Free Fall (3 page)

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seal he'd seen fifty thousand times in the last four months, six days, seven hours and twenty-two minutes had been replaced by the seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.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 any one 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 some thing 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 by 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.

He continued to flip quickly through each folder, finding a stack of photos in each. Some mostly drug related were obvious crimes. Some just looked like chance meetings between two people, though one was always a young, relatively clean-cut male. Those would probably benefit even more from the accompanying narrative.

Tristan opened the last file, this time finding that the photos were not loose in the folder, but had been sealed in a manila envelope. He hesitated for a moment, but then reminded himself that it was already too late to turn back and tore into it.

His breath caught as he slid the first picture from the envelope. It was an extremely graphic depiction of two naked black women lying on a bed in the throes of passion. Or at least the throes of lesbian sex.

As he moved his face closer to the photo, he could read the expression on one of the women's faces it was more intimidation and confusion than passion.

He could also see that she wasn't a woman at all. She was just a little girl.

Tristan flipped through a few more of the pictures, finally stopping to examine one focused on a naked young man at the edge of the bed. He was sitting in a folding chair, eyes locked on the show playing out in front of him. Judging from the condition of his penis, he was enjoying himself immensely.

Tristan dropped the photos onto the floor and pulled another handful from the envelope. There were probably fifty or so in all, ten times the number in any of the other folders. The ones he'd originally pulled seemed to be from the middle of the stack. They were more or less in chronological order, starting with everyone clothed, then to the woman doing things to the little girl, and finally to the young man's enthusiastic participation.

Tristan stopped on a close-up of the young man's face. Despite the sexual release etched across it, the features looked familiar in the same vague way three or four of the others had.

He shoved the pictures back in the envelope and flipped to the stack surveillance records riveted to the inside of the folder. A few more minutes He'd milk a few more minutes away from the camera.