Free Fall (24 page)

The second box contained a large backpack with the tags still hanging from it. She opened the drawstrings and started stuffing it with clothes, shoes, and climbing gear. In about fifteen minutes, it was completely full.

She sat back in the hay, inexplicably exhausted, and emptied the cheap pack that she had come in with of the one thing it contained. The cold plastic covering the file shimmered in the dead light, making it look even smaller than it was. It seemed impossible that it could be important enough to have caused all this. She turned it over in her hands, but couldn't see anything except the reflected moonlight. There was writing under the thick layer of plastic, she knew. But only one word had been typed large enough to be legible: PRODIGY.

She reached into the large pack she'd just filled and pulled out a knife.

The blade seemed to glow as she held it against the thing that had killed Tristan and most likely would do the same to her.

No.

If she did this, it would never be over. What the file contained wasn't part of her world. If she knew, she would be forever linked to it. She would have no hope of ever getting her life back.

The guilt she felt was almost physically painful as she stuffed it back into the pack she'd pulled it from. She wanted to do it: to rip open the plastic, to make whatever it was public, to use it to hurt the men who had killed Tristan. She wanted to be blinded by anger and hate, to lash out... But she'd never been blinded by anything. Her ability to detach her self from any situation, to make rational decisions, was the gift that allowed her to get away with climbing at the level she did.

But sometimes it could be a curse, too. Sometimes it was hard to discern judgment from coldness and self-absorption.

She crawled back to the boxes behind her and started separating the camping gear stacked neatly in the hay when she heard an unnatural creak from the edge of the loft. Without thinking, she lunged for the shovel propped against her bike and spun around to face the ladder she had come up, but the barrel of a shotgun was already visible over the lip of the loft.

Darby threw the shovel in the direction of the ladder and started to run through the deep hay. If she could make it to the window, she could climb down the pulley system and escape. She had to make it. She had to.

"Darby! Stop!"

The voice seemed to physically grab hold of her. She slowed and turned around in time to see a woman about her age and build, but with closely cropped dark hair, drop the shotgun and pull herself into the loft.

"Oh, my God! We thought you were dead!" The woman threw her arms around Darby and held her in a powerful hug.

"Jared's been sending us the articles. They say that you killed Tristan and ran! We knew that wasn't true. We thought someone had taken you and ..."

Darby gently pushed her friend back, examining her face in the moonlight.

"Have the police been here, Lori?"

The young woman looked a little confused for a moment, then shook her head.

"What happened? What happened to Tristan?"

Darby took her friend's hand and pulled her down into the hay. They sat there in silence for almost a minute with Lori staring intently into her face.

What could she say that wouldn't make her sound guilty? She couldn't tell her what had really happened that kind of knowledge would put her in harm's way. They'd been friends for a long time. She'd have to rely on the trust they'd built up over those years.

"Someone else killed Tristan, Lori. They were going to do the same thing to me, but I got away "

"Who? Who killed him? A local?"

"I don't know," Darby said honestly.

"You have to go to the police, Darby. Tell them what happened. They think you did it!"

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"You believe that I didn't kill Tristan, don't you?"

"Of course I do, Darby. But "

"Look, you have to trust me on this. I can't go to the police. And I can't tell you why. I'm afraid you could get hurt."

"What the hell is going on, Darby?" Lori said, frustration starting to creep into her voice.

"Are you still going to Thailand next Sunday?"

"What?"

Darby took her hand again, suddenly feeling a little dizzy. She realized that she had been so consumed with making it to Wyoming that she hadn't spent any time thinking about what would happen when she actually arrived. The plan that had seemed to completely hinge on her making it to this particular spot now felt like it was slipping into impossibility.

"You ... you told me you were going climbing in Thailand, remember?"

"I'm not going," Lori said, sounding a little confused at the change in subject.

Darby let her friend's hand slide from hers and fell back into the soft hay. When she closed her eyes it caused two small tears to run down her temples. What now? That had been her only way out. What now?

"Darby, what's wrong? Look, I talked to Sam " Darby was only half listening. Sam was a friend of theirs who had a house in the heart of southern Thailand's best climbing area.

"... he said it's getting crazy there it's been really unstable politically since the crash and it's getting more dangerous every day.

There's been a travel advisory out for a while now. He said he's leaving next week and he doesn't know if he'll ever go back..."

"I'm sorry, Lori," Darby said, eyes still closed.

"It was a stupid idea. It would have been wrong for me to ask you anyway. I'll just have to figure something else out. No problem."

"Ask me what?"

"Nothing. Forget it."

"Ask me what, Darby?"

"I need to get out of here. The people who killed Tristan are still after me. I was going to ask to use your ticket."

The quiet of the Wyoming night settled over them and Darby used it to try to think. There was always more than one option. She just needed some time ... "I still have the tickets," Lori said, interrupting Darby's concentration.

"It's a courier deal. I haven't called them yet to tell them I'm not going. I was waiting to see if things maybe would get better over there."

Darby raised her head and looked at her friend for a moment, then sunk back into the hay.

"It doesn't matter."

"You'd have to use my passport," Lori said.

"Forget it," Darby said again, still trying to figure out what she was going to do next. She couldn't go to Mexico they'd have read the maps in her van and would be expecting that. Canada maybe? Alaska? She could definitely get lost in Alaska.

She struggled to her feet, still lost in thought, and started pulling ski equipment from under a pile of climbing gear.

"Where are you going?" Lori said quietly.

"There's something I have to do."

She'd take the file up to the old forest service lookout tower. It was ten hard miles into the mountains a place she and her friends used to stop to warm up on their way to wherever they were skiing or climbing that day. The floorboards were loose she'd pull up a few and hide the file there. No one would ever find it. And in the time it took her to get up there, she could make some decisions about what was left of her future.

Lori watched in silence as Darby pulled on a pair of ski pants and a polypropylene undershirt, finally speaking again when Darby threw a pair of ski boots off the edge of the loft.

"The snow's really messed up right now. We never got summer this year..."

Darby shrugged and pulled a pair of skis off the wall.

Lori walked to the edge of the loft and picked up the shotgun she'd dropped there.

"When you get back we'll cut your hair."

Darby looked down at her as she began slowly descending the ladder.

"You shouldn't have any problem passing for me; my passport picture isn't that good. Hell, the Thais think we all look the same, anyway."

It seemed like an impossible combination, but Beamon found himself both staring into the rising sun and having to manually work the car's wipers to keep the heavy snowflakes from freezing to his windshield.

It seemed that late fall in Wyoming was even worse than in Flagstaff.

The barn became visible first, appearing out of the crystalline haze hanging over the rolling landscape. When the house next to it came into view, Beamon pressed his foot down on the accelerator a bit harder, causing a minor fishtail that almost put him in a ditch.

At his increased speed, it only took about five minutes to cover the rest of the distance and gracelessly slide the car to a stop behind a beat-up old pickup with temporary Maryland plates. More out of habit than anything, he scanned the plates of the other four trucks parked haphazardly in front of the barn. Two from Wyoming, one from Canada, and one from California. These kids got around.

Beamon stepped from the car and slammed the door. None of the five or six people inside the barn seemed to notice. They were all concentrating on something that he couldn't see through the half-open door.

"Hello!" Beamon called, leaning casually against the makeshift doorjamb.

"Is--" He snapped to attention when he spotted the young woman standing at the back of the barn.

"Darby Moore?" he said tentatively, stepping forward and squinting into the dim light. Instead of moving back as he expected, the woman stepped forward out of the shadows.

"Darby who?"

He could see her better now. She looked a lot like Darby: roughly the same height and weight, and the same slightly weathered complexion and general features, though her nose lacked the pleasant crookedness of Darby's and her hair was much shorter.

"You must be Lori Jaspers," Beamon said, taking another couple of steps forward and sticking out his hand.

"My name's Mark Beamon."

The young woman walked right up to him and looked down at his hand as though he'd just pulled it from a bucket of nuclear waste.

"What do you want?"

Beamon looked past her at the five young men standing off to her left.

"Don't let me bother you," he said to them.

"Go ahead and go back to whatever you were doing."

They didn't move, so Beamon just stared at them. Finally, they became uncomfortable enough to shuffle toward a large plywood and two-by-six construction near the wall. It overhung at about forty-five degrees, rising from the ground to a height of about twelve feet. The underside was peppered with small wooden handholds and the ground below it was completely covered in varying thicknesses of old mattresses. Above it, painted on the wall in large black letters was a quote: There's a leisure class at both ends of the social spectrum. The attribution had been obscured by a leak in the roof.

Beamon continued to watch as one of the young men hoisted himself onto a couple of holds low on the wall and proceeded up it with the grace and effortless ness of a ballerina. At the top, he dangled for a moment and then dropped into the mattresses.

"That's really amazing," Beamon said, walking past the young woman and stopping in front of the bizarre-looking construction that he knew from his research was called a "woody." As he approached, the young men moved back.

"You mind?" Beamon said, stepping up on the mattresses and grabbing onto what he figured were the two largest handholds within reach. He gave them a little pull, but it was clear that nothing short of a hydraulic lift was going to get his fat ass off the ground. He looked closer at the holds peppering the plywood overhang. Each had a word written next to it in black magic marker. The two he had his fingers curled around were Godzilla and Tiny Tim.

He smiled and shook his head. The mysterious codes in the back of Darby Moore's diary were nothing more than training routes that she didn't want to forget. His friend at the NSA wasn't going to be very happy when he found out that he'd been squandering his brain and computer power on a rock-climbing problem.

Beamon jumped up and bounced off the mattress onto the straw-covered ground, landing a few feet from Lori Jaspers.

"Neat. Now where?"

"You were going to tell me who the hell you are," she said with almost enough anger to cover up her nervousness.

"This is private property, you know."

"I told you. My name's Mark. I'm looking for Darby Moore. You two are friends, right?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," the girl said, then started chewing her lower lip like it was a tough steak.

Her companions had stopped climbing again and were watching Beamon carefully. This time, he just ignored them.

"Come on, Lori. If you're going to lie, fine. But come up with something plausible.

"I haven't seen her in months," would work. Or "She and I had a falling out years ago." Show a little imagination."

"I haven't seen her in months."

"That's the spirit."

"What makes you think she'd be here?"

"Well, I talked to a friend of yours, Jared Palermo, but he was less than helpful." Beamon reached into his back pocket and pulled out a crumpled page from an old issue of Climbing Magazine.