Free Fall (2 page)

"You do what you gotta do," Clausen said, starting for the door again.

"But I'm not part of this. You can write it up any way you want to, but I'm not staying here to find out what he does to that little girl with those gloves."

Tristan Newberry glanced up at the seemingly endless rows of gray metal shelves surrounding him and immediately spotted the ancient black man as he came around a mountain of file boxes.

"You ready for another one?" the man said as he continued to shuffle, slightly stooped, in Tristan's direction.

"Guess so." Tristan wedged a toe under the box at his feet and lifted it a few inches off the floor. Still a little heavy. The old security guard, as the only other human being inhabiting this forgotten warehouse, insisted on helping lug files around. But at seventy-two, his back wasn't what it once was. Tristan crouched down, pulled out a few of the heavier looking bundles, and laid them on the floor.

"Watcha doin'?" Carl said, continuing to deliberately close the distance between them. Same question every day.

"The bottom of this box looks like it's about to fall through." Same answer every day.

Carl nodded sagely and accepted the white lie with a grateful smile.

Tristan hefted the box with an exaggerated grunt and presented the light end to the old man who got a firm hold of it and began shuffling slowly backward.

"Probably ought to cut down here," he said, adjusting his trajectory a bit.

"Looks like we got another leak the other way."

Tristan looked up at the tangle of pipes running across the ceiling and tried to spot the particular one that Carl was talking about. The insulation surrounding most of the lines had started to rot years ago and now the condensation was beginning to slowly drip on the mindless government drivel contained on the shelves below. After the first few weeks of being trapped there, Tristan began to notice that the distinctive smell of mold was still clinging to him on his drive home.

Now it hung on even after his evening shower.

This wasn't how things were supposed to have worked out.

He'd been a year into his law degree at Georgetown University when the economy had gone into a tailspin. By that time, he'd already sold damn near everything he owned to pay for tuition and was up to his eye balls in credit card debt and student loans. But who cared? In less than two years, he'd graduate and sign on with some prestigious law firm for a hundred grand a year, right?

Wrong. Last year's law school graduating class probably had more lawyers in it than there were practicing. And they were all going after the same ten jobs. He'd recently run into a friend who had passed the bar six months ago, working in a video store.

So he'd no choice but to drop out and take a shot at landing a job in one of the few growth industries left in America: the government. Or more specifically, declassifying documents through the newly fortified Freedom of Information Act.

He showed up for the open interview and was directed toward a waiting room so full of other potential applicants that some of them had been forced to stake out small areas of industrial green tile and sit on the floor. After a few seconds of milling through the crowd and discovering just how jealously those tiles were being guarded, he'd headed for the door. What chance did he have? He was just a penniless law school dropout from a poor farming family with no connections and no back ground in government work.

He'd been halfway down the hall, and nearly to freedom, when a young woman in thick, black-framed glasses jogged up behind him and took him by the arm. He could still hear her voice: "Mr. Newberry. I'm sorry.

You were directed to the wrong interview."

He'd followed obediently through the maze of hallways, stairs, and elevators, long enough for his normally infallible sense of direction to start to spin, then was deposited in a small, windowless office somewhere deep in the building.

It was there that he had met some bald guy with marginal dental work and heard the rather cryptic legend of the Misplaced Documents. The guy had gone on to tell Tristan how his resume was most impressive which it wasn't--and how he seemed to be imminently qualified to help in the search--which he wasn't. Blah, blah, blah.

At first he hadn't been that interested in the man's story. He just wanted a secure job that would pay enough to keep him living at a reasonable standard until the economy turned around. But the more the guy talked--in circles, mostly--the more captivated he became. Bald Guy--he honestly couldn't remember his name--had told him that the person they were looking to hire would be kind of the Indiana Jones of the National Archive. Now, how could anybody resist a pitch like that?

"On three," Carl said.

Tristan followed Carol's lead and gently swung the box as the old man counted. On three they dropped it on the card table Tristan had been using as a workspace since his first day.

"I'll go grab the stuff you took out," Carl said, already moving off in the direction they'd come from. Tristan nodded absently and peeked into the box. What would it be today? Farm subsidy budgets from the 1940s?

An in-depth statistical analysis of the height of wheat versus inches of rainfall? Whatever.

As was so often the case, the reality of the job hadn't quite lived up to the initial hype. The real story was that, a while back, some government moron had deposited a hand-truck full of apparently sensitive FBI documents in the middle of an Agriculture Department storage facility. And now they needed to be found before the warehouse could be emptied into the public domain.

It hadn't seemed like a particularly monumental task until Bald Guy had started slapping down thick stacks of bound paper.

"Revision of the filing system," he'd said. Slap.

"Original warehouse closed down, documents moved." Slap.

"Broken water line, documents moved again." Slap.

"Construction." Slap. It had gone on like that until there was a paper trail nearly eight inches in height teetering on the desk.

Strangely, though, the job was right up Tristan's alley. Since grade school whenever he'd taken those tests where you had to find patterns in streams of numbers or geometric shapes, he'd always scored off the scale.

He'd told Bald Guy as much during his interview and gotten a disinterested smile that seemed to say "lucky for us." Tristan sighed heavily and rubbed his temples as he dropped into the worn canvas chair.

Day in and day out, it was the same. Endless hours cross-referencing old government records he could care less about, trying to follow the murky trail of a few pointless FBI needles in the Ag Department's haystack.

When he'd finally pulled his nose out of the endless procession of boxes and files to look around him, though, it had finally struck him how strange his situation was. Why was he here alone, with only an ancient security guard to watch over him? Or more accurately, a security guard and a battery of video cameras. Tristan looked up at the sleek, ultra-compact camera bolted to the dilapidated wall in front of him and wondered again who was watching. Not Carl as near as Tristan could tell the cameras didn't output anywhere in the building.

It had started him wondering. When he'd told Bald Guy about his childhood test scores, had that smile really said "lucky for us"? Or had it said "we know"?

It was little things like that that had kept him interested. He'd always been burdened with an overactive sense of curiosity. Why wasn't any body checking up on him? He hadn't talked to Bald Guy, or anyone else in a position of authority, since he'd started. Why did some of the file records seem almost intentionally cryptic and obtuse?

It looked like he might be getting closer to finding out. A hell of a lot of detail work and two back-to-back strokes of blind luck had led him to the section of the warehouse from which he was now pulling boxes.

Four months, six days, four hours and thirty-three minutes of mind-numbing torture and he was finally starting to get somewhere.

Tristan leaned forward and turned up the small television resting on the edge of the table, but his attention was instantly diverted to his portable computer when it picked up the vibration and the screensaver came on. A million pixels glowed out the picture of a man struggling up a snow-covered mountain surrounded by sky. Tristan reached out longingly and touched the screen, but withdrew his hand when Carl came around the corner and dropped a portion of the remaining files on the table.

"Who you votin' for, Tristan?"

"Huh?"

Carl nodded toward the TV screen where the highlights of last night's presidential debates were being rerun for the hundredth time.

"Oh. I don't vote."

"What do you mean you don't vote? You're a college boy. If anybody should, it ought to be you. You understand it all." Carl pointed at the screen.

"I'm starting to like that Hallorin guy. I mean, he always seemed like he had something to say, but he was such a hard-ass. Now, though, he seems... I don't know, less..."

"Glasses," Tristan said absently as he centered a dusty file in front of him.

"What?"

"It's the glasses. In the last election, when the economy was riding high, everyone wanted to be associated with the government--take credit for the boom. Now, with the Dow at forty-five hundred, it's a whole new ballgame. No one wants to look like a politician. Senator Hallorin, our previously obnoxious third-party candidate, has gone with eyeglasses.

And as you pointed out, they have the added benefit of softening his image."

Tristan motioned to the screen with the binder-clipped stack of paper in his hand.

"Now our clever Democratic candidate has completely bucked the conventional wisdom of facial hair being the political kiss-of-death and gone with the beard for the same reason. Senator Taylor, our flat footed Republican front-runner, missed the boat again. His only recourse now is to shave his head. But since he's leading by thirteen points, don't hold your breath. Packaging, Carl. It's all about smoke and mirrors."

The old man shifted uncomfortably and shoved his gnarled hands in his pockets.

"I really don't think it's what they look like that's important, it's what they say--"

"What they say?" Tristan interrupted, feeling his mood darken as it always did when the subject of politics came up.

"They aren't saying anything."

He pointed to the television again.

"Our Democratic hopeful's gotten used to all the limos and butt-kissing he gets as vice president and doesn't want to be pounding the street looking for a job. So he'll tell you that he's dedicated to supporting the poor and out of work. But then he'll get real vague when it comes time to tell us exactly how he plans to pay for it."

Carl tried to say something, but Tristan cut him off.

"Then there's of' Bob Taylor. He'll try to blame the sad condition of the country and the world economy on the current Democratic administration, and try to make you forget that the Republicans have controlled Congress through all this and that he's been a major power in that party since the dawn of time. Notice how, when he talks about his history of leadership, he never mentions Congress? No, he always talks about the past--his days as head of the CIA, the Cold War, the Carter years.

"And last, but not least--except in poll numbers--we have your newly bespectacled Independent candidate, David Hallorin. He'll try to convince the public that the country's current condition is the result of years of mismanagement by both established parties, which is essentially true.

What he'll leave out, though, is that the parties have pretty much just followed the public's mandate to not rock the boat boat rockers don't get elected. And while he's dancing around the fact that the American people got exactly what and who they asked for, he'll offer up all kinds of ridiculously oversimplified solutions to America's complex problems, that, even if they would work, he'd never be able to get passed. If he wins and he won't even come close the established parties will combine forces to ensure that he never gets anything done so they'll never again have to worry about a third-party candidate becoming a serious threat."

Carl began to shuffle off toward his miniscule office near the front door of the warehouse, his shoulders a little more stooped than usual.

"Wait! You haven't told me who you're voting for Carl," Tristan called after him.

"Guess it'd be stupid for me to even bother," the old man said as he disappeared around one of the myriad box-stuffed shelves.

Tristan leaned out around the table and tried to catch a last glimpse of the old man.

"Don't be that way, Carl." He leaned out a little further, but still couldn't see around the shelf.

"Come on, man. Don't take me so seriously. I'll buy you a beer after work and tell you why I'm full of shit."

There was no answer, but Tristan knew that by five o'clock the old man would have forgotten everything but the beer offer.

He quietly admonished himself as he started through the pile of papers in front of him. Not everyone wanted or needed to hear his brilliantly cynical analysis of the American political system. He didn't even know if he wanted to hear it anymore. Time to just deal with the fact that his carefully laid plan of being a millionaire at thirty-six was as dead as any dream could be. A bunch of useless politicians had seen to that.