Free Fall (30 page)

Beamon was about to oblige when he realized that Whitlock might be his ticket to meeting the man in charge of this rather odd little government backwater.

"I wouldn't want you to get in any trouble, Carl. Why don't you do that."

Beamon dug a handful of files and loose papers from the box at his feet as the old man started dejectedly back to his office.

About ten minutes, and forty or so tedious government documents later, Carl came rushing back holding his hand over the receiving end of a cordless phone.

"Mr. Beamon!" he said breathlessly.

"They say you have to leave here immediately!"

Not an entirely unexpected reaction. Beamon reached up and pulled another box off the shelf. He grabbed a piece of paper from it and wrote on the back in bold letters.

TELL THEM I'M ARMED.

Whitlock stared at the message and seemed to still be staring after Beamon had dropped it on the floor and started digging through the new box.

"Uh, sir?" he heard the old man say into the phone. His voice washes it ant "He says he's armed." The shouting over the other end was clearly audible, though indecipherable from where Beamon sat.

Whitlock held out the phone.

"He wants to talk to you."

Beamon waved his hand dismissively, not bothering to look up from the documents he had spread across the floor.

"He won't talk," Whitlock said into the phone. The click as the person on the other end slammed the handset down seemed to echo through the building.

"They're coming."

"Thanks, Carl," Beamon said absently, concentrating on the problem taking shape before him.

"You wouldn't happen to have any hot coffee back in your office, would you?"

Thirty minutes later, Beamon was leaning his cramping back against an empty shelf with six boxes and countless pages of government documents piled up around him. Newberry had obviously been through those particular six and had apparently been excited. Papers and files had been stuffed haphazardly back into them, in stark contrast to the neatly packed boxes surrounding them.

Despite Newberry's interest, though, the only thing Beamon had found that wouldn't put a speed freak to sleep was some old FBI stuff. Even that, though, was only noteworthy because it was misfiled in a bunch of Ag Department droning. It consisted mostly of old Hoover-era stuff endless memos on petty crimes and even pettier criminals, budgets, internal pissing contests, commies hiding under the sofa cushions, and what have you.

Beamon flipped over an original memo signed by the Hoov himself, and started scribbling on it what he knew about this case from a Newberry-centric point of view.

Tristan had been working alone in a warehouse full of classified documents for four months. He was working slowly, seemingly randomly.

On his last day in the office, he breaks out of his pattern finds something interesting enough in one of the boxes to come back here and rifle through the ones around it, not even bothering to take them back to his desk. Based on what Beamon knew about the epic dullness of everything and everyone involved with Agriculture, it seemed reasonable to assume that the misfiled FBI documents were what got him so fired up.

Had he been looking for them? His work pattern and the fact that he was alone might suggest a search. Or was all this just a bunch of far-fetched mental masturbation? Beamon decided to assume that it wasn't and resumed working on his timeline.

Next, Newberry rushes out of there, standing the security guard up for a beer, calls in sick, does something unknown for a day, then goes on a climbing trip with Darby Moore. Then he turns up dead tirelessly perforated with an ice axe. Darby takes off, detouring through Conrad, Maryland, then to get her stuff in Wyoming, then disappears again, obviously running. Who was she running from? The cops? Why didn't she go straight to them if someone else killed Newberry? It would have been the natural reaction for anyone in her position.

Then and this was his favorite part an impeccably dressed attorney comes to his house and offers him three hundred thousand dollars to find the girl on behalf of an anonymous client. And by the looks of things, Beamon wasn't the only one who had been hired for this particular job.

There was a loud crash as the front door to the building was thrown open, breaking his concentration. Beamon carefully folded up the piece of paper he'd been doodling on and shoved it under the shelf behind him as two D. C. cops started closing quickly on his position.

"Come out from there!" one of them shouted.

"And, boy, I better be able to see your hands!"

Beamon stood slowly and shuffled out into the open with his hands on his head. The larger of the two cops kept an automatic trained on his chest as the other rushed forward and pushed him roughly to his knees and then to his face.

Beamon was read his rights and searched, wincing slightly when his arms were yanked behind his back and handcuffed. When he was safely bound, the cop covering him holstered his weapon and helped drag him to his feet. As soon as Beamon was standing under his own power, an imposing man in a gray business suit appeared through the door at the other side of the building and walked purposefully toward them. While he hadn't taken part in the fireworks, his grave, supervisory expression said clearly that he was in charge.

"I guess you're the man I've been looking for," Beamon said, being less than cooperative as the two cops tried to drag him from the warehouse.

"Did Tristan Newberry work for you?" He craned his neck to keep the man in view as he was pulled past.

"Where did all these files come from?

Why aren't they in the National Archives? Why is this place being closed down? And who the hell are you?"

Carl flashed an apologetic smile just before the two cops used Beamon's face to push the door open and marched him to the cruiser parked on the sidewalk. One of the cops opened the back door of the car and the other shoved him through it in a coordinated effort that suggested a significant amount of practice. Beamon struggled into a sitting position and leaned out the open door so they couldn't close it. The man in the gray suit was just then walking though the door that Beamon's head had been so instrumental in opening.

"No answers for me today?" Beamon said as one of the cops lined up to slam the door on his leg.

"Wait," the man said, stopping and cocking his head slightly to the right.

"All right, Mr. Beamon. Fine. My name is Price. This is one of many satellite warehouses used for overflow while we go through document declassification. Tristan Newberry worked here before he was killed.

This facility is being closed down because we've cleared enough space in the central warehouses to consolidate these documents. I believe that was all your questions?"

The cop holding the door wound up to slam it and Beamon pulled his leg back just in time to avoid a cracked shin. He immediately hooked a toe under the driver's seat and pulled himself up to the metal screen separating the backseat from the front.

"Hey, Price! How many government workers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

If the man knew the answer, he wasn't saying.

The truth was, there was no punch line that Beamon was aware of. All he knew was that the answer wasn't one. The U. S. government did not send a twenty-six-year-old kid alone into a warehouse full of classified government documents and tell him to knock himself out. Hell, there was probably a chain of command fifty people deep just to schedule the cleaning of the Pentagon's toilets.

Beamon leaned back into the seat and tried to move his hands into a more comfortable position as the two cops slid into the front and eased the cruiser back out onto the quiet street.

"Come on, guys," Beamon said.

"I haven't been arrested in years. How 'bout a little siren?"

Uavid Hallorin was focused almost completely on his peripheral vision.

At the edge of it, he could see the studio audience lined up in rows that ascended into the darkness and Oprah Winfrey standing on the stairs near the stage.

To the cameras and the millions watching the images they recorded, though, he was concentrating on Phillippe Mohamed, nodding thoughtfully as the bow-tied leader of the Nation of Islam spoke in precise, clipped sentences.

The last fifty minutes had been the most difficult of Hallorin's career.

It was critical that he show enough respect for Mohamed to keep his message from being degraded by obvious personal animosity, but not so much that Mohamed's many powerful white detractors would see Hallorin as weak. It was a nearly impossible balancing act that he had pulled off brilliantly. He already knew before seeing the tape that he had created one of the most riveting pieces of television ever broadcast.

Hallorin was still only half listening as Mohamed continued the diatribe he'd started some three minutes before. They were all the same--the evil of white America, the clandestine conspiracies to keep blacks down, the popular fantasy of African-American history.

"... pattern of slavery and degradation."

Mohamed folded his hands in his lap and let his final words hang, staring at Hallorin with the polite smile that seemed permanently etched into his face. Hallorin didn't reply right away, making it look like he was giving the man's words the deep thought that a very vocal minority of Americans thought they deserved.

"I believe," Hallorin started slowly, "that it's critical for the African American community to look forward to its future and not backward to its past. The slavery issue is always there, lurking in the background and creating an atmosphere of guilt and distrust. So let's talk about that for a moment." He took a sip from the glass of water next to him, mostly for the drama of the pause, but also because the television lights were close to making him break into a sweat something no politician could afford.

"Less than five percent of white Americans ever owned slaves the rest of them were just working their fields and trying to raise their kids.

Anyone from that small group who actually participated in the slave trade died generations ago it's unlikely that anyone in America has ever even met a person who owned a slave. On the other side of this story are the hundreds of thousands of white Americans who died freeing the slaves. But again, this is irrelevant the people who participated at that time in American history have been dead for a century."

Hallorin crossed his legs and let an ironic smile cross his face.

"Look at my situation. Right now, my opponents are glued to their TV sets waiting for me to say something they can use against me. Likewise the press." He looked over at Oprah.

"Present company excepted." The light on the camera covering him flashed off for a moment so that another could pick up Oprah's nodded acknowledgment.

"Are they doing this because they hate me? Because they have some kind of prejudice against me? No, it's because if I'm president they can't be. And, if to gain the presidency, they have to climb over my carcass, they will." He looked straight into the camera.

"That's not meant to be a slight against my opponents. Frankly, within certain bounds, I'd do the same to them." He readjusted his gaze back to Mohamed, who had a wonderful tendency not to interrupt.

"In a free society and this is a free society, or Ms. Winfrey wouldn't be one of the wealthiest entertainment moguls in the world the person who gets the prize is the one who wants it the most. My sense is that many African Americans lack a clear focus as to exactly what it is they want."

"But, Mr. Hallorin," Mohamed said, taking advantage of a brief pause.

"If I am not mistaken, you are last in this presidential race."

Hallorin smiled. Roland Peck was a true wonder. After watching probably five hundred hours of Mohamed on tape, Peck had anticipated nearly every statement Mohamed had made. He'd called that last one almost verbatim.

"You prove my point, Reverend," Hallorin responded smoothly.

"I want the presidency, sure, but I want it on my terms. I promised myself that I would be completely honest with the American people that I would say exactly what I believe and that I would not personally attack my opponents. In the end, if that philosophy hurts me I have no one to blame but myself."

Mohamed's frustration continued to build as Hallorin used Peck's carefully crafted responses to subvert everything the man said.

"Yes, Senator," Mohamed said, the anger starting to show around the edges of his well-practiced serenity.

"Your ideas on personal responsibility and social Darwinism are well documented. Anyone who does not fall into step with white society will be selected out. Victims of your horrifying ideas on welfare reform and your Eugenics Machine."

He'd actually given Mohamed too much credit. The Reverend was apparently going to continue walking into Peck's right crosses until the network felt sorry enough for him to turn the cameras off.

Hallorin raised his eyebrows just the way he'd practiced and affected a little uncomfortable squirming in his chair.

"I didn't think it would be my responsibility to defend the African-American community tonight, but I feel obligated to point out that there are more whites on welfare than blacks."