by Kyle Mills
“What are the letters for?”
“The first one relates to keywords. The computer has some really spectacular voice recognition software. It listens for interesting words. Bribe, sex, kill, Kneiss, Evolution, and money are a few. Various swear words, too. It also measures volume, on the premise that if people are shouting, they’re probably saying something interesting. If an important person hits on the right keywords, the conversation is given the code of one-? and it’s sent down to a group of listeners who get right on it.”
“Have I mentioned that you’re a genius?” Beamon said, feeling for the first time in a week that he might just weasel his way out of this thing with his skin still wrapped around him. “What’s the last letter for?”
“Oh, that signifies that it’s been listened to and tells you how interesting it actually turned out to be.” “So we’re getting the good stuff.”
” “So we’re getting the good stuff.”
“Oh, yeah. I think you’ll find it to be interesting listening. Could you hold on for a second?”
Beamon and Ernie both jumped at the loud crack that came over the speakers. It was followed by a muffled whimpering.
“Would you please shut up already? Try to be a man, for God’s sake.” Goldman’s voice, but it was clear that he wasn’t speaking to them.
“Mr. Goldman! Hello? Mr. Goldman? What the hell was that?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry, Mark. Just giving ‘em something to think about.”
Beamon realized that he’d been so elated by Goldman’s coup that he hadn’t really considered how he’d pulled it off. “Where are you, exactly?”
“Vericomm’s tech center. Hold on for just one more second.”
There was another crack that Beamon now knew was a gunshot.
“Yeah, you want some of that? Put your head out there again!” Goldman’s voice taunted over the speakers.
“What’s happening, Mark?” Ernie said, an expression of fear and confusion playing across her distorted features.
He held up his hand as Goldman’s voice started, giddy again. “Their security boys are looking pretty upset, I’ll tell you. Don’t think it’s going to be long before they figure out how to get that door the rest of the way open, though.”
“Jesus Christ, Jack, get the hell out of there,” Beamon said.
“Only one door out, Mark, and you can believe me when I tell you that they’ve got it covered.”
The gunfire that sounded over the speakers this time was fully automatic.
“Damn!” he heard Goldman shout. There was rustling and the sound of things being knocked over as the old man took cover.
“What the fuck. Jack! You must have had a plan when you went in there,” Beamon shouted desperately.
“I did. I planned on it being a one-way trip. I’ll keep the feed going as long as I can. Been good knowing you, boy. Good-bye, Ernie. Oh, and Ernie? Lose some weight and find a man, for God’s sake.”
The phone went dead and Ernie wheeled to the screen behind her. Tears began running down her round face as she stared at it.
After a little less than a minute she made a quiet choking sound. “The feed’s down.”
51
SARA RENSLIER DIDN’T TURN WHEN THE footsteps began echoing off the walls behind her, but continued to concentrate on the large cross hanging above the altar on invisible wires. A symbol of everything she had built. “Was there any damage?” she said when the footsteps stopped.
“Yes. A substantial amount of audio material was transmitted. All recent. All highly sensitive.”
Sara took a deep breath and felt the burn of bile rise in her throat. “Were you able to trace the phone number it went to?”
Silence.
She turned and faced Gregory Sines, the head of the church’s security force. His face was sunken and pale, accentuating the narrow pink scar that ran from his mustache to his right eye.
“Did you trace it?” she repeated.
“The call went to a hotel room, where it was connected to another number.”
“What number?”
“There’s no way to tell. Whoever set up the transfer knew what he was doing.”
“Who was he?” she said.
“The man who got into Vericomm? We don’t know yet. White male. Probably well into his eighties …”
“His eighties!” Her breath was coming short now. She closed her eyes and forced herself to calm down.
“He wasn’t carrying any identification. We found the car he was driving, but it had been rented under an alias. We’ve fingerprinted his body and sent copies to one of our people at the FBI. We should know more soon.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Beamon’s behind this. That man was working for him.”
Their private investigators hadn’t been able to dig up anything substantial to use against Beamon—he was unmarried so no affairs, he wasn’t a closet homosexual, no history of drug use or any other illegal activity. What they did find, though, was his drinking, his self-destructive behavior, and his lack of close friends or family—suggesting that he was a weak man with no foundation. A man the church’s psychologists insisted would be easily diverted.
It was clear now that they had underestimated him. And she knew that she had accepted their analysis too easily, considering Beamon a relatively small player in another one of the government’s hopeless bureaucracies.
Over the last decade, as the church’s power had grown, she had begun to discount the power of the world’s governments. Organizations led by men and women of shockingly limited intelligence who could be bought and sold with little more than glass beads. Beamon didn’t seem to fit into that category.
She backed away from Sines and sat down on the steps leading to the altar. There was no turning back. She had created a nearly perfect plan to maintain her power over the church. But the plan didn’t include a way out. When she had spoken her version of Kneiss’s dying wishes to the Elders, she had set something in motion that couldn’t be stopped. Jennifer had to die on the appointed date with all the Elders present. If she died before her time, the Elders—many of whom were already silently suspicious of her—would begin to put things together.
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.
52
FIVE 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.”
53
“DO 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.