Last Days of the Condor

  “What can I get you, hon?” The rust-haired waitress leaned on the back of Faye’s booth and gave the customer a real smile—what the hell, we’re stuck here, might as well go for the happy we can get.

  Faye ordered a hamburger and a Coke. Protein and caffeine. Fuel and fire.

  “Not Diet, right? Good for you, hon.” The rust-haired waitress yelled the food order back to the kitchen, swayed toward the bar to get Faye’s drink.

  Let me count the ways I’m trapped, thought Faye as the jukebox played.

  Don’t know where I’m going, don’t know how to do what I’ve got to do, don’t know how to get found by a killer—the right killer, anyway. Don’t know how I ended up here—well, ended up here like this.

  Don’t know how I can warn off the man who loves me.

  Years ago, there’d have been a pay phone in this bar. If there was now, Faye still couldn’t use it. The cover team would catch that, zap the pay phone coordinates to the command center, and NSA’s MAINWAY computers would flash who or where Faye called. Same reason she couldn’t use her cell phone to call Chris, leave a message for him at work or get him on his cell. Faye considered stealing a phone from one of the Congressional staffers who were one beer away from being more than a little drunk, but every complication on a mission increases risk and the risk of a stolen cell phone scenario equaled why she wanted to steal a phone: keeping Chris clear of all this, of her.

  Or so she told herself.

  Had nothing to do with wanting to reach out and touch him, know he was safe, know he was there, know he still cared.

  Last thing I need, she told herself sitting in that black upholstered bar booth, sipping a Coke as the jukebox played some Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion song, is to worry about him worrying about me.

  Sunset pinked the front windows at the end of the bar as she forced herself to finish the hamburger she couldn’t taste, the Coke that didn’t quench her thirst.

  Her stomach gurgled. She told herself it wasn’t nerves, had to be the bar food, maybe the drug she’d swallowed the night before.

  She took the heavy purse/backpack with her through the scruffed & scarred brown wooden door labeled WOMEN.

  The hook & eye lock would stop a polite customer’s pull but not much more.

  If only it would be Condor jerking on that door!

  But it won’t be. And if it were, her two colleagues at the bar would claim him. Not her. Not just her and Sami and what the two of them needed.

  She didn’t shut the door on the metal stall when she did what she had to do in there: if someone burst into the bathroom, she wanted a chance for a clear shot.

  Washing her hands in the white sink, she raised her eyes to the mirror.

  Saw the face called hers staring back.

  Saw the chance.

  Stupid, sure. Crazy, sure. Corny, sure. Risky. With all that, still her best shot.

  She found her mission toiletries in the backpack purse, the gold tube of cheap bright red lipstick, the kind Faye as herself would never wear, the kind of notice me lip paint that dominates a witness’s perception, cheap tradecraft she’d never used.

  She turned the dial so the glossy red tip slid up and out of its gold sheath.

  On the glass of the mirror she made appear in bright smear cherry-red letters:

  Call Chris 202 555 4097

  Tell him better roads r

  around this bend. Tnx F

  Then surrounded her lipstick plea with the outline of a red heart.

  Slashed a long bloodred line under her heart on that mirror and—

  Saw her second shot.

  Do. Not. Run.

  Walk out of the bathroom.

  Go back to your booth.

  She let her eyes sweep over her sisters who were in this bar, who were yet to come there tonight, would use the bathroom before the janitor mopped up with his ammonia cleaner and tired eyes. Surely some woman would come to that mirror who had a romantic soul, the courage of her curiosity. And a cell phone.

  She counted out the cost of her dinner plus a great tip.

  Showed she wasn’t hurrying by standing there, dipping a last French fry into the plop of ketchup on her plate. She put the straw between her lips for a last sip of Coke.

  Sure, that’s all anyone sitting at the bar would see.

  And she walked out without showing or saying a thing worth reporting.

  Gray twilight muted by streetlamps swallowed her as she stepped onto the sidewalk. Could have turned to the right, but the formula of her epiphany mandated Condor being a sentimental guy, so she turned left as she cell-phoned Control.

  Sami’s voice in the cell phone pressed to her ear: “What have you got?”

  “A hunch.” Faye quickened her pace past a lucky mother who was her age and pushing a laughing baby boy in a stroller from Me-ma. “Give me room to play it.”

  “How?”

  “Have cover teams pull back if they spot me come into surveillance Op zones.”

  “I’ll do what I can, give you as much slack as is Op safe. Tell me—”

  “Whatever you know, you’ll try to plan ahead of, and that might mess me up.”

  “Then don’t miss.” Sami hung up.

  Faye muttered “ABC to you, motherfucker” as she returned her cell phone to the shirt pocket above her bulletproof vest, but she meant it in the nicest possible way.

  The white-icing dome of the Capitol slid past her heart side as she marched to Union Station where she thought she saw a homeless woman rolling her shopping cart of rags and remnants away with more purpose than prayer. Could have been a headhunter pulling back as ordered, could have been just another nobody in the night, Faye couldn’t let herself care. Rode Union Station’s exterior escalator down to the subway platform and stood in front of the poster-sized stations-and-routes map for Metro’s subway, the names of the stops in black letters, the subway lines drawn between them in thick colored connectors of orange and blue and green and yellow. And red.

  Red like blood.

  Red like lipstick.

  “I like the Red Line.” She’d chalked that up to Condor sounding crazy.

  Now hoped he’d told the truth.

  Faye saw a man with a Metro patch on the shoulder of his blue sweater giving directions to two tourist-clad senior citizens—older even than Condor, thought Faye, buying that both the tourists and the Metro worker were true to those identities. The Metro worker finished with the grateful tourists and Faye caught his eye.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “I’m visiting my father,” she said, and even though she rode the Metro at least three times a week, asked: “He said there’s one stop on the Red Line that after rush hour gets deserted on the platform and that I should ride to the next one. Is there a Red Line stop where, like he said, not many people are on the platform after now?”

  The Metro worker blinked. “Really?”

  She gave him her friendliest What can you do? shrug.

  “Could be … I don’t know. This one, or this one … Maybe that one.”

  And Faye pictured that one: an underground platform. One set of escalators, the upper entry level with turnstiles visible from the red-tiled platform between the two sets of train tracks, a gray cement cavern with dark tunnels for the trains at either end.

  She thanked him.

  Rode the first train there.

  “DOORS OPENING.”

  One person got off the train at that stop with Faye, a businesswoman who barely looked up from answering the endless stream of e-mails in her smartphone as she rode the escalator up, out through the turnstiles, gone.

  This is the picture.

  A woman standing alone on the red-tile platform in the gray concrete tunnel.

  Me.

  Wearing the black raincoat I had on when we met. Coat unbuttoned, Condor’d expect that, believe that. Could see me as any train he rode slowed into the station.

  Faye calculated it made more sense to set the backpack purse on
the red tiles in front of her shoes. Sure, not as in her control, but also, one more thing for his eyes to process. One more thing for her to worry about, but the weight of it during her waiting and the energy that would cost seemed worth avoiding.

  What ifs raced infinitely down each set of tracks. What if she was wrong and he hadn’t chosen to be a moving target on the line he liked? What if a Metro patrol scooped him up? Why hadn’t they? What if he didn’t see her waiting on the platform or did and rode on anyway or jumped out of the Metro car blazing away with Peter’s stolen gun?

  She let all that go.

  Waited to deal with what the steel rails brought her.

  A train rumbled roared whooshed into the station, rectangular windows of light dotting the long silver snake like scales as it slid past her facing eyes, stopped.

  “DOORS OPENING!”

  No one got off.

  None of the three people she looked at through the train windows looked back.

  “DOORS CLOSING!”

  The train whooshed away.

  She refused to look at her watch.

  Or count the number of times trains whooshed into the station, stopped, let one or two or three or mostly no one off to ride the escalators up and out into the night.

  A rumble roar whoosh, silver train sliding to a stop.

  “DOORS OPENING!”

  No one getting off, no one—

  Standing in the subway car’s open doorway twenty paces from her.

  A baseball-capped, fatboy freak in brown skin, hands by his sides, empty, are they empty?

  The freak stepped off the train.

  13

  Dragons fight in the meadow.

  —The I-Ching, K’un/The Receptive

  A man and a woman stand alone on a red-tiled subway platform.

  He’s stepped out of the silver train on the track behind him.

  She’s keeping her stance soft and still, facing a maroon-jacketed, big-bellied apparition with a baseball cap, absurd eyeglasses, brown skin. He knows she knows.

  “DOORS CLOSING!”

  Rubber-edged doors ca-thunk shut behind him.

  The silver train streaks from the station.

  She said: “If I wanted you dead, you would be.”

  Her hands stay at her sides, fingers splayed open to show empty. The thirty feet of red tiles between them represent the optimal kill zone for a handgun.

  What’s that bag on the tiles near her feet? Remote-detonated flash-bang? Gas?

  “How are you, Vin?”

  “Call me Condor. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Do you remember who I am?”

  “Your work ID is Faye something.”

  “Faye Dozier. And it’s more than a work name, a cover.”

  “Who are you right now?”

  “Your rescue. Your chaperone. Your minder to bring you in. Get you safe.”

  “I think I remember I’ve been told that before.”

  Take a step toward her.

  She didn’t move. Reposition. Shift her weight. Draw her gun.

  Take another step closer. Close the gap.

  She said: “My partner got whacked at your place. I need to know all about that.”

  “And you think I know.”

  “The white car,” she said as he was three steps from being able to hit her. “That makes me think you don’t know enough. So we’re stuck on the same bull’s-eye.”

  He stopped two paces from her. She was out of his striking zone. But close. If she moved to draw a weapon, theoretically, at least now he had a chance.

  Condor said: “What’s in the bag?”

  “Proof you can trust me.”

  An electronic marquee on a hollow brown metal column listed glowing lines of train schedules. Rush hour was over, the next train was due in nineteen minutes, the one on the opposite track due three minutes after that. Empty escalators whirred up from and down to this platform where only the two of them stood.

  He imagined she heard the slamming thunder of his heart beneath his maroon nylon jacket. Imagined he heard her muffled thunder, too. Inside her black coat that no doubt covered at least one pistol, under her blouse, he saw the thickness of a bulletproof vest.

  Where they stood was the lowest level of the subway station. The closed orange doors of the “Handicap Accessible” elevator leading up to the street waited near the escalators that connected this passengers’ platform to an entrance level twenty feet above the top of their heads, an apron of red tiles inside orange turnstiles that whumped open & closed. Beyond those turnstiles were fare card machines, and mere steps beyond them, a forty-one-second-long escalator ride connecting our world to these underground arteries. Condor couldn’t see much past the top of the escalator up to the entrance level, couldn’t see the orange turnstiles, certainly couldn’t see the main escalators up to the night.

  Faye said: “How long are we going to just stare at each other?”

  “My chaperone.” What does she think of me: the dark skin, the baseball cap and big glasses, the fat-man jacket? “I liked slow dances in high school.”

  “This isn’t high school, Condor,” she said.

  She’s worried I’m losing it.

  Next train: eighteen minutes.

  Concrete columns five times as thick as Condor’s fat-man suit rose from the red tiles to the curved gray ceiling. He remembered two FBI agents and two bank robbers in … Miami, who’d chased each other around a parked car, all four of them blasting away with semiautomatic pistols, two of them reloading on the run, all the bullets missing flesh. The two columns on this subway platform needed fewer steps to race around than a parked car. And down in this tunnel, the perils of ricochets canceled out any advantage the concrete gave over bullet-porous car metal.

  “Hey, chaperone,” said Condor: “Slow dance.”

  He took two steps back.

  Faye took two steps forward to preserve the distance he’d chosen between them.

  Her shoes stopped beside the backpack purse on the red tiles.

  Condor said: “Pick it up. Both hands.”

  Oh so slowly, she did.

  No BOOM! No flash-bang stunning light. No eruption of tear gas or smoke.

  “See?” she said. “So far, so good.”

  Green eyes, he thought. Her eyes are green.

  “Don’t see only what’s in front of you.”

  Who taught me that? Let that go. Let that ghost dissolve.

  Faye said: “What now?”

  “Unzip it. Make sure the opening is toward your face, not mine.”

  The zipper zuzzed a slow opening of the backpack purse.

  Condor said: “Show me—easy.”

  She tilted the backpack so he could peek into the bag. “Take what you want.”

  He flicked his eyes up from the bag to meet hers.

  “I was right,” he said. “One way or another, you’re how I’m going to die.”

  “Not now,” she said. “Not with me. Not if I can help it.”

  “And this is your help?”

  She shrugged. “And my bona fides.”

  He took the last step to be close enough to her.

  Slid his right hand into the backpack. She didn’t close it. Trap him. Try for some aikido or judo throw, she just … let him do it.

  Feel cool steel, textured wood, the terrible weight of choice.

  Condor filled his right fist in the bag with a snub-nosed .38 revolver.

  He pulled out the hand-sized pistol. Let its death hole drift aimlessly and casually from side to side, but showing him the gold glint of brass cartridges in the wheel cylinder that implied the gun held ammunition that worked.

  Faye said: “I thought you’d go for the .45 in there. The updated 1911, but still like you said you—”

  Thunk! The cold steel bore of the snub-nosed revolver dug into her forehead.

  “—prefer,” she finished.

  Her green eyes blinked.

  But she didn’t back away. Whirl/sweep her arm
up to beat a bullet to her brain.

  A man and a woman stand alone on a red-tiled subway platform.

  His arm extended to press a gun’s death bore against her third eye.

  “I prefer to be murdered with my partner Peter’s weapon,” she said.

  “Sorry, I don’t have it.”

  “Then you’d be stupid to shoot me.”

  “Stupid comes easy.”

  “Here I thought you were a hard guy. If you don’t have my partner’s gun, then you didn’t kill him and somebody took it to package you as armed and dangerous.”

  “Great minds,” he said. “Theirs. Yours.”

  Slowly the steel barrel backed off her skull.

  Still she didn’t counterattack.

  Condor put the revolver in his jacket pocket.

  Smiled.

  Lifted the holstered .45 semiautomatic out of the backpack. That gun came with a pouch of two spare ammunition magazines. He awkwardly shifted the bulk under his jacket to clip both the ammo pouch and the holstered .45 to his belt.

  She shook her head. “You look ridiculous.”

  The marquee read fourteen minutes until the next train arrived.

  “Moving,” she told him. “Getting my phone.”

  She used her left thumb and forefinger in an overly formal pincer grip to lift her cell from the blouse pocket over her heart.

  Told Condor, “I’ll put it on speaker.”

  Empty escalators whirred to and from this red-tiled station platform.

  The cell phone buzzed once. Buzzed twice.

  Condor heard faint background noise coming from the phone.

  Faye told the device in her hand: “Someone’s here to talk with you.”

  “Who?” said a man.

  That voice! Here! D.C. National Airport. A little girl—Amy. A bomb.

  Be sure: “Tell me something.”

  Eagerness came through the man’s voice in the phone: “Always Be Cool! Condor, it’s Sami!”

  The question ripped from Condor’s bones: “Where have you been?”

  “Trying to bring you home. Where are you—both of you?”