Free Fall

by Kyle Mills

  So he’d no choice but to drop out and take a shot at landing a job in one of the few growth industries left in America: the government. Or more specifically, declassifying documents through the newly fortified Freedom of Information Act.

  He showed up for the open interview and was directed toward a waiting room so full of other potential applicants that some of them had been forced to stake out small areas of industrial green tile and sit on the floor. After a few seconds of milling through the crowd and discovering just how jealously those tiles were being guarded, he’d headed for the door. What chance did he have? He was just a penniless law school dropout from a poor farming family with no connections and no background in government work.

  He’d been halfway down the hall, and nearly to freedom, when a young woman in thick, black-framed glasses jogged up behind him and took him by the arm. He could still hear her voice: “Mr. Newberry. I’m sorry. You were directed to the wrong interview.”

  He’d followed obediently through the maze of hallways, stairs, and elevators, long enough for his normally infallible sense of direction to start to spin, then was deposited in a small, windowless office somewhere deep in the building.

  It was there that he had met some bald guy with marginal dental work and heard the rather cryptic legend of the Misplaced Documents. The guy had gone on to tell Tristan how his résumé was most impressive—which it wasn’t—and how he seemed to be imminently qualified to help in the search—which he wasn’t. Blah, blah, blah.

  At first he hadn’t been that interested in the man’s story. He just wanted a secure job that would pay enough to keep him living at a reasonable standard until the economy turned around. But the more the guy talked—in circles, mostly—the more captivated he became. Bald Guy—he honestly couldn’t remember his name—had told him that the person they were looking to hire would be kind of the Indiana Jones of the National Archive. Now, how could anybody resist a pitch like that?

  “On three,” Carl said.

  Tristan followed Carl’s lead and gently swung the box as the old man counted. On three they dropped it on the card table Tristan had been using as a workspace since his first day.

  “I’ll go grab the stuff you took out,” Carl said, already moving off in the direction they’d come from. Tristan nodded absently and peeked into the box. What would it be today? Farm subsidy budgets from the 1940s? An in-depth statistical analysis of the height of wheat versus inches of rainfall? Whatever.

  As was so often the case, the reality of the job hadn’t quite lived up to the initial hype. The real story was that, a while back, some government moron had deposited a hand-truck full of apparently sensitive FBI documents in the middle of an Agriculture Department storage facility. And now they needed to be found before the warehouse could be emptied into the public domain.

  It hadn’t seemed like a particularly monumental task until Bald Guy had started slapping down thick stacks of bound paper.

  “Revision of the filing system,” he’d said. Slap.

  “Original warehouse closed down, documents moved.” Slap.

  “Broken water line, documents moved again.” Slap.

  “Construction.” Slap. It had gone on like that until there was a paper trail nearly eight inches in height teetering on the desk.

  Strangely, though, the job was right up Tristan’s alley. Since grade school whenever he’d taken those tests where you had to find patterns in streams of numbers or geometric shapes, he’d always scored off the scale. He’d told Bald Guy as much during his interview and gotten a disinterested smile that seemed to say “lucky for us.”

  Tristan sighed heavily and rubbed his temples as he dropped into the worn canvas chair. Day in and day out, it was the same. Endless hours cross-referencing old government records he could care less about, trying to follow the murky trail of a few pointless FBI needles in the Ag Department’s haystack.

  When he’d finally pulled his nose out of the endless procession of boxes and files to look around him, though, it had finally struck him how strange his situation was. Why was he here alone, with only an ancient security guard to watch over him? Or more accurately, a security guard and a battery of video cameras. Tristan looked up at the sleek, ultra-compact camera bolted to the dilapidated wall in front of him and wondered again who was watching. Not Carl—as near as Tristan could tell the cameras didn’t output anywhere in the building. It had started him wondering. When he’d told Bald Guy about his childhood test scores, had that smile really said “lucky for us”? Or had it said “we know”?

  It was little things like that that had kept him interested. He’d always been burdened with an overactive sense of curiosity. Why wasn’t anybody checking up on him? He hadn’t talked to Bald Guy, or anyone else in a position of authority, since he’d started. Why did some of the file records seem almost intentionally cryptic and obtuse?

  It looked like he might be getting closer to finding out. A hell of a lot of detail work and two back-to-back strokes of blind luck had led him to the section of the warehouse from which he was now pulling boxes. Four months, six days, four hours and thirty-three minutes of mind-numbing torture and he was finally starting to get somewhere.

  Tristan leaned forward and turned up the small television resting on the edge of the table, but his attention was instantly diverted to his portable computer when it picked up the vibration and the screensaver came on. A million pixels glowed out the picture of a man struggling up a snow-covered mountain surrounded by sky. Tristan reached out longingly and touched the screen, but withdrew his hand when Carl came around the corner and dropped a portion of the remaining files on the table.

  “Who you votin’ for, Tristan?”

  “Huh?”

  Carl nodded toward the TV screen where the highlights of last night’s presidential debates were being rerun for the hundredth time.

  “Oh. I don’t vote.”

  “What do you mean you don’t vote? You’re a college boy. If anybody should, it ought to be you. You understand it all.” Carl pointed at the screen. “I’m starting to like that Hallorin guy. I mean, he always seemed like he had something to say, but he was such a hard-ass. Now, though, he seems … I don’t know, less …”

  “Glasses,” Tristan said absently as he centered a dusty file in front of him.

  “What?”

  “It’s the glasses. In the last election, when the economy was riding high, everyone wanted to be associated with the government—take credit for the boom. Now, with the Dow at forty-five hundred, it’s a whole new ballgame. No one wants to look like a politician. Senator Hallorin, our previously obnoxious third-party candidate, has gone with eyeglasses. And as you pointed out, they have the added benefit of softening his image.” Tristan motioned to the screen with the binder-clipped stack of paper in his hand. “Now our clever Democratic candidate has completely bucked the conventional wisdom of facial hair being the political kiss-of-death and gone with the beard for the same reason. Senator Taylor, our flat-footed Republican front-runner, missed the boat again. His only recourse now is to shave his head. But since he’s leading by thirteen points, don’t hold your breath. Packaging, Carl. It’s all about smoke and mirrors.”

  The old man shifted uncomfortably and shoved his gnarled hands in his pockets. “I really don’t think it’s what they look like that’s important, it’s what they say—”

  “What they say?” Tristan interrupted, feeling his mood darken as it always did when the subject of politics came up. “They aren’t saying anything.” He pointed to the television again. “Our Democratic hopeful’s gotten used to all the limos and butt-kissing he gets as vice president and doesn’t want to be pounding the street looking for a job. So he’ll tell you that he’s dedicated to supporting the poor and out of work. But then he’ll get real vague when it comes time to tell us exactly how he plans to pay for it.”

  Carl tried to say something, but Tristan cut him off.

  “Then there’s ol’ Bob Taylor. He’ll tr
y to blame the sad condition of the country and the world economy on the current Democratic administration, and try to make you forget that the Republicans have controlled Congress through all this and that he’s been a major power in that party since the dawn of time. Notice how, when he talks about his history of leadership, he never mentions Congress? No, he always talks about the past—his days as head of the CIA, the Cold War, the Carter years.

  “And last, but not least—except in poll numbers—we have your newly bespectacled Independent candidate, David Hallorin. He’ll try to convince the public that the country’s current condition is the result of years of mismanagement by both established parties, which is essentially true. What he’ll leave out, though, is that the parties have pretty much just followed the public’s mandate to not rock the boat—boat rockers don’t get elected. And while he’s dancing around the fact that the American people got exactly what and who they asked for, he’ll offer up all kinds of ridiculously oversimplified solutions to America’s complex problems, that, even if they would work, he’d never be able to get passed. If he wins—and he won’t even come close—the established parties will combine forces to ensure that he never gets anything done so they’ll never again have to worry about a third-party candidate becoming a serious threat.”

  Carl began to shuffle off toward his minuscule office near the front door of the warehouse, his shoulders a little more stooped than usual. “Wait! You haven’t told me who you’re voting for, Carl,” Tristan called after him.

  “Guess it’d be stupid for me to even bother,” the old man said as he disappeared around one of the myriad box- stuffed shelves.

  Tristan leaned out around the table and tried to catch a last glimpse of the old man. “Don’t be that way, Carl.” He leaned out a little further, but still couldn’t see around the shelf. “Come on, man. Don’t take me so seriously. I’ll buy you a beer after work and tell you why I’m full of shit.”

  There was no answer, but Tristan knew that by five o’clock the old man would have forgotten everything but the beer offer.

  He quietly admonished himself as he started through the pile of papers in front of him. Not everyone wanted or needed to hear his brilliantly cynical analysis of the American political system. He didn’t even know ifhe wanted to hear it anymore. Time to just deal with the fact that his carefully laid plan of being a millionaire at thirty-six was as dead as any dream could be. A bunch of useless politicians had seen to that

  Tristan started into the stack of paper in front of him, flipping quickly from page to page, taking in the gist of each document or binder of documents. When he was satisfied they were of no interest, he placed them in a neat pile to the right of his chair.

  Within a few hours, it was starting to look more and more like another dead end. This box was no different from any of the others. Luck or no luck, he knew it would take only a minor error on his part or on the part of the documents he was relying on to completely throw him off.

  Tristan swung a fist at the box in frustration, knocking it to the floor. He was about to start refilling it when he noticed a creased piece of paper caught under one of the flaps at the bottom.

  He gave it a cursory glance and then dropped a stack of documents on top of it before his mind had a chance to fully process what he’d seen. A moment later, he was on the floor overturning the box and sweeping the loose files out of his way. Snatching up the single sheet of paper still trapped in the flap, he stared at the letterhead. The mundane Department of Agriculture seal he’d seen fifty thousand times in the last four months, six days, seven hours and twenty-two minutes had been replaced by the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Tristan realized that the silent camera above was recording the fact that he was kneeling on the floor with his mouth hanging open. As the initial shock of actually finding something started to wear off, he was left a little deflated. He stood as casually as he could, tossed the memo back into the open box, and started randomly reshuffling the stuff on his desk as he tried to think through his situation.

  If it was a false alarm, a lone piece of misfiled paper, it didn’t mean much. But what if it wasn’t? What if he was right and he was closing in on the documents he’d been hired to find? This was the government—he wasn’t being paid for results, just for showing up. There would be no bonus for a job well done, no big promotion. What if he’d just worked himself out of a job?

  Tristan hefted the box and started struggling back toward the shelves where he’d found it. He concentrated on staying relaxed, knowing that there was a camera at the other end of the path cut through the metal storage units and that it was monitoring his progress. He turned right into the row of shelves where he’d found the box in his hands and slid it back into the empty space it had left. He stretched his back in an exaggerated motion, using the opportunity to scan the walls and shelves around him and confirm that he was no longer in a camera’s line of sight.

  When he had completely satisfied himself that he wasn’t being watched, he began quietly pulling down the boxes that surrounded the one he’d just replaced. He dumped the first three out on the floor and began pawing through the contents as quickly and efficiently as he could. Five minutes of less than methodical rummaging produced a few more loose FBI documents where they shouldn’t have been, but nothing anyone would care about. Maybe the strange circumstance of his hiring and job description was nothing more than typical government inefficiency.

  He glanced at his watch and guessed that he had about another five minutes before his disappearance from the camera-covered areas of the building started to look unusually long. He refilled the boxes at his feet and put them back where he’d found them, then pulled down three more, dumping their contents onto the floor.

  Six was the magic number.

  Down near the bottom, beneath a six-inch-thick document on foreign lettuce production, he found a brown accordion folder tied together with a nylon strap and sealed with a large sticker depicting a faded FBI seal. The label at the top right carried a single word: PRODIGY.

  He placed the folder on the floor behind him and repeated his search pattern, dumping another three boxes on the floor. Ten minutes beyond the five he’d given himself, it seemed clear that this sealed folder was unique. Had the rest of the Misplaced Documents been broken up and disbursed over the years? Did they even exist?

  He knew what he was supposed to do now. Call the number on the card he’d been given—Baldy’s number, he guessed—and hand it all over. It had been made quite clear to him that when he found the probable location of the documents, he was to do nothing but get on the phone.

  Tristan pressed his back against the shelf behind him and slid to the floor. He dragged the folder onto his lap and felt his heart begin to pick up its pace as he fondled the nylon strap.

  The right thing to do was to make that call and hand all this stuff over to the powers that be. But what would happen then? There had been no promises made. While this wasn’t a great job, it paid pretty well and he was more or less his own boss.

  Tristan began thumping his fingers rhythmically on the file in his lap. What if he just forgot to mention that he found the stuff? He could come in every day and go through the motions for the cameras. Long lunches, good paycheck, no pressure. Then, when the economy started to show signs of recovery, he’d take the money he’d socked away straight down to the Georgetown front office and jump-start his education.

  But what about the file in his lap? He looked down at it. If he was right and the story he’d been fed was a load of crap, then the government was looking for something specific. There might be something in it worth reading. Hell, it was his duty to read it, right? What if it contained a cure for cancer or something?

  He ran his index finger over the seal affixed to it, aware that he’d been hidden away in this corner of the warehouse for far too long now.

  The months of speculation and suspicion quickly overcame his nervousness, though, and he worked the knot out of
the nylon string holding the file together. Why he didn’t cut it he wasn’t sure, since he was going to have to tear through the seal anyway. It just seemed wrong.

  He held his breath for a moment, making a final, irreversible decision, and gave the flap on the folder a tug. The seal ripped halfway. Its tenacious grip on the brown cardboard made him even more uneasy. He suddenly wasn’t sure that he wanted to do this. He wanted to stand, to put it back, but his curiosity wouldn’t let him.

  He gave it one last tug and dug out the individual folders inside. The first contained various FBI documents, all in customarily small type and dense language. He gave up on the first paragraph of the first memo when the edge of a photo slipped from between the pages.

  The quality was poor and had a strange fishbowl quality. He’d never seen a surveillance photo, but he imagined this was what one looked like. It must have been taken through a two-way mirror or a hole in the wall. The picture depicted a group of well-dressed young men and women, none probably older than thirty. The mens’ jackets were off and the top buttons of their shirts were undone. They were all sitting in a circle on the floor of a well-appointed office, surrounded by beer bottles and passing around a flat tray that looked empty. Tristan pulled the rest of the photos from the folder and found that the shots became more interesting. The tray was actually a mirror and the people were snorting something through it with a rolled-up piece of paper, or more likely dollar bill—the picture was too grainy to see clearly. The composition of the photographs was definitely centered on the young man on the right. with numerous 8×10 glossies of him with the mirror in his face and the alleged dollar bill partway up his nose. Tristan couldn’t place him, but he did look vaguely familiar. No doubt the accompanying documents would clear up any confusion.

  Not quite ready to wade through a hundred pages of FBI droning to ferret out a pertinent piece of information, he moved on to the next folder and found pictures of a similar indiscretion by a similarly clean-cut young man.