Free Fall (53 page)

Sherman worked the dial for a few moments and opened it.

"There were two originals made of everything. One went to the archive to keep us all on safe legal ground. The other has been with me all these years. But then, you'd already guessed that, hadn't you?" He dropped the file into Beamon's outstretched arms.

"Here's your mutual assured destruction, Mark. The day before the election."

Beamon took a sip of his second bourbon and adjusted the heavy file into a more comfortable position on his lap. Much of it was useless.

Suspected communist activity, a threat that history had seen fit to make laughable, made up a good half of it. Money, sex, and drugs made up the rest. The classics just never went out of style.

Beamon had tossed the marijuana-related files onto the commie hoard stack, deciding that it was another formerly heinous threat to U. S. security that looked a little silly in the current context. On the same pile, he tossed the files of men who had never lived up to Hoover's expectations and those who had already been exposed.

That left him with eight fabulously damaging and exhaustively documented stories on eight extremely powerful men. The most impressive and dangerous, of course, was the one containing the pictures of Robert Taylor, taken by none other than a young Tom Sherman. Beamon shuffled through the randomly ordered photos of the Republicans' family values candidate one more time--resisting the urge to organize them and see if he could make a movie by flipping through them really fast.

He extracted one of the more artistic compositions of young Taylor and his two naked companions and smoothed it out on top of the file. He stared down at it for a long time, looking for answers in the writhing bodies and the blank stare of that child's eyes. It was a bomb all right.

But how could he set it off without getting caught in the blast?

"She was twelve."

Startled, Beamon jerked his head in the direction of the voice. Tom Sherman was leaning--sagging--on the doorframe that led into the room.

"I did some background on her and the woman after I took those pictures.

She was just a baby. I could have stopped it--my partner wanted to.

But I didn't. I wouldn't."

Beamon looked down at the picture again, unsure what to say.

"Where ... where is she now?"

"She's dead. They both are."

"Is the silent treatment over then, Mark?" Darby said.

He hadn't much felt like talking after his less than successful meeting with David Hallorin, despite Darby's probing curiosity. After about an hour, she'd gotten angry and frustrated and they'd spent the rest of the drive to Manassas in silence.

"Yeah, it's over," Beamon said, crashing through the lower branches of a tree, swinging the six-pack in his hand like a machete.

"But you may be sorry."

He took a seat in a folding chair across a low burning campfire from Darby. He'd tried to get her to stay in the house, but every time she'd politely declined--saying that she'd rather sleep in her own bed in the back of her truck.

He couldn't blame her, really. Between him sweating out their uncertain future and Tom sinking deeper and deeper into depression, the atmosphere was getting a little oppressive. The tiny clearing alongside the road that wound through Sherman's property was downright cheerful by comparison.

"So are you going to give me a beer and tell me what happened, then?"

"That's why I'm here." He tossed her a bottle from the six-pack and she deftly opened it on the edge of a rock.

"Well?"

Beamon tried to find the best way to paraphrase his meeting. Darby had finally gotten some sleep and had cut back on the beer a little, bringing some of the color back to her skin and erasing the dark circles that had painted themselves beneath her eyes. He didn't want to say anything that could cause a relapse.

"The meeting went well," he said.

"Great, really. He offered to get the FBI to call off the dogs and wants to give me a job for about a mil a year."

Darby nodded, staring into the fire.

"That does sound great. What's the catch?"

Beamon didn't answer.

"The offer doesn't extend to me, does it? I'm too weird and unpredictable. Besides, they still need somebody to take the blame for Tristan."

She looked up at him and saw the surprise on his face.

"I'm a quick study, Mark. Did you take the deal?"

"Hell yeah. I told them where you're camped and then went straight to the Ferrari dealer."

He smiled easily.

"I told him I had to think about it."

"So what's the future hold for Darby Moore, Mark? Anything?"

Beamon tapped his front teeth with his beer bottle for a few moments.

"You have some options. I can get you a fake passport that looks better than a real one and help you build a new identity. You can run, try to lose yourself. It's what you wanted, right?" She continued to stare into the fire.

"Here's the downside. They'll never stop coming remember Thailand? And no more climbing it's the first place they'll look for you.

No associating with your old friends, no going anywhere you might be recognized. You'd have to completely reinvent yourself. Maybe get a job as a stockbroker or something wear blue suits, drive a BMW. Be a person they won't be looking for."

"Where does that leave you? I assume that part of your deal is to give me up?"

"That's my problem. Don't worry about it."

"You said I had options, plural."

Beamon nodded.

"I might have found some leverage we can use.

Think of it as a bomb that'll most likely blow up in our faces."

"What is it?"

"That's not important."

"What if it doesn't blow up in our faces?"

"There's a slim chance that it could send David Hallorin down in flames."

Darby scooted back and leaned against the tire of her truck, suddenly looking very tired again.

"So what should I do?"

"I don't know, Darby ... I wish I could help you with the decision, but I don't think one option is really better than the other. The question is, what do you want to do?"

She stuck a foot out and kicked a small log onto the fire. Beamon could feel the warmth on his face and hands as the flames rose.

"Let me give you a scenario, Mark. There's a lightning storm coming in.

You're a thousand feet up on an exposed rock face. The leader you're belaying takes a fall and is unconscious, but the rope isn't long enough for you to lower him down. What would you do?"

He understood the point she was trying to make. She was telling him that she was completely lost in her current situation she wanted his help.

But it wasn't his call to make.

"I guess I'd ask you to give me an honest appraisal of my options, and make the decision myself."

She finished her beer in silence and nodded toward the six-pack sitting in the dirt next to him. He tossed her another one.

"Did you see that BMW driving in front of us on the highway when we were coming back here from D. C.?"

Beamon shook his head.

"The guy had personalized plates that said 3201 or something ..." Her voice trailed off as she opened her beer against one of the rocks in the fire ring.

"I don't think I'm following you," Beamon said.

"The guy went through all the trouble and cost of getting personalized plates and in the end, all he could think to put on them was the model number of his fancy car. That's it. That's all he had to say about his world ... I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that I like my life. I don't think I'd fit into the BMW crowd."

"I want you to go into this with your eyes wide open, Darby. I'm pretty good at finding people. But this ambiguous political crap isn't where my talents lie this is more Tom's thing."

"You're worried about him, aren't you?"

"What?"

"I think he's a good man. He's just having a bad time right now."

"Darby, let's try to focus here. I'm telling you that I'll most likely get us both killed."

"It's up to you, Mark. It sounds like Hallorin's given you the opportunity to walk away from this."

"I'm not going to hang you out to dry, Darby. You know that."

"Well then, I think we should stick a knife in that man and twist it."

Beamon leaned back in as far as the makeshift camping chair would let him and took a deep breath. The air temperature was dropping fast as the angle of the sunlight became more severe. He held up his beer in a toast.

"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees, right?"

She smiled sadly and returned his salute.

Jesus Christ," Beamon muttered to himself, and sunk further into the leather seat of his rental car. Despite the fact that they were now a good hundred yards away, the press still completely filled his rear-view mirror. An enormous semicircle of vans, satellite dishes, and well-coiffed slugs with microphones had put Robert Taylor's northern Virginia home under siege.

Thanks to a combination of erratic driving, sunglasses, and his still slightly swollen face, Beamon had successfully maneuvered his car through them without being recognized. Maybe his luck was finally changing.

He eased the car to a stop in front of a barricade set up in front of Taylor's driveway. It looked like the local police had done a fair job of keeping the Godless Hordes at bay, but Beamon was still reluctant to roll the window down and give someone with a telephoto lens an unobstructed view. He watched a tired, angry-looking cop come around the barricade and walk toward his car. The man's annoyance seemed to grow exponentially as he leaned down toward Beamon's closed window and rapped hard on it. Satisfied that the cop's body would block his face from any prying eyes, Beamon rolled the window down halfway.

"Sir, unless you have an appointment, I'm going to give you precisely two seconds to--" Beamon lifted his sunglasses and stuck his hand through the half open window, cutting the man off before he could finish his threat.

"Mark Beamon."

The man shook it, looking increasingly confused.

"Sure, I recognize you. But what are you doing here?"

"I need to talk to the senator--it's kind of an emergency. He doesn't know I'm coming."

The cop looked more than a little uncertain and glanced back at the surrounding press.

"Jesus, Mr. Beamon. It's Election Day. I don't know ..."

"He'll agree to the meeting--I can guarantee it. It just wasn't anything I could go into over the phone. You understand."

Now, that wasn't entirely true. He had initially tried to call Taylor's campaign headquarters in D. C." but found that it had been dismantled with uncharacteristic efficiency. In fact, it almost seemed as if it had never existed--which was probably the point. After that, he had made repeated calls to Taylor's home and had been told each time that the senator's calendar was completely filled for the foreseeable future and warned not to call again. He'd never even gotten high up enough to talk to someone he could effectively threaten.

So, here he was at the man's front door, prepared to start flashing unfortunate photographs if it became necessary. He hoped it wouldn't.

"Look, Mr. Beamon," the cop said nervously.

"All I can do is let you through here." He pointed to the next set of barricades about seventy-five feet in front of them.

"Then you'll have to talk to the senator's people."

"I'd thought our business was finished, Mr. Beamon," Robert Taylor said, moving through the clutter that dominated the small office at the back of his home.

His mode of dress had changed radically now that his bid for the presidency was over. The jeans and peach polo shirt had undoubtedly been carefully calculated to give him a healthy, relaxed look as he scrambled to maintain his power base. The effect was less than successful, though.

For some reason, the absence of the gray suit and red tie that had been his uniform for the last thirty years made him look artificial. Like a naked doll.

"I thought this would interest you." Beamon walked forward and put one of the more impressive Prodigy photographs on his desk. The old man glanced down at it for a moment and then swept it into a drawer.

"I suppose that you think I should be grateful to you for wrestling the file away from David Hallorin," he said, keeping an impressive poker face as his mind undoubtedly raced to calculate his options.

"But you're too late. It's done."

Beamon thought he seemed kind of aloof for a man with such a small penis, but decided to keep the observation to himself.

"You're right, Senator. David Hallorin is going to be elected there's no stopping it. But he doesn't ever have to take office."

"I see. You think you're going to take his place as my blackmailer."

Taylor stood and leaned across his desk, using his bony fists for support.