Free Fall (56 page)

"I can't! I can't just leave him "

"There'll be an ambulance here in five minutes. Go!"

Beamon pressed down a little harder on his friend's wound and felt the blood bubble up between his fingers as he watched Darby run for the trees. The cops were close now; the crunch of skidding tires was becoming audible beneath the scream of the sirens.

Sherman's eyes were half open and cleared a bit when he saw Beamon hovering over him.

"I told you you were wasting your time," he choked out.

"Hallorin wins."

Beamon shook his head slowly, feeling the rage building up inside of him.

"Not Hallorin. He didn't know about the other file. And that son of a bitch was Russian."

Sherman's laugh was weak and humorless.

"Robert Taylor. Your knight in shining armor."

He lost consciousness just as the first police car came skidding to a stop and two cops trained their guns on them.

"Fuck!" Beamon screamed suddenly. Robert Taylor. He was going to find that geriatric piece of shit and cut his heart out for this.

"I dislocated my shoulder a couple of weeks ago and I didn't think I had that much strength left," Beamon said, finding it hard to concentrate on the story he'd concocted.

The cop shrugged and leaned over the body to more closely examine the odd bend to its neck.

"No big loss as I see it."

Fifty feet from them, two paramedics were hefting a stretcher containing Tom Sherman into the back of an ambulance. A few moments later, it was picking its way carefully but quickly down the dirt road toward the highway.

"So you say he heard the siren ..." the cop prompted.

"Yeah. He'd made us help him carry out valuables and put them in the truck. What he didn't know was that I'd been on the phone ..."

"The woman who called us. She didn't tell us her name."

"She's an old friend from college," Beamon lied.

"I was talking to her when the doorbell rang. Told her to hold on and I put the phone down on the counter. She must have heard what was going on."

The sheriff scratched his head, seeing no compelling reason to dispute the rather unlikely story.

"You're a lucky man, Mr. Beamon," Beamon nodded his agreement. Damn lucky.

"Anyway, when he heard the sirens, he was distracted for a second. Tom was closest to him and... "

"The gun went off."

Beamon nodded.

"I was too late. I knocked it out of his hand and got him around the neck. Like I said, looks like I got a little overzealous ..." "Matter of opinion," the man said. He apparently liked Tom Sherman and seemed to think that Beamon had been just zealous enough.

Beamon allowed his mind to wander for a few moments as the cop broke off from him and walked around, looking for nothing in particular.

There was no one to blame but himself for this. He'd underestimated Taylor, and now his best friend was lying in an ambulance, most likely dying. Sherman had been right. They were all the same Hallorin, Taylor, whoever. After twenty some years in the cynical service of the government and now facing a trumped-up felony charge for the convenience of the Beltway elite, he had no excuse for not seeing this coming.

He couldn't seem to stop his anger and hatred from continuing to build, and he had to struggle to keep it off his face as the cop came full circle and leaned over the body again.

"Trouble just seems to follow you around, doesn't it, Mr. Beamon?"

Through the back window of the tiny Japanese compact, Beamon could see two shadows moving through the parking garage.

They were coming in his general direction so, for what seemed like the fiftieth time, he laid down in the cramped backseat and wedged himself between the doors. The pain in his shoulder was nearly unbearable as he tried to keep himself hidden, and that just fed his anger. It was 7:30.

Where was that dumb bitch? Quitting time was two fucking hours ago.

He hadn't been to the D. C. hospital Tom Sherman had been transferred to--though he knew things looked bad. He'd told himself over and over that it wasn't his fault, that Sherman had fucked up bad and then fallen apart--a poor combination. Logic wasn't working for him any more than it had for Darby, though. The truth was that Tom Sherman had saved his ass more times than he could count and when, for the first time in their long friendship, Tom had needed help, he ended up shot.

There was nothing Beamon could do to change that now, though. All he could do was hit back.

Another half an hour went by with Beamon in an only slightly more comfortable position. It was fairly dark in this part of the parking garage--he'd made sure of that by strategically knocking out a few lights before he'd broken into the car. That, in combination with the fact that the car's rearview mirror was now in pieces on the floorboard, ought to be enough to suit his purpose.

When the echoing click of dress shoes became audible, he lifted his head slightly and peered out the rear window. At first, all he could see was a shadow moving in his direction. The figure slowly gained detail and color as it got closer, finally taking on the slightly pudgy female shape of his victim. It was about goddamn time.

He remained completely still as the woman approached and jabbed at the lock in the semidarkness. He could see her perfectly through the side window attractive in a slightly disheveled, businesslike manner, with hair cut into a practical bob and large wire-frame glasses.

He followed her with his eyes as she ducked into the car, not noticing the missing rearview mirror until she had closed her door and was reaching up to adjust it. From the side, Beamon could see the confusion cross her face and then change to terror when he sat up and stuck the barrel of Tom Sherman's .38 in the back of her head.

"Oh, my God," she said in a panicked voice.

"Please. Take what ever you want. I " "Shut the fuck up," Beamon said, his mood continuing to darken. She tried to turn her head, but he put a stop to that by moving the gun barrel to her cheek, which was billowing in and out with her short, desperate breaths.

He hadn't seen her in years. It seemed impossible, but she looked precisely the same. In fact, he was pretty sure she had been wearing the same oddly colored pantsuit the last time they'd run into each other.

Helen Block wasn't the sleaziest reporter he'd ever met, neither was she the most respectable. What he remembered about her was her drive and the fact that she was incredibly bright. Her star had continued to rise at the Washington Post as his at the Bureau had fallen. All in all, she had just the right combination of qualities to make this happen. A perfect instrument with which to inflict pain.

"You think you're about to have the worst night of your life," Beamon said, reaching onto the floorboard and grabbing hold of Tom Sherman's copy of the Prodigy file. He dropped it next to her on the passenger seat.

"But you couldn't be more wrong."

He could see her straining with her eyes to see what he'd passed up to her, but she still couldn't move her head because of the gun. Even in the gloom Beamon could see her shaking. He started to feel a little guilt mar ring the perfection of his anger when a tear started to well up in her eye.

"Don't do that," he said, backing the gun off a little. He held out a small penlight to her.

"Take it," he said.

"Have a look."

She reached slowly for the light.

"I don't have all fucking night. Take it. Don't make me shoot you."

A moment later, she was clawing through the open file in her lap more to please her captor than anything else. It wasn't long, though, before her fear started to fade and she began looking more carefully at the documents he had given her. A few more minutes and she seemed to have forgotten he was there entirely, the silence in the car only occasionally broken by the crackle of turning pages and the quiet grunts and squeals escaping her throat. Beamon leaned back and lit a cigarette in the clean-smelling car. Either because of the file or the gun, she didn't protest.

"Are these real?" she said finally. He could tell from her voice that she already knew the answer to his question.

"What do you think?"

"Where did you get them?" she asked, looking straight through the windshield at the concrete wall in front of the car.

"I used to be an FBI agent."

"I know you, don't I?" There was recognition in her tone, but he could tell that she hadn't figured it out yet. They hadn't known each other very well it was one of the reasons he'd picked her.

"You don't want to know me."

She nodded her understanding.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"I'm not showing it to you. I'm giving it to you. You go get yourself whatever experts you need to confirm that it's all legit. Then print it.

All of it."

She looked down at the photos and memos that were now spilling over her lap onto the passenger seat and shook her head.

"Jesus Christ, man. This is beautiful. Do you have any idea " Beamon pulled the handle on the back door, the sound cutting her off in mid-sentence.

"Wait!"

"You don't need me. It's all right there." He stepped out into the quiet parking garage, but didn't immediately shut the door.

"How much you get for a Pulitzer these days?" "Five grand," she said without thinking.

The nudity was blacked out, David Hallorin saw, but the face of young Robert Taylor was clearly visible. The photograph was a full eight by-ten, reproduced in its original garish color on the first page of a special section of the Washington Post. According to the exhaustive text that made up the rest of the page, the photo, as well as the FBI memos and surveillance data that had accompanied it, had been reviewed by three independent experts from different corners of the country. All were in agreement as to authenticity.

It wasn't just Taylor, though--almost all of the file was there. Not the data on the few men who had already admitted to their crimes over the years, not the ones who had never risen from obscurity, but the rest.

The rest were all there.

The gentle rocking of the van as it weaved through D. C."s crowded streets usually had a calming effect on him, but today it was making him feel nauseated. Hallorin wadded up the paper in a single violent motion and threw it to the floorboards. He leaned against the side window and covered his eyes with his hand.

It had all been perfect. The meeting yesterday with the Republican leadership had gone even better than he'd hoped. Hallorin had made sure that everyone knew exactly who he was--the next president of the United States--and Robert Taylor had played the loyal lapdog.

It had been exquisite. The men who had spent their careers trying to tear him down, to discredit him, to strip him of the power that was rightfully his, had been completely off balance, fearing for their political lives.

They had treated him as the new leader of the country and a man who now had the ability to crush them under his heel if he should find it necessary.

Today he had risen at five-thirty to make final preparations for his meeting with the Democratic leadership and his former Democratic opponent. There, he was to play a different game moderating his positions, deferring to their weak leadership. They were panicked, desperate for any crumb of control he saw fit to throw them, and he could have used that to his advantage.

But not anymore.

Hallorin let his hand slide from his face, looking past a terrified Roland Peck, into the flat light of early morning Washington. It had changed he could already feel it. Something had altered in the city's tempo. The traffic was strangely light, as though the people who inhabited the city and kept the government limping along had decided to stay away. As if they had decided to lock themselves in the hallucinatory safety of their suburban homes and insulate themselves from the electricity of anticipation and dread that had jolted the country.

Hallorin picked up the cellular phone next to him and hit the recall button as the driver maneuvered the van smoothly through the down town traffic as he did every day. As though nothing had happened.

And in a sense, nothing had. Yet. None of the men implicated by the file had come forward, despite the seriousness of the allegations against them. CNN was just picking up the story no fancy graphics or historical musings yet just paraphrasing the text they'd found in the Post. No foreign reaction at all.

"Have you gotten through to Taylor yet?" Hallorin said when his private secretary picked up the line.

"I left another message, sir, but no call back yet. I'll patch him through the minute "

"Call him again."

"Sir, I just hung up the phone " "I said call him again, goddammit!"

"Yes, sir, I'll " He hung up before she could finish her sentence and tried to will his heart to slow down. Until now, the former Republican candidate had jumped at Hallorin's every word. Now he wouldn't return calls. What was he doing? What was he planning?

It was almost certain that Taylor would think that he was responsible for this, that he'd released the file after using it to force him from the race. To Taylor it would make sense: part of Hallorin's plan to tear down what was left of the government and improve his own standing.