Storming Heaven (39 page)

Until now, she had kept them weak by creating conflicts and jealousy between them—showing occasional favor toward one or another in Kneiss’s name, passing out generous monetary rewards and severe penalties. But if they began to suspect what she had done, they would band together. Even Sines and his Guardians would be powerless in the face of that.

She considered for a moment the possibility of keeping Jennifer alive, telling the Elders that she had misinterpreted Kneiss’s words. Isolating his granddaughter as she had him.

But that was impossible. Eventually they would gain access to her. And then they would learn the truth. No. There was only one way.

“We can’t afford the luxury of keeping Mark Beamon alive anymore. We’ll deal with whatever problems his death causes when they arise.”

Sines remained silent.

“That’s all, Gregory,” she said, waving him away. “See to it. Now.”

“We don’t know where he is.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, rising slowly to her feet. “He was being watched …”

“Our people lost him in the storm yesterday. He hasn’t returned to his apartment and I don’t think he will.” Sines’s expression turned indignant. “You’ve left him very little to come back to.”

Sara swung an arm across the altar, sending a crystal urn and a set of elegant candlesticks crashing to the floor. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that! I assumed that you would be competent enough to watch one broken man. Perhaps it was my fault for trusting in your abilities.”

“It was a mistake to have him suspended. It freed him. Before, he was easy to watch and bound by the rules of the Bureau. Now—”

“I didn’t ask for your analysis!” she shouted. “I only asked that you follow my instructions.”

She stepped back and tried to calm down. This was not going to fall apart now. It couldn’t. Not because of an overweight low-level bureaucrat.

“He’s alone now,” she said aloud. “The man who helped him is dead. He’s alone. Homeless. He’s lost everything. He can’t possibly care about the girl anymore.”

Beamon was controllable, she told herself. He had to be.

F
IVE SHOTS OF BOURBON HAD SLOWED THE
shaking in Beamon’s hands enough for him to hold a lighter to the tip of his cigarette. He took a deep drag and felt the smoke fill his lungs. The instant lightheadedness and heaviness in his chest that he had been experiencing since he abandoned his new health regime seemed to be gone. A sign that the healing process, started when he moved to Arizona, had been completely reversed. Hallelujah.

A cockroach scurrying across the linoleum floor caught Beamon’s eye. He followed it as it found its way through the maze of boxes, cables, and computer equipment that were strewn across the room, finally disappearing beneath the overalls Goldman had worn when he’d wired the church’s phones. Draped over the empty box in front of Beamon, they looked like the old man’s goddamned ghost.

Relying heavily on the worn arm of the chair he was sitting in, Beamon pushed himself to his feet and stuffed the still-damp overalls into the box. He began to close the cardboard flaps but stopped himself midway, realizing that this was the closest thing Goldman would ever get to a burial.

He had known the man for almost twenty years. He’d never counted it up before, but that was how long it had been.

Goldman’s hair had been a little darker and fuller when they’d first met, and his skin had fit him a little better, but overall he’d been pretty much the same. People who had worked with him since the beginning—all dead now—swore he’d been a cantankerous old bastard at the tender age of nineteen.

Beamon wanted to call someone, but who? Goldman’s family was long gone. As far as he knew, the old man didn’t even have a secretary—having given up on them when they started objecting to being patted on the ass and called honey, and insisting that his battery of answering machines and mountains of software were more efficient and less flighty. But whenever he made that familiar speech, it was always with a tinge of loneliness in his voice.

Goldman had probably called him four or five times in the last three years. Beamon would pick up the phone and the old man would start into a tirade about something or other—the FBI, the CIA, politics, television. That was just the old man’s way—he’d always known it. Goldman didn’t know what else to say. But he had used Goldman’s harmless badgering as an excuse to avoid him. Avoid the man who had just given his life to save a little girl and to get him out of the trap he’d sprung on himself.

Closing the flaps on the box was like throwing dirt on a coffin. Beamon raised his glass in salute, sloshing about a quarter of it down his arm. “You were right, Jack. I am a worthless sonofabitch.” Words he’d have to remember for his own tombstone.

He scooted a chair up to the nearest computer terminal and unwrapped the computer disks containing the Vericomm audio from a piece of legal- sized paper that contained the instructions on how to listen to them.

He was having a little trouble bringing the instructions into full focus, but after a few minor wrong turns, he was faced with a screen full of file names. Each started with the surnames of the people on the line, then gave a date and time.

He slipped a pair of headphones over his ears and clicked twice on the first file. He recognized the name of one of the callers, but he couldn’t place it exactly. A governor or senator or something.

Two hours later, halfway through the last file on the list, he tore the headphones from his ears and threw them to the floor in disgust.

“Jesus Christ!” he said to the empty room.

He’d always been a pretty hard-boiled cynic when it came to the people who chose to crawl around in the muck of politics, but never in his darkest alcohol-induced imaginings would he have ever come up with the contents of those tapes. Pre- pubescent prostitutes, bribes, blackmail, unholy alliances, and borderline treason. And all in glorious digital stereo.

The really worrisome thing, though, wasn’t that the men running the government were into things that would make Caligula blush, it was that they weren’t bright enough not to talk about those things over the phone. No, Beamon reminded himself, actually, that wasn’t the most worrisome thing. The worst part of the whole thing was that the people whose voices were immortalized on his hard drive would slit their own mothers’ throats to keep their extracurricular activities quiet.

As he leaned back and lit another cigarette, the cell phone in his pocket started up again. He flipped it open and put it up to his ear. “Hello, Sara.”

The caller on the other end was silent for a moment. “Mr. Beamon.”

“Somehow I knew you’d reconsider,” Beamon said. “Real Christian of you.”

“I assume that you’re still interested in a meeting,” Sara said.

The fury and frustration clogging her throat would normally have given Beamon at least a little bit of satisfaction. But sitting there in Goldman’s empty apartment, he just felt numb. “Love one.”

“Where?”

“There’s a little restaurant called Antonio’s. It’s—”

“I know where it is.”

“There, then. I’ll let you buy me dinner. Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.”

Beamon flipped the phone shut and let out a long breath. Antonio’s would be crowded. He’d be safe. Probably.

He looked at the calendar on his watch. He—Jennifer—had six days. Sara would try to play him for time. He was going to have to make this bargaining chip count.

The phone rang again and he picked it up on its third ring. “Let me guess. You don’t like Italian.”

“Mark?”

The accent was a little thicker and the voice a little higher-pitched than he remembered it, but there was still no mistaking who it was.

“Hans? It’s good to hear your voice. How are you?”

“I am not well, Mark. Not well at all.” He spoke quickly. “I have word from our people in the church.”

“Yeah?”

“The church’s leadership has recognized that you cannot be deterred by the normal means. Mark, I believe they mean to kill you.”

Beamon lit another cigarette and blew the smoke into the phone. “I think you may be right, Hans.”

“You must get out of there! I assure you that they not only have the will but also the means. Come here, to the embassy. I can offer you protection while we talk. Perhaps together we have enough information to expose them for what they are.”

The offer was tempting. There was only one little problem. “What are your sources telling you about Jennifer Davis?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid. If the church does have her—and I know you believe that they do—they’re keeping it very quiet. Knowledge at the highest levels only.”

Beamon nodded and stared at the file names on the computer screen. “Well, when it’s all over, if I’m still standing, I’ll have an interesting story to tell you.”

“Make sure you’re still standing, then, Mark. A man with your reputation coming out against the church could do much to end the friction between our two governments.”

“And I want to help you do that, Hans. But the girl’s what I’m after. If I can do both, I will. If not, I’ll have to leave politics to the politicians.”

“Fair enough. But, Mark …”

“Yeah?”

“You must be careful.
Very
careful.”

“D
O YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE?”
Sara screamed as the door flew open and slammed into the wall.

Jennifer rolled off the bed, where she’d been lying in the half-sleep that seemed to have overtaken her in the last few days. The jolt of the cold floor cleared away some of the cobwebs, but she was still too groggy to dodge when Sara ran at her and pushed her back onto the bed.

Jennifer raised her hands too late to deflect a vicious open-handed slap that hither full in the face. The stinging pain in her cheek cleared her mind a little more as Sara jerked her head back. The face she found herself staring into was unfamiliar—it was Sara, but the woman’s eyes had gone wild and her pale complexion had turned bright red with rage.

“You think I’m going to lose everything because of you?”

She heard more than felt Sara’s second strike across her face.

“Albert would still be preaching on a street corner if it weren’t for me.”

Jennifer tried to push her away, but she was too weak. Sara brought her face close and tightened her grip on Jennifer’s hair. “No one’s coming for you, Jennifer. No one.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Jennifer felt the tears coming and choked off a sob. “I just want to go home! I just want to go home.”

The desperation and hate in Sara’s face began to fade into the now-familiar expression of cruel superiority. “You’ll never go home, Jennifer. You know that, don’t you? You should have never come here.”

“I didn’t come here,” Jennifer said, letting her body relax and her mind begin to drift away again. “You took me.”

Sara was talking in a voice so low that she could almost feel it in her chest, but the words were meaningless to her. She looked away and let her eyes wander across the blank wall, trying desperately to return to the make-believe world that had taken away some of her loneliness and fear. Her gaze lingered for a moment on the door to the room. It was still open, and the poorly lit hallway was visible through it. For a moment the image confused her. Something was different. It took a few seconds for her to grasp why she could see straight through to the far wall of the hallway. The man who always stood silently at the door wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there.

Jennifer could feel her heart rate slowly increasing. After a few more seconds, she could almost hear it. The blood began to push through to her limbs, clearing away the lethargy that had overwhelmed her as she’d slowly lost hope.

The meaningless drone coming from Sara stopped short when Jennifer turned back to face the woman.

Closing her mouth was probably the only thing that saved Sara’s front teeth.

None of the elaborate fantasies Jennifer had constructed over the last week could compare to thee
feeling of her fist connecting with the face that had tormented her and twisted everything in her life around. The face that had caused her father to go crazy and her mother to die. The face that she saw in the dark when she bolted awake at night.

Sara’s hand fell from her hair and she watched the woman stumble backward, finally falling hard in the middle of the room. She was on all fours trying to get back to her feet when Jennifer reached her at as full a run as the short distance between them would allow.

Sara tried to cry out, but it was strangled in her throat when she was nearly lifted off the ground by Jennifer’s bare foot.

A second kick, aimed at her head, glanced off her jaw.

Jennifer started to line up for another blow, feeling an indescribable sense of release as the burning in her stomach and the shaking in her limbs stopped. She wanted to kill this woman. She’d never wanted to hurt anyone before in her life, but now all she wanted was to feel this woman’s skull cave in beneath her foot.

There wasn’t time, though.

Instead of continuing the attack, Jennifer forced herself to use the momentum in her leg to jump over the woman and run from the room, slamming the door behind her and hoping desperately that it locked. Or, better yet, that she’d done too much damage for Sara to get up.

Which way?

To her left, the hall seemed to get darker, to her right, brighter. She picked right and began sprinting down the corridor, hoping the light was coming from the sun. She had to get out.

When the hall came to a T, she had to make another decision.
Come on, Jennifer,
she thought.
This is your chance. Don’t go off half-cocked. What are you going to do?

The possibility of her walking out of there was most likely less than zero, she realized. She had no idea where she was, it was the dead of winter, and she was in her underwear. A phone. She had to find a phone.

She moved as quietly as she could to the first door she saw, trying to get control of her breathing before someone heard her. It was a bathroom. She ducked back out of it and padded down the hall to the next door.