Last Days of the Condor

  She saw it.

  Whispered: “Holy shit.”

  “Just like Phil Agee who published a book and blew the covers of a hundred of our people, everybody in our bad-guy streets knew Condor by that civilian name, knew he was on the CIA enemies list. The enemy of my enemy…”

  “It was all cover Op to plant him out there!”

  “No,” said Sami. “Whatever bloody Op gone wrong triggered him, that was real. He started out some first-job-out-of-college guy in the right place at the right time.

  “After-Action Evaluation was he’d tried to be on the side of the angels. The Agency rerecruited him. He had the perfect cover: a verifiable enemy of the CIA.

  “Nobody knows all he’s done. At least two stateside counter-spy Ops, one I think involved China. Mixed with American expat draft dodgers in Europe targeting Soviet agents and terrorists who tried to co-opt the antiwar GIs and draft resisters. Life isn’t Hollywood, terrorist or rule-the-world megalomaniac organizations with chrome skyscraper headquarters and pension plans, but I think he ran with Marxist-tinged groups in the seventies. Red Brigade types. Japanese Red Army. And Neo-Nazis like the National Front, he told me about one night on the docks of London. Maybe even some IRA boyos, something about Paris. Locked onto the drug cartels early, they’re more important politically than most countries. He was the perfect flytrap. They’d come to him. His truth became his cover.”

  “But he’s been Vin for…”

  “Since he got out of the CIA’s secret insane asylum in Maine.”

  Faye’s frown asked her question.

  “No, he really was crazy. Or went crazy. Evidently, still is crazy.

  “Your drone rumor,” Sami told her. “That Op was one of the big ones he thought up after 9/11. That’s what he was best at—the wild idea.

  “Bottom line, yeah, he got cornered in the shit, used one of the first iPads to call in a drone strike on himself. Some al Qaeda wannabes decided he was who he really was, a CIA plant. The bad guys were racing to torture and/or kill him, we couldn’t exfilt and evac his ass, he couldn’t go under, so he waited until they were right on top of him …

  “The drone killed bad guys and proved they were wrong: the CIA’d sent a drone to kill Condor, so he must have been their enemy, and the Op he’d created stayed safe.”

  “Why didn’t he die?”

  “Suicide is a hard shot when you’ve been taught to take out the other guy.”

  Sami leaned across the table and his gravity pulled Faye closer to him.

  We’re whispering in a soundproofed glass box, she thought.

  Somehow, that doesn’t seem crazy.

  “That part of the world,” said Sami, “when it does rain, it pours. Lot of runoff goes down the gutters into city parks, so cities like that, they got big storm drainage slits.

  “The argument around the Seventh Floor is: Did he plan for the slit being there when he called in the drone, or did he call in the drone then suddenly see the slit and change his mind about being a kamikaze?”

  “What do you think?” said Faye.

  “Doesn’t matter,” answered Sami. “Whatever he decided, he got it done.

  “Figure this: Hard as it might have been calling in the drone strike, after he exploded his world, when he was down there in that storm sewer, dust everywhere, a slit of sunlight, the sound of rescuers racing to find survivors …

  “To be trapped there and not shout for rescue because that will reveal your truth … That buys him a hell of get out of jail forever card from me.

  “Night comes, he can’t claw his way out, crashes down and tumbles through the storm drains, into the city sewers. We figure fourteen hours he was down there. Saw the sunshine of another storm drain, crawled out with the rats. Had to mess some woman up to steal her cell phone, call the panic line, hide while he was soaked and stinking of shit.”

  Sami stared out the glass walls.

  Drilled his eyes into Faye.

  “When we got him back, he seemed damaged but doable. Had to stay officially dead, of course. Even had some surgery on his face—repair the drone attack damage away from had been to what could be. Getting older had changed his looks anyway.

  “That was when I knew him best. That was back when private contractors were all the rage—Blackwater, a dozen others you know, a dozen more you’ve never heard of. Contractors still account for about one in four U.S. spooks, but their clout is dropping. Condor set me up in an outsourced Op. If you don’t trust who’s in charge or how their show might go, stick in a player you rely on. I did what I did, it cost what it cost, never mind now. By the time I got clear of all that—got my head on straight, got back inside Uncle Sam—Condor’d officially gone crazy.”

  Sami said, “They didn’t even let me know he’d gotten better.”

  “Maybe he hasn’t,” said Faye. “What’s going on?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Really?” Sami smiled. “What about the buzz? What about ‘the record’ we keep rewriting with our ABCs? What about Seventh-Floor Langley or the West Wing of the White House? What about every hustler looking for anything that gets TV? What about our people out there hunting a fugitive who they think is as good a killer as they are?”

  “They’re going to shoot first.”

  “In their shoes,” said Sami, “so would you.”

  Sami looked at her. “You’re the last known contact with Condor I can trust.”

  “You want me to find him.”

  “Oh, he’ll be found. Forget about the overt global BOLOs, we got great shadow headhunters out there after him. He’s not that good, not for long.

  “But before that happens, before he gets grabbed up or gunned down, either way out of my control, I want you to get found by him.”

  Faye blinked. “What makes you think he’s looking for me?”

  “Crazy as he’s supposed to be, he might not be—not looking for you, I mean. But if he spots you … You’re the last known official contact for him, too. If he’s looking to escape the sewers, you’re someone who might know a way out. Which is me.”

  “I have no idea what to do.”

  “Hit the bricks. Follow whatever it is that makes you duck before your mind tells you there’s a bullet coming your way.”

  “There’s a million miles of nowhere out there.”

  “Yeah.” Sami didn’t blink. “We can’t give you a cover team. He spots that, he’ll know and go, blood bath or back into hiding. Then the percentages suck for me, for us.”

  Sami leaned back in his chair. “You’ve got my phone number, I’ve got yours. I don’t want to be the one who calls to say Condor’s been got.”

  “He was your friend. You like him. Trusted him. You want him alive, right?”

  “I want to know what I want to know, and I want this all to go down right.”

  Faye stood. “What about Peter? You would have turned his life inside out.”

  “The saddest thing about his dying is he left nothing behind him worth knowing. You ask me, Peter was the wrong guy in the wrong place at somebody’s wrong time.”

  “What about Condor?”

  “Yeah.”

  She put her hand on the handle of the glass door.

  Looked back at him: “What, no parting ABCs?”

  “Always Be Careful.” He shrugged. “If not: Accept Being Crucified.”

  She walked through Complex Zed’s warehouse, full of portable workstations and data screening posts and folded-up tables in front of giant steel trunks full of hardware and that glowing soundproof glass booth.

  Thought: Act Beyond Crazy.

  She wore post-shower clothes from her GO! bag she kept by her desk. Dark slacks, gray blouse, a business-acceptable blazer to cover the Glock .40 on her belt and carry the folders of official IDs and badge. Faye marched to the locker room and her locker searched by squirrels who were professionally respectful enough to leave it untidy so they wouldn’t insult her b
y pretending not to have been there. She knew everything they found. Unless something had been planted there, in which case, not knowing had a better chance of being believed on a polygraph test or with whatever confession drugs the priests used in their interrogations.

  Like maybe whatever drug they gave me last night.

  Not a problem, she knew. She had nothing mission critical to hide.

  So far.

  But if they got me to offer up Chris …

  Some things we don’t like to think about.

  She snapped the pouch with two ammo magazines on the left side of her belt under the jacket. Her dull metal spring-bladed jackknife had a belt clip on one of its flat handle’s sides, rode on her belt over her spine—tolerable if she sat in a chair.

  Smart tradecraft would have been to unpack the hip, suede leather backpack-like purse thoughtfully, put its contents on the locker shelves in and with some kind of order, a tidy display that implied she believed she was coming back, a trustable clue for profilers and squirrels who’d open her locker after she was gone.

  She dumped her backpack purse into her locker, put back in only the pouch of mission toiletries, grabbed her short black raincoat she’d worn when she interviewed Condor, slammed the locker shut.

  A handmade poster above the camp made from portable storage and delivery trunks read: EQUIPMENT DISBURSEMENT DETAIL. Two M4 carbine-slung SWAT guards paced near the bulletproof vest over his white shirt & tie Santa sitting behind EDD’s unfolded table that would have fit in at a church social.

  Faye confirmed her ID through Santa’s portable retina scanner, established her Access/Action Level logging her identifier and Op code word into the laptop on the table, negotiated what she wanted out of what Santa said he had and could release.

  Two credit cards with a phony female name came from him without a blink.

  Cash was no problem, $2,500 in twenties and fifties, two tens, two fives.

  Faye unbuttoned her blouse.

  Santa stared at the list they’d typed into his iPad.

  Said: “You going to war, Agent?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” lied Faye.

  Before he disappeared in canyons of locked storage trunks, Santa gave her the advice every good government spymaster bestows on their secret agents: “Get receipts.”

  She laid her blouse on the table and stood there in her black bra.

  Santa brought her a charger for her cell phone and spare battery, a forgettable light blue nylon jacket a size too big for her and a ballistic (bulletproof) vest.

  “Seven pounds,” he said as she strapped it on. Faye told herself the vest fabric that would show above her blouse’s open collar could pass for a hip T-shirt. “No plates, but rated for most combat pistols. Never had any complaints.”

  “If they had to, they couldn’t.”

  His shrug conceded the point. He returned to the canyon of gear trunks for what he could get. Came back and helped her arrange that weight in her backpack purse.

  “You were lucky we got these.” Santa shrugged. “I’m a sentimentalist.”

  “I’m a satisfied shopper,” lied Faye as she walked toward the elevators.

  She knew it was useless to divert to the WOMEN’S room. Rub her hands over her body. Use the spring-bladed jackknife to check behind the badge in her folder. Smell the soles of her black sneaker-like shoes for the scent of fresh glue. Sami or her bosses at NROD or Home Sec or the CIA didn’t need to plant a tracking bug on her. They and probably the whole world were pinging on the GPS in her cell phone.

  Doesn’t matter that they know where you are if they can’t touch you there.

  The elevator let her out at the main lobby.

  Our world waited beyond those walls of glass.

  Faye pushed her way through the revolving door, walked across the plaza to the sidewalk curb and raised her hand for a taxi.

  He’s presumed to be on foot, so I should be, too.

  A taxi slid to a stop, she got in, told the driver where she wanted to go, didn’t recognize him as one of Sami’s soldiers—but he’d have used a face unknown to her.

  After all, she wasn’t supposed to have a cover team.

  The backpack purse rode heavy on the seat beside her.

  Cuts your speed and stamina. That weight better be worth it.

  “Rush hour,” said the cabby, a black guy with an accent of where: Nigeria? “Always rush hour where you got to get to, to get where you got to go.”

  “Yeah.” She turned so he saw her face in the rearview mirror point toward the sidewalks they whizzed past and no more conversation. Let her eyes scan his side mirror.

  The route he chose took them all the way down Wisconsin Avenue to the tricky left-hand turn onto Massachusetts Avenue by the fenced grounds of the Naval Observatory and the vice president’s official residence.

  Mass Avenue below the vice president’s house is Embassy Row, the sprawling brick estate with Winston Churchill’s V-fingered bronze statue out front for the Brits, the black glass castle-sized box of Brazil that had seemed ultra modern before Faye’d been born, gray stone mansions for European powers, the Islamic Center seized and held bloody hostage along with the headquarters for B’nai Brith and a D.C. government building by radical Hanafi Muslims in 1977.

  A few blocks later, her taxi flowed with traffic around Sheridan Circle where in America’s bicentennial, the year before the Hanafi siege, a wet squad including a former CIA agent from Waterloo, Iowa, remote-control bombed a car during the rush-hour commute in order to murder a former Chilean diplomat, also killing one American and wounding her husband as part of Operation Condor, the secret spy collaboration between six right-wing South American nations.

  Faye had the taxi drop her at the corner of Third Street & Pennsylvania Avenue, SE. The Capitol waited behind her, Condor’s Library of Congress office loomed a block-plus off to her left. Pennsylvania Avenue stretched away from the Congress’s turf with blocks of cafes and bars and restaurants, there a Starbucks, there a two-story brick building with a street door listing offices for three different groups, all with public policy–sounding names that guaranteed nothing about what they really did.

  This was your turf, Condor.

  Faye corrected herself: Is your turf.

  See me, she wished as she stood there, the last cars of rush hour whizzing past her, the crowd of Congressional staffers who’d headed somewhere after work now thinning.

  Besides Starbucks, whose interior she cleared with a quick scan through its picture windows, the “social business” that appeared most in Condor’s credit card bills waited down the block near Fourth Street.

  The Tune Inn. A flat-fronted beer & burgers saloon sunk like a shaft into the block’s wall of coat & tie–friendly restaurants and bars.

  Two steps into The Tune and Faye knew why Condor came here.

  Three steps into the saloon and she spotted Pulaski sitting at the bar to her left as she walked toward the back end of booths before the bathrooms and kitchen. Pulaski was pure Special Ops, a scraggy beard that would have let him drop from this stakeout cover team mission to the streets of Kabul without much more than a minor wardrobe adjustment from his dirty blue jeans and soiled cloth Windbreaker Faye was sure covered two pistols in shoulder-holster rigs. He kept his eyes on his bottle of Miller beer.

  Three stools away from Pulaski sat Georgia, an ex-cop from Alabama, dressed like a hard-luck drinker who didn’t take her eyes off the half-full glass of white wine in front of her and kept her hands resting lightly on the scarred bar beside her cell phone.

  Sami wouldn’t have called off the dogs of Standard Operating Procedure just because he’d sicced her solo into the streets. Beyond headhunter patrols, there’d be cover teams at Condor’s house, at his work, at—say—the top five places he’d been known to frequent. Faye wondered who she hadn’t spotted in the Starbucks, but maybe that cover team coded in the Op plan as an exterior post surveillance, maybe a van parked where the watchers could cover the Starb
ucks doors and also scan more of the target’s turf.

  She walked past her colleagues without a sign of recognition amongst them.

  Knew one of them would text Control that she was on-site. As if the bosses didn’t already know from pinging her cell phone.

  “You want a booth, hon?” asked the strong but slumping sixtyish waitress with rusted hair and a face that as a teenager slowed all the pickup truck traffic in whichever small Maryland town she’d gotten this far from. “Wherever you want.”

  This is what Condor sought, thought Faye as she took an empty, black-cushioned booth. The Tune’s brown-paneled walls were hung with stuffed animal heads and a rifle rack of guns that clearly wouldn’t work, pictures and plaques and beer signs from truck stops along the highways of Out There, America. She smelled beer, cooking grease from the kitchen beyond a half-door, the scent of evening drifting in from the city street.

  This was a bar an American could call home. A place that felt like those post–World War II days when everything still seemed possible. You could wear a torn T-shirt or a tux here, and probably both came in during the course of any business week. A sign said the bar had been here longer than any other alcohol stop on Capitol Hill. Faye believed it. Most of the other stools at the bars where Pulaski and Georgia sat held people who’d not gotten where they were on easy roads.

  One booth held two facing-fifty women whose blond dye jobs and white mohair sweaters and strings of pearls cost a lot of alimony, while their college-age sons, trying not to look bored or embarrassed, were clearly being shown where it used to be happening back when. Try as they might to maintain their aloof, Faye knew those college boys were tracking three scattered groups of Congressional aides who couldn’t be more than a few years older than them, “men” and “women” who’d beaten the odds, gotten jobs, maybe’d gone to Harvard on Daddy’s rep & billions or worked their way through heartland state universities on student loans they’d be repaying for decades, but whatever, they’d made it, they were here, “on the Hill.”

  In a bar that felt like the America they all wanted to believe was in their blood.

  Faye didn’t need to listen to the music above the bar chatter or check the jukebox to know Condor’d come here hoping for his clongs amidst sounds of Hank Williams and Dusty Springfield, Bruce Springsteen and a handful of country & western songbirds flying the same skies as Loretta Lynn and other icons Faye recognized only by name.