Free Fall (7 page)

Beamon tried unsuccessfully to count the number of metaphors and cliches in that little speech as Hallorin walked around his desk and put a hand on his shoulder.

"Americans are losing confidence in their country, Mark. Yes, some of that's benefited me, but it's gone too far now."

Beamon shifted uncomfortably. Despite the sincere resonance of Hallorin's voice, he just couldn't buy it. Men who attained what Hallorin had in the world of politics were men who never got tired of being proven right--it just wasn't possible for their egos to be overfed.

"There are no more tapes that I'm aware of, Senator."

"I have your word on this?"

"You have my word."

Hallorin stood in the doorway of his office watching Mark Beamon wander slowly through his campaign headquarters and didn't immediately turn when he heard the voice behind him.

"Do you believe him, David?"

Hallorin finally closed the door turned to face Roland Peck.

"I do."

Peck nodded and walked quickly to a straight-backed chair against the wall that seemed to fit his small, thin frame better than the heavily padded one centered in front of Hallorin's desk.

"Yes, yes. I'm afraid I do, too," Peck said, wiping away a thin coating of perspiration that made his pale, almost translucent, skin seem to glow from some internal power source. His hand caressed the side of his sharp nose and then moved down to smooth the meticulously trimmed red mustache growing from his upper lip. The motion was nothing more than one of his many elaborate ticks, an obsessive-compulsive ritual that told Hallorin the young man was concentrating on other facets of the problem at hand.

"There's nothing in Mr. Beamon's profile or history that would suggest he would lie," Peck said, abruptly clipping each word and phrase as he always did.

"Nothing that would suggest he wouldn't turn all of the tapes over to the FBI. No, nothing."

"He might have held back some information to help him in his suspension hearing," Hallorin offered, slipping back into the chair behind his desk.

"No. No. He's not a game player, that one. And my sources say his suspension is based completely on hearsay evidence. Most of it relates to a newspaper article about his alleged drinking problem that came out in the Flagstaff Chronicle. The article was retracted though, so--"

"Then the alcohol problem was a fabrication?"

"Oh, no, no, no. It was very real. The question was whether it impaired his ability to do his job. An impossible question to answer, but it's clear that he has one of the best conviction records in the Bureau. In short, Mr. Beamon was a drunk, but not at work. One could use the rather dramatic phrase, "He gets the job done." Yes, absolutely."

Hallorin took a deep breath.

"Was a drunk."

"Mark's got a girlfriend," Peck half said, half sang.

"A psychiatrist, no less. I understand that she's henpecked him down from bourbon to beer.

Light beer, I think."

Hallorin laced his hands on top of his head and leaned back in his chair.

"If he's that talented, should we be making a place for him in this organization?"

Peck barked out a short laugh that shook the air for a moment.

"Your Mr. Beamon is uncontrollable no, no, that's the wrong word.

Unstable.

And worse, completely apolitical. He has a juvenile arrest record that, if you put it into a notebook as I have, leaves considerable space between the covers " Hallorin cut him off.

"What kind of arrests? Drugs?"

"No, no. Nothing like that." Peck paused and looked around the room, his head moving in random, birdlike motions. Another compulsive mannerism Hallorin was familiar with. Peck was thinking of an example.

"When he was seventeen, a woman who worked in the cafeteria of his high school died. Young Mark liked her, so one night, he poured a concrete monument some five feet tall in the middle of the front lawn of the school. Of course, the school had it torn out a few days later. So incensed was Mark, that he re-poured the monument. This time, he first dug down around the main to the school's electrical system and poured the base around it. Also, he mixed the concrete with .22 shells. That left a construct that could not be chipped away or pulled up. It is my understanding that it still stands today." Peck tapped his fingers together.

"I tell you this generally irrelevant story because I believe it gives some insight into Mr. Beamon's psyche."

Hallorin crossed his legs and examined Peck coolly. He'd found acquired Peck when the man was only eighteen years old. He'd come with an advertising and business consulting firm that Hallorin had purchased sight unseen based on its inspired and wholly unconventional marketing strategies.

It had taken only a couple of weeks to realize that the genius of the organization wasn't in its management team. A few more days of investigation had turned up Roland Peck, a thin, red-haired boy toiling in a small basement office that looked like a trash dump.

Peck's tenuous grasp on sanity was obvious the moment Hallorin met him, as was his brilliance. The boy's ideas were utterly original some times too much so and showed a depth of understanding of human nature and its manipulation that Hallorin had never seen before.

On that day, he had taken the parent less boy under his wing and discarded the company Peck had worked for, Hallorin had spent years carefully cultivating a father-son relationship that would ensure Peck's undying loyalty. With the right handling, Roland Peck was the ultimate weapon.

Now, sixteen years after their first meeting, Peck controlled every aspect of the Hallorin campaign and the widespread business holdings of Hallorin Industrial. On paper, though, he was still nothing more than an assistant marketing director in one of Hallorin's insignificant real estate partnerships.

His anonymity was at times inconvenient, but absolutely necessary.

Hallorin knew that Peck's sexual tastes ran well past amoral and into the bizarre. In fact, when Peck was twenty-five, Hallorin had provided him with a wife that was amenable to allowing him to act out his twisted fantasies with her keeping the possibility of scandal to a minimum. If there were any extramarital excesses, Peck hid them with his normal brilliance.

"So where are we, then, Roland?"

"We had never counted on additional tapes, David. No, we hadn't ever counted on them. They would have been helpful, but it doesn't matter We're still on track. It doesn't matter." from his position in the back of Darby's gently rocking '76 VW van, Tristan Newberry couldn't see the ground or the trees, only the gray clouds moving through the sky. He pushed the sleeping bag off and adjusted himself into a more comfortable position on the bed as Darby turned and began maneuvering up a steep incline. The feel of the old mattress, the smell and motion of the van--it was all so familiar, so comfortable.

Right now, he wished he'd never left it.

They had been inseparable--best friends. They'd traveled all over the world together: wandering from Africa's heat and claustrophobic crush of humanity, to the empty expanses of Patagonia, to the icy tundras of Tibet and the Himalaya. There had been no agenda then; nearly everything they owned and certainly everything they cared about fit in her van or on their backs. The only thing they ever had to think about was where their next adventure would take them and how they were going to finance it.

Tristan felt their progress slow and looked up at Darby as she leaned forward and squinted through the windshield. He felt the van drop as the front tire hit a rut, then a slight acceleration, and the back tires were in and out. Only the right side of Darby's face was visible, but it was enough for him to see the broad smile and exaggerated sigh of relief. No important parts had fallen off what was left of the old vehicle.

"You alive back there, Tristan?"

He stretched and kicked the sleeping bag that was Darby's only blanket into the corner of the bed.

"Yeah, yeah."

"Good." The van lurched to a stop.

"Because we have arrived at our final destination. How 'bout setting the emergency brake?"

Tristan smiled and slid the van's door open. A blast of cool, damp air rushed at his bare chest and face as he jumped out and began searching through the tall grass for appropriately sized rocks. Less than a minute later he was shoving the two he'd found beneath the back tires of the van.

"Okay! Ease off it!"

The brake lights went out and before the tires had fully settled in against the rocks, Darby jumped from the van and ran full-speed past him toward a cathedral of a cave fifty meters away. He watched as she scrambled up a ten-foot tall boulder and stood gazing at the gray sand stone that undulated in front of her.

"This is it," she said excitedly as he climbed up the coarse boulder in his bare feet. About halfway up, he was reminded that the skin on his soles was more used to argyle and leather than to stone and dirt these days.

"This is it," she repeated as he came alongside her.

Tristan surveyed the intimidating stone wall in front of them and decided that it looked like a Dr. Seuss nightmare. Black and gray rock rose from dense undergrowth in a wave that probably averaged thirty-five degrees overhanging for about the first sixty feet, then kicked back to virtually horizontal for another forty or so. From where he stood, the cliff looked almost featureless he couldn't make out much more than the occasional door jamb-width edge or two-finger-wide hole. He craned his neck and looked overhead at the imposing stone roof above them. The hand- and footholds on that section were hidden, but he could see brightly colored nylon slings dangling from the roof every ten feet or so.

Called quick draws they were the things that climbers would hook their ropes through when they were on the route. Not just any climber, though.

By the looks of it, there were probably only a handful of men around the world that would even have a chance of making it to the top.

And only a couple of women, one of whom was standing next to him.

"How hard?" he asked.

"In the end, I think it'll go at a fairly stiff fourteen," she said, dropping into a full split on top of the flat boulder and starting to stretch.

That confirmed it. The hardest climb in the world had a difficulty rating of easy fifteen.

"Jesus, Darby ... what're you gonna call it?" All routes up a rock face had a name just like all routes down a ski hill had a name.

"I'm leaning toward "Disco Girl and the Mutant Strain."" He laughed and shook his head.

"Like I said, you're one weird chick.

You warm up, I'll go grab the gear."

Tristan jogged back down to the van and began rummaging around in the various backpacks and duffels it contained. He glanced back up at Darby through the side windows just in time to see her gracefully rise from the splits to a perfect handstand. She tilted her body to one side and tentatively lifted her right hand off the rock. She stayed like that for about five seconds and then crumpled onto the boulder.

He tried not to laugh loud enough for her to hear, remembering the acrobat from the Cirque de Soleil who had developed a terminal crush on Darby a few years back during a climbing trip near Vegas. She'd been trying to duplicate the guy's one-armed handstand ever since.

"Which shoes do you want, Darb?" he yelled through an open window.

"Stingers, please.

He grabbed the pair that looked like a couple of mutant yellowjackets, stuffed the rest of the gear in a pack, and started toward the cliff. By the time he got to the base, Darby was pacing back and forth beneath the route.

He knew better than to talk to her at this point, though a comment on the quickly worsening weather was on the tip of his tongue the wind had picked up and was kicking dust into the air in swirling clouds. He tossed the climbing shoes and a harness onto the ground in front of her and started to uncoil the rope.

Darby muttered quietly to herself as she struggled to pull on the shoes that were at least two sizes too small for her feet to prevent slipping on critical moves. She seemed to be in a world all her own as she slowly stood, slipped on her harness, and started threading the rope through it.

"You're on, Darb. Whenever you're ready," Tristan said, pushing his end of the rope through a metal device at his waist designed to lock off the rope if she fell.

Darby slid her hands into a small bag of gymnast's chalk tied around her waist to dry them and slipped two fingers into a small hole in the rock.

She paused there for a moment, bouncing her forehead gently against the stone.

"Okay," she said quietly, stepping her right foot up onto a small edge no thicker than a nickel and using her fingers to pull her weight over it.

Each individual move on a climb this hard had to be performed with absolute precision. The wrong hand on a hold, moving a foot out of sequence, even a slight swivel of the hips at the wrong moment, and the climber was guaranteed a fall. Darby performed the first four moves like a ballet dancer, making them look completely effortless, though Tristan knew it would probably take him a day of effort to just get both feet off the ground on this horror show.