Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  Darby took a deep breath, did her best to empty her mind, and swung around so that her legs hung over the precipice. After a few more unintentionally short breaths, she slowly let her body slide off the edge, leaving her dangling straight-armed from the overhanging tongue of rock she’d been lying on top of moments before.

  The wind buffeted her gently as she looked down past the brown of her legs and the bloodstains still clinging to her sandals, through three hundred feet of empty air, to the green juniper trees that looked like tiny bushes on the canyon floor. She could feel the blood starting to flow into her forearms and the sweat that would soon become slick, leaking from her palms. She focused all her concentration on a six-inch ledge a few feet in front of her, trying to stay completely focused. Fear was a very real danger in climbing—it wreaked havoc on judgment and balance, and caused premature exhaustion.

  She swung her legs at the ledge, feeling her hands slip slightly when she missed by a solid inch. The adrenaline that she was trying so hard to keep under control surged wildly as her forward momentum petered out and her body weight started to carry her into a backward swing that had the very real potential to pull her off and send her into space. She curled her knees to her chest to try to deaden the motion and strained with her fingers to hold the sloping edge of the cliff. Her hands started to slide back, out of control, but at the last moment found a tiny indentation in the rock. It turned out to be just enough to save her.

  The blood pulsing through her forearms was starting to give her the familiar feeling of her skin being too tight. She knew from experience that she had only a few more seconds before the lactic acid started building up in her muscles and she began to lose her contact strength.

  She kicked out again, harder this time, knowing that if she missed, she wouldn’t be able to control the increased force of her back swing. At the last possible moment, she pulled in hard with her stomach muscles and felt the edge of her sandal catch on the ledge. She used it to pull herself in a little and let her leg take as much weight off her hands as possible—but there was no way to know if it would be enough. She closed her eyes for a moment and then let go with her left hand, bringing it slowly down in front of her as her right hand started to slip again. She managed to lodge it in a fist-sized crack at chest level just as her right hand cut loose.

  It held.

  She quickly swung her entire body to the right and wedged herself into a wide groove in the rock, her breath coming way too fast. Fear again, she told herself—but knew it was something more. She felt strangely at odds with nature—something she’d never experienced before. The rock was too sharp under her hands and the wind too cold against the sweat dripping down her back. She felt ….

  Darby wiggled into a slightly more secure position, reminding herself that this probably wasn’t an ideal time for philosophizing. The three men below her had gathered around something that might have been a backpack, and the blond one seemed to be passing something out to the others. A moment later she saw the individual beams of light leap magically from their hands and cut through the approaching darkness. Flashlights.

  Darby started down the chimney-sized groove in the rock, staying as far back in it as possible in an effort to remain invisible, but soon found that the plan had a substantial drawback. The darkness in the small fissure was deepening more each minute, making it increasingly difficult to find the small hand- and footholds that were the only things keeping her from falling the remaining two hundred and fifty feet to the ground. She was being forced to rely almost completely on the friction she could generate by pressing her hands and feet on one side of the groove and her back on the other.

  Her progress was painfully slow and so much harder than it should have been. If the lack of a rope and harness was eating at her concentration, the lack of the sure- footedness of climbing shoes was destroying it.

  No whining, she reminded herself. The situation was what it was.

  It took over an hour for her to work her way to a small alcove ten feet above the cave that contained Tristan’s file. There had been two very close calls on her way down—one when she’d briefly run out of holds and friction, and the other when she’d knocked off a sizable rock that had, thanks to a soft sand landing, gone unnoticed.

  The men scouring the canyon floor were close now. She couldn’t see them from her position, but she could hear the crunch of their footsteps and an occasional eruption of a voice. When she finally worked herself into a position where she could spy on them, she saw that they were nearly invisible. Shadows behind the powerful beams of their flashlights, just like …

  She waited until their search pattern had focused them in another direction and swung quickly over the lip of the cave. Her luck had finally run out, though, and she felt her hands slide from an unexpectedly polished surface on the rock and then the sudden weightlessness of falling.

  It had been years since she and Tristan had stashed their gear in this cave, but she seemed to remember that its floor extended out further than its roof. In most cases she had a good memory for that kind of thing. But if this was one of those rare occasions that she’d confused one cliff with another, her fall would be broken by a pile of jagged rocks fifty feet below. And then all her problems would be solved.

  She hit the floor of the cave hard. Unconsciously she had pitched her weight forward, away from the precipice, and she went face-first into the rock. Dazed, she laid there for a few moments and listened to the voices of the men outside grow loud.

  They’d heard her.

  She struggled into a crouch but then froze, not sure what to do. There was no time.

  “What about over there?”

  It was the first full sentence she’d been able to make out, no doubt thanks to the acoustics of the cave. The deep, masculine voice had a complete lack of urgency to it. She moved back to the mouth of the cave and saw the flashlights still moving in a more or less random pattern a hundred meters away. The voices hadn’t turned to shouts, she realized; it was just acoustics.

  She took a moment to collect herself, then crawled to the back of the cave, feeling around her in the darkness for anything that didn’t belong. After a few moments the voices started to grow again in volume. This time it wasn’t an audio illusion, though; the men had redirected their search and were getting closer.

  When Darby reached the back wall, she turned left and started along it in a straight line, trying to conduct as methodical a search as possible under the circumstances. There were broken rocks strewn everywhere, and she could already feel the blood flowing from her bare knees and shins. But that didn’t bother her as much as the realization that Tristan would have most likely buried the file with the rubble scattered around the floor of the cave. And there was no way to feel the difference between a natural and man-made formation.

  “What’s up there?”

  She froze at the sound of the man’s voice as it echoed around her.

  The crack of sandstone on sandstone was unmistakable as someone started up the talus field below.

  You’re still okay, she told herself.You’re still okay.

  The fifty-foot climb up to the cave was difficult—solid 5.10. Anyone who would try that in this light, without the protection of a rope, was probably a friend or at least acquaintance of hers. And if they took the time to set up a rope belay, she could be long gone by the time one of them made it all the way up. But not without the file.

  She pulled the backpack off her shoulders and fished around in it until she found the lighter at the bottom. The desperate shouts started below the moment she lit it and the cave came flickering to life around her.

  She ran around the cave throwing rocks off any formation that looked like it might not have occurred naturally, the sound mimicking the clatter rising from below as the three men scurried to the base of the cliff.

  “Fuck the shoes! Go! Go!.”

  Darby froze for a moment and listened.

  “Move, goddamnit!.”

  The voic
e was deafening, as though it was aimed directly up at the cave. Or perhaps at someone climbing toward her. She went back to her search, frantically kicking and throwing rocks at the back of the cave until she started to hear the labored breathing and occasional grunts of a climber moving toward her. She picked up a rock and considered rolling it off the edge, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. What if it was just a local guide they’d hired? Maybe someone she knew?

  A gust of wind blew the lighter out as she started back the way she’d come. She flicked it again and the intensity of the flame as it exploded to life created a dull glitter beneath the sand at her feet.

  She dropped to her knees and brushed it away, feeling the unmistakable cold smoothness of plastic. She shoved a large rock aside and started to dig as the sound of the mysterious climber continued to close in on her.

  Whatever it was, it had been encased in at least a half- inch of shrink-wrap. She held it up for a moment, but the glare from the flame was too intermittent to see anything but its shape and deep brown color.

  Darby shoved it in her backpack and slung the pack over her shoulders just as a loud grunt echoed through the cave and the blond head of the man she’d seen from the cliff top appeared at the mouth. She ran within three feet of him as he struggled to pull himself over the lip, dropping the lighter and lunging at a line of softball-sized holes gouged in the rock by a million years of water flow.

  She forced herself not to look back again—there was nothing she could do but go straight up. Moving right would bring her into view of the men on the ground and left would take her back into the cave. Desperation gripped her as she threw herself recklessly at each hand- and foothold, forgetting how high she was off the ground, forgetting everything but the man behind her.

  She remembered the huge hold at the base of the little alcove above the cave and launched herself at it. She felt her feet and hands leave the wall and her body arc through the night air as a gunshot sounded and a bullet skittered off the rock close enough to kick dust into her eyes. She latched the hold with her right hand and used the powerful muscles in her arm to continue her upward momentum. She rolled into the alcove and hit the back of it hard, then froze and listened for the sound of pursuit.

  Nothing—only the sound of her own breathing. Then, a moment later, a quiet, heavily accented voice.“Darby?”

  She leaned forward out of reflex. The voice was familiar.

  “Darby, come down.”

  That was enough to put a nationality to the man. Slovenian. She scooted forward a few inches.“Vili?”

  “Come down now, Darby.”

  She almost leaned her head over the edge to see if there was enough light to make out his features, but then remembered the gunshot that couldn’t have come from anyone but him.

  “You shot at me, Vili.”

  “Just to scare you.” His voice was calm and even, but obviously forced.“The men I am with hired me to help them find you. To bring you to the police for what you did to Tristan.”

  “I didn’t do anything to Tristan. You know that.”

  “Of course I do. Come down, we will take you to your police. You can tell them.”

  Whoever the people after her were, they were smart. It had only been three days since she’d escaped from the old farmhouse and they’d already found the perfect person to track her. Vili had been a professional climber for years—he knew the ins and outs of her lifestyle and probably most of her friends. But more, he hated her with a burning passion that she would never understand.

  It had been three years ago on Ama Dablam in the Himalayans. She’d gone there to attempt a solo ascent of a new route on the west face of the mountain. But he’d sneaked in a week before, with a map she’d drawn, to try to steal the ascent out from under her.

  She’d found him about halfway up it, his leg broken and half frozen. She’d almost died about ten times getting him down. He hadn’t even tried to help; he’d just lain there and whimpered while she dragged him along the steep slopes in subzero temperatures and blinding snow. A week after he’d been evacuated by helicopter, she’d completed the route, and worse, made the cover ofClimbing magazine.

  She hadn’t really been looking for gratitude and she hadn’t gotten any. Apparently embarrassed by his behavior and for being saved by a woman, he’d somehow managed to convince himself that his accident had been her fault and that she’d stolen the climb from him.

  “Why are you doing this, Vili?”

  A shout from below floated up, but he didn’t answer it. ’To show the world who you really are. Darby. What you did to me.”

  “You would have died up there.”

  “You say!”His voice suddenly went from a whisper to a scream.“You forced me down. You took that climb from me!.”

  It occurred to her again just how pointless Tristan’s death had been. He was the victim of the stunted, adolescent egos of supposedly full-grown men. Politicians searched for power, captains of industry pursued money. For climbers, it was glory. But it was all an illusion. No matter how much they amassed, they would still grow old and weak and die. Tristan should have known better.

  Darby stood and looked up the pitch-black chimney cut into the rock behind her. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the most difficult sections that she had passed on her way down and project how hard they’d be in the dark and with the extra weight in her pack.

  She calculated a one-in-three chance of making it to the top alive. That could be improved to fifty-fifty if she took her time, but the men below would undoubtedly take the same dirt road up the back that she had and try to be there to meet her.

  “Wait!”Vili yelled when he heard Darby start up the chimney.“Darby! Wait!.”

  She continued on, picking up her pace when she heard him step around the edge of the cave and start the climb to the alcove. She found a spot that she could comfortably stand for a moment and looked down into the blackness.“There’s a lot of loose rock up here, Vili.”

  She heard his progress come to a sudden halt. The meaning of her statement was clear—if he continued up behind her, she’d kick off enough debris to ensure that he took the express to the ground.

  “Wait, Darby! Wait!”He switched to his native language, speaking slowly and deliberately, enunciating every word very carefully. Her Slovenian was horrible—self- taught during a six-month climbing trip there a few years back.

  He repeated himself, even slower this time, and she struggled to translate. She couldn’t nail every word, but the gist was that if she threw the file down he’d let her go and lead the men who had hired him away from her.

  Darby reached up and tested a small flake in the rock that was just big enough for her to get her fingers behind.“Don’t follow me, Vili. You won’t make it,”she said, pulling herself up a few more feet. He screamed something she couldn’t translate and she heard the crack of another gunshot. She continued on, satisfied that there was no way he could hit her from where he was standing, and that he wouldn’t follow. In the end, Vili Marcek was a coward.

  fifteen

  Mark Beamon stared down at his coffee table—or more specifically, the half-eaten Big Mac resting on it. He reached out for the hamburger, but a slight cramping in his stomach redirected his hand to the cup full of Coke next to it. This was really pathetic. Not only had he grown accustomed to the no-fat, whole-grain, tree-hugger food that Carrie insisted on cooking day in and day out, he’d actually come to rely on it. His constitution had been so weakened by the endless procession of salads, bran muffins, and granola that he couldn’t even drown his sorrows in a good fast food burger anymore.

  Beamon pressed a button on the remote lying next to him on the sofa before he could start thinking about her again. Breaking off their relationship had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done—but he’d had no choice. As difficult as it was going to be to adjust to living without her and Emory, he knew he’d done the right thing. He had no right to drag them along behind him through this thing.


  The television came to life, and the craggy yet earnest face of Robert Taylor, the Republican excuse for a presidential candidate, appeared on-screen. As always, he was talking in grand concepts: tradition, morality, ingenuity, family. The morality part seemed to be the focus tonight—or more specifically, the importance of bringing it back to a scandal-besieged political system. The confident words of man too goddamn old and tedious to do anything that the papers would find even remotely provocative.

  Beamon’s eyes narrowed as Taylor started in on the meaning of integrity. Undoubtedly that old son of a bitch had spent his week shoveling the crap that Beamon was about to drown in—making deals that would save the Grand Old Party and destroy a certain hapless, former FBI agent. Nothing happened in Washington without the old man’s knowledge and approval.

  Beamon jabbed at the channel button and the screen flickered over to a group of well-dressed women, once again, discussing the presidential race. There didn’t seem to be any escaping it. Politics was everything.

  A few more jabs landed him a few more political saps. One last click and the imposing figure of David Hallorin sitting across from Larry King appeared on the screen. Beamon paused for a moment, remembering his meeting with Hallorin. He still wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, or what Hallorin had hoped to accomplish.

  Beamon more or less agreed with the man’s politics, as much as he could agree with anyone’s, and Hallorin had been reasonably pleasant in their meeting, but there was something else there; something at the edge of his perception. Maybe it was the fearful reaction of Hallorin’s employees whenever Hallorin came within ten feet of them. More likely, though, it was just Beamon’s all-encompassing distaste for anyone in Hallorin’s line of work.

  “Okay, Larry. You win,”Hallorin said through the television’s speakers. ’Two minutes of complete, concise honesty. That’s all you can ask of a politician.”

  King took the challenge and said, simply,“Abortion.”

  Beamon laid the remote down next to him and watched Hallorin feign surprise at the directness of the question.“Starting with the tough stuff. Okay. I’m pro-choice. It’s an intangible moral argument that’s impossible to win by either side. In that kind of situation, a free country has to leave the decision to the individual.” He looked into the camera.“Based on what we’ve seen lately, America’s government officials can’t keep their own houses in order. Do you want these men and women making choices for you about your family and health?”