Free Fall (5 page)

The definition in the muscles in her forearms seemed a bit more pronounced, but that might have been an illusion brought about by the deep tan that uniformly covered all her visible skin. Her light brown hair was tied back in its ever present ponytail, though it had worked its way halfway down her back a good six inches farther than he'd ever seen it before.

Tristan reached out and grabbed her chin, turning her head back and forth to examine spiders-web scars crisscrossing the sides of her nose, which now sat slightly crooked on her delicately featured face.

"It's got character. I like it. But I thought they said they were going to make it good as new."

"They told me better than new," she said.

"What they didn't tell me was it was going to take like, three surgeries in all." She shrugged.

"I figured having a perfect nose would be like having a new car. You'd always be worried about bumping it into something or leaving it out in the sun too long, you know?"

Tristan pulled a key from his pocket and slid it into the door.

"Darby, you're one weird chick."

"Yeah, but I'm so much fun," she said, pushing past him into his apartment.

"Man, look at this place! It's huge!"

"It's a dump, Darb." Tristan stepped through and pulled the door closed behind him. For some reason, he felt some of the tension that had been slowly sucking the life out of him for the past twenty-eight hours fade as he watched her run the fifteen feet into the kitchen and look through the door at the back.

"What? You have another room back here, too?"

Tristan laughed quietly as Darby eyed his dishwasher and then stuck her head in his refrigerator. If you wanted to impress a woman with your run-down six hundred and ten square foot apartment, it was key to pick one who had spent her entire adult life living in a van.

"How long have you been waiting out there, Darb?"

When she peeked back around the refrigerator door, she had a foot of celery hanging from her mouth.

"You mind if I eat this?" She didn't wait for an answer but vanished behind the door again.

"Since this morning. I was headed south and I thought I'd stop by."

"Shit, Darby why didn't you call? I could have had someone let you in."

He heard the clinking of jars as she continued her exploration of the fridge.

"You know how expensive long distance is, Tristan." Her hand suddenly appeared over the door and pointed in the general direction of her backpack.

"If I'd called, I couldn't have afforded to buy that." He looked down at her pack. As unarguably the finest woman mountain climber in the world, he knew that Darby had never bought a piece of equipment in her life.

Manufacturers fell over themselves to give her stuff for free.

He alone had over three thousand dollars worth of her cast-offs.

"Uh, the pack?"

"No. Look inside."

He unzipped the top and pulled out the bottle of wine wedged between a pair of sweatpants and six cans of tuna.

"Who says you can't get a decent bottle of wine for under five dollars,"

Darby said, kicking the door of the refrigerator closed and dropping a handful of food on the counter.

"Mmmm. Chateau de Ghetto."

"Sandwich?"

"Sure."

Tristan walked into the kitchen and reached around her for a corkscrew before noticing the screw top.

"I think I'll save this one, Darby.

Why don't we open one of mine?"

"Whatever."

"So where have you been?" he asked, working a corkscrew into a thirty-dollar bottle. He'd suffer this shit apartment, he'd drive a beat-up car, he'd even eat meat loaf three times a week, but life was too short to drink cheap wine.

"Last I heard you were in Borneo. That was, like, six months ago or something."

"Yeah, Borneo. I went in with the idea of checking out these huge, really steep limestone cliffs they've got over there." She held up her mustard-covered knife and used it to illustrate the severely overhanging nature of the rock.

"Anyway, I was there for only like two weeks when I got dengue fever.

Ended up staying with this tribe of reformed headhunters till I got better. Spent my twenty-seventh birthday sitting in a river to keep my temperature down and watching for snakes."

Tristan nodded knowingly.

"Best birthday you ever had, I'll bet."

She grinned, but didn't let her concentration waiver from the sandwich she was creating.

"Yeah, it was pretty cool."

"Well, you didn't have dengue for six months."

She shook her head.

"Nah. I started feeling better after a few weeks.

Finally got to go check out those cliffs. They're epic I've got to climb one. I was on my way out drinking a beer in Miri that's Malaysia when I ran into some people from National Geographic who were heading into the jungle to try to study one of those Borneo rhinos."

Tristan walked into the living room and dropped into a chair, strangely exhausted by the conversation. Sometimes he felt like he'd aged twenty years since he'd quit climbing and returned to the real world.

"You all right, Tristan? You look kind of tired."

"I'm fine. Borneo has rhinos?"

"Yeah, they're really amazing. Smaller than an African one, but really hairy. I don't think any nonnative had ever seen one."

"I assume they have now."

Her face lit up.

"Oh, we got some amazing pictures. I'll have to show you my slides."

She poked at the sandwiches until all the vegetables fit inside the edges of the bread, then brought them over. After accepting a glass of wine from him, she sat down on the floor with her sandwich in her lap.

"So what about you? Still in school? Weren't you getting a masters in taking over the world or something?"

"It was a law degree," Tristan said.

"Whatever."

"I dropped out. Got a job."

She rolled her eyes and let out a loud lung full of air.

"No wonder you look like hell. You've got to get your life together, man."

"Get my life together?"

"I know you. You're gonna fall into this work thing and one day you'll wake up and you'll be sixty. And you know what you'll have done?"

"I'm sure you're going to tell me."

"You'll have spent your life pursuing enough money to buy a bunch of crap you didn't need."

He nodded slowly and took a bite of his sandwich, trying to force down the image of the file that had suddenly crashed back into his mind.

"Somebody's got to work, Darby. You know, keep the streets safe, build piece-of-shit vans for climbers to drive, fly airplanes to Borneo."

She shook her head slowly, making a slice of carrot wave back and forth until she sucked it all the way into her mouth.

"Yeah, but it doesn't have to be us. Look at you, man. It's killing you.

I can tell. I'm going to France next month. Francois just bought a house within hiking distance to the cliffs at Buoux. He says I can set up a tent in his backyard and stay as long as I want. Why don't you just quit and come with me? We'll get a couple of cheap courier tickets over there, then we can pretty much live for free."

"I can't just quit, Darby. Life's a little more complicated than that "Is not." She finished off the rest of the sandwich in one Herculean bite and chewed furiously.

"Tell you what." Chew.

"Why don't you blow off work for a couple of days and come to the New River Gorge with me?"

Chew.

"We'll do a few routes, drink some beer by a nice campfire." Chew.

"Give me a chance to break you of this herd mentality you've developed since I've been gone."

*****

I can appreciate that suspended FBI agents don't rate limos, but I figured I'd do better than a golf cart," Beamon said, half to himself and half to the back of the driver's head. He took one more shot at adjusting himself into a comfortable position in the cramped backseat and then just gave up.

"No one rates a limo, Mr. Beamon." The driver glanced in his rearview mirror for a moment and then returned his attention to the congested Georgetown street.

"You've probably heard that Senator Hallorin is kind of a stickler for saving gas. This car not only gets great mileage, but it actually runs on natural gas."

Beamon knew all that, of course--Hallorin had made damn sure everyone in America did. He had turned the image of his six and a half foot, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame unfolding from the back of these underpowered, propane-propelled vehicles into a cornerstone of his presidential campaign, softening the impact of his one dollar per gallon gas tax proposal with surprising effectiveness.

"It's amazing, really," the driver continued in a monotone that suggested he had been forced to memorize this little speech.

"Cheap, environmentally safe, and all you lose is a tiny bit of acceleration. You don't even notice it after a couple of weeks."

"Uh, huh." Beamon reached for the one amenity that was included with the car: a small phone set into the armrest between the front seats.

He had his own cell phone in his pocket, but what the hell. Hallorin could afford it.

He gazed lazily out the window as they drove along M Street. It was only about eight o'clock, but the sidewalks were nearly deserted. Many of the bars and shops he remembered from his tenure in D. C. were gone, victims of the hot air finally exploding from America's economy. The large picture windows that before had framed expensive clothes and yuppie revelers were now dark and dominated by tasteful "for rent" signs.

"Hello?"

The woman's voice at the other end of the line instantly relieved some of the tension he was feeling about being called to a mysterious meeting with one of the country's most powerful men. Strangely, though, that sense of relief worried him a little bit.

"Hello?" the voice repeated.

"Hey, Carrie."

"Mark! I've been trying to reach you at the hotel. Another hour and I was going to start calling the bars." She paused for a moment.

"I was starting to worry when I didn't hear from you. Was I right to have?"

Beamon smiled and straightened his legs halfway out across the back seat.

"I don't know yet."

"I'm sure what you meant to say was, "I was in and out in five minutes I'll be on my way back as soon as Congress is done slapping me on the back and giving me cigars.""

"I was in and out in six and a half hours, no cigars, and it wasn't my back they were slapping."

"But were they happy with your respectful and concise answers?"

"No. But I'm starting to think that might be a good thing." Beamon looked up at the driver for a moment, wondering how much he should say in front of the man. He decided it didn't matter. Hallorin probably already had a transcript of the hearing sitting in his fax machine.

"We've had months of media frenzy over those tapes, two high-level resignations and God knows how many indictments in the works. It was a fishing expedition they were looking for something they could use to divert the attention of the press."

"And you didn't give it to them, right? You didn't let them make you mad and bait you into saying something stupid."

"Your lack of confidence in me is startling, Doctor."

"Answer the question, Mark."

"The answer is no, I didn't. But I doubt it mattered. The only reason I was there was because they would have looked silly having a hearing without a witness. They'd already made their minds up about this before I'd ever opened my mouth. It's gone way beyond me."

Beamon pitched forward as his driver slammed on the brakes and laid on the horn.

"Are you in the car, Mark? What time will you be back?"

"Well, I am in a car, but it's not mine."

"Whose car are you in?"

"David Hallorin's."

Another pause. This one much longer.

"Carrie? You still there?"

"The David Hallorin?"

"Uh huh."

"Why, Mark? Why are you in his car?" There was a tired frustration in her voice that didn't really surprise him. He'd been in a hell of a bind when they'd started their relationship and it seemed to have gotten worse every day since. If she was smart, she'd have moved to Alaska and changed her name by now.

The driver swung the car right and slowed, starting up a steep, winding road. Beamon looked down at the lights of the city and the dark streak cut through them by the Potomac.

"I don't know, Carrie, but I guess I'm about to find out. Try not to worry, okay?"

"You make it hard."

A large iron gate that seemed to have been built in the middle of the street began swinging open in front of the car.

"Look, I've got to go. I'll tell you all about it when I get back."