Last Days of the Condor

  Merle drove her red Ford north on Rock Creek Parkway.

  Condor rode shotgun.

  Faye lay across the backseat.

  A quick glance profiled this car as two aging, innocent civilians out for a drive.

  The red Ford turned off the Parkway and onto the golf course road.

  Faye heard Condor call “Clear!” and felt Merle brake the car to a crawl.

  The red Ford was almost stopped when Faye leapt out of the backseat.

  The Ford sped up, drove away, left her alone on the road.

  Two minutes later, she’d walked out of the Parkway at the intersection of the golf course road and Sixteenth Street. She turned right, put the 209-meters-away specter of Walter Reed and its security cameras behind her, walked toward the 50-blocks-distant White House past blocks of apartment buildings where maybe no fish-eye lens recorded her passing. Two hundred paces that direction and she jaywalked across the busy divided city street, walked back the way she’d come—but now on the other side of the road, headed north for any cell tower tracking analysis.

  She used the cheap disposable cell phone. Kept walking as she dialed the cell phone number she’d memorized less than forty-eight hours before.

  Second buzz and her call got answered with unresponsive silence.

  Into her phone as she walked, Faye said: “Say it ain’t you, Sami.”

  “Where are you?” said his voice. “Are you okay? What are you—”

  “Why’d you sic a wet team on me, Sami?”

  “Not our people! They beat us there. Do you have Condor? Are you—”

  “Who were they?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Bullshit! You’re in the belly of the beast—you are the beast. They were trained, equipped, targeted and briefed pros and the fuck you don’t know!”

  “Never seen anything like it. One guy, sure, maybe two. But we’ve got four bodies we can’t find in the system. Any system, including NATO and Interpol. No prints. No facial recognition. No forensics. No intercepted chatter about MIAs. Sterile gear, no consistency. All we got are ghosts.”

  “What’s going on, Sami?”

  “You tell me and we’ll both know, kid. It’s all we can do here to keep the world from flying apart, the cover from exploding.”

  In the street, somewhere far off to her right, Faye heard a distant police siren wail.

  Nothing, it’s nothing, routine, too soon to be connected and targeted to me.

  And one siren in Washington’s District of Crime wouldn’t be enough to give any listeners on Sami’s call a quick bead on her.

  “There’s at least two more opposition gunners out there, Sami.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you not know?”

  “Condor: is he okay, is he functional, what’s his state of mind, where—”

  “And here I thought you cared about me.”

  “We care about the same things, Faye. You know that. Know me.”

  She didn’t respond.

  Sami said: “Think, Faye. I told you something was off, wrong, screwy. That’s why I sent you out there on your own. And I was right!”

  “Congratulations.”

  “How are we going to—”

  “What ‘we,’ Sami? It was just you and me and then we included that wet team.”

  “I don’t know how we got compromised. I don’t know that we were. Maybe the opposition got lucky. Maybe you got…”

  “Give me something I don’t know, Sami. ABC: All Bullshit Considered.”

  “Whoever they are, why-ever they are … I got the tingles, the creeps that I can’t promise you I’m not compromised in ways I can’t see. So you tell me: what do we do?”

  “I’m coming in.”

  “Yes! Where? How? With Condor, right? What should I—”

  Faye hung up. Pulled the battery from that phone, tossed its parts into a trash can, crossed the street, walked back down the road to the golf course and Parkway.

  The red Ford rolled back onto that same road when she was twenty steps into the trees, slowed to let her climb in, then sped off.

  “Got nothing but denials,” she told Condor as she lay on the backseat. “He’s lying or telling the truth, maybe compromised, maybe not, but at least he and whoever he trusts now have to assume I—we—are coming in. They’ll swarm the streets, sure, track the call to that neighborhood, but they’ll concentrate on the two locations I’m most likely to exploit: Complex Zed and CIA HQ at Langley. The good guys will make perimeters to get us inside, the bad guys will stake those sites out to snipe us when we show.”

  Merle whispered: “We means…”

  “I don’t think they know about you.”

  “So I could just…”

  Faye and Condor finished her thought with their silence.

  “I can just drive,” said Merle. “Where you tell me to.”

  They found an underground parking garage with rates by the hour, day or month two blocks from the target. Faye paid a vacant-eyed attendant for three days in advance.

  The underground concrete cavern echoed with the closing of the car doors from the red Ford they parked in its designated yellow-striped slot. They stood in flickering artificial light. Smelled burnt gas, oil, cold metal from a dozen other vehicles crouched on this level. Shadows obscured the distant cement walls.

  “Never liked these places,” whispered Merle.

  Faye said: “At least you can’t get spotted by drones.”

  “Unless they’ve already cross-haired the building above us,” said Condor. “Rubble buries anything.”

  “You’re such cheerful people,” said Merle.

  The best Op formation called for Merle walking on the street side of the sidewalk, Faye between her and Condor, the collar turned up on his black leather jacket, not enough to obscure his face for later identification via any security camera they passed, but odds were, no lens in any of the storefronts or flat faces of the modern buildings they passed on this classy Washington street had cameras linked to the NSA grid.

  Two blocks. They had to cover two blocks and not get spotted, caught, shot.

  Midafternoon foot traffic was light, but they weren’t alone enough to stand out. They reached their target address and caught a break: no security guard was on day duty at the building’s front desk, no one was lurking in the lobby, no postman spotted them.

  “The mailman,” said Condor.

  “What?” said Merle.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  Faye herded them into the elevator, punched the floor button.

  “Tool up,” she told Condor.

  Merle’s eyes widened as the man she’d embraced filled his hand with the .45.

  Condor kept the pistol pressed low along his right leg.

  Faye heard the click as he thumbed off the safety.

  The elevator stopped.

  Those cage doors slid open.

  Faye rolled out first and fast, checked both ways as Condor whirled behind her, his eyes probing the opposite direction as hers until she whispered: “Clear!”

  Merle nervously stepped off the elevator.

  “Stay between us,” Faye told her as they hurried down a corridor of closed doors.

  Stay closed stay closed stay closed!

  At the target door, Condor gestured for Merle to stand against the opposite wall of the corridor, rooted himself near the target portal, held his gun in front of him, ready to whirl whichever way they’d need to send death.

  Faye worked on the lock with her picks and tension bar for thirty seconds before the first click. The second lock took half that time, then she pushed the door open, stepped in, whispered for the others, Merle coming in fast and Condor bringing up rear guard. Faye eased the door shut, had to disturb the corridor’s silence with the relocking click.

  But they were in.

  Merle whispered: “That was fast.”

  Faye said: “I’ve done this before.”

  25

  Put yourse
lf.

  —Citizen Cope, “A Bullet and a Target”

  Condor aimed his .45 at the blond man’s face, said: “You’re not who I expected.”

  Blue eyes blinked behind the blond man’s glasses as he stood there in his own apartment, his eyes locked on the gun held by a stranger who’d surprised him, pushed the door closed behind his after-work entrance and zeroed him with what the suit & tie blond man would forever after think of as “the biggest black hole in the fucking universe.”

  Condor saw the blond man blink again, then say: “I didn’t expect you either.”

  Across the room, Faye said: “You’re both the right guy.”

  From off to his right, Condor heard Merle whisper: “Don’t shoot him.”

  “Whoever you are, lady,” said the blond man. “I’m with you.”

  Then he told Faye: “Actually, I came for you.”

  And Condor grinned.

  “Chris Harvie,” said Faye, “meet … Call him Condor. And this is Merle.”

  “Could he … I don’t know, lower the gun now?”

  Yeah, he’s cool.

  Condor holstered the .45 and claimed the younger, taller man’s hand for a shake.

  Why is Faye hanging back? Like she’s … Embarrassed. Ashamed. Scared.

  “Just like you said in your text,” Chris told the green-eyed Glock-packing woman who trembled near him. “I came straight home after work.”

  “Told no one?” whispered Faye.

  He shook his head no.

  And she ran to him, into his arms, buried her face against his chest and said so everyone in their known universe could hear: “I’m sorry!”

  Chris kissed the top of her head, then again, said: “Whatever, it’s okay.”

  He’d previously only glimpsed the Faye who now stood back and stared at him, said: “No it’s not.”

  I’ve been you, thought Condor.

  The four of them sat on secondhand recycled office chairs in front of the wall made by Chris’s sophisticated and expensive sound & cyber system.

  Faye said: “I’m sorry, but this best choice puts you at terrible risk, your life, your career—I’m serious!”

  “The big gun convinced me of that,” said Chris.

  “We can’t laugh about this!” argued Faye, fighting a smile.

  “We have to laugh about this.”

  Faye said: “You’re a lawyer and there are laws and security codes we’re probably breaking on top of all that, but … you have to know enough to know why.”

  Then she revealed a framework of truth, disclosing Condor just enough, justifying and exonerating Merle, taking the blame and the blood all on her.

  “And now we need you,” she told Chris.

  Condor interrupted: “Tomorrow, it’s got to be tomorrow.”

  “What—” Chris held up a hand against both Faye and the man called Condor.

  Who he frowned at, asked: “What did you mean, I’m not who you expected? This is my apartment, my home, she’s my … my I’m hers.”

  Condor said: “The way she talked, I thought you’d be taller.”

  A smile twitched Chris’s lips, he blushed, stared at the floor.

  Faye’s eyes searched that plane, too.

  Let them have the moment.

  Let it touch you.

  Chris looked up, his motion pulling all others’ eyes to him as he said: “I get it. Look, I don’t do what I do because it’s a job, and I didn’t take this job to punch my ticket to some ‘better’ gig, and if I’m not here to matter, I don’t belong here at all.”

  Faye said: “I … You know.”

  “Yeah,” said Chris, “I know. But now what matters is this … thing we’re in.”

  He looked at Condor, said: “Besides the obvious cosmic reality, why does what we do next have to be tomorrow?”

  “Because it’s Friday,” answered Condor.

  Faye told the blond man who’d loosed the tie around his neck why, what, how.

  “Yeah,” said Chris, “it’s gotta be tomorrow.”

  Merle said: “What about tonight?”

  Tonight was frozen pizzas, a refrigerator six-pack of cold microbrewery beer, speculation and nervous silences, things said and not said, glances, eyes full of questions and words full of hope. They used Chris’s computer to map out their moves, Google street view and satellite images to scan what they’d see in the future.

  As the small one-bedroom apartment filled with the aromas of baking pizza crust and simmering tomato sauce, cheese bubbling and coins of pepperoni and sausage curling their circles in toward their centers, Condor inventoried this other place where he didn’t want to die.

  A particular bachelor’s home. “Particular,” yes, as in this one, but “particular” more in what was chosen and cherished.

  Almost like me.

  Or who you could have been if.

  A wall of electronics. Great speakers, a dollar-devouring computer and music system, racks of CDs arranged in categories of subtle distinction. A few photos of a mom, a dad, a brother and two sisters, one older, one younger. Among the framed photos on the walls hung original art by a creator with a flair for purple and red crayons and dinosaurs, a display that screamed nephew to Condor. One frame held the iconic New Yorker magazine cover after 9/11, an all-black skyline enveloping even blacker silhouettes of twin towers. Another frame showed a rare indigo night aerial shot of the glowing U.S. Capitol dome that Condor and Chris saw from the sidewalks of every ordinary workday. Stacks of books lined walls, a couple volumes of Camus, law tomes and histories, novels. Titles Condor spotted included Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, East of Eden, Neuromancer, The Nature of the Game, Crimegate. The TV was small, a few DVDs stacked beside it. A cable hookup. The quick search & secure stalk through the apartment he’d done with Faye after she broke them in had shown Condor the lone bedroom, a closet with half a dozen suits plus sports jackets, ties, plastic bagged from the dry cleaner’s shirts and lots of running shoes—“Ultimate,” Faye’d whispered, a comment he didn’t understand but let pass as strategically irrelevant. Their good luck meant frozen pizzas in the otherwise bleakly sparse refrigerator unit.

  You could live like this.

  Almost.

  But the madness you bring with you would crash this sophisticated order.

  Condor looked across the five remaining slices of pizza to the floor space where Chris sat beside Faye, asked him: “Has anybody been watching you?”

  “Ah … No.”

  “No odd looks at work? Strangers suddenly around? Familiar faces appearing when you didn’t expect them?”

  “You mean other than you?” Chris shook his head. “Nobody’s watching me.”

  “Somebody’s always watching you. What matters is who’s looking and why and what do they see.”

  “Chris,” said Faye, “if we—if I wasn’t here, is this how it would be?”

  “You mean am I maintaining a normal profile and not breaking my known patterns in a way that would alert whoever is crazy enough to care?”

  “I care,” said Condor.

  Chris cocked his head and with an exaggerated expression of affirmation, said: “Exactly. But no, this—what’s happening on the floor of my apartment on a Thursday evening, pizza with friends, not my usual after work, not a bite out or a game or a…”

  He smiled at Faye. “But I’ve been spending more time like this lately. Waiting.”

  Condor said: “What’s different between now and like then?”

  “Noise,” said Chris. “NPR, music or even a game. Something would be on.”

  “Make that happen,” said Condor.

  Chris’s quick keying of commands into the sound system created a random playlist of songs heavy on alternative country/folk/rock songwriters shotgunned with jazz like Miles Davis and once fabulously famous but now tastefully forgotten moments of music.

  Was one of those pop songs, a studio syncopation of electric guitars and violins and commercially soulful male voices wailing words th
at triggered memories in anyone who’d heard this tune more than thrice, a song with juvenile lyrics that meant nothing akin or ironic to this moment, nowhere near a clong, just a catchy three-minute musical chorus in rock ’n’ roll slow-beat time.

  Condor—

  —old man grunting, straining, but quickly—

  —got to his feet, his hand reaching down and finding Merle’s instinctively reaching-up hand to be grasped.

  “Dance with me,” he said.

  Unfolding, yoga graceful, wide eyes scanning him, saying: “What?”

  “This is the chance we get. Dance with me.”

  Wet filled her blue eyes but she had no strength to resist him taking her in his arms, holding her right hand with his heart-side grasp, his gun hand pressed on her blouse, on her bra strap, on her spine as he swayed them into step-step-slide, step-step-slide and the music played and she pressed her face against his blue shirt to dot it with her tears, as he felt the push of her breasts, the smell of her gray-blond hair and this moment, this moment of dancing to cheesy music he would never have picked, music that meant only this dance, this dance in an apartment where a couple who could be their children sat on the floor with beer bottles and bad pizza and watched them sway through time.