Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  All but one of the cameras seemed to be intact, protected by their raised positions along the back wall. He could see movement behind them as the smoke ebbed and flowed—they were still rolling.

  Hallorin felt someone grab him from behind and begin dragging him back toward the door behind the podium. He allowed the Secret Service man to pull him a couple of feet, and then used his superior strength and bulk to break free. His other three protectors were on their feet now, too, and moving quickly in his direction as he grabbed the agent in front of him by the shoulders.

  “NO!” Hallorin shouted over the sound of the sprinklers and the screams of the people behind him. He released the man and pointed down into the crowd. “Help them!” The other agents stopped a few feet from him, momentarily confused.

  “Help them!” Hallorin yelled again as he jumped off the podium and ran to a woman who was trying to lift her husband to his feet The Secret Service men still looked like they were unsure of what to do, but after a few seconds of indecision, all four jumped to the floor and ran to him.

  “You! Get him out of here!” Hallorin said, pulling the man lying on the concrete to his feet and passing him to the nearest Secret Service agent. “You three—help the others get out!”

  They did as they were told, weaving their way into what had been Hallorin’s audience, lifting people off the ground and shouting orders at anyone who looked able to move under their own power.

  Hallorin started toward the now diminishing wall of flame at the back, knowing that there would be no second explosion. The smoke became thicker as he continued, but the heat had diminished enough that it couldn’t penetrate his soaked-through suit and the stream of water still falling from the ceiling. He pulled out a wet handkerchief and held it over his mouth and nose as he moved through the billowing clouds and nearly tripped over a man lying facedown on the floor. He continued on, knowing that he was completely obscured from the cameras now, finally coming upon what looked like a family lying motionless on the floor in a quickly deepening puddle. He ignored the adults and went for the two young girls lying next to them. One appeared to still be alive and one already dead. Both were black. He hesitated for a moment, calculating the media impact, then scooped up the dead girl and began stumbling blindly toward the exit.

  The girl was small, no more than sixty pounds, and he was able to cradle her in one arm as he ran. When he had cleared the densest area of smoke and came into camera view again, he used his free hand to grab hold of a confused-looking woman and pull her through the open bay into the bright sun and clean air.

  Once clear of the building, he dropped to his knees near a balloon-covered picnic table and laid the girl’s body gently on the warm asphalt. He bent over her and looked down at her burned skin and blistered lips, finally opening her mouth and trying to resuscitate her, though he knew it was hopeless.

  The chaos around him grew as he continued to make a show of performing CPR on the girl. Finally, when there would have been no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was beyond saving, he fell back into an exhausted sitting position and pulled her body to his.

  She would have never done anything significant. Had her parents managed to save enough to send her to college, she would have toiled in a mid-level position, retired, and died. If not, she would have worked for six dollars an hour and had five children the government would have had to support. But now she would influence the future of the entire world. She would live forever.

  Hallorin dropped a hand behind him for support, finally looking up as though he was just becoming aware of the flashing cameras going off around him.

  He was going to be the president of the United States.

  thirty-four

  Mark Beamon squinted as the early morning light reflecting off the small lake in front of him slipped in around his sunglasses. Most of the leaves on the trees had turned to intense reds and golds, creating an enormous quilt that covered the mountains around him.

  The old A-frame cottage at the end of the dirt driveway looked like an overgrown birdhouse—a simple structure constructed of weathered cedar and broken wood shingles. Beamon paused in the middle of the driveway and took one more look at the lake and the small dock jutting out into it. It fit the vague description he’d been given, but he suspected that just about every house out here would. Street signs and house numbers seemed to be more a luxury than a necessity in this remote section of Maine.

  Steve Rose had come through with typical efficiency. The day after Beamon had contacted him, the Conrad, Maryland, police station had been faxed pictures of eight Maine State Troopers who fit the rather general description Beamon had provided. There was no doubt that Terry McMillan was the man who had been in Conrad asking questions about Darby Moore.

  The biographical data Rose forwarded to Beamon included an unfortunate paragraph putting McMillan in David Hallorin’s protection detail until only about a week ago, supporting Beamon’s fear that this case was going nowhere good.

  He knocked on the front door, the sharp sound disturbing the stillness that surrounded him. When there was no response, he cupped his hands around one of the glass panes and peered inside. Most of the room was in shadow, illuminated only by the sun glare coming through the small windows at the back. Beamon tried the doorknob and, finding it locked, reached for one of the mittens in his pocket He looked around him to make sure he was alone, but then rethought his plan of punching through the glass and instead ran his hand over the top of the doorframe. Nothing.

  Jumping off the small front porch, he lifted a planter with a dead bush in it Nothing there either. It took a few more minutes, but the key finally turned up under a canoe leaned against the house. The improvement in his breaking and entering skills was slow but reasonably steady.

  The smell hit him the moment he entered and was powerful enough to force him back outside again. He slammed the door shut and pulled his cell phone from his pocket, dialing a nine and a one, and then letting his thumb hover over the last digit. He wasn’t an FBI agent anymore. There was no more calling in cops and experts and ordering them around. No more people to do the dirty work and provide him with a nice clean sheet of paper containing their findings. In this instance, he knew that it would be much better for him if no one ever knew he’d been there.

  Beamon put his hand back on the doorknob. One … two…

  He twisted it on three and charged forward into a small living room with an open kitchen on the right. He covered his mouth and nose with his handkerchief and looked up at a ladder that led to a small loft.

  Reluctantly, he closed the door behind him and made his way across the cheaply furnished room to the base of the ladder. Leaning his head against one of the rungs, he kept his breathing shallow, getting enough air to keep him from getting light-headed, but not enough to feel like he was taking the overpowering stench of the place fully into his lungs. The two hundred and forty-five grand that he had coming as of today was starting to look more and more like a slave’s wage.

  He started slowly up the ladder, stopping when his head cleared the floor of the loft. He couldn’t see much of the man—only the back of his head and his arms were visible around the Barcolounger type chair. He seemed to be gazing out the window, but judging by the smell, his days of admiring the lake were probably over.

  Beamon made his breathing even more shallow as he continued into the loft and walked up behind the chair, concentrating on the view that the dead man had been so interested in. It took a few seconds, but he finally managed to coax himself into looking down at the body.

  It was probably McMillan, but that was based only on the short, thick hair graying at the temples. His features had been rendered unrecognizable, alternately bloated and cratered by the bacteria at work decomposing his body. Black splotches covered most of the visible skin on his face and hands, and his nose seemed to have partially sunk into his skull beneath mercifully closed eyes. Flies walked drunkenly across the body and littered the floor—going after one last feast
before fall brought an end to their life span.

  Blood had soaked through the orange velour of the chair and dried, turning it and the floor around it a dull reddish black. Beamon held the handkerchief a little tighter to his face and looked down at McMillan’s right wrist. What had probably been a narrow slit when inflicted had swelled and now gaped open like a dead flower. There seemed to be no marks that could have been caused by a rope, though at this level of decomposition, Beamon probably wouldn’t know them if he saw them. In any event, the design of the chair would make it tricky to secure someone to it. That left the obvious answer suicide. Convenient and certainly possible. Maybe even probable.

  Beamon looked down at the small table in front of what had, until recently, been Terry McMillan. The young man’s badge was lying open on it next to his gun. Beamon leaned down to examine the picture on McMillan’s ID, but the motion made his stomach roll over violently. He walked quickly across the ten feet of floor and down the ladder, bursting through the front door, taking a tentative gulp of fresh air. He increased the depth of his breathing carefully, not wanting to do anything violent enough to disturb the delicate balance that was holding down yet another wonderful first-class airline lunch.

  The Maine air settled his stomach fairly quickly, and after about five minutes, he was able to go back into the house. He made a quick turn around the kitchen and living room, poking into cabinets and closets, and taking a quick peek into the bathroom.

  Nothing particularly suspicious—beyond the body in the loft. No sign anything had been searched or of any struggle. There was food in the fridge, some of it still good.

  Beamon grabbed a couple of oven mitts off the stove and went back into the loft. After a cursory search of the confined space, he stepped up to McMillan’s body and poked at it with a mined hand. It felt kind of like a half-full water balloon.

  He held one of the mitts to his face and took in a quick filtered breath, then reached down to grab hold of the body, saying a silent prayer that no major parts would fall off it during this operation.

  For once, his luck held. McMillan’s body flopped over like a broken doll and exposed the back of his jeans. It took some doing, but Beamon managed to relieve him of his wallet without taking the mitts off, then retreated outside again.

  He walked down to the lake, taking deep breaths and clearing his head. The power of the sun’s rays burnt through his jacket and pants as he lay down at the edge of the dock and let his lower legs dangle over the edge.

  McMillan’s wallet didn’t contain anything unusual: photos, plastic, roughly thirty dollars in cash, et cetera, et cetera. Beamon found himself staring at a picture of an older woman standing on the very dock he was now lying on. “What happened to your son, Mrs. McMillan?” he said aloud.

  Had he been involved in Tristan Newberry’s death—sucked into David Hallorin’s personality cult and convinced that it was for “the good of the people”? Then, overcome by guilt, killed himself? Or had he found out what was going on and refused to play along? Any number of virtually untraceable drugs could have been used to keep him docile while his wrists were cut and his life was soaked up by that Barcolounger.

  Beamon raised his arm and momentarily blocked out the sun as he looked at the calendar on his watch. He was supposed to be using his time to decide whether or not he was going to spend the next six months in a minimum-security prison playing poker with a bunch of embezzlers, bond traders, and former congressmen—not chasing trouble around New England.

  And then there was Roland Peck. His deadline was tomorrow. If Beamon said no to the job offer, Hallorin would have to find another way to solve the problem of this particular former FBI agent poking around things that were better left alone.

  Beamon didn’t notice the quiet sloshing of water until it was only a few feet away. He raised his head and had to squint to focus on a man in his early thirties rowing a dented aluminum canoe toward the dock.

  “Hi there,” the man said. “Is Terry around?”

  “Not home.”

  “Know when he’s going to be back?”

  Beamon propped himself up on his elbows and shrugged as best he could from that position. “How’s the fishing?”

  “Hasn’t been that good,” the man said, dipping his paddle in the water to avoid colliding with the dock. “But hell, look at this day.”

  Beamon nodded thoughtfully as he examined the man’s face. There was no worry, stress, or pain there. Probably worked at a gas station or something—made just enough to keep his dinky little place on the lake stocked with fishing line.

  “Hey, if you catch up with Terry, tell him Sean stopped by,” the man said, executing a lazy paddle stroke that propelled him back toward the center of the lake.

  “No problem,” Beamon said as he laid his head back on the dock and started wondering what he’d done with his life. What had he actually accomplished that would matter ten minutes after he was dead? Would as many people remember him as they would Terry McMillan, or would his memory be contained only in a bunch of useless old FBI reports?

  He shook off the thought, forcing it back to wherever it had come from. It was too late to ask questions like that, too late for regrets. Lately, though, when he saw people like the young man in the canoe, he couldn’t help wondering if they were the ones who had life nailed.

  He remembered an article he’d read in Rock and Ice magazine that followed a young climber’s various adventures over a six-month period. Every spectacular photograph shown in the article had been accompanied by a small handwritten account of how much money the young man had spent during the week. At the end of the six months, the subject of the article hadn’t worked a single hour and had spent something like thirty-five hundred dollars. The really amazing thing was that included two trips abroad—he’d figured out how to fly as a courier for next to nothing….

  Mark Beamon glared at the woman standing a few feet from him as he dialed the pay phone for a fourth time. The frustrated expression on her face melted into one of intimidation, then uncertainty, and she finally started down the sidewalk in search of another phone.

  Beamon turned his attention to a cop car cruising slowly through the parking lot as the ringing started on the other end of the line. His rental car was about ten feet away, with one wheel up on the sidewalk that ran the length of the Barnes and Noble store he was standing in front of. The cruiser didn’t seem interested in his creative parking job, though, and disappeared around the back of the strip mall.

  Beamon looked down again at the book in his hands—The Worldwide Guide to Cheap Airfares—and crossed out the name of the last company he’d talked to.

  “Eco-Courier, how can I help you?”

  “Hi,” Beamon said in a friendly tone. “My girlfriend is flying for you guys and she hasn’t received her tickets yet. She’s working and she asked me to call and make sure that they’re going to be waiting for her at the counter.”

  “Sure. Could I have her name and date of travel?”

  “Lori Jaspers,” Beamon said, using Darby’s friend’s name. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember when she told me she was leaving.”

  “No problem, let me put you on hold and take a look.”

  Courier companies often bought tickets in their own name and then switched them to the name of the person flying at the last minute, and that meant that there would be no record of the reservation that Beamon’s friend at the FAA could get his hands on.

  There was a click on the line and the woman’s voice again. “Yup, they’ll be waiting for her there. Thai flight 775 leaving L.A. at eight P.M.”

  Beamon threw the book across the sidewalk and missed the garbage can at the edge of the road by a good four feet. “And what’s the date on that?”

  “Uh, it’s tonight—”

  Of course. When else? Beamon hung up the phone and dialed Lori Jaspers’ number from his address book.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Lori? You gonna be around tomorrow?” “Yeah …
Who is this?”

  He slammed the phone down and ran for his car.

  thirty-five

  The imaginary knife in Mark Beamon’s side started to twist as he took the stairs to the LAX departure terminal three at a time. The clock above him read 7:55.

  He sprinted through the glass doors and began pushing roughly through the crowd, scanning the long counters on either side of him for Thai Airways. When he reached the back wall, he was forced to stop for a moment and bent forward at the waist to catch his breath.

  The Thai counter, in strict adherence to Murphy’s Law, was on the other side of a barrier wall near where he’d come in. He ignored the protests of the people in line as he shoved his way close enough to see the departure board. Darby’s flight was leaving on time. He looked at his watch: three minutes. Goddamn Asian efficiency.

  Despite his body’s vigorous protests, he started to run toward the crowded entrance to the departure gates and sprinted past a rather large man in a generic blue uniform.

  “Sir, your ticket!”

  Beamon ignored him and continued to duck and weave through the crowd, but was hit from behind when he tried to get around the metal detector. He managed to stay upright by bouncing off a wall and let his momentum carry him further down the concourse. “FBI—”

  The hit that put him on the ground was, embarrassingly enough, from a sturdy-looking Hispanic woman. He went face-first on the floor and almost immediately felt a nightstick being forced into the back of his neck. The sound of running coming from behind him was quickly followed by the unmistakable jab of a gun barrel in his back. He couldn’t move his head up, but he could see enough to discern that he was now completely surrounded by the poorly polished shoes of LAX security.