by Kyle Mills
“You’ve put yourself in harm’s way here, Mark, and now you’re going to make it worse. You think they’ll send you back to Flagstaff?”Sherman shook his head.“No way. They’ll find a reason to transfer you back to D.C., where it’s easier to keep an eye on you. They’ll dole out the jobs and cases to keep you pacified, and then they’ll find a way to hang you.”
Beamon slid up on the stone table behind him and took a sip of his beer, the muscles in his jaw tightening perceptibly. He needed to hear this no matter how much it hurt him, Carrie told herself. And he needed to hear it from the only person who had even a remote chance of getting through to him.
“Mark,”Sherman continued,“you’re bigger than life at the Bureau. A hundred years from now, people are still going to be telling stories about the moronic stunts you pulled and the rabbits you managed to pull out of your hat. But it’s time to walk away now. It’ll only add to your legend.” Sherman motioned around him.“I’m telling you, retirement isn’t half bad. You do a little consulting work when you feel like it and play golf when you don’t. No more politics, no more crap. Once you have a little time for yourself, you won’t know how you lived without it.”
The silence lasted a long time. Carrie could see that Beamon was building something up inside and moved back to her former position along the rail to let Sherman take the brunt of whatever it was. Cowardly? Sure. But sometimes cowardice was the better part of valor.
“Screw you, Tommy,”Beamon said, not looking up from his beer.“How old were you when you retired? Fifty-six? Well, I’m nowhere near that. You walked out the—”He lowered his voice.“Associate fucking director. I crawl out a disgraced SAC.” Beamon waved his arm around him.“Your family owns half of Chicago, so you retire to your Dupont Circle brownstones, your ranches, your villas, and your horses. What do I get? A one-bedroom apartment and a job as a night watchman somewhere?”
“Mark!”Carrie scolded.“Tom’s just trying to—.”
Beamon jumped off the table and brushed passed them, picking up Emory as he went by.“You want to go see the horses close up, honey?”
Carrie watched for a long time as Beamon and her daughter trudged down the muddy hill toward a distant buck-and-rail fence.
“I did my best, Carrie,”Sherman said in a customarily melancholy tone.“I’m sorry.”
“You did more than anyone else could have.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“It’s an impossible situation, Tom. The FBI’s been such a big part of his life for so long, he isn’t sure who he is without it. He won’t let himself see all the other things he has in his life.” Carrie surprised him by suddenly smiling and clinking her glass against his.“You may have failed at saving him from himself, and I imagine that Emory will be demanding a pony for Christmas, but the trip won’t be a complete loss if you can show me how to do that trick.”
’Trick?”
“The one where you make Mark shut his mouth.” Sherman nodded slowly.“I’m getting old, Carrie, and my powers are waning. I can only do it once per visit these days’.”
seven
Tristan Newberry opened his eyes, but it was like being blind. The clouds had rolled in again, obliterating the stars and sliver of a moon that had glowed over them as they ate by the campfire. He propped himself up on his elbows and turned his head slowly back and forth, trying to make out the lines of the interior of the van with no success. Two lousy years in the city and he’d already forgotten what real darkness and silence felt like.
He settled back into the makeshift foam mattress, slipping his arm under the covers and running a hand down Darby’s side. Her back was pressed up against him, the warmth of her overpowering the cold damp of the fall night. Just like old times.
He closed his eyes again and let his exhaustion overcome the dull pain in his joints and muscles. He was almost out when he felt Darby drive her rear end into his hip.
“Darby? Shit, man, I’m trying to sleep,”he said, putting a knee against her back and giving her a halfhearted shove.“What?”
He heard her shift her position in the darkness and then what sounded like her head rising from the pillow.“Did you leave food outside?”Her voice was groggy.
“Huh?”The hypnotic sense of half-sleep had slipped away enough that another few seconds of this and it would take half-an-hour trying to get his thrashed body comfortable enough to drop off again.
“I heard something outside.” Darby yawned.“You left food where animals could get to it, didn’t you?”
“No,”he whined, throwing the covers up over his head.
He heard her head sink to the pillow again, and he let his eyes close and conjured the memory of their last trip to Europe. The blackness and quiet hum of the wind outside became a sun-bleached seashore and the crashing of waves against bone-white cliffs as he finally dropped off thinking of her and French limestone.
The next time it was an elbow.
He groaned quietly and tried to read his watch. The clouds had parted enough to see the vague outline of the cluttered van and to give the windows a mirrorlike glow, but not enough for him to be able to figure out what time it was.
“There’s something outside,”he heard Darby mumble into her pillow.“You left food out.” It was a statement now, not a question.
“Didn’t,”he protested.
He moved away from her, pressing himself against the back wall of the van. He’d been in similar situations with Darby in the past: freeloading varmints, tent air vents clogged with snow, early morning weather checks. He knew that if he was stubborn enough long enough, she would eventually get frustrated and face the cold world outside of the sleeping bag herself.
Fortunately, she hadn’t changed. No more than two minutes had gone by when he felt a cold draft as she wiggled out from under the covers. A groggy smile formed on his lips when he heard her start to fish around for a pair of shorts.
“With my luck, it’s probably a bear,”he heard her say over the swish of fabric as she dressed and started strapping a pair of Tevas to her feet.
He closed his eyes again and pulled the sleeping bag over his face before the overhead light—one of the few things he remembered still working on the old VW—flickered on.
“Jesus, Darb. Close the door,”he said as she jumped out into the tall grass and the outside air started to circulate in the van. She didn’t respond and there was no sound of the door sliding shut. In fact, there was no sound at all.
Tristan slowly pushed the sleeping bag from his face and squinted against the light that, for some reason, seemed wrong. He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked out the open side door. The dome light overhead wasn’t1 working. What illumination there was, was leaking around Darby’s silhouette as she stood motionless in the powerful beam of a flashlight.
Tristan raised his hand to partially block out the light, letting his eyes adjust and shaking off the grogginess still clinging to him.
“Hello?”he heard Darby say.
No answer.
“Hello?”
Her voice was slow and steady like always. The hint of uncertainty beneath it would have been undetectable to anyone who didn’t know her well. He saw her take a step forward and had to adjust his hand as the glow around her became brighter.
“Stop right there.”
It was a man’s voice. Tristan took a deep breath and let it out, trying to muster the will to overcome a sudden sense of weakness and fear.“Who are you?”he said, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed and standing. He’d wanted to sound angry, forceful, but it hadn’t worked—his voice shook perceptibly. Calm down, he told himself. Just people looking for a campsite. Worse case, a couple of drunk rednecks. This was West Virginia, after all—the progeny of the hillbillies from Deliverance and their sisters probably lived down the road.
Some of his confidence returned as he slowly convinced himself that he and Darby were faced with nothing more than some locals who had been out spotlighting deer.
“Get that goddamn flashlight out of our faces!”There, that had sounded better.
He jumped out of the van and stood next to Darby, aware that the harsh light illuminating them would bring out the definition that still existed in the muscles across his bare chest and arms. Hopefully that would be worth a little intimidation value.
“I said—”he started again, but went silent when Darby tapped him on his bare leg.“It’s okay, Tristan.” She pulled him gently to the side, exposing the open door to the van. As they moved, the flashlight followed them and briefly illuminated a pistol in what seemed to be a disembodied hand. Tristan started to step back involuntarily, but Darby put a hand on his back. She had seen the gun but gave the illusion of being completely unaffected.
“We don’t have much,”she said,“but if you need it, you’re welcome to it.”
“Are we?”the man holding the flashlight—and the gun—said. At the word“we”Tristan heard a loud rustling coming from the darkness at the edges of the flashlight’s beam. In reality it must have been almost inaudible, but to him it sounded like an explosion. These weren’t locals. Darby didn’t understand—they had to get out of here.
He grabbed her arm and, in one swift motion, pulled her hard to the left. The sharp stones that littered the ground tore at his bare feet as he tried to drag her out of the light and toward the trees at the edge of the clearing. He’d made it no more than ten feet when Darby’s arm slipped away and he fell over what was left of the pile of wood they’d gathered to keep the fire going.
By the time he’d untangled himself from the branches, it was too late. The beam of light arced toward him and he felt a powerful hand grab the back of his neck. He rolled over onto his back, hearing more than feeling the sharp branches breaking beneath him. He was about to take a wild swing at the man holding him when the cold metal of a gun barrel pressed into his throat.
“Tristan! Calm down!”
It was Darby’s voice, but he couldn’t process it. He looked around him as best he could as the man with the flashlight walked slowly toward him. The path of illumination as the flashlight swung loosely from the man’s hand alternately lit the brown rust on the side of the van, the red and yellow of the fall leaves on the trees, Darby being held from behind, but never the man’s face. When he finally stopped a few feet away, all Tristan could see was a thin layer of dust clinging to a pair of expensive black dress shoes.
He continued to watch helplessly as the well-dressed legs turned and walked back toward Darby. As the man moved away, the rest of him slowly became visible: the perfectly pressed wool slacks, the blinding white of his shirt, the red tie loose at the neck. He could see the quiet confusion on Darby’s face as she examined the man approaching her. Obviously, not the flannel-clad West Virginia native she had expected.
“You didn’t really think this one through, did you?”The man was looking at Darby, but his words clearly weren’t directed at her. One of his gloved hands suddenly moved up and grabbed hold of Darby’s face as he spoke. In one explosive motion he threw his weight forward and drove the back of her head into the passenger side window of the van.
She didn’t make a sound. Tristan heard only the dull crack of the safety glass and saw her slide down the door, struggling to get her arms to work well enough to use them to cushion her landing.
He felt the bile rising into his throat as he watched Darby try to remain in a sitting position. She didn’t seem to want to fall completely to the ground but didn’t look like she knew why.
“No!”he shouted.
He’d seen Darby being blown wildly into a rock face at the end of hundreds of feet of rope, he’d seen her fall into a deep crevasse on a remote Himalayan peak, but watching someone purposefully hurt her ignited something in him that he’d never felt before.
The man holding him must have seen or felt it, because he moved the barrel of the gun to Tristan’s mouth. The pressure of the metal against his teeth created shooting pains that went through his gums and into his head. There was nothing he could do. He opened his mouth and tasted the metal as it slid against his tongue.
’Take a look, boy,”the man on top of him said, pushing the end of the barrel against the inside of his cheek and forcing him to turn his head back toward Darby.
He did as he was told when his cheek was pinched painfully between the gun barrel and the hard dirt beneath him. The man with the flashlight crouched down in front of Darby and took hold of her face again. She reached up and closed a hand around his wrist, but her normally uncanny strength was gone.
“No, you didn’t think this through at all.”
This time his words were punctuated by the sound of Darby’s skull denting the metal door of the van.
eight
Darby had felt this way many times before. Clinging to some nearly nonexistent handhold or standing on a dangerously unstable cornice of snow and ice. The feeling that the slightest move, the tiniest muscle twitch would send her hurtling into space. But those situations had a certain familiarity, an almost comforting simplicity. Right now, she felt lost—like the world she found herself in was no longer her own.
Darby let her eyes move slowly across the small room, taking care to keep her head completely motionless. The walls were covered with yellowed and peeling paper that had once depicted blue horses ridden by red soldiers. The furniture seemed too well cared for to belong: a small bed with a delicately worked quilt bedspread, a child’s writing desk of expensive and exhaustively polished hardwood, a richly painted dresser, and a deep chest that she imagined was full of a little boy’s toys.
She had no idea where they were or how long it had taken to get there. She’d woken up in the back of a windowless van with a splitting headache that had continued to grow in intensity as she was pulled from the vehicle and marched into this old farmhouse.
The medical-looking white straps that had bound her wrists during the trip had been removed, leaving her free … to do what? Stand helpless and confused in the middle of the floor?
Darby let her gaze wander to the only door in the room, afraid to focus directly on the man standing next to it. He didn’t look much older than she was, despite the fact that his hair was turning prematurely gray at the temples. He was thin, athletic, and clearly, extremely uncomfortable. His weight shifted from one foot to the other every five seconds or so and his eyes darted back and forth to the heavy closed door next to him, the bed in the corner, the window—but never at her or the other people in the room.
Darby strained her eyes left until she could see Tristan. He looked so scared and angry; naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. There was blood running from the corner of his lip, a bright streak of color set off against the dull brownish-red splatter patterns drying across his face. He was stmggling uselessly as the man who had knocked her senseless at their campsite looped a rope through his canvas handcuffs and secured him to the chair he was sitting in. She hadn’t actually seen the man clearly until now, and her strained examination of him just confused her more. He had a solid, stocky build and a strangely square face, topped by close-cropped dark hair that made him look kind of military.
Tristan stopped thrashing and let his chin drop toward his chest in defeat as the man gave the rope binding him one last tug. The desperation and pain etched across his face made her turn her eyes away.
They’d spent two years together—maybe her two favorite years so far. He had been so fired up about everything—all energy and no judgment. But his kindness and enthusiasm had been infectious and she had always been there to keep him from doing something stupid and getting himself killed. Until now. In the end, it looked like she was going to be the death of him after all.
It had taken a while to learn to think around the razor- sharp pounding that was tearing at the back of her skull, but after some effort, she had managed to string together a few coherent thoughts.
There was only one possible reason this was happening to them. It had to be something she’d seen, somewhere she’d be
en. These men, conservatively dressed and disciplined, had government written all over them. Could it have been the old plane she’d come across in the Laotian jungle? The thick plastic packaging of its cargo had mostly been reclaimed by the indigenous vegetation, but where it hadn’t, the heroin was still very much in evidence. The plane had been an old Dehaviland, and judging by what was left of their clothing and other personal belongings, the two skeletons in the cockpit had been American. She had taken photographs and delivered them to the U.S. Embassy along with the general location of the plane.
Then she’d never thought it about it again. Beyond hoping to ease the pain of the dead men’s families, the plane meant nothing to her. A decaying relic from a time in history to which she felt no connection. A forgotten monument to a world she chose to live at the very edges of.
Tristan shouted something at the man standing behind him, the rage in his voice registering with her though the actual words didn’t. She moved her eyes slowly to the opposite corner of the room and the man standing in it. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t moved an inch in the last five minutes. His eyes were glassy and unblinking, and seemed to be aimed directly at her right hip. She decided to take a chance and tilted her head down slightly so that she could try to see what he was seeing. That nearly imperceptible move, as she somehow had known it would, broke the man from his trance. His head came level and he pushed himself from the wall he was leaning against, starting toward her. She could hear Tristan shouting again. Something about her.
“Hello, young lady,”the man said. He stepped close, breathed in deeply and held it. His head nodded forward and he raised it slowly, carefully inspecting the black sandals on her feet, the deep brown of her legs, her green cotton shorts, her white T-shirt. Only then did he exhale. His breath didn’t smell like anything.
“We have some questions we want to ask,”he said, tilting his head forward again and focusing on her crotch.“They won’t be hard. No, not hard at all.” The thin red mustache under his nose barely held onto the tiny droplets of clear fluid forming on it as he spoke. Darby wasn’t sure whether they were spit, sweat, or both. All she knew was how this thin, twitchy man made her feel. She had to fight to resist the urge to step back away from him and tug at her shorts to cover more of her bare legs.
