Last Days of the Condor
He sent teams to Union Station to cover the tracks, its subway entrance, food courts and upper parking lots where buses left for Baltimore, New York, Boston. Made sure TSA at area airports had photos of Condor on their cell phones and alert screens. Made sure Condor’s photos got Priority Match status with Facial Recognition Software programs on the grid of federal, state, and local Big Brother cameras.
“Circle a perimeter five blocks out so it won’t hit the looky-loos who are here,” said Sami. “Get the D.C. cops to help FBI guys, flash badges, describe Condor, see if him being around tonight hits with any witnesses without polluting their timeline credibility of having seen him around before. If we get a hit, confirm with pictures.
“Get our people to the homeless shelters,” he told one of his cadre who was coordinating his commands. “One inside, backup outside. Stay the night. Gonna be cold out there. Gonna rain. He’s not going to hide under bridges because he knows cops drive past with the spotlights on, and make sure they do. Hospitals, museums, any place that’s been open since Condor got off work. Come back every four hours. Agents who officially approach gatekeepers should use a … a Department of Social Services rap, a lost Alzheimer tourist—maybe: say we don’t want to create a false press report in case it’s just an old guy sneaking off from visiting his grandkids to get laid.”
The cadre’s Harlan asked: “What Intensity Level?”
The room held its breath.
Sami said: “One of our guys got cut down. We lose no more people. We let no bad guys get away. Locate, cover, call in a collection team and back up. We got zero solid that Condor is a killer, though no doubt he cruises Crazytown. He’s a person of extreme interest. We want him. Want to talk to him. But don’t let him get away.”
Sami pointed to a woman in his cadre. “I skimmed the visitation report from yesterday by our dead guy on the way here. A white car, stolen license plate. Go with uniformed cops from that jurisdiction, Virginia suburbs. A low-key investigation, but brace everybody associated with that license plate about a white car, smell out who they really are. If you don’t get anything, smile, say thank you, just routine, drive away. But no matter what, full-spectrum geographic and behavior profiles, full cover teams on them.”
He designated three agents to sit on this house, a fourth who was ex–murder police from Baltimore to “run the janitors, suck up the scene,” bag any physical evidence beyond the bloody knives pulled from Peter’s crucified palms.
Walked to where Faye leaned against the wall, said: “How are you doing?”
“Wasn’t him,” said Faye. “He’s crazy, but he’s more clever than this.”
“Easy to buy either way, given his record.”
“What record?” she said.
“What you know now is what’s important. We’ll go over that back at your HQ building. You’re in quarantine. There’s an ambush team already in your apartment.”
And a squirrel team, she thought. Knew there was nothing there they’d find she couldn’t live with. Nothing in there about Chris.
Faye said: “I want the streets.”
“After we debrief,” he said.
She said: “Do you know Condor?”
“What you don’t know won’t get in your way,” he told her. “I want you running free and hard and full-on after you tell me what you can tell me.”
Faye said: “Besides my two guys you put on the ambulance CPR scam, there were two Homeland Security hard guys who breached this place with me. The guy with the scraggy blond goatee, the other guy—”
“Can they tell me anything about Condor?”
“I don’t see why.”
“Then let’s keep them on the streets. We want every gun looking.”
“You mean every badge.”
“We’ll talk when I get back to the Task Force command center.”
Sami walked away, past the ambulance crew muscling a butchered body onto a waist-high wheeled stretcher.
Harlan came to her and she knew to pass him the car keys before he held out his hand. Faye waited with Harlan inside the bloody living room while the ambulance crew and Brooklyn cop David and asshole Harris kneeling on the stretcher played out the CPR farce on a corpse, roared off in the siren-screaming ambulance.
She left Sami staring at Condor’s mad collage wall.
Heard him whisper: “What are you trying to say?”
11
Secret heart of lonely. (what Condor always wrongly thought the song says)
—Yardbirds, “Heart Full of Soul”
Screaming someone’s screaming! Wet blood on—
Condor realized: It’s me screaming.
Bolted upright wrapped in wet plastic bags & jackets. Wearing a cap. Butt on the concrete of a cemetery in the gray of false dawn. Fists in yellow rubber gloves.
Every joint, every muscle, everything ached. Won’t survive another night outside.
Morning light bathed gravestones in the cemetery. He smelled wet grass.
You’re where you’re going to end up. Stay.
Your canvas shopping bag holds drugstore scissors.
These are your wrists.
Right here, right now, cut yourself free from the handcuffs of whoever they are.
Condor stood with his ghosts amidst a garden of gravestones in a city of marble dreams where so many somebodies wanted him dead or silent or a servant to what they said was sensible. Wind stirred the trees and the sky was blue and he could not fly away.
The only way you’re not a lie is to fight to be true.
You’re not going to choose to fucking lose.
Ghosts watched Vin eat leftover Chinese food, take be healthy not cured pills.
The scissors trimmed the three pairs of footpad inserts but only two sets fit under his feet in his black sneaker-like shoes. He felt taller, no worse balance.
Stones from the Zen garden let him break the dark lenses out of the Roy Orbison sunglasses. Condor taped plastic cling wrap into taut transparencies over the lens holes. Search metrics account for sunglasses or empty frames as disguises. The “lenses” he made registered on camera scans as existing, let him see—though with distorted translucence. The huge black frames dominated his face, changed his profile.
Condor kept his thermal underwear on under his blue shirt and black jeans, put his blue raincoat in a garbage bag. They have photos of that coat from that Faye and the murdered man’s Monday visit two days ago. Yesterday’s surveillance footage from the Library of Congress office building would show his gray sports jacket. He dropped the sports jacket into the trash bag. By now, squirrel teams would have cataloged his closets. Two missing jackets/coats doubled the data they had to BOLO.
Condor strapped himself into the Kangaroo Love baby carrier. Stuffed his black leather jacket into the baby pouch over his stomach. Hid that under his maroon nylon jacket.
Maybe discerning eyeballs will notice the jacket isn’t really covering too many beers and fast-food hamburgers, but Facial Recognition Software in security cameras around town will register my fat guy as 0 not 1, signal NO MATCH to the grid.
He pulled on the baseball cap: amateur, but every bit of bad data helps.
Bottles of makeup clinked in his jacket pockets as he policed the pavilion. His pill bottles bulged in his shirt pockets. Everything not in the Kangaroo Love or his pockets went into a trash bag he ditched behind a tree. Keep your hands free.
Condor shuffled over roads paved through this cemetery in the heart of the city. Found the locked office building. Its windows mirrored this empire of the dead. A stranger emerged in those windows’ reflection as he rubbed HipGirlz cover-up over his face, his hands. Turned his skin some disgusting color of mud.
You look marvelous!
And then they laughed.
At 8:02 on the other side of the building, steel gates creaked open, let in workers.
Only ghosts saw Condor walk out of the cemetery.
One formula made sense.
Fuck with them.
&
nbsp; Find some chance in the chaos.
Figure out what you can’t remember or don’t know, who and why.
Fix it. Or at least go down fighting.
He spotted an orange-plastic-wrapped Washington Post tossed in front of a house like it was still the twentieth century. Nobody’d come outside to claim this delivered reality while water boiled on the stove for morning coffee. I would kill for a cup of coffee, so stealing someone’s newspaper seemed like an acceptable moral stretch.
When he started this life, it would have taken Condor twenty minutes to skim The Post. That morning, he scanned the newspaper in less time than it took to walk a block.
War in Afghanistan that was officially almost over. Car bombings in Iraq that weren’t officially war. Slaughters in Syria that started as hopeful Arab Spring. Strong moves by the strong man in Russia. North Korea ranted. Europeans raged in the streets. Sound bytes shouted on the Senate floor. Hong Kong had coughing chickens, we all had whacky weather. Wall Street wages were up for the thirty-first straight year. A factory closed in Indiana. Traffic sucked. Divorcing Hollywood stars vowed to remain friends.
Nowhere in the newspaper did Condor spy a story about a crucified federal agent or a manhunt for a missing Library of Congress employee.
A handmade sign hung taped to the screen door of a corner grocery:
COFFEE.
The grizzled black man behind the store counter blinked at the entering freak.
“’Need coffee,” said Condor.
The counterman filled a cup from the urn. “Take this one on me and walk on.”
Vin shuffled down an access street parallel to North Capitol, here a used furniture store, there a nail salon he could imagine no one frequenting except “beauty students” scamming a few cents out of cash-strapped federal job-training programs.
A Hispanic man wearing a tool belt glanced at the weird gringo sipping coffee beside him while they waited for the traffic light, then watched his fellow crew members on scaffolding across the street. The light turned green. The workman hurried toward the scaffolding. Didn’t feel Condor steal the cell phone out of his tool belt pouch.
A pickup truck hauling debris from a house gut idled at the red light.
Padding jiggled under his maroon nylon jacket as Condor hurried toward the idling pickup while tapping the secret CIA Agent In Trouble digits into the stolen cell phone.
The traffic light’s changing—
Made it, behind the pickup, in front of a car that honked at his jaywalking as he thumbed SEND on the cell phone he tossed into the pickup’s cargo box.
The Panic Line Center at Langley won’t recognize the caller ID. Won’t hear a voice on the call. Will activate a GPS track. Divert headhunters off Condor. Maybe find the cell phone still on, maybe find fingerprints on it, maybe chase maybes all morning.
First time you called the panic line was from a pay phone.
Condor blinked. Cooling black coffee trembled in the paper cup he clutched.
Remembering, you’re remembering.
Up ahead a man stepped outside of a glass-fronted store:
CYBER WEB D.C. A poster read CYBER CAFE. Orange calligraphy on the store’s glass read:
NEW AND USED COMPUTERS! LAPTOPS & COMPUTERS & CELL PHONES REPAIRED HERE! DISPOSABLE CELL PHONES! SE HABLA ESPANOL!
A man stood outside his store, smoked a cigarette, licked the street with his eyes.
Chicago. California Street, a Friday-night table in a dive bar, sitting with ebony-hued Ethelbert. He wears a perfect suit, Cary Grant confidence. Watches you sip the second shot of Scotch that he insisted you drink as he says:
“Do you think I care about any of that bicentennial happy 1976 going on out there in the good old U.S. of A.? I’m working the deal, two years of schooling you amateurs on short cons, then I’m out of a go-to-jail jacket.”
“I’m a couple tough Ops past being an amateur.”
That’s you. That’s Condor.
“Yet you just blew your cover to show me you’ve got a big dick.” Ethelbert finished his Scotch. “But you also got some savvy. Didn’t freak when I walked you in here, only white face around, and yes, maybe those days are over, but this has never been about white or black, it’s about where you belong, whether you’re an insider or an outsider. These are hard-line folks. They been put on it, they walk it and expect you to do the same. You spotted those two bad motherfuckers who are considering clobbering your ass just because. They’re gonna clobber somebody tonight, might as well make it easy on themselves and clobber the outsider.
“You’ve got no money,” said Ethelbert. “No guns. No knives. Not a two-way wrist-radio the comics keep promising we’re going to have someday. You don’t have a dime in your pocket for a pay phone, can’t pay the tab for our top-shelf Scotch that I’m walking out of here leaving you holding.
“You want to learn, you got to do. You can’t do, I can’t teach you, so then tell our boss you’re quitting the knock-knock who’s there school. NOC, ‘Non-Official Cover’—Hell: everything is official out here in the street.
“Now con your way safe downtown by midnight.
“Remember, if you’re an outsider, try working The Sideways Slide.”
Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C., when we have “two-way wrist-radios.”
The man outside this cyber store lets the smoke drift from his cigarette.
Condor walked up to him. “I been robbed.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“You sell used cell phones,” said Condor. “Good chance one of them is mine.”
“We aren’t that kind of store. We sell disposables. Burners.”
“Whatever I buy, you’re giving me my money’s worth after what been stole.”
The man laughed. Dropped his cigarette. Made a show of grinding it out.
Flicked gonna fuck-you-up eyes onto this freak.
Condor strobed back: So what?
Said: “I’m gonna buy a phone from you, twenty bucks fair, but what I’d really like to buy is what else they stole.”
That Sideways Slide sank the hook into cigarette man.
So it was he who said: “What else you looking for?”
“My gun.”
“What’d you lose?”
Like that matters. “An Army .45. Brought it AWOL back from ’Nam.”
“Sentimental guy?”
“Practical,” said the man with the weird dark skin in the Redskins cap and fucked-up glasses and some soft gut under his maroon jacket. “What works, works.”
“If we did sell guns, we’d do it in the law. We don’t do it here.”
“But you might know somebody, and if they kick back to you, who cares.”
Cigarette Man shrugged.
“Here’s that twenty. I’m gonna tap on your keyboards in there, and the phone you sell me’s gonna work.”
Cigarette Man took Condor’s twenty-dollar bill, gestured for him to enter.
Condor swept his hand toward the visibly empty cyber store: After you.
Cigarette Man added such caution to whoever he thought this freak was, went into the store’s back room, out of sight.
Gonna happen how it’s gonna happen.
Condor picked the computer workstation that let him watch the back room. Like he guessed, the desktop machine needed no password: such a legitimate feature created a record for income tax, money laundering, or fraud audits.
His first search engine result dropped him onto the “Ask Us!” page for the city government’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission covering Capitol Hill, a window on the computer screen into which he typed: “What happened with that murder in his house on Thirteenth Street, SE, of a Homeland Security agent last night?”
The second search zapped him to the Web site for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where he skipped the thirty-second Hollywood-level movie highlighting the Committee as a streetwise defender of every American voter and found the “Contact the Committee” click: “Why is
the CIA overstepping its jurisdiction and investigating the murder of a Homeland Security agent on Capitol Hill last night?”
Nine clicks in the third search revealed a “conspiracy center” Web site that ranked high on popular search results and had a flowing “HAPPENING NOW!” message board system where each posted “citizen’s report” had a click for comments that spun into rants and cross-links to other Web entries. Condor typed: “Who’s running the cover-up of the murder of a Homeland Security agent in D.C. on Capitol Hill last night that the CIA is somehow involved in, too?”
His next two searches led him to phone numbers Condor wrote on scrap paper.
Cigarette Man came out of the back room waving a cell phone. “Cheapest one is thirty dollars. Say … four hours of use. The strip of white tape on the back shows its number.”
“Say exactly four hours.” Condor cleared his search history, exchanged another of his few bills for the cell phone. “Say I’ll be pissed off if it doesn’t. And on that other thing, say I’ll be back around four this afternoon to see what’s what and who’s here.”
“You will or you won’t.”
Condor left the store. You will or you won’t. What more is there to say?
Ten minutes later, he stood in a bus stop, its three plexiglass walls filled by public service posters in Spanish. Condor understood the top banner of a poster that exhorted readers to call 911 in case of emergency, but didn’t know that the Jamas tendras que pagar! line meant: “You never have to pay!”
He stared down the street to the entrance of a Metro station—D.C.’s subway.
Sure, there’d be security cameras. He’d done what he could about that.
Washington’s subway doesn’t run twenty-four hours. Last night, cover teams would have ridden the last train, swept the locking-up stations with Metro cops. Spy shop headhunters probably swept the system again when it opened before dawn. But now it’s morning rush hour, deep into double shifts for spook agency headhunters, day shift for straight cops who’d be working only off a “regular” high-alert BOLO.
No uniformed cops stood scanning the commuters swiping their fare cards through the orange turnstiles. No men or women with soft clothes & hard eyes lingered by the escalators up to the platform. Could be patrols, cover teams he didn’t see, but could be the hunt for him now focused on Facial Recognition and other search programs across Big Brother’s grid.