Darkness Falls (24 page)

"I can explain that. I'm an
...

"Yes, sir, Mr. Beamon," the other man said. "You spoke at my graduation from the academy. I want you to know how sorry we are about this."

The handcuffs clicked around Beamon's wrists and he was pulled away from the car as the girls pressed their faces against the window. They looked impressed.

Predictably, the passenger door was suddenly thrown open with enough force that the cop standing by it had to jump back to avoid being hit. Carrie shoved Emory off her lap and leapt from the car.

"Ma'am. You need to --"

"Don't ma'am me. What's going on here? Why have you handcuffed him?"

Beamon remained silent. Now they were in for it.

"Please, ma'am --"

"Don't tell me what to do! Look, this is America and we have rights here. I demand to know why you have him in handcuffs."

There was a brief silence before the man answered. "We don't know, ma'am."

"Carrie," Beamon cut in. "It's okay." He nodded toward the cop slowly backing away from his fiancee. "What's your name?"

"Joseph."

"Carrie, give Joseph the briefcase that was down by your feet and we'll talk later, okay? The girls are going to be late for school."

She glared at him for a moment and then reluctantly reached for the briefcase. "Is there someone I can call?"

He actually laughed at that. "I'm pretty sure there isn't."

The White House conference room was populated by the usual suspects, with the unfortunate addition of Bob Oberman from the CIA. He was standing confidently at the head of the table, his smooth patter stuttering perceptibly when Beamon was led in.

"The timeframe we're concentrating on now is around when Erin Neal originally worked for the Saudis."

"That's when you suspect he was turned?" President Dunn said.

"Yes, sir. We believe he converted to Islam when he was remediating a similar infection at a field called the Hawtaw Trend. So, combined with his well-documented environmental beliefs, we have a clear motivation to go along with all the other evidence against him."

"Who was the al Qaeda operative he said he was working with?"

"Ishmael Fedallah."

Beamon smirked as he took an empty chair at the table.

"Do we have anything on him?"

"Not yet, but we're working on it."

"Obviously, you've learned a lot from your interrogation, but have you gotten anything more practical?" Jack Reynolds asked. "Something we could use to strategize our economic response or stop the spread of the bacteria?"

"No, sir. Honestly, I think it's unlikely that Neal would know exactly what was hit and when -- he was there for scientific knowledge and, as you know, terrorist organizations are fanatics for compartmentalization." He glanced at Beamon. "But, as you said, we've made significant progress in the short time we've been running this operation. We already have a name, a motive, and an organization. It's just a matter of time now before we identify the rest of the people involved."

As Oberman fell silent, Beamon focused on the president, who looked understandably worried. The latest announcement from his administration was that the way people paid for energy was going to be restructured. The first units you bought would be extremely cheap and every successive unit would get more expensive. Great for a poor guy living in a six-hundredsquare-foot trailer, but Dunn's conservative backers lived in large houses that needed serious heating and cooling.

The president studied the notes he'd scribbled before looking up at Beamon. "Bob tells us that some of your people have refused to contribute to what may be the most important investigation in history, and that you've been maneuvering behind his back. Is that correct?"

"Yes, sir. I suppose it is."

Obviously, it wasn't the expected response and the room fell into a church-like silence that Beamon figured he had better use before he found himself sharing a cell with Erin Neal.

"We -- I was continuing a line of investigation that I'd been pursuing before the CIA took over." He lifted his briefcase onto the table. "I was on my way to give it to Jack when I was . . . diverted."

"Are you insane?" Reynolds said in a tone clearly calculated to make everyone understand that he had had nothing to do with Beamon's actions.

The president held up a hand, silencing what would have undoubtedly been a long and overly theatrical protest.

"Mr. Beamon. In light of your reputation, I'm going to give you an opportunity to explain yourself."

In Beamon's mind, that translated to something like "The CIA hasn't given us anything we can use to rescue the people we count on to vote for us and we're getting desperate."

"The truth is, sir, I'm concerned that Bob isn't competent to run this investigation."

"And you are?" The CIA agent said, but was silenced by another wave of the president's hand.

"And what makes you say that, Mr. Beamon?"

"Well, for instance, the fact that Ishmael and Fedallah are characters from Moby Dick."

Everyone looked over at Oberman, but for once he didn't have a response.

"Then you're saying that you don't believe Erin Neal is involved with al Qaeda?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying. In fact, I don't think he has much to do with any of this. I think he came up with the basic structure of that bacteria because he thought he could use it to clean up oil spills."

"Are you trying to tell us that this was an accident?" Oberman said.

"No, Bob. I'm saying he had a girlfriend. A woman who was also a very gifted biologist, but much more radical than he was. She had strong ties to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She's the one who adapted the bacteria --"

"This is the dead one you're talking about?" Oberman said. "I think you need to look at the facts a little harder. We have solid dates on when the contamination was introduced, and it was after she died."

"She's not dead, Bob. She lives in Montana."

"You have proof of that?" the president said.

Beamon nodded. "She supposedly drowned along with a number of other radicals, but I think it's a fair bet that they're all still alive, too. And that they not Erin Neal -- are behind this."

A young woman slipped through the door at the back of the conference room with a telephone in her hand.

"What do you need, Sharon?" the president asked.

"I have a call for Mr. Beamon. It's Terry Hirst."

Beamon looked around him at the faces of some of the most powerful men in the world and then twisted around in his chair. "Could you tell him I'm busy?"

"I tried, but he won't take no for an answer."

"Excuse me a second," Beamon said, accepting the phone and walking as far as the room would allow before putting it to his ear.

"Terry," he said quietly. "I'm in with the goddamned pres--"

"Jenna Kalin's using her phone again." "Can we get a bead on her? Who's she calling?"

"Turn on your cell, Mark. She's calling you."

Chapter
33.

It was hard to believe that outside the relentless Mexican sun had turned the landscape into a burnt-out moonscape. Beamon shoved his hands in his pockets against the chill and dodged around a spray of water coming from a rusted pipe.

The CIA's short-lived control of his investigation was over and they had done their organization proud by disappearing so quickly and completely that it was almost as if they'd never been there. Of course he hadn't had the opportunity to see it with his own eyes and had to rely on reports from Terry Hirst, who had called to thank him for the elaborate cake with the CIA seal and "Good Riddance" printed across it. In the background, the noisemakers that came free with the cake had been clearly audible.

Petty and childish? Sure. But that kind of behavior helped him forget the expanding scale of the disaster he was once again presiding over.

"What is this place?"

Beamon refused to look at Jenna Kalin, who had looped an arm through his as though he could protect her from the stained cinderblock walls and broken-down industrial machinery disintegrating into puddles on the floor.

The truth was, he didn't know. Some kind of abandoned Mexican factory purchased by the CIA as a base for the games they liked to play but preferred not to have reported in the news.

"I asked you not to come, Jenna. It's not too late for you to go wait outside."

She didn't answer, redirecting her gaze to the two men escorting them, trying to stare them down from behind. One was the CIA agent who had taken custody of Erin Neal in Texas and the other was an anonymous and typically no-nonsense man in an army uniform.

Before picking Jenna up, Beamon had demanded a signed letter from the president saying that she would be remanded to his sole custody and would not be turned over to any other authority. Not worth the paper it was printed on, of course, but at least everyone was clear about where he stood on the subject. And so far, things were going relatively smoothly. No one had commented when he'd brought her back to the office for coffee or put her up in a nice hotel room with minimal security, though he understood that it was giving ulcers to the few White House staffers who didn't already have them. Interestingly, it seemed to be bothering her, too.

They stopped at a metal door secured by a padlock of almost comical dimensions and waited for the soldier to open it with the key hanging around his neck. The door swung slowly on rusted hinges and Beamon winced as Erin Neal came into view.

He'd obviously been cleaned up, but the carefully arranged hair and well-pressed clothes only highlighted his swollen face and blood-filled right eye.

The fury that was etched so deeply into his face faltered when he saw Jenna, and he sagged forward against the handcuffs securing him to his chair. As Beamon suspected, his impressive ability to resist the CIA's interrogators had been the product of only one thing -- protecting the woman he still loved.

"Oh, my God," Jenna said, rushing through the door and kneeling next to him. "What did you people do?"

The two men escorting them were completely unmoved by a scene that, in Beamon's mind, encompassed the few things worthwhile in mankind -- courage, compassion, love. No matter how misguided and destructive Jenna's actions had been, there was still something to admire there.

"Erin! Say something. Are you alright?" She was having a hard time getting the words out as tears began running down her cheeks. "This is my fault. It should have been me. I should have stopped when I saw them at the post office. I should --"

"How did they find you?"

"I turned myself in."

"No . . ." he said weakly. "Why would you do that? Do you have any idea what I've gone through to keep you out of this?"

"Erin, you don't know what's happening. I had no choice. But I said I wouldn't talk to them until I saw you."

Beamon took a key from the CIA man and stepped behind Erin's chair, a dull jolt of adrenaline surging through him. He wasn't looking forward to this.

Jenna didn't seem to notice he was there until she heard the key sliding into the handcuffs. Suddenly, her eyes cleared. "Wait! Don't do --"

But it was too late.

She was knocked to the floor when Erin leapt from the chair and spun, swinging his elbow toward Beamon's head.

Despite anticipating the attack, Beamon was unable to duck in time. The room suddenly went blurry and he felt his knees collapse as the elbow connected and the open handcuff cut a deep gash in his face.

By the time Beamon hit the concrete, Erin had grabbed the small table in the center of the room, though what he planned to do with it was unclear. The soldier running at him guessed wrong, raising his arms to protect his face and instead getting hit in the shins. He quickly found himself tangled up in the table legs, sliding on his stomach across the wet floor. Erin leapt in the air and came down with one foot on the back of the soldier's neck. The man went limp, but fortunately there was no sound of crushing vertebrae accompanying the blow.

The CIA man obviously hadn't expected his enforcer to have any trouble with an injured, sleep-deprived biologist, and was only now going for the door. Beamon was still struggling to balance himself on all fours as Erin ran forward and blocked the room's only exit.

"So there is a God after all," he said before driving a fist into the man's soft midsection. The agent doubled over and Erin grabbed his face, forcing him upright and ramming the back of his head against the cinderblock wall. The crack was a little too loud, and Beamon pushed himself to his feet, realizing that he'd made a serious mistake.

He lurched forward, but then collapsed onto all fours again. When he finally managed to look up, Jenna had jumped onto Erin's back.

"That's enough!" she shouted, snaking an arm around his neck and locking her feet around his waist. The CIA man appeared to be out cold, suspended only by Erin's hand clamped onto his throat.

"Erin, you're going to kill him!"

He pulled the man's head forward so he could drive it into the wall again, but Jenna managed to stop him by tangling her arm in his.