by Kyle Mills
“Okay, Darby. I’m sorry, but it’s time to make a decision. Are you going to tell me what I’ve gotten myself into, or are we just going to keep playing till the snipers show up?” He stopped and looked into her face, unable to tell whether the clear droplet running down her cheek was sweat or a tear.
“I’m completely lost, Mark,” she said. “I always know what to do. But now…”
“You’re making this too hard, kid. If I’m working for the other side, you’re screwed. I’ve got you.” Beamon reached into his bag for a club and was about to start poking around in the thick bushes for his ball, but then thought better of it. There were probably ten things in there that could kill a man in three seconds or less.
“I guess you do have me,” Darby said. “But if you’re not who you say you are, and you’re just smarter than the guy in the Mercedes, don’t play games with me, okay? When you get what you want, just kill me and be done with it.”
Empathy had never been one of Beamon’s strong suits, but he couldn’t shake the sense of the enormity of the crime that had been committed against this girl. It wasn’t the physical act of murdering her friends, or the frame-up, or the physical abuse. It was the way those things had changed her view of the world. They’d taken a girl who had built her life around freedom and joy, and over the course of a few weeks, dragged her into a world of fear, greed, and thoughtless violence. His world. The real one.
“Quick and painless,” Beamon promised, motioning to the men following along behind them to hold their ground for a moment. He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her out of earshot. “I’m going to make a few statements and you just say right or wrong, okay?” She nodded.
“You didn’t kill Tristan Newberry.”
“Right,” she answered quietly.
“Tristan saw something important where he worked, probably in an old FBI file, and he told you about it”
She nodded.
“You were attacked at the New River Gorge.”
Another nod.
“Now, were you taken to an old farmhouse in Mary-land?”
“Uh huh.”
Beamon smiled. “I’m particularly proud of myself for that one. But tell me—how the hell did you get away?”
“There were two men in the room. I grabbed one of them and pushed him over. He fell into a window and cut his neck. I… I think he probably died….”
Beamon remembered the uncanny strength she had displayed during their sprint through the streets of Krabi. Bet that son of a bitch had been even more surprised than he had been—he’d obviously bled enough to make a new coat of paint necessary.
“You said there were two men in the room. How did you get away from the second?”
“I didn’t. He let us go. He didn’t want to be there the whole time, you could tell. He didn’t want to hurt us.”
Beamon ran his tongue over his front teeth. “Young guy? Twenty-nine or so, but with gray hair at his temples?”
She cocked her head slightly to the right. “Yeah. How did you know?”
“Not important.”
“We ran,” she continued. “Jumped out the window and ran. I didn’t think there was any way they could catch us.” Her voice started to sound kind of faraway as she dragged herself back into the past.
“The butte,” Beamon said. “You would have run straight up that butte. These guys were like me, right? They wouldn’t be able to keep up.”
She nodded. “But Tristan didn’t have any shoes. By the time we made it to the top, his feet were all cut up.”
He remembered the pictures of Tristan’s body and the local sheriff’s comment about how Darby had even attacked his feet with the ice ax. Beamon hadn’t registered the wounds as unusual, assuming that he had been kicking at his attacker, trying to defend himself.
“Tristan said we had to split up,” Darby said. “That he could keep ahead of the people chasing him, even with his feet torn up like that” She looked directly into Beamon’s eyes. “I think I knew he couldn’t. No, I’m sure I did. But I’d never been in a situation like that before—I was so scared…. That’s not much of an excuse, is it? For leaving him?”
“What could you have done, Darby? Stayed with him until they caught up? Then you’d both be dead. It wasn’t your fault.” Beamon calculated a respectful pause, then continued. “Now this is really important—life or death, okay? Did Tristan tell you what was in the file?”
Suspicion crossed her face for a moment. She didn’t say anything, calculating again. If he was lying to her, the next words out of her mouth might kill her. She took a deep breath—as though she thought it might be one of her last. “No, he didn’t He just told me that the information in it could hurt some very powerful people.”
Beamon sighed quietly. That wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear. “Did you tell anybody else anything about this?”
The suspicion again, and then resignation. “No.”
Beamon stepped back and leaned against his golf bag, staring at the ground.
“What are you thinking?” Darby said after a few moments.
He shook his head, not sure how much to say. Normally, he’d sugarcoat their situation, but this girl deserved better than that; she deserved to know what was coming. “I don’t know, Darby. These people probably think Tristan told you what was in the file. You—and I—are a loose end to them now, and they’re going to keep coming until they’ve tied it up. I’d hoped you’d have something we could use—something that could at least force a truce.”
A confused expression crossed her face. “What about the file? Isn’t there a way we could use that?”
He looked up. “Excuse me?”
“Tristan took the file…. Oh, you didn’t know that, did you? He told me where it was before we split up.”
“What?” Beamon had been working under the assumption that Tristan was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “He took it?”
She nodded. “He wanted to sell it to the papers.”
Beamon stood up straight for a moment, but then sagged back against his golf bag. “But I’m sure he told the men who killed him where he stashed it”
“He did. They almost got to it before I did.”
It took a moment for that to compute. “What did you say?”
“Yeah. I barely made the descent down this cliff in Utah. And Vili Marcek shot at me on the way back up.”
“Are you telling me you have the file?” Beamon said, his mouth suddenly feeling a little dry. “The file’s here?”
She shook her head. “It’s back in the States. I didn’t want it this close to me.”
Beamon dropped his clubs on the grass and signaled the Thais guarding them to move further back. “Okay, Darby,” Beamon said, speaking slowly. “What is in the file? Taylor? Hallorin?”
“The presidential candidates? I don’t know. I never looked at it”
“What the hell do you mean you never looked at it?” he said, suddenly aware that he was speaking too loudly. He lowered his voice. “What do you mean you never looked at it?”
She shrugged, suddenly looking a little intimidated. “Like you said, if I knew what was in that file, I’d never have a chance at getting my life back.”
The logic was sound, but made Beamon want to pull out what was left of his hair.
“All I know,” Darby continued, “is that the word ‘Prodigy’ is written across the outside of it.”
Beamon leaned forward and put his face in his hands, trying to concentrate. It looked like he was right about the contents of the file. In the time before randomly generated operational names, it was often possible to glean information from what a project was called. Prodigy. Tracking young talents before they gained power.
“Okay, Darby,” he said, voice muffled slightly by the hands still in front of his mouth. “Where’s the file now?”
She hesitated for a moment and then decided that it was too late to turn back. “In an old forest service lookout tower about twenty miles from
that house in Wyoming where you came looking for me.”
“Lori Jaspers’ house?” Beamon thought about that for a moment, then ran at the two surprised-looking Thai guards standing fifty yards away. “Give me a phone!”
They looked at each other in confusion:
“A phone! A goddamn phone!” he shouted, as though speaking the words louder would help them understand. He was about to grab one of them and start going through his pockets when Darby jogged up next to him. “Toh-rah-sahp!” she said. “Is there something wrong, Mark?”
Beamon ignored her, snatching the cell phone produced by one of the guards. “Lori’s phone number in Wyoming—what is it?”
“Mark! Is there something wrong?”
He looked directly into her worried face, not really wanting to tell her. “Darby … If you were them and you didn’t turn up the file at your friend Sam’s house, where would you go next? You’re traveling on Lori’s passport.”
forty-two
Mark Beamon jerked awake for what must have been the tenth time and felt a fog instantly descend into his mind. He fumbled around in the dark next to him, finding the expensive transistor radio he’d purchased and clicking it off. The hiss of static that had been NPR when he’d first fallen asleep faded out of the earphones, replaced by the sickly hum of Darby Moore’s pickup truck.
It was cold.
He wriggled toward the truck’s tailgate on the foam pad beneath him and pulled the sleeping bag up around his neck. The night outside was dead black. He leaned up on one elbow and peered though the small window between the makeshift bed in the back of the pickup and the cab. All he could see was the shadow of Darby Moore’s head and the dizzying swirl of snow as it rushed the windshield. He let out a breath that shimmered for a moment in the reflected light and sank back under the sleeping bag.
Darby had slept through all but the eating and layover portions of their trip back from Thailand. A trick unique to climbers, he supposed. When the stress was too much and there was nothing to be done, it was best to just shut down, rest, and wait for your chance.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the same ability. The wheels in his mind had spent the last twenty-four hours grinding themselves to pieces. And what had he figured out in all that time? Not much that would be useful. Mostly dazzlingly useless conjecture.
According to NPR, David Hallorin had closed to within seven points of Taylor. A hell of an improvement, but still not exactly what anyone would call striking distance. And that had to be where Prodigy came in.
Beamon had considered the problem as carefully as his sleep-deprived brain could and concluded that there was nothing on Hallorin in the file. When Hallorin had decided that finger-pointing would be the cornerstone of his political career, his life had come under intense scrutiny by those he targeted. With any kind of skeleton in his closet, it was unlikely that his career could have survived.
And that brought Beamon around to Robert Taylor and Hallorin’s classy and honorable unwillingness to go negative on the man in his campaign. There seemed to be a three-part strategy at work: first you set yourself up as squeaky clean and can-do—if somewhat self-righteous and unsympathetic. Second, you shatter the negative part of that image with an act of unparalleled bravery and compassion. Third, you get the guy beating you to drop out of the race and throw his support to you. Hallorin had already forced enough of an illusion of grudging respect between him and Taylor to make it all palatable to the voters.
Beamon kicked the window between him and the cab and waited for Darby to look back at him. He pantomimed steering a car, but she just shook her head and turned her attention back to the snowy road. Her face was drawn and paper-white in the reflected headlight, further robbing her of the healthy glow that had been so obvious in the pictures he’d seen of her. The interesting contradictions in her face—the slightly crooked nose perched in the middle of the perfect cheekbones and mouth, the sun-enhanced crow’s-feet at the edges of her clear, youthful eyes—had seemed so unique and beautiful before. Now they combined to make her look a decade older than she was. As though her youth had been stolen by the recent sacrifice of her friends on the altar of David Hallorin’s presidential aspirations.
He’d called Lori Jaspers’ house no less than twenty times since they’d returned to the States and at least five times from Thailand. The machine had picked up each time. He’d called the local police, but even with a shameful amount of name-dropping, had been unable to get them interested enough to go out to her house. The cops seemed to think of Lori Jaspers and her friends as itinerants who for all intents and purposes existed outside their jurisdiction.
Beamon rolled over on his stomach and buried himself deeper in the thick sleeping bag, trying to let the darkness and gentle rocking of the truck lull him back to sleep. He tried to let his mind go blank—to force out thoughts of Hallorin, Lori Jaspers, himself. There was no point to it now, he was caught up in the current and the best he could hope to do was keep his and Darby’s heads above water.
“Wake up, Mark!” Darby said in a loud whisper. “We’re here.”
The sound of the truck’s back gate dropping was followed very quickly by a less than gentle gust of frozen air. Beamon opened his eyes to a dirty white sky and the cold of snowflakes dropping onto his skin, melting, and then running down his cheeks.
“Jesus,” Beamon said, not moving. “You drove straight through?”
She reached into the truck and pulled the sleeping bag off him. The air instantly penetrated the light clothes he’d traveled in. Luggage hadn’t been an option.
Beamon struggled out of the truck with Darby’s help, breaking through the crusty snow on the ground when he slid from the tailgate. “Where the hell are we?”
“We’re here.”
When he looked up, he saw that they were parked directly in front of Lori Jaspers’ barn.
“Shit!” he said under his breath, diving into the back of the truck and retrieving the .357 he’d managed to con a Nevada gun dealer into selling him. He dragged Darby behind the truck and aimed the pistol over the hood in the general direction of the buildings.
“Jesus Christ, Darby! I told you to wake me up before we got to town. Maybe I wasn’t completely clear on the concept of a stealthy approach.”
She slid down the side of the truck and into the snow. “I’m sorry, I… I thought…”
He knew exactly what she thought. She thought that her friend was in danger and that he would have been overly cautious in his approach. She was terrified that something had happened to Lori and that it would be her fault
Beamon looked around him uselessly. The house and barn were closed up and there were no cars in sight—but that didn’t prove anything. There could be fifty men in either structure and another five hundred secreted in the empty, snow-covered tundra that surrounded them.
“Well,” Beamon said, standing up from behind the truck, “if there’s anybody waiting for us, we might as well go meet them. At least it’ll be warmer in the house.”
That’s what Darby had been waiting to hear. She jumped to her feet and started to run around the track, but Beamon caught her by the back of her sweatshirt before she got out of range. “No point in being complete idiots, though. Nice and easy.”
The tension in Beamon’s stomach increased to an almost unbearable point as they walked past the barn. The platoon of Navy SEALS he half-expected to come charging out of it didn’t materialize, though, and so far he hadn’t noticed any suspicious red dots of light on any vital parts of their bodies.
The front door of Lori Jaspers’ house was locked, so Beamon struggled through a deep snowdrift next to the porch and peeked in a window. There were no lights on inside, but he could see well enough to note that it was much neater than last time he’d been there. The mattress on the floor was made up with blankets, and the dirty dishes and climbing gear that had been so evident a week before were all gone.
“Looks like nobody’s home. Like maybe they went out of tow
n.” He turned to Darby, who was looking more and more panicked. She moved through the deep snow at a seemingly impossible speed, forcing him to chase her around to the back door. When he finally arrived, she was desperately yanking on the locked doorknob.
“Looks like they tidied up and hit the road, Darby.” He wrapped his arms around himself against the cold. “Maybe they headed south?”
Darby gave the doorknob another violent tug and then kicked the door in frustration. “Lori doesn’t have a key.”
“What do you mean?”
“The farmer she bought the house from lost them years ago.” Darby swept her arm around at the nothingness surrounding them. “It’s not exactly a high-crime area.”
“Let’s see if we can change that,” Beamon said, gently pushing her aside and slamming his shoulder into the door. The old wood cracked loudly and gave way on his second try. He let his .357 lead as he stepped slowly inside.
“This is all wrong,” Darby said after they’d made a quick turn through the house. “It’s never been this neat in here.”
Beamon made another circuit through the house, looking for anything that might tell him its owner’s whereabouts. Why would they take her? She made sense as a hostage only if her kidnappers left some kind of calling card or had a way to communicate with Darby. Neither was the case.
Beamon rejoined Darby in the small living room where she seemed to be wandering around lost “Let’s try the bam,” he suggested.
It was similarly empty. They climbed up into the hayloft and found Darby’s stash of clothes and equipment strewn out across it
“No,” Darby said in a barely audible whisper as she picked up a ski boot half buried in the hay. She stood there looking at it for a moment and then threw it powerfully against the wall. “I killed her! I killed her too, didn’t I?”
“Take it easy, Darby. We don’t know what happened.” He kicked around her things for a moment, finding nothing, as he knew he would. “Help me out here, Darby. Why? Why would anyone be interested in Lori? You said you didn’t tell her anything about the file or what had happened to you.” He decided not to think about the possibility that they tortured her to death trying to confirm that she didn’t know anything and then dumped the body. It was possible, but too goddamn depressing.
