banging against a wall.)

  “Stop! Knock it off! Damn, now I’ve twisted my ankle, and I have track practice this aft!”

  “Fuck off, John. Who gives a shit about your ankle?”

  (The voice turned deep and guttural.)

  “I’ve tried to be reasonable. That’s over—here’s what’s at stake for you. You will follow the Honor Code and respect your Commander. If you don’t, I will kill you and dump you in the same ditch as your little slut, Monica. You can be together, forever. Your choice.”

  (A door slamming. Then silence.)

  Sandy pushed the Stop button on the tape player and glanced up at Judy. He’d forced himself not to look at her face while the tape was playing.

  Her eyes were as wide as saucers, and she was covering her mouth tightly with her right hand. Her left hand trembled as she clenched and unclenched a fist—over and over again.

  “Are you okay?”

  Judy shook her head.

  Sandy got up from his chair, walked around the kitchen table and hugged her from behind. Nestling his cheek against hers he could hear her breaths, labored and anguished. Listening to her husband’s young voice on tape was probably shocking in itself, but the subject matter of the recording was no doubt more than she could have imagined. Sandy thought that maybe he should have given her an advance warning of what he’d expected.

  “I had no idea, Sandy. He never told me about this—thing—that happened.”

  Sandy backed away from her and knelt down on the floor, taking her hand in his.

  “I’m so sorry, Judy. I know this is a shock to you. But, it might explain why John descended into depression and alcoholism. You can give yourself a break, now. It had nothing to do with you.”

  She stared into his eyes. “You knew about this. Were you there? Were you one of the five?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. But, John confided in me. I went to the dean on his behalf, but kept his name out of it. I told the dean that someone had confessed the incident to me, and I identified Lincoln Berwick as the leader, the rapist, and the killer. The dean assured me that justice would be exacted, but nothing happened. Well, nothing except that I got booted out of the Honor Guild, followed a year later by John. I got kicked out for violating the Honor Code, and John got booted for being a drunk.”

  “What’s this stupid Honor Code?”

  “It’s hard to describe, almost a sacred rite of passage. They take it more seriously than the law itself. You violate it at your peril, and serious offenses get overlooked for the greater good. There are some things about the Honor Guild itself that are kind of weird. It was an elite group of young men, all high achievers, all high IQs. Futures were determined for each boy, and plans would be put into place to make sure those futures happened.”

  Sandy took a deep breath. “After a few years in the program, high level sponsors would be assigned to each kid, kind of like career guides or—a more apt description would be like guardian angels. I didn’t get far enough into the program to have a guide assigned, nor did I ever find out how each of us had been selected in the first place. We were all West Point students to begin with, but quickly got shuffled into this special Honor Guild unit. Because we were apparently ‘special.’ I guess if I’d lasted in the program I would have learned more about what it was all about, but I might also have been more beholden to it. I don’t regret getting the boot.”

  Judy seemed to be regaining her composure. “So, how did they all end up being with this girl?”

  “They picked her up in a van. Thought she was a hooker. John was the one who discovered she was only fourteen, by seeing her age on her library card. Warned Linc as he was in the middle of—fucking her. Linc got mad, hit her hard across the face, and her head slammed into the side of the van. Went into a seizure. John apparently tried real hard to save her, it’s important you know that. But, she died. Then Linc just dumped her by the side of the road, and kicked her body into a ditch.”

  Judy seethed, “Bastard.”

  “That word is far too kind.”

  “Did the police ever investigate? Did they visit West Point?”

  Sandy shook his head. “Not that we know of. We checked the newspapers for weeks after the incident. Nothing. Makes you wonder, does
n’t it?”

  “Covered up?”

  Sandy nodded. “I think so.”

  Judy shook her head. “Unbelievable. Her poor parents, never knowing what happened to her.”

  “That incident shook John to his core, and he was despondent when nothing was done. He never told me he’d made a tape—kept that as his own private secret. I don’t know why, maybe to protect me since I went to bat for him. It’s such an incriminating thing, that he might have been afraid for both me and him. And he held onto it for all these years—maybe he thought he could use it one day.”

  Judy squeezed Sandy’s hand. “He did try to use it, didn’t he? You know something.”

  Sandy squeezed back.

  “I know as much as you know. But, I suspect that’s where this windfall of money was going to come from. Sounds like blackmail, and not in the least bit a coincidence that Lincoln Berwick is now a presidential candidate. I think John saw this as an opportunity to finally do something worthwhile with his life. Extort some money from the bastard and use it to take care of you and Cynthia. Make amends.”

  Judy started crying. “He was murdered. It wasn’t suicide. Linc killed him.”

  Sandy nodded sadly. “The dots seem to connect. I doubt that the coward would have done the deed himself. He has people now for things like that. But, if this old skeleton got out of the closet, it would have devastated his campaign, let alone his freedom.”

  Judy stood up and started pacing.

  “Sandy, listening to that tape, there was something that wasn’t characteristic of John. At times, he was sobbing like a baby. And, he let Linc smack him around and didn’t fight back. Instead, he just whined. He sounded pathetic.”

  “I think he was play-acting. John was a very intelligent man. He knew how to get as much as possible on that tape. In fact, I think he was brilliant. One time John and I were having drinks and, as we got drunker and drunker, and babbled and babbled, we discovered we had both been conceived by artificial insemination. Isn’t that a weird coincidence? We joked about how smart we both were and that maybe we even had the same father and didn’t know it. But, I think John’s gray cells were a lot more powerful than mine. Such a waste.”

  “Yes, such a waste. I regret that Cynthia never really knew the man that he used to be. But, Sandy, no matter how down or depressed John was at times, I don’t remember ever seeing him cry. And he knew how to defend himself—he wouldn’t let anyone push him around.”

  “I agree. John wasn’t being himself on that recording. Sly dog. He was smart in other ways too, Judy. He made sure to get the name of the girl on the tape, her age, and also the location where her body was dumped. He took a chance doing that, but Linc didn’t seem to clue in at all. I think that’s why John went into his crying wimp act—to distract Linc from the specific information he was getting on tape.”

  Judy stopped her pacing and sat down again.

  “Who were the other three?”

  “I’ve lost touch with them over the years, and I don’t think they were all that close with Linc, or John either for that matter. They were just kids out cruising around, wilding, and things got out of hand. But, I saw them at a couple of West Point reunions over the years. Hank Price became a bigwig engineer at Boeing. Lloyd Franken moved up to the top ranks at NASA. And Bill Tomkins, the guy I knew the best out of the three, became a Wall Street banker.”

  Judy smirked. “They did well. The Honor Guild paid off.”

  “Yep. All three graduated from it, along with Linc, of course. And, they’re all perfect examples of what I was talking about. Linc might be the next president, and the other three are all in influential positions of power. Their careers were chosen for them, and they were guided along—or, manipulated. Who knows?”

  “But, you did okay, Sandy, despite being kicked out of this—Guild thing.”

  “Yeah, I did. Professor at MIT and now the Lincoln Laboratory as well. Can’t complain. West Point does give a good education, but I sometimes wonder what kind of power position I would have been steered towards if I hadn’t flunked out of the Honor Guild.”

  “You might not have been as happy.”

  “No, but I’m not happy now anyway, so I guess the end result was the same.”

  Judy wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek.

  Sandy broke the awkward moment with a question. “Do you have your computer handy? We could look these three guys up and see how they’re doing?”

  Judy opened a drawer and pulled out a laptop, fired it up, and passed it over to him.

  Sandy searched for Lloyd Franken first.

  “Here he is. Still at NASA. Says here that he’s the senior astronomer, responsible for near-earth objects and defensive capabilities.”

  Next up was Hank Price.

  “There’s old Hank. A nice pic of him—still a handsome dude. Chief engineer at Boeing. Oh—what’s this?”

  Judy rubbed his hand. “What? Tell me.”

  Sandy looked at her, then back at the screen again. “He’s dead. Died in a recent car accident. His vehicle rolled off the highway into a lake near Seattle. Says here that he might have fallen asleep at the wheel.”

  He googled Bill Tomkins next.

  “There’s Bill—a good photo of him, too. Still looks the same, pretty much. CEO of an investment banking firm on Wall Street. I always liked Bill. A special kind of guy, different from most of the guys at West Point. A very hard nut to crack, but once you did, he was nice to be around. We always hit it off.”

  He scrolled down further.

  “What’s this?” Sandy swallowed hard before continuing. “A news article here says that he fended off a couple of thugs in his office. Says here that it was a robbery gone wrong, and they attacked him and his niece. Bill killed them both in self-defence. Happened just recently, just before Hank’s death.”

  Judy squeezed his arm. “John’s death is recent, too, Sandy.”

  Sandy stood, walked over to the window, and gazed out at Judy’s large backyard. “Your grass is still very green for January. Looks great.”

  Judy joined him at the window. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking, aren’t you? That these can’t be coincidences? Out of the original five from that van, John is dead, Hank is dead, and Bill would be dead if he hadn’t killed the attackers instead. There are only two left who haven’t been killed or attacked—that Lloyd guy at NASA and Lincoln.”

  “Yes, and John was the first to die. Clearly, he was trying to blackmail Linc.”

  “Linc decided to take out all the other loose ends? Just in case?”

  “Maybe. And that means that Lloyd will be next, and very soon. They’ll probably leave Bill alone for a while. It might look too obvious if they tried again so soon with him. And he’ll be on his guard, too.”

  Sandy could sense that Judy was shivering. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  She turned her gaze away from the backyard and ran her fingers through Sandy’s hair.

  “You have such nice thick hair. Did you notice that all three of those men you googled had blonde hair just like you?”

  Sandy laughed. “Yeah, I did. Well, mine’s a little bit darker than theirs, more dirty blonde.”

  “John had blonde hair, too.”

  Sandy nodded.

  She continued fingering the hair on the back of his head.

  “And, so does Linc.”

  He nodded again, then reached back and grabbed hold of her wandering hand, stopping it in its tracks.

  Judy tapped the fingers of her free hand against the windowpane. “Don’t you think that’s weird, Sandy?”

  18

  It was located on the tenth floor of a rather normal looking office tower on West Street in Lower Manhattan, appropriately only a block away from Goldman Sachs.

  Appropriate, b
ecause the motivations of the two companies were similar.

  Power and money.

  But that’s where the similarities ended.

  Goldman Sachs was high profile and always in the public eye. You couldn’t ignore Goldman Sachs, and it would have been negligent for its executives to allow it to be ignored. Publicity was what it thrived on, and its business model was based entirely on being top of mind and first at the table for any mergers and acquisitions that needed money and expertise.

  The tenth floor of 400 West Street, on the other hand, was low profile. It only had a handful of employees, and its business model required it to remain low profile, and secretive to all except America’s richest and most powerful.

  Even though companies like Goldman Sachs prided themselves on planning for the longer term, in reality that wasn’t the case. Not with the demands placed on executives by shareholders. Fortune 500 companies could pretend all they wanted to, but long-term thinking was not the reality for their business models. Instead, short-term shareholder value was paramount.

  The occupant of 400 West Street, however, was a behemoth in long-term thinking, and its impact on the corporate, scientific, military, and political worlds was immeasurable. In fact, if anyone attempted to place a value on the company in the interests of an IPO, it would be virtually impossible to measure or quantify.

  The company was, in a word, priceless.

  Legacy Life Ladder Incorporated took deposits.

  And they sold those deposits only when the time was right, and when the buyer was right. But, different from any other corporation, the selling price of its deposits was immaterial. In fact, even profits were immaterial. It only charged enough to cover expenses, because margins meant nothing in its business model.

  In some ways, the company was like a charity, just without the tax advantages. Its view of the world was decades in advance. In fact, deposits sold today wouldn’t see a payoff until forty or more years down the road.