by Kyle Mills
Attendance could be generously described as spotty. Besides Beamon and the priest, only two people had decided to brave the weather to attend Roland Peck’s funeral. One was his wife, who looked like she probably never missed an opportunity to wear black leather. The other was a slightly stooped old man with a shocking white beard whom Beamon didn’t recognize. They all stood silently around the snow-dusted coffin, positioning themselves to maintain the maximum physical distance from their fellow mourners.
The priest raised the volume of his voice a bit, invoking God and humanity in a general way that made it obvious that he had never had the displeasure to meet the guest of honor. Beamon took a couple of steps backward until the eulogy once again faded into a quiet garble.
Beamon had been forced to talk to Roland Peck on a number of occasions after his boss had finally completely caved to Tom Sherman’s demands. And every time he did, he noticed that the little man slipped a little closer to insanity. Peck hadn’t been able to accept that anyone could control David Hallorin, a man who, depending on the day, he seemed to think was either his father, God, or the emperor of the galaxy.
Tom Sherman had used his considerable powers to try to keep the leprechaun in control—underplaying his own involvement in Hallorin’s impending administration, keeping Peck in the speechwriting and strategizing loop—but nothing worked. Peck seemed to blame himself for Hallorin’s situation, and that failure was more than his tenuous grasp on reality could handle. Every day, he’d become more desperate and more unpredictable. The possibility that he would destroy the delicate balance that had been so carefully constructed started to become very real.
Apparently, Hallorin had found the situation unacceptable. The boy whom he had taken in at eighteen, who had masterminded his rise to the presidency, who had looked to him as a father, was found shot dead in front of his Georgetown home. A victim of random violence according to the police report, but more likely a victim of David Hallorin’s all-encompassing ambition.
Beamon barely noticed when the priest fell silent and the coffin began to sink into the grave on quiet hydraulic rails. He watched with mild interest as the old man across the hole from him broke out of his motionlessness and walked carefully over the slick ground to Peck’s veiled wife, offering his hand. She turned her back on him without a word and started for her car as quickly as her spike heels would allow.
“You were a friend of Roland’s?” the man said to Beamon as he worked his way around the open grave and came within earshot.
“I guess you could say that,” Beamon answered, shaking the man’s ice-cold hand.
“My name’s Jeffery Tanin.” He looked around him at the now empty graveyard. “I read Roland’s obituary. It seems he did well—I’d hoped there would be more people.”
“How did you know him?” Beamon said out of politeness more than a desire to prolong the conversation. He had a plane to catch and this graveyard seemed to have the effect of amplifying his uncertainty about the events he had involved himself in.
“I used to be a foster parent,” Tanin said. “I had Roland for a few years when he was a teenager.”
Beamon didn’t respond. He hadn’t known that Peck was an orphan. Now that he thought about it, he knew almost nothing of the man. What he did know, though, was that Peck was a murderer, pervert, and sociopath—all qualities he didn’t much admire.
“Deep down, he was a good boy…. And so brilliant,” the old man said—more to the grave than to Beamon. “But he was too far gone when he arrived at my door. His mother died when he was four and his father was a nightmare. He had sexually abused Roland’s sister for years, often in front of him. No one did anything, though, until he finally killed her. She was ten, Roland was twelve. I believe the man died in prison.”
They stood there in the snow for a while longer. Tanin spoke, a little incoherently, about Peck, and Beamon tried, unsuccessfully, to block out his words.
He could admit that he had screwed up a lot in life. But it had always been the result of doing what he knew was right. Until now.
Mark Beamon smiled imperceptibly, as he always did when he entered the doors of the expansive Phoenix office of the FBI. He wandered through it, taking in the sound and the smell, watching the young, idealistic agents moving purposefully from desk to desk. This was the FBI. It didn’t have anything to do with politics or upper-level management or compromise. This was what he couldn’t force himself to leave behind. It was just like an addiction—he knew it wasn’t good for him, but he wasn’t strong enough to break the habit. Not yet anyway.
“Mark Beamon, back from the void!”
Beamon looked up from the floor at the sound of the familiar voice. “D. Thank God.” His indispensable secretary from Flagstaff had been initially resistant to the financial hardships that would accompany following her boss to his new post in Phoenix. Fortunately, with his newfound political clout, Beamon had been able to make her an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“You all right, Mark? You sound a little down.”
“Fine.”
“Fine? Look around you! You’re the head of one of the biggest offices in the Bureau in one of the sunniest towns in the world!”
“Where would I be without you to put things in perspective for me?”
“Lost. Wandering helpless in the desert.”
“Right. Exactly. D., really, I don’t think I’ve said it out loud, but thanks for coming down.”
She smiled uncomfortably and shrugged her shoulders. “No problem.”
“Okay, then. I’m going to go into my office and start to wade through my mail. If any of the God-knows-how-many people that work for me now want to talk to me, tell them I’m dead.”
She nodded her understanding and went back to the box she was emptying onto her desk.
All he’d wanted was to extricate himself from the legal problems that had been plaguing him and get back his little job running the Flagstaff office. The first part of that wish had been taken care of weeks ago. The Bureau had been quick to reevaluate his qualifications as a scapegoat when they’d received a letter from the attorney general stating that he had found the charges against Beamon to have no merit. The call from soon-to-be President Hallorin proclaiming his admiration for Beamon and his willingness to throw his full political and financial weight behind Beamon’s defense hadn’t hurt either.
The suddenness and force of the whole thing had so terrified the Bureau’s senior management that they had not only personally apologized but promoted him to SAC of the fucking Phoenix office—a management nightmare that he still hadn’t completely faced yet
Beamon dropped into the expensive leather chair behind his ridiculously large desk and pulled a stack of mail onto his lap. He jabbed at the remote built into one of his drawers and heard the volume of the TV come up to an audible level, filling the room with David Hallorin’s voice.
He’d heard the speech before, of course—a surprising little ditty in which Hallorin had suddenly taken on a pacifying tone. National Healing, Clean Slate, Meaningless Youthful Indiscretions, the Foundations of a Great Nation that will Rise Again—that kind of crap. With his new kinder, gentler approach, and his focus on bipartisan leadership, the press had started to jump on the David Hallorin bandwagon. The economy had taken a sharp upward turn, and people who hadn’t voted for David Hallorin were starting to lie about it.
Of course, it was really all Tom Sherman. Hallorin didn’t open his mouth unless Sherman had signed off on what was going to come out of it. The situation was killing Hallorin slowly, stripping him of his identity and the ego that had been his entire existence for most of his life. It was more than the bastard deserved. And Tom Sherman was more than America deserved.
Beamon looked up from the mail when his favorite part came on. A reporter asked a rather pointed question about one of Hallorin’s campaign promises and the old familiar anger started to creep into the new president’s voice. A moment later, a demure-looking Tom Sherman stepped forward and
whispered something in Hallorin’s ear. With a pained smile, Hallorin announced that he had been told that he had time for only one more question and that pacifying tone magically returned. Beamon watched Hallorin walk from the podium and stared blankly at the television for a little over a minute as the press conference wrapped up, then went back to work.
He didn’t open most of the mail, instead dumping it in a box that would go to D. for sorting and paraphrasing. He was about half an hour into clearing the desk when he came upon a letter with a colorful foreign stamp. There was no return address.
He stared at it for a few seconds, turning it over in his hands. He’d known for weeks now that Vili Marcek had been promised an additional two hundred thousand dollars for causing the death of Darby Moore. Beamon had been desperately trying to find either one of them, calling in damn near every favor he and Tom Sherman had, to no effect. Darby had obviously taken him seriously when he told her to disappear for a couple of months.
He took a deep breath and held it as he slit the top of the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper it contained. It looked like an old-style Teletype, written in English but with Chinese or some other Asian script across the top and bottom. The single paragraph in the middle of the page was a brief, no-frills report relating the death of Vili Marcek on a remote Himalayan peak. Beamon let out the air caught in his lungs in one long rush as he reread the report, lingering on a brief quote by Darby Moore, the only person to witness Marcek’s two-thousand-foot fall.
Across the bottom of the Teletype, in bold capital letters, Darby had written a single line. He recognized it as a paraphrase of something he had said to her the last time they’d spoken.
A fairly black piece of justice.
Beamon stared at that sentence for a long time, remembering Darby in those brief moments—usually after she’d had a few beers—when she managed to forget her friends’ deaths and their nearly hopeless situation. When she would spark with enthusiasm and innocence. He had hoped that she would be able to find that again, that David Hallorin hadn’t taken it away from her forever….
“Mark. Mark? Are you okay?”
Beamon looked up at his secretary and balled up the Teletype. “Fine. Great.”
“You don’t look great,” she said, heaping another pile of mail onto his desk and glancing down at the box that was overflowing at his feet. “I assume that’s for me.”
Beamon nodded. “Before you start on it, though, could you write up a press release for me?”
“Sure. What’s it going to say?” She picked up a notepad off his desk.
“Something to the effect of ‘At the request of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office and the West Virginia State Police, the FBI will be providing assistance on the Tristan New-berry murder case. According to an FBI spokesman, Darby Moore has been ruled out as a suspect based on new evidence.’ I’ll give you the list of people to send it to as soon as I find it on my desk.”
She tore off the page she’d written on and dropped the pad back on the desk, causing an overly tall stack of paper to teeter dangerously. When she reached out to stop it, she spotted the small blue velvet box partially hidden behind a stapler. “What’s that?”
“What?”
She reached across him and picked up the box.
“Don’t—”
It was too late. She’d opened it and already her eyes had taken on that specific glassy look that women get when they see a diamond.
She pulled the gold chain from the box and examined the pendant attached to it with total concentration.
“Not gonna pull out your loupe?”
“God, Mark. This is beautiful. I thought you said you and Carrie weren’t seeing each other anymore.”
“I’m going to try to change that” Beamon held out his hand, but D. ignored him and continued her silent appraisal.
“Don’t say anything about this, D. It’d be kind of embarrassing if she does the smart thing and throws that back in my face, you know?”
Look for Kyle Mills‘ new thriller
Burn Factor
Coming in hardcover from
HarperCollins in April 2001
The shadows weren’t getting any shorter.
Despite that rather obvious observation, Quinn Barry didn’t move. She just sat there peering through the windshield, letting her fear and the wind’s gentle rocking of the car make her increasingly nauseated.
It wasn’t actually a neighborhood she found herself in. That is to say, it didn’t look like anyone lived there, or for that matter, ever had. She was parked behind a partially collapsed stone wall that effectively hid her car but still allowed her a reasonable view of the surrounding area.
Based on the artistic embellishments on the brick buildings crumbling around her, she guessed the place had been built at least seventy-five years ago—before utilitarianism had completely won out over aesthetics. And based on their state of disrepair, she guessed that they had been abandoned for at least half that time.
Quinn leaned forward, peering out at the collapsed roofs, rusted doors, and shattered glass of the old industrial park. Her eyes slowly tracked right, searching for evidence of any human presence, but not finding any until they fell on the building directly across from her.
At first glance, it hadn’t seemed much different from the others. Upon further inspection, though, it became obvious that the structure was still intact, as were the tall narrow windows set into its faded brick walls. It was surrounded by a stone fence with rusted but still formidable-looking iron pikes growing from it. At one time they had undoubtedly provided effective security, though now all that was left of the gate were some twisted hinges.
What really made the building stand out, though, was its metal door. Instead of the uniform color of rust one would expect, it was electric blue with a strange yellow geometric symbol three feet wide painted on it.
Quinn took a deep breath and let it out. Time to make a decision. What already seemed really dumb would move quickly into the insane category when the sun hit the horizon and darkness started to spread.
She’d spent most of the day at work just going through the motions of her job. Her mind had been too preoccupied by CODIS and the case files to really do anything. After hours of contemplation, she had finally been forced to accept that she had only three options and that none of them were good.
The most obvious was to quietly return the files and forget the whole thing. Then she could spend the next year working her butt off and hope Louis didn’t completely trash her on her review. Her chances of being accepted for agent training would still be at least fair. But could she just forget about this? While it was unlikely that the cases were really related, stranger things had happened. How would she feel if she found out years from now that this was real—that more women had died horribly because she was worried about her career prospects?
Another option was to take the files to her new boss and tell him the whole story. It hadn’t taken long to find the holes in that plan. If it turned out to be nothing, which it probably would, all management would remember was that she had illegally ordered the files. She’d be lucky to stay out of jail and could pretty much forget about ever being an agent
The bottom line was that she needed to be sure. If she could obtain evidence that Eric Twain was guilty of these crimes, then she could take the files to Nate and be fairly confident in her position. What could the FBI do? Fire her for tracking down a serial killer that they didn’t even know existed? No way. They’d be forced to pin a medal on her and forget about her bending of the rules where the files were concerned.
Quinn opened the car door and picked her way quickly through the shattered asphalt of the road, slowing only when she came to the empty archway in the building’s protective wall. She managed to keep moving through it but stopped in the middle of the large courtyard to stare up at the tall, intricate sculptures surrounding her.
They seemed to have been welded from the discarded materials that
littered the area—gray and brown sheets of metal, the jagged edges of old machines, rusted chains rattling quietly in the wind. Some rose as much as fifteen feet over her head, cutting dark silhouettes against the reddening sky. After a few moments she started forward again, trying to shake the feeling that they were twisted grave markers and that she was walking through a cemetery.
Beyond the bright paint, there was nothing on or near the door that would suggest the building was occupied. Quinn stopped in front of it and stood there for almost a minute, summoning her courage. It would be all right, she told herself. The story she’d concocted would protect her. Wouldn’t it?
She finally shot a hand out and slammed it into the door, rattling it on its rails. For some reason, the sound calmed her, so she continued to pound for a few seconds, making sure that anyone inside could hear.
A minute went by, then two, with no response. She had pretty much decided that no one was inside when the door started to rattle and move on its own. She took a step back as it began sliding straight up, the sound of metal grinding on metal slowly being overpowered by music pouring from the opening.
The man standing in the doorway wasn’t the one she’d been prepared for. His nearly black hair was long, tied back in a loose ponytail that she guessed went a good ways down his back. He was wearing a pair of denim overalls and no shirt, exposing thin muscular arms and broad shoulders—one of which was adorned with a black tattoo of a geometric symbol similar to the one on the door. A closer inspection, though, proved it to be a complex intertwining of different animal and bird images that looked vaguely American Indian. But then, so did he. His delicate features were sculpted from dark skin that looked more genetic than sun enhanced. Or maybe it was just the effect of the thin layer of dust that covered him.
“Wow. A secret agent.”
“Excuse me?” She tried not to sound startled.
The edges of his eyes crinkled slightly as he examined her. He started with her face, pausing at the horn-rim glasses perched on her nose, then moved down her formless sweater and skirt, and finally reached the tennis shoes she’d chosen for this particular outing. “I don’t get many visitors out here. Particularly beautiful women in disguise.” His expression and voice were totally neutral. His words clearly weren’t meant as a come-on, or even a compliment. Just an observation.
