Free Fall (42 page)

He'd bought two pairs in her size anyway, on Reynolds, Trent, and Layman--or more likely, David Hallorin. The moral here was never give a company credit card to the person you're setting up.

"What are we doing here, Mark?" she said, fidgeting with the waistband of her new shorts.

"They know we're here. We could probably make it to Cambodia or--"

Beamon looked up from the rented set of clubs he had been picking through and frowned dramatically.

"Cambodia? Cambodia? Cambodia has no golf courses."

Her nervousness seemed to tick up a notch. She still didn't trust him, despite his repeated attempts to put her at ease. He'd been completely unsuccessful in getting her to open up about what had happened to her and why--information that was becoming increasingly critical to their survival.

"Look, Mark. I appreciate what you did for me, but I really need to get out of here. I've got to keep moving."

Beamon hefted the hot pink golf bag containing a set of ladies clubs and handed it to her.

"Yeah, you've done so well thus far."

He instantly regretted his words as the pain registered on Darby's face.

Two of her friends were dead and she was undoubtedly blaming herself.

"I'm sorry, Darby. I didn't mean it that way."

He slung his own bag over his shoulder and started for the first tee with her reluctantly following.

"Look around us," he said as they walked.

She did as he instructed, letting her eyes wander to the armed men following behind them and the ones that had already taken up strategic positions near the dense line of trees that bordered the fairway.

"There are two more in the parking lot and another few in the club house." He waved around them at the empty course.

"Have you noticed that there's no one else around? The course is closed to the public as long as we're playing."

Beamon stopped and looked out over the first hole, spotting two more men standing near the green. Whatever Somporn Taskin's debt to Tom Sherman was, he obviously took it seriously.

"I don't know, Darby. Looks like we have one of the most powerful, and more importantly, sadistically violent men in the country extremely interested in our well being. Back home ... Well, I don't know. Until I figure out what's going on, we're staying put."

Beamon pulled his driver and three-wood from the bag and began swinging them around, trying to appear more relaxed than he was.

Hopefully, he'd been successful in making it look like coming within half an inch of getting your head blown off ten thousand miles from home" had been written in the "things to do" section of his day planner.

"But how long will it last?" Darby said.

"How long can your one friend protect us?"

She was nothing like he'd imagined. He guessed it was the van, the lack of a job, the itinerant lifestyle he'd expected a twenty-first century version of a hippie. In retrospect, it had been a stupid assumption just the mind's tendency to file things and people into familiar categories.

Hippies didn't spend their time testing their physical and mental limits in places where every decision could be the difference between life and death.

"How long? If I'm right about who's after you and now me I figure we'll be dead inside of three days," Beamon said, continuing to swing the clubs.

"What? Three days! We've got to get out of here!"

Beamon shoved a tee into the soft ground and tried to balance a ball on it.

"To where? To sneak around the jungles of Southeast Asia waiting for another group like those Thai cops to catch up with us? That doesn't sound very attractive."

Darby clearly wanted to make a break for the jungle, but looked around her again at the guards and instead started chewing her thumbnail relentlessly She was calculating something. Most likely, her chances on her own versus her chances with an out-of-work, soon to be incarcerated or dead, former FBI agent. Neither option probably looked all that rosy.

"What am I to you, Mark?"

Beamon was having trouble getting the ball to stay on the tee due to a slight tremor in his hand. A leftover either from the physical exertion of his unplanned sprint through the town of Krabi, or the psychological baggage of his near-death experience. He wasn't sure.

"Two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars is what you are to me," he said, finally getting the ball into a stable perch. The quiet chatter from the Thai guards behind them faded to silence as he lined his driver up behind the ball and swung. The ball left the tee with a satisfying hiss and soared toward the sun that was slowly dipping into the sea ahead of them. Then it curved hard and disappeared into the dense jungle that the course had been cut from.

"Should have hit a few at the range," he said, bending over and snatching his tee from the pockmarked grass beneath him.

"You do play golf, don't you, Darby?"

"Sometimes. On rest days."

"The ladies tees are up there."

"I'll hit from here."

Beamon shrugged as casually as he could. If he was right and the missing FBI file existed, then it almost certainly had something to do with Hallorin's bid for the presidency. There was only a week left to the election and he was fucking around on a golf course in the middle of nowhere. What was the alternative, though? Clearly intimidation wasn't going to work on the girl. He had to make her trust him.

Darby put her ball on a tee, straightened up, and leaned against her club.

"What do you mean when you say two hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars?"

"I mean that I have been hired by an anonymous client to find and deliver you. I got paid one hundred and fifty thousand to take the job and I get the rest when I deliver."

"That's a lot of money. Would you buy a house and a sports car?"

Beamon crinkled up his eyebrows at the strangeness of the question.

"You have to vacuum houses, and let's face it, I'm not the sports car type." He decided that his need for expensive lawyers to keep him out of jail probably was better left unsaid at this point it made him look desperate and probably wouldn't instill a lot of confidence in the girl.

"Look, Darby, I'm not prepared to sell my soul for eighty-five grand it's worth probably double that. No surprises, okay?"

Darby lined up her club and slammed the ball with the force of all the anger, sadness, and frustration that had built up in her over the last few weeks. Her swing was flawless and the ball landed in the middle of the fairway some two hundred and fifty yards away.

"That wasn't luck, was it?" Beamon said as he picked up his bag. She shook her head and followed him up the fairway.

"Okay, Darby. I'm sorry, but it's time to make a decision. Are you going to tell me what I've gotten myself into, or are we just going to keep playing till the snipers show up?" He stopped and looked into her face, unable to tell whether the clear droplet running down her cheek was sweat or a tear.

"I'm completely lost, Mark," she said.

"I always know what to do. But now ..."

"You're making this too hard, kid. If I'm working for the other side, you're screwed. I've got you." Beamon reached into his bag for a club and was about to start poking around in the thick bushes for his ball, but then thought better of it. There were probably ten things in there that could kill a man in three seconds or less.

"I guess you do have me," Darby said.

"But if you're not who you say you are, and you're just smarter than the guy in the Mercedes, don't play games with me, okay? When you get what you want, just kill me and be done with it."

Empathy had never been one of Beamon's strong suits, but he couldn't shake the sense of the enormity of the crime that had been committed against this girl. It wasn't the physical act of murdering her friends, or the frame-up, or the physical abuse. It was the way those things had changed her view of the world. They'd taken a girl who had built her life around freedom and joy, and over the course of a few weeks, dragged her into a world of fear, greed, and thoughtless violence. His world.

The real one.

"Quick and painless," Beamon promised, motioning to the men following along behind them to hold their ground for a moment. He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her out of earshot.

"I'm going to make a few statements and you just say right or wrong, okay?" She nodded "You didn't kill Tristan Newberry."

"Right," she answered quietly.

"Tristan saw something important where he worked, probably in an old FBI file, and he told you about it."

She nodded.

"You were attacked at the New River Gorge."

Another nod.

"Now, were you taken to an old farmhouse in Maryland?"

"Uh huh."

Beamon smiled.

"I'm particularly proud of myself for that one. But tell me how the hell did you get away?"

"There were two men in the room. I grabbed one of them and pushed him over. He fell into a window and cut his neck. I ... I think he probably died..."

Beamon remembered the uncanny strength she had displayed during their sprint through the streets of Krabi. Bet that son of a bitch had been even more surprised than he had been he'd obviously bled enough to make a new coat of paint necessary.

"You said there were two men in the room. How did you get away from the second?"

"I didn't. He let us go. He didn't want to be there the whole time, you could tell. He didn't want to hurt us."

Beamon ran his tongue over his front teeth.

"Young guy? Twenty-nine or so, but with gray hair at his temples?"

She cocked her head slightly to the right.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"Not important."

"We ran," she continued.

"Jumped out the window and ran. I didn't think there was any way they could catch us." Her voice started to sound kind of far away as she dragged herself back into the past.

"The butte," Beamon said.

"You would have run straight up that butte. These guys were like me, right? They wouldn't be able to keep up."

She nodded.

"But Tristan didn't have any shoes. By the time we made it to the top, his feet were all cut up."

He remembered the pictures of Tristan's body and the local sheriff's comment about how Darby had even attacked his feet with the ice ax.

Beamon hadn't registered the wounds as unusual, assuming that he had been kicking at his attacker, trying to defend himself.

"Tristan said we had to split up," Darby said.

"That he could keep ahead of the people chasing him, even with his feet torn up like that," She looked directly into Beamon's eyes.

"I think I knew he couldn't. No, I'm sure I did. But I'd never been in a situation like that before I was so scared ... That's not much of an excuse, is it? For leaving him?"

"What could you have done, Darby? Stayed with him until they caught up?

Then you'd both be dead. It wasn't your fault." Beamon calculated a respectful pause, then continued.

"Now this is really important life or death, okay? Did Tristan tell you what was in the file?"

Suspicion crossed her face for a moment. She didn't say anything, calculating again. If he was lying to her, the next words out of her mouth might kill her. She took a deep breath as though she thought it might be one of her last.

"No, he didn't. He just told me that the information in it could hurt some very powerful people." Beamon sighed quietly. That wasn't what he'd wanted to hear.

"Did you tell anybody else anything about this?"

The suspicion again, and then resignation.

"No."

Beamon stepped back and leaned against his golf bag, staring at the ground.

"What are you thinking?" Darby said after a few moments.

He shook his head, not sure how much to say. Normally, he'd sugarcoat their situation, but this girl deserved better than that; she deserved to know what was coming.

"I don't know, Darby. These people probably think Tristan told you what was in the file. You and I are a loose end to them now, and they're going to keep coming until they've tied it up.

I'd hoped you'd have something we could use something that could at least force a truce."

A confused expression crossed her face.

"What about the file? Isn't there a way we could use that?"

He looked up.

"Excuse me?"

"Tristan took the file ... Oh, you didn't know that, did you? He told me where it was before we split up."

"What?" Beamon had been working under the assumption that Tristan was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"He took it?"

She nodded.

"He wanted to sell it to the papers."

Beamon stood up straight for a moment, but then sagged back against his golf bag.

"But I'm sure he told the men who killed him where he stashed it."