Rising Phoenix

by Kyle Mills

  “Looks like he does okay,” Mark Beamon commented as the elevator door slid open. The decor in the hallway that stretched before them was understated, but reeked of wealth. It didn’t seem to reflect the man that they had come to see.

  “Nice vase.” Beamon stopped to admire it further. “My mom used to love this stuff. Had a house full of it when I was a kid.”

  “I don’t think that one’s in your price range,” Laura said, continuing down the hall. They were already five minutes late for their appointment.

  “Hello, can I help you?” the receptionist asked as they approached.

  “Yes, I’m Laura Vilechi, and this is Mark Beamon. We’re here to see Reverend Blake.”

  She nodded, appearing not to recognize Beamon’s name. She looked like she was used to powerful people dropping by. “Go right in.”

  They walked through a beautifully etched glass doorway and into a large waiting area dominated by flowering trees. The air smelled fresh and sweet.

  “Hello, I’m Terry, the Reverends personal secretary You can go right in. Can I get you some coffee or perhaps some tea?”

  They politely declined.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Reverend,” Laura said graciously, extending her hand. “I’ve seen your show.” Beamon knew both statements to be lies.

  “It’s nice to see that our law enforcement officials know the Lord. I imagine it’s difficult not to become cynical and hard—the things you must see.” He turned to Beamon. “And you’re Mark Beamon. I recognize you from your photos.” They shook hands.

  Beamon examined the Reverend carefully. Blake’s expression was the serene mask required of men in his profession.

  “Please sit down. So what can I do for you today?”

  “We’d like to get some information on a former employee of yours. A John Hobart,” Laura said.

  Blake laced his fingers together and laid his hands on the table. He seemed to be deep in thought. “No, I can’t think of a single thing that I haven’t told you.”

  The two agents looked at each other, confused. Blake elaborated. “In my meeting with Agent … Martinez, is it?”

  “Let me get this straight,” Beamon started slowly. “You’ve had an FBI agent in here recently asking about Hobart?”

  “That’s right. You didn’t send him?”

  “When did you meet with him?”

  “Just yesterday, actually.”

  Laura broke in. “Could you describe him.”

  “Sure.” He paused. “About thirty-five, I think. Very well dressed. Slight Spanish accent. Not Hispanic—Spanish. I’d peg him as a European. He said his name was, uh, Alejandro I think. Alejandro Martinez.”

  Beamon shook his head, a thin smile on his lips. The cartels are smarter than the whole goddam FBI.

  “Do you know where Mr. Hobart is?” Laura asked.

  “No. As I told Mr. Martinez, he’s probably at his house. I can have Terry pull his personnel file if you like.”

  “We’d appreciate it.”

  Blake leaned back in his chair, looking around Laura. “Terry!”

  She peeked in the door.

  “Could you copy John Hobart’s personnel file for me please.” She disappeared without a word.

  “Just a few more questions, Reverend,” Beamon said. “We’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

  The questions took less than a half an hour but had still been a complete waste of time. Like Hobart’s neighbors, Blake knew very little about his old employee. Personal interests, friends, hobbies. No one seemed to know the first thing about John Hobart.

  “We really appreciate your time, Reverend. We know how busy you are.” Beamon shook his hand. Laura was already out the door.

  “Anytime, Mr. Beamon. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”

  Beamon strode purposefully across the office. In the doorway he stopped and turned around.

  “Oh, I almost forgot, Reverend.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did this Martinez tell you why the FBI was looking for John?” Blake’s jaw clenched slightly. “No. No he didn’t.”

  “Thanks, Reverend. It was nice meeting you.” He hurried off to catch Laura, who was standing at the elevator, jabbing at the DOWN button.

  Laura maneuvered the car through the thick traffic, leaning down over the steering wheel so that she could read the street signs hanging from the traffic light wires. She seemed to never be able to remember which street took them back to D.C.

  “Oh, he’s in on it all right.” There was a note of happiness in her voice.

  “Why?”

  “Too cool. Not curious enough. Did you notice he didn’t even ask why we were looking for Hobart? Besides, it would take some serious cash to get an operation like this off the ground.”

  “What if our mystery agent—Martinez—told him why we were looking?” Beamon tested.

  “He still would have asked something about the case. Especially when we didn’t know who Martinez was. I mean, come on. He’s got the infamous Mark Beamon sitting in his office, and he doesn’t even bring up the CDFS. Please.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. It’ll be hell to prove, though.”

  Laura flipped on the radio to a news station. It was playing the tail end of a report on the President diverting millions of dollars to drug rehab clinics and away from enforcement programs. Beamon ignored it. It was the same story they’d been running all morning.

  “He really did it, though,” she observed. There was something in her voice that made Beamon a little uneasy.

  “What?”

  She looked over at him. “What do you mean, what? He’s damn near killed the coke and heroin trade in the U.S. And the few people who are still using are trying to get help.” She pointed to the radio to punctuate her remark. “How much have we spent over the last ten years—and never gotten close to what he’s accomplished?”

  “I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t even know …”

  Laura’s voice softened a bit. “Yeah, me neither, but I’ll bet it’s a hell of a lot. Time and money that could have been spent better somewhere else.”

  It was something that he had been struggling with for months. The pro-CDFS arguments, hawked by the media for their sensational, audience-grabbing effect, rang true more often than he liked to admit.

  The constant media coverage, with its thoughtful sound tracks and high-tech graphics, had been very effective in desensitizing the public to the carnage associated with the CDFS’s actions. In his opinion, the coverage was more to blame for the public’s increasing support of the CDFS than the DEA’s leak of drug-use statistics.

  And now the number of deaths had dropped dramatically. All that was left was fear. But when he captured Hobart, that fear would disappear. He would go back to Houston and the drug users and dealers would let out a collective sigh of relief. The lines at the rehab clinics would disappear, and twenty thousand people would have died for nothing.

  There were only two things keeping his heart in the investigation, Beamon knew. The thought of his nephew rotting in the ground, and the fact that he couldn’t bear letting John Hobart get the better of him again.

  It was just barely enough.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a breaking news story. Laura leaned forward and turned up the radio.

  “We have a report that the FBI has put out a statewide APB in Maryland for John Hobart in connection with CDFS activity. He is described as a forty-year-old Caucasian male with short dark hair. He stands five foot eight and weighs approximately one hundred and fifty pounds.”

  Beamon reached to the dash and turned the radio off.

  “Man, that was fast,” Laura observed.

  He just shook his head and dialed the cellular phone anchored to the floor. He put it on speaker.

  “FBI.”

  “Carol? Hi, it’s Mark.”

  “How are you, Mr. Beamon.”

  “Oh, you know. Could you patch me through to Tom Sherman?”r />
  The phone went dead for a moment, then began ringing.

  “Tom Sherman.”

  “Hey, Tommy, you watching the news?”

  “Yup.”

  “Who won the pool?”

  There was a pause and the sound of shuffling paper.

  “Looks like Laura did. Six hundred and thirty-five dollars.” Beamon looked over at her and scowled. She flashed a wide smile and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  “Do we have that press release ready?”

  “It went out an hour ago. Hobart’s picture will be on every TV in the world in a few hours.”

  “And we’ve got our men in place.”

  “Yeah. A mouse couldn’t get out of the country without our knowing it. The SAC’s aren’t too happy about it, though. We’re draining off a lot of their manpower.”

  “Fuck ’em. Let ’em complain to the President if they don’t like it. See you in an hour.” He reached over and disconnected the phone.

  “So you’re sure he’s going to skip the country?”

  “Probably. Too many people looking for him here. And it’s not just us, it’s every drug dealer and addict, too. Europe’s the way to go. Nobody’s too mad at him there.”

  “Getting him at the airport’s going to be tough. He’ll spot our guys the minute he walks through the doors,” Laura said.

  Beamon shrugged. “I’m sure you’re right. Hobart didn’t get drummed out of the DEA ’cause he was stupid. He’s not going to just waltz into an airport when he knows we’ve got guys crawling all over ’em.”

  He leaned the seat in the car all the way back. Staring up through the skylight, he pulled out a cigarette. “If I was in his position, what would I do?”

  He didn’t light the cigarette but just let it perch between his lips. Laura had made it clear that if he ever lit another one in the car, she’d put it out on his scalp. They remained silent for almost a half an hour. A few minutes from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, Beamon sat upright so fast that the seat belt caught, snapping him back. “Jesus, how much more stupid could I be?”

  “What?” Laura asked anxiously.

  “The question isn’t what I would do in John Hobart’s position. It’s what would I do if I were John Hobart.”

  She failed to see the difference.

  “That’s the ball game,” Robert Swenson said with a hint of relief in his voice. He and Hobart were sitting in his apartment above the warehouse that they had been using as a base of operations for the past two months. Both were intently watching the news report on the television in front of them. On the screen, a computer-generated image of Hobart’s head was slowly rotating. After each full revolution, minor changes were made—hair, eye color, facial hair They matched his elaborate makeup jobs surprisingly well.

  “Looks like it,” Hobart agreed. “I’ll call our guys in the field and tell them it’s time to pack it in.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  Hobart shrugged. “Don’t know. Somewhere where I’m getting a little less press. Can you stick around for a day or two? I can’t imagine they have anything on you—and I could use the help wrapping things up.”

  “They’re looking for me, though. I doubt that they missed that I quit the church right after you did.”

  “Oh, they’re looking all right. But what will they charge you with when they find you? Getting tired of your job?” Swenson let that sink in for a moment. In the end, he decided that staying on would be less dangerous than leaving Hobart in the lurch. He knew better than to cross him. “Okay. I’ll stick around and help you wrap things up—then I’m out of here.”

  “Good. Why don’t you call our people and tell them to go home. I’ll figure out a way to get rid of the orellanin.”

  “That ought to be a trick.”

  They were both driving rentals now, having dumped their cars in a manufacturing plant’s expansive parking lot. Swenson was trying to picture how Hobart would get the large metal storage drum into the trunk of a Subaru.

  “I’ll figure something out,” Hobart said, rising. “With a little luck, we’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

  Those were the words that Swenson had been waiting to hear. It seemed they’d been at this for years. He turned back to the television and watched Hobart’s disembodied head spin slowly around. It was somehow entrancing.

  Less than two miles away, Alejandro Perez was watching the same program while he carefully tucked his clothes back into his suitcase. Luis wasn’t going to be happy, but he would just have to take it like a man. With Hobart’s identity public, the chances of finding him before the FBI were a million to one.

  He pressed hard on the top of the suitcase and latched it. His first-class flight to Bogotá left in an hour, and at this time of evening, the traffic was unpredictable. He didn’t want to be stuck in Baltimore for another night.

  The Reverend Simon Blake took another pull from the vodka bottle and went into an inevitable coughing fit. He had once experimented with alcohol as a college freshman, and it was an episode that he didn’t look fondly back on. Since then—almost twenty years—he hadn’t touched a drop. Until today.

  He laughed bitterly when his throat loosened enough to allow it. Quite a pickle he had managed to get himself into. He thought back to his meeting with John Hobart, how sure he had been that they were on the righteous path. How he was going to single-handedly bring America back on track. He laughed again and took another pull. The alcohol in his empty stomach felt like the fire of hell.

  Events had conspired against him in the last few days. His clumsy attempt to put an end to the CDFS through snitching on Nelson had backfired. Now Hobart’s face was plastered across every TV in America. Blake could hear the threats Hobart had made against his family as clearly as if the phone were still pressed to his ear. Threats he knew that his ex-security chief was fully capable of carrying out.

  And then there was Mark Beamon—who Blake was convinced knew of his involvement. Finally, there were the countless thousands dead because of him.

  Blake put the bottle down on the floor next to him and listened to the silence reigning in the house. He had sent his wife and children away for a few days. Erica had been needing to see her mother for some time.

  He closed his eyes and reflected on the brief moments in life that so easily turned into milestones. His agreement to finance Hobart’s eradication of narcotics. His forgetting to ask Mark Beamon why they were looking for Hobart when he’d been so careful to ask Martinez. His call to the FBI about the DiPrizzio episode. All in all, these three events made up less than twenty seconds of his long life. But those seconds would define him, and overshadow everything he had built.

  He reached for the phone and dialed 911.

  “Hello,” he said into the mouthpiece when the police operator answered. “I heard gunshots at the Reverend Simon Blake’s home.” He could hear the operator asking for details as he let the receiver fall between his chair and the table next to it. He picked up the revolver sitting on the floor next to the nearly empty fifth of vodka and put the barrel in his mouth. The taste of steel almost gagged him. “I love you, Mary,” he slurred over the barrel.

  The good thing about having your picture all over the TV is that you know what not to look like.

  Hobart tossed his backpack on the bench next to him and watched a tugboat struggling into its slip. Pigeons flapped around his feet, waiting to be fed.

  His hair was long and blond, the color that suggests years of surfing in Hawaii, or birth in Southern California. A large earring dangled from his left ear—he’d pierced it himself only an hour ago. Torn canvas pants, a turtleneck, and a brightly colored vest completed the effect. He nodded a silent greeting as a group of skateboarders strolled by. Normally they wouldn’t have given him a second look, but they seemed to identify with Hobart’s new image, and returned his greeting.

  Satisfied that he was drawing no attention whatsoever, Hobart grabbed the army surplus knapsack next to him and headed for a
pay phone perched on the side of the ice cream shop across the street. He shoved a quarter in the slot and dialed the warehouse.

  “Clipper City Antiques and Oddities.” Swenson’s voice.

  “Could you do me a favor, Bob?”

  “Sure, what do you need?”

  “Look something up on the computer for me.”

  The skateboarders began to do tricks on the steps of the large brick square in front of him. He watched with mild interest, listening to his partner walking and finally sitting down.

  “How many times have I told you that you don’t have to turn the computer off every time you leave, John. It’s got a screen saver. You’re gonna have to wait till it warms up.”

  “No problem.”

  A skateboarder took a hard fall into a steel railing. His friends laughed.

  Being almost a mile from the warehouse, Hobart hadn’t expected the explosion to be quite so loud. The skateboarders ducked involuntarily, then straightened up and looked around with confused expressions. Everyone else on the street did the same. Cars stopped, drivers leaned out their windows.

  Hobart replaced the receiver and strolled casually to his rental car. Once inside, he retrieved a small chess board from the pocket in the passenger side door. The board had been designed for travel, and the pieces had been replaced by small magnetic discs that allowed the player to fold the board up midgame and continue later. The position of the pieces matched the board that until a few minutes ago had rested next to his television. Hobart pulled the white queen—Robert Swenson—off the board and threw it on the floor of the car.

  The driver of the car behind him was still looking around, trying to figure out what had happened. Hobart gave a short honk on the horn and began backing out onto the cobblestone street.

  Hobart had planned on shutting down the CDFS before his identity was discovered. That had been plan A. Mark Beamon’s artful meddling had forced him to switch to plan B.

  He had been careful in diverting the funds from Blake’s accounts, but he wasn’t so conceited as to believe he was smart enough to fool the army of CPAs the Bureau would throw at the church’s books. At least he hoped he wasn’t. He had used Robert Swenson’s terminal number and password.