Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  When the black cold surrounding him started to glow yellow with the coming dawn, he’d crawled outside the snow cave, leaned his back against a rock outcropping, and let the light of the rising sun soak into his chest. He could still feel the sunburn he’d suffered through the bruises and swelling on his face.

  When the sound of a snowmobile engine had started to reflect off the silent mountains around him, he still hadn’t the faintest idea what they were going to do. And despite the fact that he’d been hurtling toward Washington, D.C., at just under the speed limit for nine hours now, he still didn’t.

  Beamon looked over at Darby and saw that she had slumped down in the passenger seat and wrapped herself in her sleeping bag. He reached over and gently slid the empty beer bottle from her hand and propped it next to the small cooler at her feet. She stirred and then settled even deeper into the bag.

  He was getting kind of worried about her. The dark circles under her eyes were taking on a noticeably green hue against the tan of her skin, and she’d been through at least a six-pack in the last two hours. She seemed to have learned to cope with Tristan’s death, but the memory of her friends Lori and Sam was much fresher. Guilt was tearing her apart.

  One problem at a time, Beamon reminded himself.

  Steering with his knees again, he dialed the number of Gerald Reys’ office into his cell phone for the tenth time that night. And for the tenth time, he turned the phone off before it started ringing.

  His deadline to take Reys’ deal and do some jail time in return for his pension had expired the day before. Reys was undoubtedly delighted, and Beamon doubted there was anything he could do or say to stop a full criminal prosecution at this point. The best he’d been able to come up with was a half-assed bluff that involved subtly mentioning Tom Sherman’s offer of unlimited legal defense funds. The problems with that were twofold: first, he’d never take a dime from a friend—though Reys didn’t know that. And second, it felt too much like begging. Maybe being trapped in a snow cave and then in a hospital was the gods’ way of telling him not to take the deal.

  “Karma,” he said quietly to himself, and then shook his head. Five days with Darby Moore and he was already using words like “karma.”

  “What?” Darby’s groggy voice. “Did you say something?” She adjusted herself to a position that allowed her to see the side of his face, but didn’t fully emerge from the sleeping bag.

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “How do you feel, Mark?” she said, immediately reaching into the cooler at her feet and pulling out a fresh beer. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll live.”

  She dug a bottle of ibuprofen out of the glove box and poured four into her hand. “Climber’s candy. Open up.” He did, and she dropped them in his mouth, then held her beer up so that he could wash them down without taking his good hand off the wheel.

  “Have you figured out what we’re going to do yet?”

  “Still working on it”

  She nodded silently and started in on her beer.

  “Have you figured out what they’re going to do?”

  Beamon didn’t look over at her, but continued to concentrate on the section of road cut from the darkness by the truck’s headlights. “If I’m right about there being something on Taylor in that file, it isn’t real hard to guess.”

  “You think David Hallorin’s going to release it to the press?”

  Beamon started to reach for his beer, but Darby beat him to it and held it for him while he took a gulp.

  “Thanks. I doubt it. Notice how Hallorin’s been so respectful to the Republicans during the campaign—and how that’s forced them not to go heavily negative on him?”

  Darby shrugged and shook her head.

  “Take my word for it. No, I’m guessing that he’ll get Taylor to drop out and endorse him. There are only four days till the election—the Republicans will still be fighting with each other about what to do when Hallorin’s picking out a color scheme for the Oval Office.”

  “What about the other people in the file? Tristan said there were lots of them.”

  Beamon shrugged. “If there’s anybody else worth blackmailing in it, I imagine Hallorin’ll contact them as he needs them.”

  She thought about that while she finished her beer and reached for another. “Where does that leave us?”

  “I don’t know.” That was a lie. It left them screwed. It left Darby a young woman whose corpse was necessary to end the investigation into Tristan Newberry’s death and Beamon a man who, if left alive, might find a way to continue his recent success at toppling America’s political elite.

  Darby sat staring out the side window of the truck for a long time, concentrating on the darkness as if there was something to find there. “How could you kill for this?” she said finally.

  Beamon took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked over at her. “For what?”

  “Power… money …”

  He let out a short laugh that the swelling in his mouth turned into a snort. “If you were to throw in love, you’ve pretty much covered all the reasons people kill.”

  Beamon glanced over at her again and could see from her expression that she was giving his words more thought than they probably deserved.

  “I guess I’ll just never understand,” she said. “If you’re right about all this, three of my friends—three human beings—are gone because of David Hallorin. They were happy, they had families, they never hurt anybody. What could possibly make him think that he had the right to take away the rest of their lives? For nothing.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call becoming the leader of the free world nothing, Darby.”

  “Really? What if he does win? In a few years, he’ll just be one of the presidents between Washington and who-ever’s in office that kids can’t remember on their history tests. When he dies, people will get up in the morning and have breakfast, and go to work, and watch their children play baseball—just like they did the day before. I mean, look at me. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I may be the best woman climber who ever lived. But someday, not very long from now, I’ll just be a footnote in a few guidebooks—there’ll be girls warming up on the hardest things I ever did. But that’s good. Life moves on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Beamon sighed quietly, wondering what Darby would think of the way he’d lived his own life. Probably better that he didn’t know. “I understand what you’re saying, but I think most people see it differently. There are a lot of people out there who would consider becoming the president of the United States a fair shot at immortality.”

  She took a thoughtful sip of her beer. “I know you’re right. Do you ever watch TV when people trying to get elected make speeches?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Have you ever noticed the people in the audience? How they cheer and wave their signs like tins man or woman cares about them individually? Like their lives are going to be changed by this person?” She turned fully to face him, lifting her feet onto the seat and propping them against his leg. “I mean, come on. When’s the last time the government actually did something that really made a difference in your life?”

  “I might be a bad example, but I get your point.”

  “Everyone is responsible for their own happiness, Mark. No one can give it to you.”

  He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she dropped her empty beer bottle onto the floorboard and went for another one. Her voice was starting to lose the bitterness it had earlier in favor of a mellow monotone. Even though he knew it was purely alcohol-induced, he decided that it suited her much better.

  “You’re not married, are you, Mark?” she said after a long silence.

  “Married? No. Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Actually, there’s a woman back home that probably would marry me, though, if I was smart enough to ask her. Near as I can tell, it’s her only character flaw.”

  “Is t
hat a joke?”

  “Nope. You probably think I’m here hiding out with you because of the ten guys with machine guns you’ve got waiting for me at my house. Not true. It’s because I dumped my girlfriend and now I’m afraid of her.”

  “How long had you been together?”

  “Long time.”

  She concentrated on the side of his face for a few moments. “You love her, don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “I guess I do.”

  “Then why did you dump her?”

  He shrugged. “She just… didn’t seem to fit into my life right now, you know what I mean?”

  Darby nodded slowly. “I’m sorry to say that I do.”

  In his peripheral vision, Beamon could see a mellow smile spreading across her face—the first real one since he’d met her. “Would you like some advice?”

  “Relationship advice from the only person I’ve ever met who’s more career-obsessed than I am?”

  She pursed her lips and affected an exaggerated frown. “A piece of timeless wisdom that I found carved into the wall of a forgotten monastery in southern Cambodia. I’m probably the only white person on the planet that has this knowledge, you know.”

  “What knowledge is that?”

  She tilted her bottle up and drained the rest of it, looking more than a little unsteady when she tossed the empty on the floor. “A foolproof test to see if you’ve found your soul mate.”

  “Don’t keep me hanging.”

  “People have spent their entire lives searching for this one fundamental truth.”

  “You’re killing me, here.”

  “You need only answer one simple question to ensure that you’ve found the right person.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If she were a guy, would you still hang out with her?”

  Beamon looked over at her and rolled his eyes. “Southern Cambodia, huh.”

  “As far as you know.”

  forty-six

  Mark Beamon took a seat against the wall, as ordered, and studied the scene around him. The level of activity was more controlled than he’d expected, more dignified. Two days before the general election, the people staffing Senator Robert Taylor’s campaign headquarters looked like they’d already won, blissfully unaware that David Hallorin still had one last trick up his sleeve.

  Beamon still couldn’t believe that this was the best plan his mind could concoct. He’d wasted too much time focusing on the all-important file—and more specifically how to get it back. That had been a dead end, though. After all the pain Hallorin had inflicted to get it, he wasn’t going to leave it on his kitchen table next to a glass of warm milk and cookies. He was going to shove it in a concrete-and-steel safe and bury it fifty feet underground.

  As lame and desperate as his current course of action was, Beamon was lucky to even get a shot at it. He felt more than a little guilty about getting Tom Sherman involved, but it had seemed rather obvious that a disgraced former FBI agent wasn’t going to get a private audience with the man America expected to be its next president. Sherman was well connected at the CIA, where Taylor had spent five years as director. His former deputy had set up the meeting.

  Beamon had been sitting alone against the wall for almost an hour when a woman in a blue business suit emerged from a set of double doors to his right. “Mr. Beamon. I apologize for the delay, but you understand that the senator is very busy. He’s ready for you now.”

  Beamon laid down his fifth cup of coffee and smiled politely as he limped through the door she was holding open for him.

  Senator Robert Taylor was sitting behind his desk, leaning back in his chair with his feet on what must have been an open drawer. It seemed impossible, but he looked even older in person than he did on TV. The craggy, but evenly colored, skin that had been plastered across every television screen in America was actually blotched with the red and the light purple of broken capillaries, and hung loose around his jowls and neck.

  In the time-honored tradition of powerful men, Taylor ignored his entrance. Beamon approached to within ten feet of the desk and stopped, striking as respectful and submissive a pose as he could conjure up. He stood there for almost a minute, watching Taylor’s pinkish-yellow eyes scan a document in his lap. Finally, the old man looked up, appraising him over the top of his reading glasses.

  “Please have a seat, Mr. Beamon,” he said, examining the bruises and swelling on Beamon’s face, but not commenting. “My former assistant at the Agency called and told me it was very important that I see you. He didn’t know why, but was adamant.”

  Taylor’s calm boredom and mild irritation were wonderfully practiced, but the cracks in the façade were there. Even a politician—a professional liar—couldn’t stay completely steady under this kind of pressure. Hallorin had already gotten to him.

  “We seem to have a mutual problem, sir,” Beamon stated. “I was hoping we could work together to solve it.”

  “And that is?”

  “David Hallorin.”

  Taylor smiled with a perfect balance of condescension and confusion. “I’m not sure why David Hallorin is a problem for me, Mr. Beamon. I assume you’ve seen the polls.”

  Beamon didn’t speak for a moment. What the hell was he doing here? Politics had always been something he ran from—a game Tom Sherman had always played for him.

  “He has the Prodigy file, Senator. But you know that”

  “The Prodigy file …” Taylor repeated, removing his glasses and letting his old eyes drill into Beamon.

  Beamon shifted uncomfortably in his chair. A lot of this was still conjecture on his part “Prodigy was an operation put together by the FBI under Hoover. It seems that the powerful men of that era were catching on to his tricks. He had to try something new—”

  “I’m sure this is a fascinating story,” Taylor broke in. “But I—”

  “So he set up a program that identified young up-and-comers and had them watched before they became older and wiser….” He stared Taylor fully in the face and let his voice trail off meaningfully.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I believe he can use the file to his advantage in this election.”

  A shadow of anger crossed Taylor’s face. “Is that accusation I hear in your voice, Mr. Beamon?”

  Games. All these men did was play games. After all these years did Robert Taylor even know the truth when he saw it? Or had truth become indistinguishable from whatever shit his party was shoveling that particular day?

  “At first, I thought Hallorin might use the information in the file to gain control of you, but it seems obvious that he isn’t going to be satisfied with pulling strings from the background.” Beamon paused for a moment. “He wants you to drop out, isn’t that right, Senator?”

  Taylor snorted quietly though his old nose. “I did some research on you, Mr. Beamon. You have no credibility. In fact, it’s my understanding that you will almost undoubtedly be convicted of felony obstruction of justice and are going to spend some time in prison. I met with you out of respect for my former assistant, but I don’t need—”

  “Who do you think is watching, here?” Beamon said, temporarily losing control of his frustration. He spread his arms wide, motioning around the room. “There are no cameras to play to, Senator. You aren’t going to make me forget what I know with a few smooth denials.”

  Taylor was speechless for a good five seconds. A week ago, he probably hadn’t been spoken to like that in forty years. Between David Hallorin and Mark Beamon, this was shaping up to be a tough couple of days.

  “Have you forgotten who I am?” he finally blurted out. Beamon rolled his eyes. He was starting to feel… Bulletproof wasn’t the right word. Doomed was closer to the mark. The effect was the same, though. His tolerance for these tin gods had never been great, but now it was nonexistent.

  “I have been a member of the U.S. Senate since you were in high school,” Taylor continued, his voice coming up in volume. “I’ve ch
aired the Intelligence Committee, I have been both the majority and minority leader, I was the director of the CIA, and I single-handedly stopped Russia’s slide back into communism. I have done more for this country than any other—”

  “Spare me, Senator,” Beamon said, cutting the man off before he started listing his Boy Scout merit badges. “What you’ve done, you’ve done for yourself. I should know, I have, too. This country’s given you exactly what you need: power and prestige. And you’ll forgive me if I don’t think a policy of providing Russian Parliament members with enough houses, cars, and whores to keep them docile is one of the great moments in American foreign policy.” Beamon struggled to his feet and walked to the edge of Taylor’s desk. “People are already dead in this thing, Senator, and it’s not over yet. You have the power to stop it. This is your moment. Pay the people back for everything they’ve given you over the years. One great patriotic sacrifice. Go public. Whatever you did, it was a long time ago. Save the country from David Hallorin and stake yourself out a couple of nice pages in the history books.”

  Beamon stepped back and forced himself to shut up, though his anger wasn’t entirely spent. The years of dealing with men like this had festered inside him even more than he’d thought, and right now Robert Taylor personified all of them.

  This file,” Taylor said in a voice that was eerily calm. “I take it you’ve never seen it.”

  Beamon didn’t reply, but stood his ground in front of the desk as Taylor pushed a button on his phone. The woman who had ushered Beamon in appeared in the doorway a moment later.

  “Marcy. Mr. Beamon will be leaving now.”

  forty-seven

  Beamon pushed the portable computer to the edge of the table and gave himself a better view of the television. The mingled shouts of the press sounded like static as they came over the set’s tiny speakers, drowning out Senator Taylor’s amplified voice and forcing him to hold his hands up in a plea for quiet. Beamon pressed the volume button on the remote in his lap and notched the sound up a few decibels.