Free Fall (11 page)

Out of sheer necessity, she was able to defeat her uncertainty first and drop backward, pulling him toward her and simultaneously kicking at one of his legs.

When her back hit the floor, she instantly started to roll left to avoid having the man come down on top of her. She was about halfway clear when she heard the sound of shattering glass and felt the man's body arrested in midair.

She didn't know what had happened and didn't look back as she jumped to her feet and sprinted at the young man guarding the door.

She could see that his hand was already inside his jacket, and by the time she had covered half the room, his gun was leveled at her face. She launched herself forward, trying to cover that last ten feet before he could move his index finger a quarter of an inch. It was hopeless. She already knew that.

He sidestepped her easily and she hit the wall, landing hard on the wood floor. The gun was aimed at her chest now and she could see the man's finger tightening on the trigger.

A deep calm washed over her as, for the fourth time in her life, she found herself seriously considering what death would be like. She let her eyes close and waited for the crack of the gun and the pain of the bullet hitting her chest.

There was nothing, though. No gunshot, no sound of the man she'd knocked down getting to his feet and running across the room at her.

Nothing.

When she opened her eyes again, probably less than a second later, the younger man was still hovering over her. His finger was still tight across the trigger, but he wasn't moving.

"The door!"

It was Tristan's voice. He'd managed to spit out most of the gag in his mouth and was shouting around it.

She shook her head, trying to clear it. She was still alive.

"Darby!"

She could hear it now. Footsteps pounding up the stairs on the other side of the wooden door. She shot the man hovering over her a quick glance, then rolled over and threw herself at the door. Her hand slammed against the knob and pressed the lock button just as the weight of a human body hit the other side. The violent rattling of the knob and door frame mixed with muffled shouts and the pounding of fists against wood.

Darby flipped around and was about to run to Tristan when she saw the man she had fought with lying on the floor by the bed. His hands were wrapped around his neck and blood was spurting between his fingers with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Around him, the old curtains billowed in the cool breeze coming through the window his head had gone through.

They were edged with red and made a sickening slapping sound every time they hit the wall.

"Darby! DARBY! For God's sake!"

She looked over at Tristan, who was still thrashing wildly in his chair, and then back at the man on the floor. Could the bleeding be stopped?

She hadn't meant... "DARBY!"

No. His life was gone. She'd killed him.

Darby forced that thought from her mind as she ran to Tristan and unbuckled the canvas shackles around his wrists. He jumped out of the chair the moment he was free but didn't seem to know what to do next.

They both looked up at the young man standing against the wall. His gun was hanging loosely from his hand.

"I'm not a killer," he said over the desperate pounding and shouting coming from the other side of the door. He seemed reasonably convinced but not entirely certain.

"We've got to go, Tristan," Darby said, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him toward the window before the young man could rethink his value system. She tried to ignore the feeling of warm blood splashing over her open sandals as she pushed the remaining glass from the broken pane and followed Tristan out onto the roof. They stood on the edge of it for a moment, looking down at the ten-foot drop into a gravel side yard.

Darby looked at Tristan's bare feet and then behind her through the window. The man who had let them go was moving toward them and his gun was no longer hanging limp from his hand. It was aimed directly at them.

She grabbed hold of Tristan and pulled him off the roof with her just as the first shot sounded. She heard him grunt in pain as they hit the ground, but she ignored it, rolling to her feet and dragging him up with her.

"No time to complain, Twist! Come on!"

She heard the second shot ring out as they ran desperately toward a densely wooded butte two hundred yards away. She looked back at the window just before the third shot and realized that the man wasn't aiming anywhere near them. It was a show for the benefit of his colleagues.

"Come ON!" she said again. Her fingers dug deep into his bicep as she pulled him along behind.

She heard shouts that sounded as if they were coming from outside the house, but didn't look back again. All they had to do was make the trees, then they could take the steepest line up the butte. No son of a bitch in a suit was going to be able to keep up with her there even if she had to carry Tristan on her back.

Mark Beamon looked around him at the familiar blankness of the conference room and then out the windows across from him at the silent procession of agents and support staff as they moved through the halls.

It seemed like he'd spent a good half of the last six months of his life trapped in these barren cubes, waiting to be questioned, poked, and prodded about his role in the Vericomm fiasco. He looked up at the clock and confirmed that he'd been sitting there for exactly twenty-nine minutes.

The lack of creativity and spontaneity in government service was no more evident than when his persecutors were trying to gain a psychological advantage. They would leave him to stew for a half an hour. No more.

No less.

The delay actually did have an effect--but not the one they were looking for. In these empty rooms, forcibly shielded from the external stimulation he was always careful to surround himself with, he surrendered to his newfound urge to look inward. It was something Carrie would undoubtedly encourage but was turning out to be a kind of dangerous skill to be developing this late in life.

What was he feeling right now? Nervousness? Not really. The outcome of this meeting had been preordained. The Office of Professional Responsibility--the FBI's answer to Internal Affairs--had found a great deal of smoke, but had been unable to find any actual flames still burning in the embers of his ill-fated investigation of the Church of the Evolution.

Regret? No, he'd do the same thing again.

Disappointment? There it was, the current front-runner.

Tom Sherman had been right--as that son of a bitch almost always was.

The FBI, and its big brother, the U. S. government, was only interested in Mark Beamon as far as they could use him. He knew that but couldn't find the strength to use the knowledge. As much as he wanted to tell them to shove the job they were about to give back to him, he couldn't.

Even with Carrie and Emory there to help, he didn't know if he could fill the void it would leave in him. And that was just downright pathetic.

Beamon watched through the windows as Gerald Reys, his FBI appointed inquisitor du your, came around the corner and stopped at a water fountain. He was obviously aware that he still had thirty seconds to kill before the half-hour was up.

As near as Beamon could tell, they didn't get much worse than Reys.

He was a humorless, lifeless, company man, completely devoid of imagination and personality. His only qualification for his job seemed to be a naturally mean spirit and an inexhaustible fervor for poring over mundane government documents. He had a peculiar talent for taking anything anyone had accomplished in life, processing it, and finding some obscure reason to attribute that success to luck, nepotism, or cheating.

Not surprisingly, his investigation into Beamon had quickly degenerated into an inexplicable vendetta, though they had never met before this inquiry and hopefully never would again.

Beamon didn't recognize the two rather serious-looking men flanking Reys as he came through the door. Normally, he would have at least stood and introduced himself, but he just couldn't summon the will to care who they were. He just wanted to get his job back and leave with his tail between his legs. In situations like this, brevity sometimes could be mistaken for dignity. Hopefully, this would be one of those times.

"Mr. Beamon."

Reys looked dangerously confident as he laid a manila folder down on the table. He looked at it, and not Beamon, as he spoke.

"I've come across a document that's generated a great deal of interest in my office."

Beamon put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands.

"This is a rubber-stamp meeting, Gerald. You don't have anything.

There's nothing for you to have--there never was. Come on, I promised my girlfriend I'd take her out for dinner."

"I have to apologize for the last-minute nature of this line of inquiry, but this document just came to my attention." He always talked like that.

Like he was reading from a government study.

Reys pulled a thin stack of papers from the folder in front of him and slid them across the table.

"I have to ask you if you recognize this report." Beamon sighed and calmly pulled a pair of reading glasses from his pocket. Just a minor delay, he told himself. He'd still get out of here, employed and in time to make his dinner reservation. He flipped through the papers, reading every fifth word or so. Three pages into it, he honestly didn't remember having ever seen it. Toward the end, though, there was a faint glimmer.

"I think it may be a report someone in my office wrote on the church investigation. I wouldn't swear to it, though."

"I'm sure you wouldn't,"

Reys said, letting a condescending smile pass his lips.

"In fact, it is a report written about your investigation. A some what negative report."

Beamon had made it to the end of the document by this time and the faint glimmer was getting brighter. He looked behind Reys at the two men standing against the wall, wondering again what their place in all this was. He was ninety-percent sure that he'd never seen either one of them in his life.

"I don't mean to seem like an asshole here, Gerald, but so what?"

"You were asked to sign off on this document. Do you recall what you did?"

Beamon searched his memory again. As an SAC he was asked to sign off on what seemed like a thousand pieces of paper a day.

"Unless I'm confusing this with something else which is very possible I vaguely remember it being inaccurate and leaving out almost two weeks of the investigation a generally shoddy piece of work. I think I told the guy that wrote it to go back and do it again."

"And then what?" Reys probed.

Beamon felt his frustration growing again, but pushed it back. No fire works today.

"What then? I don't know. I went to lunch?"

Reys scooped up the document and handed it to one of the men behind him as though it needed to be protected.

"You destroyed it, Mr. Beamon."

Beamon stared at him for a moment, then let out a short laugh. Reys's choice of words and dramatic delivery conjured a wonderful image of Beamon huddled over a shredder in a dark office in some forgotten corner of the Pentagon.

"You mean I tossed it in the garbage?" Beamon shrugged.

"Yeah, probably."

Reys suddenly looked like the victorious coach of a high school foot ball team.

"So you admit that you destroyed a document relating to an ongoing investigation into your conduct?"

There was the frustration again, but this time he was less successful at pushing it away.

"Give me a fucking break, Gerald! You're going to tell me you keep every draft of every report given to you?"

"And you knew that, as a matter of course, your trash is shredded."

"It's the twenty-first-fucking century, you asshole. You can't destroy documents anymore. They just sit around on disks or in memory or on backup tapes." Beamon jabbed a finger in the general direction of the folder, now in the protective custody of the man to Reys's left.

"For God's sake you have the report you say I destroyed!"

"Yes," Reys said.

"Fortunately, you weren't very thorough, were you?"

Beamon shifted wildly in his chair but couldn't find a comfortable position. This couldn't really be happening.

"Mr. Beamon, I've had exhaustive discussions with the highest echelons of the FBI, including the director "

"I thought you said this document just came to your attention."

Reys flashed an irrelevant little smile and continued. "... and we've agreed to offer you a deal. Plead guilty to a felony obstruction of justice charge, and we'll recommend that your jail time be limited to six months " Beamon jumped up from his chair and Reys scooted back away from the table. The two men he had come in with stepped forward and blocked Beamon from crawling over the table and strangling the little prick with his ugly tie, answering the question of why they were there.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Beamon shouted, leaning over the desk as far as he could while still keeping his feet on the carpet.