The Ascent: A Novel of Survival (Thriller Suspense) by Ronald Malfi
“I had a friend. John Petras. He was in a cave in the—”
“He, too, has been recovered.”
The word recovered did little to clarify my friend’s condition. “What exactly does that mean?”
“He is growing strong and healthy in this village, just as you are,” Shomas said.
My gaze wandered about the room, briefly lost in the flicker of countless candles. “And Andrew?” I heard myself say. “Andrew Trumbauer?”
“You and your friend hidden in the cave were the only two recovered from this mission.” Hands together, Shomas nodded in
my direction. “I am sorry. But you were warned.”
Like a phantom, Shomas drifted across the room. Just as he bowed his head in the doorway, I called to him. He paused and turned toward me, his face expressionless. His eyes glittered in the candlelight like embers sprung from a fire.
“I’ve seen the Canyon of Souls,” I said.
Shomas seemed to smile, but it was such a minute gesture I couldn’t be sure. “No,” he said quietly, “you only saw what the land let you see.”
3
THREE DAYS LATER. I WAS STRONG ENOUGH TO
venture out to the wooden hut where John Petras recuperated.
He smiled faintly from his bed in a room remarkably similar to mine. “How do I look?”
“The truth? Like you fell off a mountain. How’s your shoulder?”
“They bandaged me up pretty good, killed the infection. Your tourniquet saved my life.”
“Did they explain to you what happened? How we were saved?”
He nodded. A wave of pain or nausea must have stuck him then, because he closed his eyes and his nostrils flared with each exhalation.
I waited for the moment to pass.
Finally, when his eyes opened, they were glossy and soft. “Andrew? What—?”
“Andrew’s dead. This whole thing was a setup, a sick plot of revenge.” I was sitting in a wicker chair beside Petras’s bed. I rubbed my face and leaned one elbow on his mattress. “We were played. From the very beginning. All of us.” Across the room, I glimpsed Hannah’s image. But when I looked up, she was gone. It had most likely been a trick of the candlelight. “He wanted me dead because I let someone he loved die,” I said in one long, pent-up breath.
“Your wife,” he said, the inflection in his voice telling me this wasn’t a question.
“He loved her.” I smiled. My face went hot. “I did, too.”
“Was it your fault?” he asked.
I thought about it for a long time. “Some things were my fault,” I said finally. “Some of it. I tried to fix things, but I was too late. She went away and never came back. And I can either blame myself for the rest of my life and keep wandering by myself through dark caves waiting to disappear … or I can accept my role and move on. Anyway,” I said, glancing across the room to the darkened space where I thought I saw Hannah just a moment before, “I think she’s forgiven me.”
One of Petras’s hands slid from beneath the cheesecloth blanket to pat one of my own. He smiled wearily. He looked ancient, a hundred years old.
I cleared my throat and swiped away tears with the heel of one hand. “So why’d he bring you here? What’s your sin?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.” His weak, pained smile widened. Out of nowhere he reminded me of my father.
Ten minutes later, I was back out by the road watching the sun burn behind the mountains while the trees glowed like fiery ember. Shomas approached. He was dressed in a heavy woolen coat that hung past his knees. A wool cap was pulled low over his ears. “Your friend is feeling better?”
“He is, yes. Thank you.”
“You both will be leaving soon.”
“Right.” Behind him, I watched the sun continue to set. In less than a minute, it would be dark. “You haven’t asked me what happened up there. Why is that?”
“Because I know what happened.”
I looked at him. I tried to read his face but found it an impossible task. It was like trying to sense emotion from a tombstone. “What do you mean?”
“The mountains are a dangerous place. Your friends suffered unfortunate fates. Accidents,” he said, his voice lowering, his eyes steady on me, “have a way of happening.”
I was about to say something—anything—but he continued before I could open my mouth.
“These lands are sacred lands,” said Shomas. “We do not need people coming here to investigate matters. We do not need people coming here to learn what happened. The Godesh Ridge does not need more foolish explorers marking the snow with traitorous footprints.”
Expelling a gust of breath, he turned and trudged up the side of the road. Where he went I could not tell; the sun had already set, covering the world in a blanket of darkness, and I lost him somewhere around the bend.
4
ONE WEEK LATER, WE DEPARTED FOR LONDON ON
the same flight. Petras slept, and I thumbed through various magazines as well as a newly purchased copy of the George Mallory book I hadn’t finished. Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, disappeared while climbing the northeast ridge of Everest in 1924. His body wasn’t discovered until 1999, and although the book skimped on description, I could only imagine what would have been left behind after being lost out there in the unforgiving wilds of Everest for seventy-five years.
In London, we boarded separate planes—John Petras to Wisconsin, me to Baltimore-Washington International. Petras’s plane left first. At his gate, we embraced, like brothers about to part.
“There’s one thing we haven’t discussed yet.”
I knew what it was. I nodded, rubbing my forehead with aching fingers. “I know. What do you think?”
“I think we can go back and tell the truth,” he said. “Call the police,
tell them what happened. Tell them everything about Andrew.”
“Then there’s the other option.”
Petras raked his fingers through his beard and down his neck. “It was all an accident, a horrible accident. Just like the Sherpas said.”
“I don’t have it in me to go through all that right now,” I said. “I may never have it in me.”
“Then it was an accident.”
“And Andrew?”
“Another accident, just like the others. Andrew Trumbauer went over the cliff. End of story.” One hand on my shoulder, he squeezed my aching muscles and smiled. Then he turned and shuffled through the doors and down the gangway to the airplane.
You only saw what the land let you see, I thought.
I remained at his gate until the plane taxied down the runway, my nose nearly pressed against the window, my eyes as vacant as twin chunks of ice.
PART FOUR
THE GHOSTS WE RETURN TO
Chapter 18
1
AS THE MOON PASSED BEHIND A DRIFT OF DARk
clouds, I turned away from the windows and encircled Marta in my arms. She sighed. Her warm legs intertwined with mine beneath the sheets; she hugged my arms. I peppered her neck with tiny kisses. “I need to get up,” I whispered in her ear. “Hmm.” Warmly.
Five minutes later, dressed in running shorts and Nikes, I took off along the waterfront. To my right, the bay glistened with moonlight, this distant shimmer of the Bay Bridge like something tangible materializing through the fog of a dream. I ran through Eastport and over the small drawbridge, flanked on both sides by the lull of sleeping sailboats. Into downtown, I ran up Main Street and downgraded to a slow jog around Church Circle. The conical spire of St. Anne’s looked like a stalagmite rising off the floor of a limestone cave. At this hour, the city was asleep. Only the occasional vehicle rolled past me on the narrow roadways. But other than that, all was silent.
It had been four months since I’d returned from Nepal. A strict regime of exercise and healthy eating had seen to it that I’d fully recovered from the events that occurred on the Godesh Ridge. Now,halfway around the world and a year in the future, it wa
Almost possible.
Of course, there were still the actual nightmares—waking up slick with sweat and with a scream caught in my throat from some half-remembered dream where I ran through feet of snow as some faceless, heartless creature pursued me down the face of a mountain. Often the chase would end when I turned a sharp corner and found myself at the edge of a cliff. Behind me, my pursuer slowed to a predatory crawl, hidden in the heavy shadows. My choices were simple: either jump off the cliff or face whatever followed me. For whatever reason, I usually woke up before having to make the decision.
Immediately following my return, I was obsessed with researching the background of the men who had died on the Godesh Ridge, including Andrew Trumbauer. And in most cases, I was able to derive some reason why Andrew would have wanted revenge on them …
Donald Shotsky was the easiest, as I already had some information to go by. He’d been a fisherman and a deckhand on various crab boats in the Bering Sea. Years ago, he’d been a crewman on a ship called the Kula Plate, along with Andrew.
Eventually I tracked down the captain—a grizzled veteran of the Korean War named Footie Teacar—who confirmed the story of how Shotsky had nearly gone over the side only to be saved by a greenhorn named Andy something-or-other. Of course, Teacar’s description of the greenhorn matched Andrew Trumbauer perfectly.
As I’d expected, confirming Shotsky’s involvement with a group of Las Vegas thugs was much more difficult. But following a phone call to an old college buddy of mine who’d for years worked as a blackjack dealer at a number of casinos on the strip, I learned one piece of interesting information: for the past decade, a New York corporation had reserved a hotel suite at the MGM Grand, although noone could say for certain if the suite had actually ever been used. The corporation was Trumbauer Petrol, the company Andrew inherited from his father after his death.
Chad Nando possessed an extensive arrest portfolio with various police departments throughout the country, mostly petty stuff—possession of dope, minor theft, a couple of DUIs. Undoubtedly, Chad’s biggest claim to fame, at least on the police blotter circuit, had been his arrest in participation with a cocaine-smuggling operation.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested and received documents pertinent to the case, and, although the names and specific identifiers had been blocked out by a black Sharpie, I was able to discern Chad’s role in the whole ordeal with little difficulty: he’d been the snitch. Arrested right up front, he agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency by the courts, which was granted to him in the form of three years’ probation.
When police followed the cocaine’s money trail, a number of high-profile businesses were mentioned in the report, though they were never able to make anything stick, and the business owners were quickly dropped as targets. One business was a small American entrepreneurial company called CliffDiver, Inc. An Internet search yielded very little information about CliffDiver, which had immediately gone out of business following the investigation. I found no records of any of the company’s personnel except for one—Drew Bauer, president and CEO.
Only the police report provided any further insight, stating that just prior to their investigation, CliffDiver had given money to a pharmaceutical company that had patented a pill to combat heart failure. Approval by the FDA never came, the pharmaceutical company folded, and CliffDiver faded into the background before disappearing entirely. Vague? Yes. However, I possessed one small bit of knowledge that the police working the case did not: the word Cliff-Diver was tattooed on Andrew Trumbauer’s upper thigh, something
I would have never noticed had he not stripped out of his clothes and jumped off the cliff that night in San Juan so many years ago.
The rest were more difficult to decipher, knowing so little about their backgrounds and their individual relationships with Andrew. Any parallels would only be supposition on my part. Yet who knew what sort of things happened in the six months Michael Hollinger spent with Andrew and two aboriginal women in the Australian outback, for instance? The women could never be found, and even if they were, the chances that they knew anything were more than slim.
What had Curtis Booker done to earn his gravestone? I found very little information about the ex-Marine on the Internet, save for an Ohio address. Feeling it necessary, I mailed a letter to that address. The letter mentioned Curtis’s death on the Godesh Ridge, although I went into no specific detail, and concluded with my return address and telephone number in case anyone wanted to get in touch with me for more information. I addressed the letter to Curtis’s daughter, Lucinda Booker. I’d yet to receive a reply.
And, of course, there was John Petras. Since he’d survived the ordeal, there was no need to conduct any research, but that didn’t mean I was able to figure out his connection to Andrew nor why Andrew wanted to kill him. We phoned each other once a month just to keep tabs, and occasionally I’d pester him about it. But Petras would only sigh and say he could think of nothing.
“We’d had one stupid argument years ago in Nova Scotia,” he told me. “It was over who’d win the Super Bowl, and we were both tanked up on liquor. I called him a stupid son of a bitch, and he said I was an ignorant imbecile—hardly grounds for wanting someone dead.”
“Do you believe the dakini exist?” I asked him during our last phone call.
“What brought this up all of a sudden?”
“It’s just been on my mind since you mentioned it.”
“They’re Buddhist myths. The word translates to ‘sky dancer,’ a
female spirit who traverses through space. Some faiths say they’re vengeful. Others say they function as muses. But overall, they’re considered ‘testers’—their purpose is to put man through tests to prove his worth.” “His worth for what?”
“To enter paradise,” said Petras. “Eternal bliss.” “Eden,” I said. “Shangri-la,” Petras added.
“So I guess if you believe in the dakini, you’d have to believe in the existence of Shangri-la,” I said. “You’d have to believe in paradise.”
I could tell Petras was grinning on the other end of the phone. “You can’t have God without the devil.”
My legs pumping, my respiration as tight as a machine, I headed back down Main Street, cut across one of the darkened, narrow alleys that crisscrossed the City Dock, and emptied onto a cobblestone byway illuminated by an interval of lampposts. I burned by the Filibuster, dark and locked up for the evening.
2
EVERY HONEST STORY HRS ONE GRERT REVEAl.
For me and my life—for my story—it would be no different. Despite the proactive research into the people who’d died on Godesh Ridge at the hands of Andrew Trumbauer, my great reveal happened purely by chance nearly one year after my return from Nepal.
I was sitting on a lounge chair on my balcony reading the Sunday edition of The Capital when my gaze fell upon a curious headline.
Regatta Race Accident Victim’s Body Finally Found
The article went on to detail how, during the annual Regatta race roughly two and a half years ago, boat owner and race participant Gerald H. Figlio had been struck on the back of the head by theboom and fallen into the bay. A search commenced, but Figlio’s body was never recovered until this past weekend when the remains of a corpse washed up at Sandy Point State Park. Figlio was identified through his dental records, the article said. The cause of death was ruled accidental.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have made the connection if it wasn’t for the brief bio of Gerald H. Figlio at the end of the article where it mentioned he’d once been a professor of English at James Madison University—both Hannah’s and Andrew’s alma mater.
The following day, I went to the local library and fired up one of the computer terminals. I located the Regatta’s official Web site and searched the backlog of race registrants from the past couple of years. After finding Figlio’s name,
Boddington, Joseph Brunelli, Michael O’Maera, Sean Trumbauer, Andrew Wesley, T.J. Wheaton, Xavier
It was just what I’d expected to find, yet it still caused an uncontrollable chill to race down my spine. And not so much because I’d come across Andrew’s name on the list but because the grand scope of all Andrew had been doing suddenly occurred to me: the trip to the Godesh Ridge had not been Andrew’s singular expression of revenge. Rather, Andrew had been seeking his revenge all over the place, presumably for years.
How many people did you kill? I thought, the monitor casting a sickly blue glow across my face. How long had you been doing this?
“Well, you’re not doing it anymore,” I said and logged off the computer.
3
WHEN I RETURNED FROM THE LIBRARY. MARTA
was sitting on the sofa with her bare feet drawn up beneath her, a melancholic look on her face. She faced the television but it was off, the whole room growing dark with the onset of night.
I tossed my keys on the credenza and took off my shoes. “What? What is it?”
“There was a phone call from some lawyer,” she said dryly. “Your friend John Petras is dead.”
4
IT WAS A FREAK ACCIDENT. DURING A PARTICULARLY
nasty storm, a felled power line landed on the roof of John Petras’s house, sparking a fire. The coroner’s report listed asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation as the cause of death.