Sphere Of Influence (2 page)
Read Sphere Of Influence Online
Authors: Kyle Mills
Chapter
2
MARK Beamon dodged clumsily, narrowly avoiding being clipped by the bus as he jogged across the busy street, only to be hit by a searing blast of exhaust as it passed by. By the time he made it to the sidewalk, sweat was stinging his eyes and his heart was pounding dangerously. He let his momentum carry him forward, skirting the densely packed office buildings in an effort to stay in the 105-degree shade.
His secretary had called his apartment at nine A
. M
. and woken him up. It was after eleven now and he was still half a mile from the office. As late and as hot as it was, it would have made sense to have parked beneath his building in the well-located space he now rated as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Phoenix office. But in the end his normal hike across the sun-scorched urban landscape had seemed more attractive.
He told everyone who would listen that he parked a mile from the office to force himself to get a little exercise. That wasn't really the reason, though, only a desirable side effect. In truth it was nothing more than a twenty-minute delaying tactic--thirty if he stopped for an ice cream. When Beamon finally made it to the edge of the stone courtyard in front of the FBI's new building, he took a deep breath and made a break for the fountain in front. There he hopped up and sat on its edge, letting the water mist protect him from the July sun. After a couple of minutes he was feeling cool enough to light a cigarette as his cell phone rang uselessly. He smiled when the caller gav
e
up but felt the smile fade when the ringing began again almost immediately. He finally wrestled the phone from his pocket and flipped it open.
"Hello, D."
"If I walk over to the window, am I going to see you sitting on the fountain, smoking?" his secretary asked. Beamon threw his cigarette down next to the fountain and ground it out with his toe. "I got hung up in traffic." "ETA?"
"Three minutes."
"You realize it's almost lunchtime?"
"Good-bye, D."
Beamon kept his head down as he weaved through the densely packed cubicles that made up the FBI's Phoenix office, pretending not to see the agents scurrying to get out of his way. A few brave ones nodded and smiled, but most seemed content to just make a run for it. Beamon recognized the deterioration in his mood over the past year and knew he was in serious danger of becoming another of a million old, burned-out, pain-in-the-ass bureaucrats. But he didn't know how to stop what was starting to seem to be an inevitable slide.
"Skidding in at the last minute," D. said, appearing from behind a fake plant and following him into his fishbowl of an office. She looked at her watch. "Eleven twenty-five. You're supposed to meet with Bill at eleven thirty. . . . Wait a minute. Are you damp?"
Beamon fell into his leather chair and peeked out at her between the stacks of paper piled on his desk. "It's four hundred degrees out, D."
"So that's sweat and not fountain water?".
"As far as you know."
"Yeah, right. I'm having surveillance cameras installed on the front of the building tomorrow. You owe me lunch." "Pick a restaurant."
"I told Bill you'd be in the conference room," she said, turning on her heel and disappearing through the door to his office.
***
It suddenly occurred to Beamon that almost everything lastingly bad in his life had begun in a conference room. While it was true that he'd been shot at, beaten up, dumped by countless women, and once even caught in an honest-to-God avalanche, the pain he'd suffered from those things had been relatively brief By the same statistical logic that suggested you might live forever if you never entered a hospital, it seemed certain that a great deal of pain and misfortune could be avoided by simply never setting foot in another conference room.
He stared blankly at the table in front of him and the empty chairs surrounding it, remembering a similar setting when he first heard that he was going to be made a SAC. He'd left the meeting elated, acknowledging the promotion for what it was--a miracle on a level with the parting of the Red Sea or the sheer perfection of a warm Krispy Kreme doughnut.
Thirteen months ago, his career--and by virtue of that, his life--had pretty much fallen apart. He'd managed to make enemies of most of Congress with a political corruption investigation that had fallen in his lap despite every effort to dive out of the way. And after embarrassing the hell out of the Washington elite, he'd looked around and seen what little support he had from Bureau management quickly disappearing. Not long after, the FBI had decided to mend a few fences by offering him up as a political sacrifice.
When it had looked almost certain that he would end up doing some jail time on a trumped-up charge, the political climate had suddenly changed. A new president was elected and his best friend ended up as the White House chief of staff Suddenly he'd found himself transformed from scapegoat to golden boy. At the time it had seemed like his luck was finally turning around. Now he wasn't so sure.
"Mark?"
Beamon spun his chair around to face a man of about thirty-three with FBI-issue hair and suit. He had his head poked into the conference room but seemed reluctant to enter. Probably a bad sign.
"Bill. Good to see you," Beamon lied. "Come on in." He did, albeit a bit hesitantly. Beamon watched carefully as the younger man closed the door and slowly crossed the . room, finally taking a seat and placing a thick folder in the center of the table. .
"Got your black hood and scythe in there?" Beamon joked. At least, he hoped it was a joke.
No response. Another bad sign.
Every couple of years or so the FBI field offices had a team from headquarters descend on them and plow through every investigation, budget, report; and management decision, carefully second-guessing each one. Right now it was Phoenix's turn. Bill Laskin was the chief of the inspection staff that had been looking under the hood of Beamon's office for the last two weeks. And, for better or for worse, he was doing a hell of a thorough job.
"We're about winding down, Mark," Laskin said, pulling a thick document from the folder in front of him. "We've finished our draft report." His tone suggested that it wasn't entirely complimentary. "I thought we could go over a few of the points and then you could look at it and give it some. . . some thought." Beamon grabbed the report unceremoniously, paging through as its author squirmed uncomfortably. With each page of neatly typed criticism he could feel what little strength he still had draining away.
"You know, Mark, last night I was sitting around my of/ fice and I started going through your report on the CDFA investigation." Beamon didn't look up from the well-organized and meticulously documented report. Maybe he could find an appropriate quote for his tombstone when he finally had that well-deserved stroke.
"Why?" "Because it was an incredible case. I mean, thousands of people died. The pressure must have been unbearable. I can't even imagine how you were able to hold it together and resolve it so quickly." The case Laskin was referring to was the most infamous of Beamon's career. An ex-DEA agent had decided to try poisoning the U
. S
. narcotics supply to stem the use of illegal drugs. It had worked.
"Bound to* happen, I suppose. Frustrating job, the DEA," Beamon said, his mouth feeling increasingly dry as he continued through the pages.
"The report's really clinical, though," Laskin continued.
Beamon flipped a few more pages. "Clinical?" "What I mean is . . . well, I'm curious. . ." "Spit it out." Laskin cleared his throat. "How did you feel about the whole thing?" That finally made Beamon look up. "What do you mean 1" "I mean, drug use was plummeting. People were dying, sure, but drug use was dropping like a stone. If you hadn't caught those guys, would people have just stopped using?
In the end, would lives have been saved?" Beamon stared past the man at the wall. It-was tempting to talk about his old cases, his old triumphs. But those things were past. He wasn't the FBI's whiz-kid investigator anymore. He was a grown-up-a SAC.
"I was just following orders," Beamon said, affecting a thick German accent. The attempt at. a joke sounded strained, even to him.
"No, seriously, Mark."
"I am serious," Beamon said quietly, sliding a finger beneath the back of the report and flipping it closed. .
The young man took the hint and just nodded, eyes glued to the document lying on the table. He seemed to have lost his ability to blink. .
Laskin was clearly a fan-something he'd proven over the last two weeks by being more knowledgeable about Beamon's past investigations than he himself was. The younger generation of agents liked to joke about people fro~ Beamon's era, calling them "the gun toters" and decrying their lack of sophistication while secretly worshiping them.
In many younger agents' minds Beamon was the last of the old-school investigators-the hard-drinking, chainsmoking, sometimes arrogant men who had created the
larger-than-life myth of the FBI agent. The truth was less romantic. Beamon couldn't help feeling that this wasn't his FBI anymore. That he'd been left behind.
"Take some time looking that over, Mark. I'm interested in your comments. Obviously it's not set in stone. I think there are some areas where your ASACs could be giving you more support. . . ."
Beamon pulled out a cigarette and lit it despite the ironclad no-smoking policy in the building. "No."
"What?"
"Whatever's wrong with this office is my doing."
When Beamon glanced up from the inspection report in his lap, the office looked deserted. The sun was still streaming powerfully through the window behind him, reflecting off a clock that read six P
. M
. Taking off his reading glasses, he squinted through the glass wall that made up the front of his office. No one.
He shrugged and perched the glasses back on his nose. Normally the complete disappearance of his staff would be worth looking into, but the inspection report he'd spent the better part of the day reading had deadened pretty much everything in him, including his normally overactive sense of curiosity.
He reached over and picked up the untouched pastry D. had brought him, examining the almond-encrusted dough, damp with butter. These had once been his absolute favorite, but now the thought of eating it--or anything else for that matter--turned his stomach.
He tossed the pastry in the trash can and flipped to the next, and hopefully more positive, page in the report. After a quick scan it turned out to contain another sharp criticism of his number two that was, unfortunately, completely untrue. Beamon took a red pen from his desk and crossed through it. In the margin he wrote a brief note as to why the deficiency that had been uncovered by the inspection staff was, in fact, his own fault.
Sighing quietly, he flipped back through the report and scanned the similar commentaries scrawled on nearl
y
every page. He couldn't help wondering if he was writing himself out of a job.
"Mark?"
Beamon looked up at the young woman hovering nervously in the doorway to his office.
"Sorry, Mark, I don't mean to bother you, but we thought you might have the inside track on this thing." Beamon threw the inspection report on the desk. Enough for tonight--another ten pages and he was going to have to relocate to the ledge outside his window. "Thing? What thing? And where the hell is everybody?" She looked at him as though he were asking trick questions.
"We're all in the back, watching the news. Don't you know what's happened?"
Beamon shrugged and she nodded toward the television bolted to the wall. He pulled a remote from his drawer and flipped it on. When he looked back toward the doorway, he saw that the young woman had slunk away.
MSNBC's Forrest Sawyer looked a little haggard as he leaned forward heavily on his desk. A logo across the bottom of the screen read "The Latest Threat."
"I think we have time to bring up the picture and audio one more time before we take you to the White House." Sawyer faded out, replaced by a still image that shimmered slightly on the screen. The exposure was a little dark, apparently lit only by a low sun filtering through dense overcast and distant mountains.
"The geological formation in the background has been preliminarily identified as the Wind River Range in Wyoming," Sawyer's disembodied voice said. "MSNBC, as well as a host of other news agencies, have received copies of this photograph and are having it reviewed by experts in the field. So far there is nothing to suggest that it is anything but genuine. . . ."
Beamon walked around his desk and jumped up on a chair to get a closer look at the photo on the screen.
The subject of the picture was something that looked like an overly simplistic artillery gun. It was nothing more than a large metal cylinder attached to a two-wheele
d
trailer. A man in traditional Arab garb, with his face obscured by swaths of white cloth flowing from his turban, stood between the gun and an open crate containing what looked like a ten-foot-tall rocket.
A scratchy hiss became audible through the television's speakers, followed by a heavily accented male voice. "Our targets are many: shopping malls, office buildings, schools. . . . We also have Stingers sold to us by your CIA to destroy airliners...."