Or the strand had been replaced.
If they were that good, that compulsive, waiting upstairs in his bedroom or in the junk-filled back room, hiding in a closet, then fuck it: call him already deleted.
He checked the downstairs half bath: toilet seat up. Only his reflection haunted the mirror above the sink. He pushed the blue hood off his silvered head.
No one waited in the kitchen, the inside back door still shut and the outer iron-bars door locked in place. Beyond those black iron bars waited a wooden slab deck in a tiny fenced backyard with nothing but a waist-high Japanese maple tree rising from an engineered square opening in the deck. The hook & eye latch on the weathered gray back gate looked in place, but anyone who walked past that wooden fence in the alley knew such security was a joke.
They let him have knives.
For cooking.
The Settlement Specialist casually mentioned that need as she filled his shopping cart on their Household Establishment visit to the Fort Meade PX between D.C. and Baltimore where the National Security Agency keeps its official headquarters. He had a set of steak knives, plus a kitchen counter wooden slotted “display holder” with a knife sharpener, a rapier-strong fileting blade, a serrated-edge bread knife, a monstrous isosceles triangle–bladed tres Francais carver, and a butcher blade that reminded him of Jim Bowie and the Alamo.
He refused to clutch one of those knives, sit waiting like a doomed fool on the living room couch.
His blue shell mountaineering coat was soaked. He shivered with that chill. Took the coat off, started back toward the living room—
Stopped in the bathroom to urinate. Told himself that wasn’t nerves.
Heard the flush shut off as he hung his wet coat up on the living room coatrack.
They were out there. Of course they were out there!
But they might not come tonight.
Or ever.
The cover team might be taggers on a Sit & See, or—
The turquoise front door boomed with a knock.
2
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.
—U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
Faye Dozier eased the front passenger door shut on the car they parked on Washington, D.C.’s Eleventh Street, SE, unbuttoned her mid-thigh black coat and kept her eyes on the blue brick town house with the turquoise door. She flexed her empty bare hands. That comfortable metal weight rode on her right hip.
Her partner, Peter, slammed his driver’s door shut, didn’t give a damn who heard it or looked through the evening light to see her walk around the car to him. He wore a tan raincoat with something bigger than a book bulging its inside pocket and carried a silver briefcase.
“Remember,” he told Faye. “You’re lead on this one.”
“Why him?” she said as she stared at the house, calculated approach angles. “Why now? He’s not on today’s action list.”
“After that thing we just did over across the D.C. line in P.G. County, the Taliban guy who was fucking worried about his son getting into college, this guy is between there and base, due to hit our screen, so …
“We got a shot,” said Peter. “Might as well take it now.”
Like two hawks dropping off the same tree branch, this man and woman stepped together across the street toward the blue brick house.
“Not like you’ve got anything better to do with your night, right?” he said.
Then laughed.
Like he knew, thought Faye, knowing he didn’t, no one did, no one could.
Peter said: “Heads up on this one, rookie.”
“When did I become a rookie?”
“Out here, with me, rookie is who you are. You’re lead on this one because I say so. Because it’s time for you to pop your cherry.”
“You’re such a charmer.”
“So people keep saying.”
They reached the side of the street of the blue brick house with the turquoise door.
“Listen,” he said to this Okay, so she wasn’t a rookie partner he’d never asked for, never wanted. “Take your time. Do it smart, do it thorough, do it right.
“And then,” he added as they reached the four black iron steps leading up to that narrow row house on the edge of Capitol Hill, “do the same for the report.”
“Wait: What are you going to be doing while I’m doing that?”
“My report, my identifier, your work, my seniority time off-line, because, like you said, you got nothing better to do with the rest of your night.” He smiled.
“I didn’t say.” She held the palm of her left hand low where anyone but another professional like him might have missed the hang back signal.
Peter retreated from the black iron steps. Stood where optics let him catch movement in the windows on both floors of the blue brick town house, where his sight line included her on the black iron stoop:
As she knocked on the turquoise door.
3
Runaway American dream.
—Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run”
This is how you live or die.
Answer the knock on your front door.
That turquoise slab swung open to the rush of the world and they filled his vision.
Woman standing on front stoop.
Man posting on the miniscule front yard made of dirt and stone inside the black metal fence.
She’s the shooter if this is a Buzz & Bang.
But she just stands there on the front porch, green eyes reflecting him.
Call her thirty, maybe older. Black coat unbuttoned. Pretty, but you might not spot her in a crowd. Brown hair long enough for styled, not so long it’s an easy grab. An oval face from the stirred ethnicity of modern America. A nose that looked like it had been reset above unpainted lips. She carried her shoulders like a soldier. Her hands hung open by her side, her right strobed gun hand. No rings. Dark slacks. Sensible black shoes for running or a snap kick.
She waited in this sundown that smelled like rain on city streets.
The hardest thing.
Waiting.
For the right moment. The right move. For the target to appear.
Her backup man cleared his throat. Familiar, he seems … Older than her, say fifty, a bald white guy. Muscle in the mass under his tan raincoat. Silver metal briefcase in his left hand, right hand open by his side. He posted backup, a line of sight past her to whoever opened the turquoise door or moved in the front windows, yet the way he cleared his throat marked him as a boss, or maybe—
Standing on the black iron front stoop, she said: “How are you?”
Tell her the truth: “I don’t know.”
“Can we come in?”
Her backup man added: “You can’t say no.”
“I could, but what good would that do?” Walk backwards into the living room.
They follow. The man in the tan coat shut the door to the rest of the world.
Her smile lied: “Damn, I hope we got the right guy! Your name is…?”
“I always hated my born-with-it name: Ronald. For a while, I think I was Joe. Sometimes I think I’m other names like Raul, Nick, Jacques, and oddly, Xin Shou.”
The bald man said: “Call him—”
Peter! The bald backup man’s name is Peter!
“—Condor.”
There it is.
The silver-haired man said: “That’s a fluke.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because the Agency rotates code names. An earlier Condor was Frank Sturgis, a Watergate burglar. Then me. With a code name back then, I felt like two people. One was regular me, one was like the movie version of your life where you’re better-looking and smarter and get the right girl. While I was locked up, the code name rotated. Something happened to that guy, they won’t tell me what. But they redesignated me Condor.”
“Right here, right now,” she asked: “What’s your work name?”
“Vin.”
“Why Vin?”
“The Magnif
icent Seven. Steve McQueen played him. As long as I’m a lie, I might as well be a cool one.”
“My name is Faye Dozier. What do you want me to call you? Condor or Vin?”
“Your choice.”
Bald Peter set his silver briefcase on the floor, pulled an iPad out of his tan raincoat. “Remember the drill?”
“You made the first home evaluation visit after my Reintroduction Settlement.”
Faye said: “Was he a charmer back then, too?”
“He had more hair.”
“I was as bald then as—never mind.”
Faye caught the flicker of Condor/Vin’s gotcha smile.
Peter told the silver-haired man: “Kick off your shoes, go stand with your heels and head pressed against that bit of bare wall next to your fancy radio.”
Your black stocking feet press the wooden floor. Don’t get caught flexing your knees or bending your hips to sink your weight but make yourself smaller, the option no shoes gave you. The wall of bricks grinds against your skull.
Bald Peter raised the iPad to scan the man with his back against the wall.
“Hold it,” said Peter. “Calculations for metrics and…”
The iPad snapped that picture with a FLASH!
“Turn to your right,” said Peter. “Face your radio setup.”
Faye asked: “So you like radio? NPR, the news networks?”
FLASH!
“I’m lucky. I can afford a radio that pulls in more than that from satellites.”
“Tell her about clongs.” Disdain filled the voice of the bald man with the iPad. “Messages from outer space. And turn with your other shoulder to the wall.”
“She knows.”
“No I don’t.”
“Sure you do. You’re somewhere doing something or thinking something. Maybe driving in a car. A song comes on and it’s dead on target for whatever’s happening, for who you are right then. The universe dialing in the exactly right soundtrack as everything epiphanies the message and feels perfect, feels … yes!”
FLASH!
“That’s a clong. I don’t like news on the radio. That’s the invisibles telling me what is. No clongs. Songs coming out of the cosmos show me something, lining up what could be, something about me, us. Like poetry. A movie or a novel.”
“But one kind of radio broadcast is about your real life,” she argued.
“Yeah.”
Peter muttered: “Instead of voices in his head, he gets clongs.”
Condor said: “What helps you make sense of it all?”
“Me?” Peter held up his iPad. “I follow the program.”
She asked Vin: “Any problems at work?”
“I show up. Do what’s there. Come home.”
“Just so you know,” she told him, “there’s no record of complaints.”
“And yet, here you are.” He smiled: “How do you like your job?”
“Better than some.”
“Better than some people like their jobs, or better than some jobs you’ve had?”
“Yeah.” She strolled toward the kitchen.
Bald Peter stared at the wall covered by taped-up newspaper articles and photographs, torn-out color bursts of magazine art, poems and paragraphs ripped from books destined for the furnace, scissored chunks of phonograph album covers and insert sleeves of lyrics from that all-but-dead medium. He raised the iPad.
FLASH! Working his way along the wall. FLASH!
Okay! It’s okay, routine, just routine. The crazy’s collage wall. Random weirdness. Textbook predictable. Nothing to see. Nothing to analyze.
Get your shoes on, go after her!
Faye stared into the kitchen’s refrigerator.
“Milk, hope it’s fresh. OJ, that’s good. Styrofoam boxes of leftovers, butter. Vanilla yogurt: for the granola on the frig? Blueberries. Your bread looks dead. Mind if I throw out those single-serving boxes of white rice? You must eat a lot of Chinese.”
“We all do.”
She stared through the bars over the back door to the wooden deck.
Said: “You look like you’re in good shape.”
See the tile floor come rushing toward your face then you bounce up away from it again. Your arms burn. Set after set after set of pushups on prison time.
Then in the Dayroom where the murder has yet to happen, Victor comes over, says: “It’s about your root, not your muscle. Your center, not your fist.”
Faye, if that’s not just her work name, Faye angled her head toward the fenced-in back deck beyond the bars, and with genuine curiosity said: “Is that where you do t’ai chi?”
“That’s where I practice the form. I ‘do’ t’ai chi all I can.”
“Like now?”
Give her the void of no answer.
She said: “Show me upstairs—no: after you.”
They passed Peter on his way into the kitchen to make another FLASH!
“Do you always make your bed?” she asked after she’d glanced into his upstairs clutter room, moved to the room with the brass bed where dreams made him fly.
“Who would do it for me?” He shrugged. “It’s a rule of lockup. A symptom.”
She looked at his clothes hanging in the closet. Peter will photograph them, too.
Then she led him into the bathroom. Blue towel over the shower rod. The toilet seat up. She opened the mirrored door for the medicine cabinet above his sink.
“Holy shit.”
On two shelves of the medicine cabinet stood lines of prescription pill bottles like squads of brave soldiers. Pill bottles labeled with words ending in “-zines” and “-mine.” Drugs whose names contain an abundance of “x’s.” The pills famous for clearing cholesterol-clogged arteries. Blue pills. White pills. Football-shaped pills. Gel tabs. Hard yellow circle pills. Green spheres.
She pointed to one prescription bottle: “The TV commercial shows that drug is for a man and a woman sitting naked in side-by-side bathtubs as the sun sets.”
“The daily dose is also used for us guys with certain … gotta go issues.”
“Really.” She pushed him with her stare. “What’s her name?”
“There is no her.”
“Or he, I don’t—”
“Romance is not as easy as just popping a pill.”
“Tell me about it.” She softened her eyes. “If there’s nobody now, who was your last somebody?”
Ruby lips pucker: “Shhh.”
“I’m not sure.”
Faye said: “There are other medications for guys who need to go to the bathroom all the time. Maybe your doctors want the best you can be for you.”
“Sure, that must be it.”
She looked at him. Looked back at the army of pills. Her eyes scanned the chart taped to the inside of the medicine cabinet door. “Thirteen pills a day.”
“Everybody must get stoned.” Looking at her, even as young as she was, she recognized that Bob Dylan quote.
“Is there anything they’re not treating you for?”
“Cancer or similar assassins.”
“You think a lot about assassins?”
“Really? That question? From you?”
Peter’s heavy footsteps clumped up the stairs outside his bathroom.
She asked: “What’s your diagnosis?”
“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Paranoid Psychosis. Delusional. Alienation. Anxiety. Depression. Recurrent Temporal Disfunctionality. Identity Integration Flux.”
“That means…?”
“Sometimes it’s like I’m in a movie. I get lost in time. Can’t handle remembering. The pills, the program, you: all to help me keep forgetting and move on.”
“How’s that working?”
“I get flashes. Dreams. Ghosts. But I’m functional. Mainstreamable.”
They heard Peter enter the cluttered back room to upload its data with flashes.
“Names drift,” Condor told her, Vin told her. “Like Kevin Powell. I can tell you how he died but who he was … Beats me. I rememb
er Victor and four other friends locked up with me in the CIA’s secret insane asylum but not my first boss in the Agency. I remember reading books for something called Section 9, Department 17, where something happened I can’t think about it don’t make me think about it don’t …
“The big blur ends when I got out last year. What came before that … I remember the first woman who showed me herself naked, but not who I killed. Sometimes when I think about killing, I smell a men’s room. I remember alleys in Beirut. Bars in Amsterdam. Airports in jungles. A Brooklyn diner. L.A. freeways. Getting shot. Shooting back. How to snap your neck. The Dewey Decimal System. The triggering event that made Dashiell Hammett a political lefty. Lying and laughing and creepy-crawlies on the back of my neck as I’m walking down some city street I can’t remember the name of and that a 1911 Colt .45 automatic is my weapon of choice.”
“Any changes lately?”
Lie. “All the time is all the same. Okay, as long as I keep taking the drugs.”
“Medicines,” she corrected.
“Aren’t medicines supposed to make you better?”
She shrugged. But his question made her join him in a smile.
He said: “The diagnosis says what’s best for me is not knowing what I don’t know I don’t know.”
“But you know what real is.”
“If you say so. I know I’m really here, or really at work. But sometimes …
“Sometimes I’m sitting on a park bench. Blue sky, trees. No sounds—or maybe whooshing. Smells like human sweat. I’m holding an iPad in my lap. In the tablet, I watch what a drone is seeing. Broadcasting. Wispy clouds. Clear air. My view drops from the sky. Buildings get distinct, bigger, then rushing closer in the center of the screen comes a park and benches and I know that if I can just keep sitting where I am, what I’ll see any second now in the iPad screen is the drone’s view of me.”
She’s staring at you, jaw dropped.
Bald Peter clunked his aluminum briefcase down outside the bathroom. Said: “Could you step out so I can get my data snaps.”
In the hall, Faye pointed to the bedroom, then to the junk room. “I didn’t spot any computer. Do you have one? A laptop? A tablet? A diary or dream journal or—”