“And you said—”
“And I said Condor. I spoke the word. I should have guessed what he must have done. He covered his ass. Probably made a call, generated a query, created a Condor data link so that by last night … Your V trolling the grid knew he was linked.”
“They just didn’t know how,” said Condor.
“Just before we left Chris’s apartment this morning, I went to the bathroom, cell phone hidden in my panties … Sent the Senator a text. Told him hell or high water, hearings or constituent or fund-raiser meetings be damned, he had to show up at nine fifteen at the main entrance to Hart and wait to escort me and mine to the Intelligence Committee offices. Safety in numbers, right? Especially when one number is a U.S. Senator. That’s what was so smart. Hiding behind him.”
“Your phone!” Condor told Merle. “They were tracking that as soon as you texted the Senator. GPS knew where we were, the parking lot, knew we were coming on foot. One spotter on a laptop relaying data, the other … How he got a bike…”
Merle flowed to her feet before Condor or Faye could stop her.
“Oh God, they’re on us now!” said Merle.
“The phone! Get it out, pull it—”
“No,” she said.
“No,” she whispered.
Her eyes focused far away as Merle said, “Me being smart got Chris killed. Me being smart might let you stay alive.”
Merle’s cheeks glistened.
Condor stepped to comfort her, took his hands in hers, she cupped his face—
Merle kneed him in the groin.
Condor collapsed to his knees on the grassy knoll.
Blinding pain gagging gasping …
Hearing Merle: “I wish I could be who you want me to be!”
His eyes opened to a teary blur of Faye in a pink hoodie struggling to stand.
As up the slope from the grassy knoll ran Merle, up to the busy D.C. street …
Gone.
She’s gone.
“Come on.” Faye pulled Condor to his feet, the wounded helping the lame. “You can’t catch her. She did what she did. Now she’s trying to make up for it. She knows they’re on the phone she’s got, they’ll track her, so she’s running until…”
Faye caught her breath. “She got Chris killed. And she bought us our until.”
She and Condor pulled the batteries of the cell phones Merle’d bought them, tossed the debris into the woods. Late-morning sun warmed them as they shuffled off a grassy knoll, the wounded leaning on the old & lame.
“I want to shoot her,” confessed Faye as each step made her lean more on him.
“I want to shoot me,” said Condor as a greater ache replaced the one in his groin.
They kept their guns holstered out of sight as Condor helped Faye toward the hotel’s taxi & shuttle bus–crowded horseshoe driveway. He adjusted the pink hoodie to cover the mess on her head, didn’t need to tell her to keep her face down because she could barely hold it up, barely keep walking beside him.
Nervous families everywhere, thought Condor as he shuffled toward the hotel’s sliding glass doors, a female form in a pink hoodie wrapped in his left arm, his right hand pressed against his black leather jacket. Dads. Moms.
Half a dozen suits & ties fretted in the airplane-ride-dressed crowd of … More than tourists. Condor dodged an overstacked luggage cart, pushed through loud families.
College kids, he thought, then, No: soon-to-be college kids.
School visits. Lots of universities, colleges in D.C. Everybody should see Washington. Bring the whole family, make a vacation of it and no, we won’t embarrass you, we deserve to see the place we’ll mortgage our future to so you can learn how the world works and get a recognized passport to a tomorrow of paychecks and promises.
Someone’s nine-year-old little brother in blue jeans and booger stains dashed through the crowd. A school-colors lanyard & plastic name-tagged ID flew off the boy, but he never looked back. Never saw Condor rescue the ID from being trampled by shoes hurrying across the vast hotel front lobby floor.
The lanyard’s name tag read: VISITOR.
Aren’t we all.
Deep in the lobby lounged couches and padded chairs, end tables to hold cocktails from the hotel bar. As eleven A.M. checkout ticked closer, most chairs were filled by suitcase-guarding spouses or (less often) solo high-schoolers thinking that back home wasn’t so bad after all. Last-minute discards cluttered the end tables—brochures, visitor packets, other relics from the era of dead trees.
An older woman used a black cane to leverage herself from a lobby chair.
Condor lowered Faye into that vacated seat. Adjusted her slump so the hood covered most of her pained face. He shrugged out of her backpack purse he’d been wearing since Chinatown, set the clunking backpack in Faye’s lap.
Whispered: “Don’t let people see your face. Try to look young.”
The lanyard draped around his neck.
I am who I say I am.
He floated here. He floated there. Cruised through the crowd. Past the lobby cart with the barista selling chocolate and coffee confections, pastries. Past the front desk where black-suited clerks dealt with a crush of airport-bound guests.
A packet from the same university as his VISITOR name tag drifted to his hands.
Elevator doors slid open. Out hurried a haggard dad with a sullen ten-year-old daughter whose hand was grabbed by a mom with an unmistakable had it up to here look. A nearby college-age daughter slouched in another world even though she could have reached out and touched the woman who gave birth to her. Mom yelled at the man who’d given these two daughters to her: “Come on, the Stevenses are parked out front to drive us to the airport!”
Already four steps behind his fleeing family, the father slapped an electronic key card on an unmanned counter with a slot on its front wall that read: KEY DEPOSIT. His face showed good enough as he hurried out of the hotel after his family.
No one saw Condor palm the key card off the counter.
The clock above the crowded front desk read 10:57.
No one destined for the Stevenses’ airport ride came back through the hotel’s sliding glass doors. Out there, in the horseshoe driveway, amidst the thinning herd of taxis and shuttle buses, Condor saw no anxiously parked & packed private vehicle.
A confident woman in her mid-thirties wearing a black-skirted business suit settled at the concierge’s desk across the lobby, clicked on the desktop computer.
Condor and a posh woman clutching an iPhone reached the concierge’s desk at the same time, but with a grandiose sweep of his arm, he signaled Ms. iPhone to go first.
Of course she said: “Thank you.”
Sat down and started talking to the concierge, who met her words with a smile and only a fraction-of-a-second look at the silver-haired gentleman who’d kindly stepped aside and now waited with his hands crossed over his black leather jacket and a look that said he appreciated the concierge’s appreciation.
At 11:04, the posh woman climbed into a taxi outside in the hotel’s horseshoe driveway and the nice gentleman who’d waited took the seat across from the concierge.
Any hospitality professional could see he looked terrible.
The man wearing the lanyard used by parents visiting a D.C. university set the packet they’d given him on the desk, sighed. “I’m sorry, we didn’t expect this trouble.”
“What can I do to help, sir?”
“Got a time machine for guests? Or maybe a daughter exchange—bad joke, I love her, we wouldn’t trade her for the world, but … They all say this is the difficult year.”
The concierge’s polite smile offered encouragement. Understanding.
“And I know, it’s late, but the crowd at the front desk, and I didn’t spot you here until…” Now let her off the hook. “… until that woman needed to go first, and yesterday, orientation, how were we to know? Sure, why not let the older girl spend the night with her new roommate and her parents, and this morning she?
??s here waiting for us in the lobby like she was supposed to, but—Don’t look, but over there? In the pink hoodie?”
The flick of the concierge’s eyes confirmed: pink hoodie, female, slumped in a chair trying not to be seen, not to be here. Verified data.
“We come down to go with the Stevenses to their place in Virginia before we catch the plane out of Dulles tomorrow and Oh shit, she’s sitting there trying to hide the scabbiest, yuckiest bloodiest bruise on her head, saying she won’t go with the Stevenses, won’t go to school here, just wants to go home, and no she won’t talk to her mother and the little one’s got … let’s just call it ‘a condition,’ needs her mom to go with her, not be the one to stay here with Callie and get to the bottom of what’s going on.”
The concierge gave him a lipstick frown: “Sir, does your daughter need medical attention?”
“No, I was a medic— No way could you have even been alive during Vietnam. Bottom line, we split things up, my wife and I, so I didn’t pay attention if she pre-checked out or at the desk, but here’s the thing: Deb and my wife are going with the Stevenses, I’m going to stay here and let Callie come around to telling me what the hell’s going on, and tomorrow we’ll meet up at Dulles, but…”
The silver-haired father passed his key card to the concierge.
A hard piece of evidence, of reality, of truth.
“The waiting to get to you made me miss the check-out time, automatic or whatever my wife did at the front desk, but here’s my key.”
The concierge swiped the volunteered electronic key card through the reader slot on her desk, said: “Yes, Mr. Cordingley, we show an automatic checkout.”
“You’re right, and that’s the problem. I’ve got a teenage girl trying not to burst out crying at any moment, answers to get before we get on the plane home tomorrow, and I needed to roll our checkout to then before eleven, but you weren’t here until now and the wait…”
“You want to extend your reservation?”
“You’re right, please, just like it is, or if we need to take another room…”
They did, smaller room, twin beds, 729 West, on the same credit card?
Of course.
The quiet of a hotel room.
Condor lay on one freshly made bed.
Faye lay on the other bed.
She started to cry.
Me, too.
Gone, then whoosh: back. Maybe he slept, maybe he didn’t. Afternoon light filled the hotel room windows. His watch shows four o’clock.
And he heard Faye say: “Wait.”
Condor sat on his bed to face her sitting up, feet on the floor to face him.
She said: “You’ve got the backpack, the laptop computer from Merle?”
He got the laptop, handed it to her.
“Confession,” she said. “When I was alone, I downloaded a ‘Protect Your Kids’ program. Cost Merle’s credit card a couple hundred dollars. I programmed our disposable phones with a GPS tracker parents buy to snoop on their teenagers, set up the system in this laptop. A full analysis of her phone at the Agency would spot it, but it’s designed to hide itself from savvy teenagers, so…”
“So the Vs tracked her secret phone she hid from us, but because of what you hid from me and Merle, you and I can secretly track her other phone?”
Faye shrugged.
“Can it back trace? Can the V—”
“Maybe,” said Faye. “But only if somebody’s looking to do that.”
“And if they’ve … got Merle, clearly it’s a throwaway burner, they’ll pull our pre-programmed numbers but we ditched those phones, no batteries, no signals, so…”
Three minutes and they were staring at the laptop screen’s street map of a neighborhood just outside the Beltway in the urban sprawl that is America’s capital.
A blue dot pulsed on the screen’s map. The address displayed.
“She’s there,” whispered Condor.
“The phone is there.” Faye worked the laptop. “Been there since 2:07. Before that—look, the map tracks her route, one stop near here at…”
“The zoo,” said Condor. “She ran to the zoo. Found someplace to sit, the bear pit, watched animals until … They came and got her. They didn’t just kill her there, or—”
He grabbed the laptop. Clicked onto the Washington Post Web site.
“Senate aide shot on Capitol Hill. Car stolen.” He read the story by reporter Claudia Sandlin, a half-dozen paragraphs, Congressional police force, FBI, suspects including a woman, stolen car found oil pan burned-out in downtown D.C. Unknown if a strong-arm theft of a bicycle from a commuting EPA worker who was knocked unconscious six blocks away earlier in the morning was related.
Condor whispered: “They’ve lost control.”
“Who?”
“Everybody. Sami and the Agency and the V. Too much, too fast, too public.”
He clicked to fill the laptop screen with the map and its pulsing blue dot.
Tell Faye the truth.
“This much chaos,” he said, “the V’s down this much … Good chance we could Panic Line or other way go in, get to Sami, an official if … banged-up exfiltration. Get in alive and give it all up to the good guys, to the system, to what’s supposed to work.”
She stared at him with her green eyes where the pupils now looked normal.
But she’s not seeing me.
The blue dot pulsed.
Condor said: “They either killed her or got her, but they got her phone. Either way, that’s where I’m going.”
“If we go in to the Agency—”
“What will be their priority?” said Condor. “Whoever they are. Whoever we can trust. Sami? The V still running on a hijacked official record? The moment we show up, we get logged in by somebody, and you know some innocent rule-follower will do that, then that blue dot … Then there’s only one smart option for the V with that blue dot.”
He picked his .45 off the bed. Looked around for his black leather jacket.
“It’s about more than Merle’s blue dot,” he said. “She’d be enough, but … Truth?”
Faye nodded.
“If I go in without finishing this, I’m just part of the program,” said Condor.
“You’re only one beat-up old man.” She wobbled to her feet. “Odds are, two of them minimum. And they’re good. They could probably put us down in their sleep. You know that, I can see it in your face. Hell, even if I was at my best…”
“You’ve got a concussion.”
“Pro football players get back in the game with concussions.”
“They die young.”
“It’s not about dying anymore. This is about what I’ve got to live with.”
She took a step—
Fell back to sitting on the bed, bumped into Condor, knocked him to his bed.
They stared at what they couldn’t avoid seeing.
She said: “You can’t take them on without me, and I can’t make it. Not now.”
The blue dot pulsed.
Faye said: “Whatever the worst of it is for Merle, it’s already happening or happened or never gonna happen because they’re holding her, maybe no extreme measures or … monster mayhem. Even if we could walk out that door now, quickest we could get there is forty minutes. Like this. Like who we are now. No prep, no Google street view recons, no nothing but two fucked-up, off-the-rez guns. You like those odds?”
Don’t tell her that she’s right.
She said: “If it’s only a phone waiting for us, something some citizen found, if we go now, we’ll get dropped like this and odds are, only our going down to show for it.”
“When?” he said.
“When we see what more chaos breaks loose. When we see more whatever they does. When we got a chance. When you and I are who the fuck we can be.”
“When?” he repeated.
“You know when,” she said.
And when they’d showered, when they’d room serviced and when she’d eaten without throwing up, whe
n they’d watched & read news and when they’d computer reconned and strategized and when he’d gone out & come back, when he’d shared pills to fight pain & coax sleep and when they lay under the covers of their separate beds, when the turned-off laptop was set on the shelf near the black-screen TV …
What he knew, what he felt, what he saw and heard in his waking and his dreams and his nightmares was a blue dot pulsing like a lone human heart.
30
Everybody needs a way to die.
—Condor
Saturday-morning suburbia and Faye sits in a stolen car—fuck it, fuck them.
Fuck me.
Outside the windshield is a cul-de-sac. Seven low brick houses spun out around a traffic circle, a road spoke leading downhill to the dead-end street that got you here, now, eleven A.M., checkout time back at the hotel for lies you left at dawn, sayonara suckers.
Call here Silver Spring, Merry-land, just a kiss outside the Beltway but still Death City, America, a suburban human terrain of wage earners. The lucky households are home to two of them. Too many households get too few or too tiny paychecks in this neighborhood where getting by is a step above getting gone.
Lots of April-green trees.
A wall of trees, then a high wooden fence on the Target Zone’s rear perimeter, a couple low bushes, sidewalk leading to the front porch, black steel railings, five painted-red concrete steps, then the aluminum storm door with its top-half window and behind it, a solid white door. Could just be wood, could be reinforced metal, but if so, call that a landlord’s paranoia because V doesn’t profile with permanently secured safe houses.
Call the TZ a Crash House.
No fucking shit.
Got a back door, but getting to it means vaulting the backyard fence. No way can Condor get over that wooden wall in great shape & good speed for a breach.
All the windows are rolled down on Faye’s stolen car crouched at a curb outside the cul-de-sac circle where two of the six non-target houses still have cars parked near them instead of cars gone grocery shopping or to kids’ soccer games or whatever real people with real families do on cool green April Saturday mornings. Gray-black clouds roll over the cul-de-sac, but when did a little rain kill anybody, whereas some days staying inside means you’re home when trouble comes calling, even if trouble only means to hit the house next door, those guys who you never knew, who just moved in.