Free Fall (60 page)

Apparently, Hallorin had found the situation unacceptable. The boy whom he had taken in at eighteen, who had masterminded his rise to the presidency, who had looked to him as a father, was found shot dead in front of his Georgetown home. A victim of random violence according to the police report, but more likely a victim of David Hallorin's all-encompassing ambition.

Beamon barely noticed when the priest fell silent and the coffin began to sink into the grave on quiet hydraulic rails. He watched with mild interest as the old man across the hole from him broke out of his motionlessness and walked carefully over the slick ground to Peck's veiled wife, offering his hand. She turned her back on him without a word and started for her car as quickly as her spike heels would allow.

"You were a friend of Roland's?" the man said to Beamon as he worked his way around the open grave and came within earshot.

"I guess you could say that," Beamon answered, shaking the man's ice cold hand.

"My name's Jeffery Tanin." He looked around him at the now empty graveyard.

"I read Roland's obituary. It seems he did well I'd hoped there would be more people." "How did you know him?" Beamon said out of politeness more than a desire to prolong the conversation. He had a plane to catch and this graveyard seemed to have the effect of amplifying his uncertainty about the events he had involved himself in.

"I used to be a foster parent," Tanin said.

"I had Roland for a few years when he was a teenager."

Beamon didn't respond. He hadn't known that Peck was an orphan.

Now that he thought about it, he knew almost nothing of the man. What he did know, though, was that Peck was a murderer, pervert, and sociopath all qualities he didn't much admire.

"Deep down, he was a good boy... And so brilliant," the old man said more to the grave than to Beamon.

"But he was too far gone when he arrived at my door. His mother died when he was four and his father was a nightmare.

He had sexually abused Roland's sister for years, often in front of him.

No one did anything, though, until he finally killed her. She was ten, Roland was twelve. I believe the man died in prison."

They stood there in the snow for a while longer. Tanin spoke, a little incoherently, about Peck, and Beamon tried, unsuccessfully, to block out his words.

He could admit that he had screwed up a lot in life. But it had always been the result of doing what he knew was right. Until now.

Mark Beamon smiled imperceptibly, as he always did when he entered the doors of the expansive Phoenix office of the FBI. He wandered through it, taking in the sound and the smell, watching the young, idealistic agents moving purposefully from desk to desk. This was the FBI. It didn't have anything to do with politics or upper-level management or compromise. This was what he couldn't force himself to leave behind. It was just like an addiction--he knew it wasn't good for him, but he wasn't strong enough to break the habit. Not yet anyway.

"Mark Beamon, back from the void!"

Beamon looked up from the floor at the sound of the familiar voice.

"D. Thank God." His indispensable secretary from Flagstaff had been initially resistant to the financial hardships that would accompany following her boss to his new post in Phoenix. Fortunately, with his newfound political clout, Beamon had been able to make her an offer she couldn't refuse.

"You all right, Mark? You sound a little down."

"Fine."

"Fine? Look around you! You're the head of one of the biggest offices in the Bureau in one of the sunniest towns in the world!"

"Where would I be without you to put things in perspective for me?"

"Lost. Wandering helpless in the desert."

"Right. Exactly. D." really, I don't think I've said it out loud, but thanks for coming down."

She smiled uncomfortably and shrugged her shoulders.

"No problem."

"Okay, then. I'm going to go into my office and start to wade through my mail. If any of the God-knows-how-many people that work for me now want to talk to me, tell them I'm dead."

She nodded her understanding and went back to the box she was emptying onto her desk.

All he'd wanted was to extricate himself from the legal problems that had been plaguing him and get back his little job running the Flagstaff office. The first part of that wish had been taken care of weeks ago.

The Bureau had been quick to reevaluate his qualifications as a scapegoat when they'd received a letter from the attorney general stating that he had found the charges against Beamon to have no merit.

The call from soon-to-be President Hallorin proclaiming his admiration for Beamon and his willingness to throw his full political and financial weight behind Beamon's defense hadn't hurt either.

The suddenness and force of the whole thing had so terrified the Bureau's senior management that they had not only personally apologized but promoted him to SAC of the fucking Phoenix office a management nightmare that he still hadn't completely faced yet.

Beamon dropped into the expensive leather chair behind his ridiculously large desk and pulled a stack of mail onto his lap. He jabbed at the remote built into one of his drawers and heard the volume of the TV come up to an audible level, filling the room with David Hallorin's voice.

He'd heard the speech before, of course a surprising little ditty in which Hallorin had suddenly taken on a pacifying tone. National Healing, Clean Slate, Meaningless Youthful Indiscretions, the Foundations of a Great Nation that will Rise Again that kind of crap.

With his new kinder, gentler approach, and his focus on bipartisan leadership, the press had started to jump on the David Hallorin bandwagon. The economy had taken a sharp upward turn, and people who hadn't voted for David Hallorin were starting to lie about it.

Of course, it was really all Tom Sherman. Hallorin didn't open his mouth unless Sherman had signed off on what was going to come out of it.

The situation was killing Hallorin slowly, stripping him of his identity and the ego that had had been his entire existence for most of his life.

It was more than the bastard deserved. And Tom Sherman was more than America deserved.

Beamon looked up from the mail when his favorite part came on. A reporter asked a rather pointed question about one of Hallorin's campaign promises and the old familiar anger started to creep into the new president's voice. A moment later, a demure-looking Tom Sherman stepped forward and whispered something in Hallorin's ear. With a pained smile, Hallorin announced that he had been told that he had time for only one more question and that pacifying tone magically returned.

Beamon watched Hallorin walk from the podium and stared blankly at the television for a little over a minute as the press conference wrapped up, then went back to work.

He didn't open most of the mail, instead dumping it in a box that would go to D. for sorting and paraphrasing. He was about half an hour into clearing the desk when he came upon a letter with a colorful foreign stamp. There was no return address.

He stared at it for a few seconds, turning it over in his hands. He'd known for weeks now that Vili Marcek had been promised an additional two hundred thousand dollars for causing the death of Darby Moore. Beamon had been desperately trying to find either one of them, calling in damn near every favor he and Tom Sherman had, to no effect. Darby had obviously taken him seriously when he told her to disappear for a couple of months.

He took a deep breath and held it as he slit the top of the envelope and pulled out the single sheet of paper it contained. It looked like an old-style Teletype, written in English but with Chinese or some other Asian script across the top and bottom. The single paragraph in the middle of the page was a brief, no-frills report relating the death of Vili Marcek on a remote Himalayan peak. Beamon let out the air caught in his lungs in one long rush as he reread the report, lingering on a brief quote by Darby Moore, the only person to witness Marcek's two-thousand-foot fall.

Across the bottom of the Teletype, in bold capital letters, Darby had written a single line. He recognized it as a paraphrase of something he had said to her the last time they'd spoken.

A fairly black piece of justice.

Beamon stared at that sentence for a long time, remembering Darby in those brief moments usually after she'd had a few beers when she managed to forget her friends' deaths and their nearly hopeless situation.

When she would spark with enthusiasm and innocence. He had hoped that she would be able to find that again, that David Hallorin hadn't taken it away from her forever ... "Mark. Mark? Are you okay?"

Beamon looked up at his secretary and balled up the Teletype.

"Fine.

Great."

"You don't look great," she said, heaping another pile of mail onto his desk and glancing down at the box that was overflowing at his feet.

"I assume that's for me."

Beamon nodded.

"Before you start on it, though, could you write up a press release for me?"

"Sure. What's it going to say?" She picked up a notepad off his desk.

"Something to the effect of "At the request of the Fayette County Sheriff's Office and the West Virginia State Police, the FBI will be providing assistance on the Tristan Newberry murder case. According to an FBI spokesman, Darby Moore has been ruled out as a suspect based on new evidence." I'll give you the list of people to send it to as soon as I find it on my desk."

She tore off the page she'd written on and dropped the pad back on the desk, causing an overly tall stack of paper to teeter dangerously.

When she reached out to stop it, she spotted the small blue velvet box partially hidden behind a stapler.

"What's that?"

"What?"

She reached across him and picked up the box.

"Don't " It was too late. She'd opened it and already her eyes had taken on that specific glassy look that women get when they see a diamond.

She pulled the gold chain from the box and examined the pendant attached to it with total concentration.

"Not gonna pull out your loupe?"

"God, Mark. This is beautiful. I thought you said you and Carrie weren't seeing each other anymore."

"I'm going to try to change that." Beamon held out his hand, but D. ignored him and continued her silent appraisal.

"Don't say anything about this, D. It'd be kind of embarrassing if she does the smart thing and throws that back in my face, you know?"