“Come on!” said Condor.
But he left it for Merle to take Faye’s arm, to help the wounded woman.
Keeping his hands open and dangling by his sides for gun, realized Faye.
“Shooters!” muttered Faye as they made her stumble along H Street’s sidewalk.
She pawed her belt where … No gun! Where’s my gun!
“Wet boys, the Oppos, where are they, where … where…”
“They’re out here.” Condor led the way across H Street, down toward the massive indoor amphitheater for Bruce Springsteen concerts and hockey games. “Gotta be.”
She saw him scanning the air above other sidewalk shufflers.
What, what’s he looking for? What— Cameras, closed-circuit surveillance.
Who’s in that closed circuit?
Condor stepped into the doorway of an abandoned store with whitewashed windows bearing a sign: COMING SOON!
But what, thought Faye as Condor pulled her into the doorway that was the size of coffin standing on its end: What soon comes?
“Turn your bloody side away from the street,” he said. “Act like you’re crying.”
Faye heard him tell Merle: “That drugstore. Get baby wipes, disinfectant ones. And there, the store next door, whichever, buy a hoodie sweatshirt for her—a big on her!”
All Faye could do was stand in that coffin-sized doorway.
Head throbbing, oh God fire on the right side of my brain!
Breathe. In. Out. Say: “Why haven’t they killed us yet?”
“I don’t know,” said Condor.
The only time Faye knew was now, but there must have been more, because now Merle was here carrying store sacks that had not been before. Faye felt stinging dabs on the right side of her head, pats and Oww! pulls of her hair, smelled … Lemons, the wipes Merle’s using smell of lemons and alcohol and … and …
“Watch out!” Condor pulled Merle away from the woman hidden in the doorway.
Faye jackknifed forward, vomited.
Staggered—stabilized standing in her own shoes by Merle’s grip.
Another swirl of nausea, then Faye felt lighter, clearer.
Felt Merle wiping her face, her lips, a swab inside her mouth. The flutter of a wipe falling into the vomit-smelling concrete doorway fuck littering. Faye heard Condor tell the older woman: “Stand beside me facing out, screen us, watch for scanners or shooters.” Faye felt him take off her backpack. Make sure the pockets of her black coat were empty. He eased that wrap off her. Tossed the coat over the puddle of what had been in her guts. Condor took the holster and ammo pouch for his .45 off her belt.
Then, oh then, that weight she’d carried for years rode holstered on her right hip. Energy flowed into her arms, her hands flexed. She helped more than hindered as Condor slid her into the soft sleeves of something, reached around to pull up a zipper, his hand brushing her breasts Chris kisses no No NO and then hands on her shoulders turned her around to face the street, see Condor’s face, blink, and she’s here, now.
Merle washed Faye’s face with lemon wipes, tossed them into the rancid doorway, white squares fluttering down to another lifetime’s black coat.
She gave a bottle of water to Faye.
Faye filled her mouth, swished it around, spit out what was to the sidewalk.
“Eww!” Two teenage girls pranced past toward the rest of their lives.
“Okay,” said Faye. She started to nod yes, but that hurt far too much.
Condor covered her wounded head with the hood on the sweatshirt she now wore.
Pink. I’m wearing a candy-pink hoodie.
Condor slid his aviator mirror-lensed sunglasses over Faye’s eyes.
Waved down a taxi and beckoned for Merle to climb in, help as he guided Faye in. His eyes scanned the street and he jumped in the taxi, told the cabby: “Go!”
Rolling, the taxi’s driving us through downtown D.C.
Condor told the taxi driver to take them to the National Zoo.
Faye whispered: “We’re going to see the animals.”
No one in the cab knew if that was a question or a statement.
Didn’t matter. After five minutes of Condor checking mirrors and side streets as the taxi drove, just past the hotel where a well-off white boy who’d failed as a Nazi and a rock musician tried—and failed—to murder President Ronald Reagan in order to impress a movie star, Condor said: “Pull over. Beautiful day, we’ll walk from here.”
The three of them stood on the curb near the first communist Chinese embassy.
Condor waited until he knew they’d vanished from the driving-off taxi’s mirrors.
“Come on,” he said. “We gotta get over the bridge.”
Head-throbbing, but clearly, I can see clearly through his sunglasses.
Faye said: “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I’ve been … he’s dead and…”
“We’re,” he said. “Focus on that: we are. All the blood and shit, but we still are.
“And now, we are getting our asses across that bridge.”
“Paris’s great bridges,” muttered part of Faye not yet back under her control.
But this was not Paris.
This was Washington, D.C.
Call it the Connecticut Avenue Bridge. Call it the William Howard Taft Bridge. Who was he to the man whose name Chris taught us for the Capitol Hill tower with ringing bells? Call it a long-ass way Faye wasn’t sure she could walk.
Merle whispered: “What if they can see us?”
Maybe they could, but Faye could only shuffle one step in front of where she’d been, follow the sidewalk of this billion-mile-long bridge through the heart of Washington, D.C. Far on the other side, she saw two-story stores and cafes near the Woodley–National Zoo subway stop, knew she couldn’t actually see the colorful high wall mural portrait of a white-blond wondrous Marilyn Monroe—M.M., Merle is M.M., too, but gray-blond and Condor’s something and holding my arm.
Giant bronze statues of lions guard each corner of that bridge.
Faye glanced up at the lion they walked past: “He’s got his eyes closed.”
Halfway across this stone bridge supported by concrete arches a hundred feet above the treetops of Rock Creek Parkway, Faye looked over the corroded green railing—
Swooned with vertigo, swayed inside Merle’s grip, closed her eyes behind Condor’s sunglasses until the universe stopped spinning.
Let herself look.
Traffic whizzed past on the other side of the railing, its whoosh as unbalancing as looking down to the treetops and the long fall.
Faye glanced up to the blue sky.
Green lampposts topped by green metal eagles, their wings spread wide.
But they can never fly away.
There! The other side of the bridge, we made it, we’re … Still in killers’ gun sights.
What a sight we make.
A sliver-haired, craggy man wearing a backpack purse over a black leather jacket.
A gray-blond used to be a beauty who could still move but had nowhere to go.
A slumping shuffling loser bitch hiding inside a candy-pink hoodie and aviator sunglasses with matted hair and stinking of vomit.
Condor led them away from the street corner with its subway entrance and outdoor cafe tables, down the slope of Calvert Street toward the access road for Rock Creek Parkway. Farther in that direction loomed the sprawling complex of a hotel that catered to conventions and tour groups and expense accounts and neighborhood residents who in the coming summer would scam their way in to use the outdoor pool. He led Faye and Merle to a grassy apron between the Parkway entrance/exit road and the hotel’s fence of metal bars. Led them to shadows on the grassy slope made by three close-together trees. Led them to the other side of those tall living sentinels where they could sit, collapse, not so easily be seen.
Merle passed the last water bottle she’d bought in Chinatown.
Condor took a swig. Held the bottle to Faye: “Replenish.”
&
nbsp; She drank half of what was left, saved the rest for Merle.
Who took three swallows and clearly yearned for more as she screwed the cap back on the water bottle, saving some just in case.
Condor said: “Why was there only one shooter?”
“What the fuck!” exclaimed Merle. “How many does it take!”
Faye said: “Sami has an army.”
“And our Uncle Sam sure does.”
“If it’s not any uncle Sami,” said Faye, “then who?”
“Maybe it is us,” said Condor, “and maybe it isn’t.”
More all back every second, Faye said: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Condor whispered: “The Vs.”
29
A walk in the park.
—The 1972 across the street from the White House presidential aides’ huddle on covert ops, including the (unsuccessful) murder of muckraker journalist
Jack Anderson
What a rush.
The clarity of a blue sky spring morning.
Sitting on a grassy knoll.
“What are you talking about?” Faye said to Condor.
Merle glared at them: “Who are you people? She’s been shot, Chris is dead, we’re … You almost got us killed! I did everything I could and it didn’t work. Now we’re worse off and he’s dead, and I can’t…”
Her rant ran out, she took a breath, whispered: “Who are we?”
“No,” said Faye, looking right at him, right at Condor: “Who are Vs?”
They sat there on a city park–smelling grassy knoll that April morning, Condor and two women he’d never even talked to the week before.
And he asked: “What would you do?
“New York City is two towers of smoke. The Pentagon’s wall is crashed in. Corpses cover a field in Pennsylvania. And except for a few novelists and one ex-spook living outside the Beltway, all our tomorrow people, the ones who are supposed to be looking ahead and seeing what’s coming, their eyes didn’t see or their mouths went unheard or their hands couldn’t stop the horror.
“So a lot got done that we now can hardly believe. Forget about torture, renditions, secret prisons, us invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. That’s old news and this is about what’s new.
“How would you create a new spy service? We created Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence and got puzzle boxes on top of puzzle boxes.”
Faye pressed: “The Vs?”
“Vapors. It’s all vapors. No name, no headquarters, no gear, no IDs, no Web site or e-mail address, no data chains, no flow chart because there is no organization, no budget, no mention nowhere. No box. No credit. No blame. No existence, no personnel. Maybe seven policy czars know about it, maybe by now V is all automated.
“Because it’s vapors. Software. The logical transitional constellation of a quintillion data points. Dark web. Deep web. Hidden web. Vapors running through it all. A regular agency good guy enters a bad guy on a ‘threat ladder or watch lists. Threat identified. The software starts to work on him, or the group, or the money-laundering bank, or … whatever, whoever, he’s targeted in the machine.”
Merle said: “Machines don’t shoot people.”
“That’s rather definitional. Armies and librarians are all part of some machine that sends pension credits and drones with missiles.
“The software computes that a guy named Seba Pezzani is a growing threat, but he isn’t fitting into a doable profile for our ‘real world’ spy or security agencies. So a plane ticket vanishes from some billion-dollar federal contract. An ATM activates. A pistol gets delivered from an Air Force base to a cafe in Rome and an action unit V with whatever credentials or authority and knowledge he needs. Who knows where our orders come from, who’s really in charge, how all our needs actually got created. It’s not ‘need to know,’ it’s knowing only what seems to be needed.
“The V uses people and systems to get things done and they never realize it. Soldiers or cops or office managers or guys on the street never know who put them there. They do the job they’re supposed to do. No extra pay, no full knowledge, no big picture the V doesn’t control. The best puppets don’t know they have strings.
“Maybe a Level-One Action Operative knows he’s a V, but he never knows the whole system. Maybe he thinks he’s detached from Delta for sanctioned Special Ops. Maybe he’s an ex–Navy SEAL who works as a personal trainer at a Missouri YMCA until he gets a text. A CIA brick agent whose Case Officer isn’t really in charge of her. A retired FBI agent, a homicide cop who gets an extra thousand bucks a month from a CIA black account that records as part of the regular bribe to a Mexican general and it’s all covered by IRS’s computers, though Level-One Vs don’t do this for the money. They believe.
“And what gets done, gets done. Only extreme cases. Only high necessities.”
“Targeted killings,” said Faye. “Illegal assassinations. Other … neutralizations. Like throwing troublesome people into insane asylums, frame jobs.”
“Beautiful system,” said Condor. “An evolution from how the Intelligence Support Activity got its start, though the V will never become a Pentagon office.”
Merle said: “It would never work.”
“Facebook knows what ads to show you. Marketers profile what you’ll want. Facial recognition systems plus behavior analysis, reconfiguring police reports and maintenance schedules on an airliner … You get it: if you link the vapors, you can see what needs to be done and you can do … amazing things. Not often, but when you do, nobody knows it was you, nobody knows it was done. You rewrite the record as you change it. Reality becomes what the data says it is.”
“Case officer,” said Faye. “The Green Light. The decider. There has to be—”
“A dead man’s switch? A heart amidst the brains of the machines? The human touch?” Condor nodded. “There wouldn’t have to be, but we still made one. But just one. One human entity as a fail-safe Level-Zero control with full knowledge programmed and final-say. Paychecks not on any audit. A quiet life with an intuitive desktop in an ordinary house in an American hometown. It’s the twenty-first-century model. You work from home. The neighbor everybody waves to and nobody knows.”
“Who did this?” whispered Merle.
Condor said: “I think it was me.”
The woman he … he … call it whatever, Merle stared at him.
The woman warrior who sacrificed her life for his stared at him.
“Street years,” he said, “the week before 9/11 and I was ready to walk away, not old, but there’re only so many scars you can carry. Then boom. And as I recovered from … from one rough Op, I had a great idea, a reputation and clout, some access to a place where everybody wanted answers.”
“But you went crazy,” said Faye.
“Well … yeah,” said Condor. “The sheer rush of it, the knowing of what you could do and had to do and did.”
“So why do they want you dead now?” asked Faye. “Jesus, back on Tuesday, they would have settled for you getting locked back up forever as a crazy murderer.”
Condor shrugged. “Maybe somebody’s pulling the plug on the whole system.”
“Or the whole system is trying to be sure nobody pulls the plug on it,” said Faye. “And you, fighting their forget-it meds … Your data metric would register high risk.
“But,” she said, asking the investigator’s ultimate question: “How do you know?”
“The lone shooter on a bike,” said Condor. “Like a clong only no music. Seeing him made me realize. Realize it wasn’t Sami or Uncle Sam Ops. Because they only sent one shooter. Had to be a system short on personnel. A small Op, small team—
“And that flashed me on remembering the V. We dropped four out of six at the subway. No replacements, especially if the V is getting shut down. All that fit with my cover team having made the first move. The V originally brought in every street meat unit they had for my neutralization. Pre-position every Level-One Action V to be read
y, to be ahead of you and Sami and the real guys, to be in them but not of them.”
Faye said: “The Homeland Security guy who showed up at your house, the guy I almost shot! He was the gunner on the subway platform who got away! The biker!”
“Got your partner working on orders V created, killed him, waited. Knew I’d be home from work. Knew you or a team would come. I’d get taken out by the good guys.”
“But this morning,” said Faye. “How did they know our play this morning? We’re off all grids, no data for them to hijack, but even with only one guy—”
“Probably two guys,” said Condor. “Six at the subway attack, two left. A spotter somewhere, plus the shooter on the bike. But somehow knowing we were coming, knowing Chris was taking us to the Senate Intelligence Committee offices where there’d be too many plugged-in people to hijack or control so then we couldn’t be hit and we’d have gotten to Sami safe. And maybe figured all this out.”
“Two guys,” said Faye. “How?”
Merle whispered: “Me.”
Faye and Condor chorused: “What?”
“Oh God, I’m sorry! Me me me!”
Merle said: “You people with your guns and your secrets, your claims that what I know isn’t the real world, wasn’t my world. Not after you came. Even if I … even if we …
“I’m smart. Savvy. In politics, in life, always cover your ass. I believed you, wanted to be with you, but I bought myself a protection policy. An outside alliance. You had me buy four phones, I went to my ATM and got money and bought five.
“I played my one ask,” she said. “The smart thing to do, not just meekly obey my way into some shit storm. I did what would have worked and would have made our chances better and maybe covered me if you … If I got dumped or duped or set up.”
Condor said: “You called him.”
“Who?” said Faye.
“The Senator who owes me,” said Merle. “Called him yesterday. Told him to be ready, that he was going to help me with a whistleblower from the CIA, a guy I met at the Library of Congress, that maybe this would make the Senator a hero but if it didn’t, it would cover his ass.”