Once upon a time, these streets hosted a satellite veterans’ hospital for Walter Reed—rumor had it, the psych ward—but that facility had been shut down, as had the 1950-something faux castle complex where two buildings were still surrounded by a gray cement wall complete with parapets to look like a local hustler’s version of what in that way back when had been a brand-new futuristic dollar magnet called Disneyland.
A railroad track slid by Condor’s view outside the driver’s window, steel rails that made him think he heard a lonesome whistle blow.
You’re done with hallucinations.
Stuck in this real.
With the graveyard the robot woman guided him past.
Gardens of the dead are everywhere.
The stolen car he drove smelled like gas inside its passengers’ compartment.
Figure that one out.
He drove past old houses, some sagging, some rehabbed by the latest hopeful generation of Moms & Dads with kids, so there was a playground, another set of empty swings. Front porches, a seedy apartment complex from some pale lime stucco-walled former motel. Lawns led back from the street. Lots of space between the houses. Hard to hear what was happening next door.
“Arriving at destination … On left, one hundred feet.”
He parked the car at the curb across the street and half a block from destination.
Looked like a horror-movie country house this capital city grew up around and forgot. Two stories, probably three bedrooms upstairs, downstairs dining room, study, front parlor maybe, kitchen, bath. Probably a basement for a furnace. Or whatever.
Almost looked like a real home.
Until you settled it in your eyes just so.
Saw the black iron fence around the double-lot property was more than hip-high to discourage hoppers without encouraging stares. Saw that though the house’s white peeling paint looked like it could use another coat, there was a sheen over the whole structure, a reflective lacquer you couldn’t buy in any hardware store. And the first-floor windows: tinted isn’t the right word, for though they shone a quiet blue in both sunshine and moon glow, those windows let in light but not sight, let out vision but not voltage. Their glass was thick, far beyond the muscle of any rock-throwing neighborhood hooligan. The two doors over the front portal looked no more formidable than the doors you drive past in any crime-conscious American neighborhood, but looks …
Well, looks are as looks see.
What else Condor saw from the parked stolen car let him know the robot woman hadn’t erred in bringing him here. A shed twice the size of that brown van from this morning rose a prudent distance from the house. Though no thick black wires connected the shed to the house, Condor knew the windowless and lightning-grounded shed held an emergency generator and sat on a vast underground fuel tank, just like he knew the glass rectangles on the house’s roof that he could barely see through strategically planted trees, those glass panels were solar converters, just in case or even just because. And there was no mistaking one—no: three satellite dishes amidst the gables pointing up from the top-story windows where bedrooms awaited sweet surrenders of yes, yes, yes.
A nine-year-old dented tan American sedan sat in the pebbled driveway.
The car looked like it seldom saw any extended roads.
Why leave when you’re already there.
Here: Tier Zero.
Like a movie director, Condor whispered: “And … action.”
Opened the stolen car’s door and climbed out to the street.
Knew security cameras watched him walk toward the house.
Worried not so much: he could have been made dead when he drove up.
Bet every badge & Black Ops gun is now dispatched to stay away from here.
Still, after he unlatched the black iron fence gate and crunched over the pebbled path to the front porch, he filled his hand with the .45.
If you’re not bringing flowers …
His left fingers brushed the handle on the aluminum storm door.
No blast of electricity.
No trapdoor sprang open under his shoes to swallow him into the long fall.
No sound of an alarm.
The aluminum door creaked when he opened it. He wrapped his gun-free left hand around the inner door’s brass knob … that turned, opened the door.
A whiff of gasoline came out to the front porch.
Then—as fast & smoothly as a battered sixty-something shaved-bald man could—Condor charged into the house, into the long front hall, his back slamming the inner door shut, his .45 swooping left, right, aiming up the empty stairs leading to the second floor.
Hooks on the hall wall held a rain slicker, a parka retired by increasingly mild and snow-less winters, a faded brown (not candy-pink) hoodie and a New York designer hip-length brown coat of quality leather.
Some security camera’s showing you crouched here, black leather jacket, gun.
Against one hall wall stood two red plastic five-gallon jugs labeled GASOLINE.
Combat stalk down the hall.
Scan your target environment over the barrel of your .45.
Brown hardwood floors, scuffed but kept dust free by an undercover janitorial crew from the NSA’s complex at not-far-away Fort Meade who had no idea why they climbed into phony “Maid Machine” vans to drive nearly to D.C. and clean a private house. But they knew the penalty for talking about this job fell under provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917 with a maybe they’d skip the trial penalty of death.
The walls were painted a soothing shade of ivory.
Dead ahead, at the end of the ten-steps hallway and before stairs to the second floor, the walls opened up, ceiling arches that in a regular house would reveal, say, a formal dining room off to the right, while off to the left would be the sitting room, the living room, the family room: call it what you will, what it was here wasn’t that.
Condor kept his back against the hall wall as he eased toward the open rooms.
What he saw in that room to his right: a twentieth-century whiteboard wiped clean, file cabinets, stacks of computer disks, CPUs or Internet servers.
Two Vietnam-era five-gallon metal gas cans squatted near those cyber slaves.
Condor cradled his heavy gun in the two-handed grip, elbows bent so the .45 that had served America for more than a hundred years pointed toward the ceiling. The cold black barrel rose past the centerline of his face, his eyes looked over the steel shaft’s hole, the scent of gun oil & fired bullets, the hard tang of metal close enough for his lips to kiss as he double-gripped the thick butt and his finger curled on the curved trigger.
Now or never.
He leapt into what could have been a living room—zeroed the .45.
At her.
She sat cupped in the C-curve of a touchscreen desk.
That flat C-shaped desk surface tilted up to face her eyes and hands with vermillion fingernails, short for keyboarding. When, like now, the desktop’s touchscreen was in sleep mode, rather than go dark, the desktop became translucent, so Condor could see her mostly bare desk held a double-edged dagger.
A letter opener on a desk without a single scrap of paper.
Her hair looked like rusted steel streaked with silver wires and curved on each side of her face but … but like it often wasn’t brushed, not like today when it was glorious and red. Her skin was pale white. Call the dark blue outfit she wore a business dress, open at her neck, trim tailored waist, a comfortable skirt that knew how to cling and ride above her knees to reveal slim black-stockings-sheathed legs. From the room’s open arched doorway where he stood aiming his gun at her, Condor couldn’t tell if she still had freckles, though time would never have let her lose the laugh wrinkles on her face, high cheekbones, clean jaw, burning blue eyes. Her thin smile was a fresh lipstick slash of midnight crimson.
She dressed up for this.
For you.
Every great strategy begins with a diversion.
Her voice was a strong tenor.
/> “You could have been a rock ’n’ roll star,” he’d once told her. She’d smiled.
Here and now, the words from her smile said: “You always wanted a big gun.”
“I’ve got what I’ve got.”
“I hope that’s enough.”
Nothing on her desk but the dagger that’s at least six inches from her hand. Scan the room, the walls: shelves, books displayed like antiques, objets d’art or were they mementos, both, whatever, guns: no visible guns.
Gas cans near that wall of wispy blue windows.
She said: “So this is how you look when you’re old. I thought you’d keep your hair.”
“Some things gotta go.”
“Some things come back.”
Swing left, swing right, swing full circle and the world swirls past your gun sights and then it’s back to her, on her. She hasn’t moved. Looks right at you.
Says: “It’s just you and me, kid.”
“Nobody’s a kid anymore.”
“Have you gone and gotten all responsible on me? All adult? All … sane?”
“More than I was before.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
“You think so,” said Condor. “That’s why you tried to kill me.”
“Be fair: the Op was to put you back someplace where you’d be safe and taken care of and not stressed. The killing you only came after you fucked up the program.
“In all fairness,” she continued, “haven’t you ever made a mistake?”
Condor stared at her.
Lowered the .45 from a dead-center aim.
Holstered his weapon.
Felt his heart slamming against his ribs.
She said: “So you didn’t come here to kill me.”
“I didn’t come here to die.”
“Why did you come here?”
He took one breath, took two before he said: “You knew I was coming.”
“Your data lit up cyberspace.”
“You knew I was coming before,” he said. “So you topped out my target index.”
“You showing up here like this, guess I was right.”
“Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“If you can’t fulfill yourself, who’ll do it for you.”
Condor frowned. “What I can’t figure is, are you full of shit, stoned on power or did you go crazy, too, or did the program just swallow you into what it can do.”
“What do you care.”
“Once upon a time,” he said.
“Once upon a time,” she said.
“Confession,” she said. “You looked good in the surveillance footage. I don’t mind bald, but I like you the way you really are.”
She gave him a crimson frown. “The woman Merle: is she my replacement?”
“She was never a promoted colleague. A conflict. A co-whatever all we were.”
“Just a co-conspirator. A collaborator.”
“She’s a person who cared—”
“—and couldn’t get out of the way of Condor. Is she dead? I haven’t looked.”
“There’s nothing there for you to see.”
“How about for you?” Oh, that smile that knows you well.
Knew you well.
Condor drifted to his left—her right, she’s right-handed, the dagger or whatever weapon, she’ll prefer to use her right hand that’s lying flat and empty on the desktop.
“Why didn’t you run?” he said. “Ten strokes on a keyboard and you could have vanished into some wealthy widow sunbathing on the shores of a luxury sea.”
“Why go be somewhere when right here I can be everywhere?”
“Time and space are more than an illusion.”
“Depends on your data.
“Besides,” she said, “maybe I was waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“Everybody needs somebody to talk to. Life is call and response.”
“And that’s what you want from me. Now.”
“I want what I can get. One way or the other, you’re going to give it to me.”
“What about…” He nodded at her desktop portal to the world.
“Whatever I—we—get will be a change they can be made fine with.”
“Are people getting nervous? Squeamish about the V? Is that why I suddenly became an imminent threat, because me in that mix getting sane…?”
“People are always nervous. That’s why they’ve got me. And you.”
“Together.”
“Again.” She shrugged. “Control was always too complex a job for just one person. We made it work. A new us could be fun. And of course, vital.”
“What about all the cans of gas?”
“I’m a careful girl.”
“And if you can’t be control, well then…”
“Why wish that on anybody else?”
“Except me.”
She smiled. “Or us.”
“Or maybe just us for a while. Keeping your options open. Ready to reboot.”
“My life is purpose, is about what’s crucial, what needs to be done.”
“Having that agent crucified on my—”
“He was worse than an incompetent asshole and a drunk. He was selling sources & methods intel to a private contractor. Fool thought he was just cashing in on what the private sector was going to get in five years anyhow. Such a terrible agent he didn’t realize his buyers were fronts leading back to a terrorist group.”
“So you terminate him and use that to frame me, two birds with one crucifixion. But what about killing that guy Chris? Merle and crashing everything into Faye?”
“They’re more than just names.”
“Yeah,” said Condor. “They’re people.”
“They’re data points of cause and effect. Maybe threat matrix computations and outcomes got a little out of control, but whose fault is that?”
“Whoever made them into ones or zeroes choices.” Condor shook his head. “Not me.”
“Really? Or were they consequences of something you created, something you did?”
“You took over.”
“When you malfunctioned, I was there. You put me there. Here.
“And what I do,” she said, “what the V does, what you did, you know it’s true: if we don’t do it, we’ll get it done to us. We stop the worst there is before it becomes real.”
She’s shifting in her chair, keeping her eyes on you as you move around her desk.
Like a child, she said: “I finally like doing that thing you liked me to do.”
Gas cans, guns, dagger, hidden buttons: what weapon?
“And now you’re here,” she said. “But instead of being the what-if whacko we both know you are, you’re acting like the data indicated and predicted you might. Only this time, looks like you really might have a chance to destroy and deactivate like you failed to last time, back when you went crazy. Are you crazy now?”
“Who knows,” he said. “How about you?”
“Who cares,” she told him. Sighed. “I am lonely.
“But you know about that, too,” she said. “That was why you recruited me.”
“No,” he argued. “You were the best of the Girl Scouts. The best of all those women CIA analysts who got Bin Laden after you came to work with me.”
“Maybe,” she allowed. Nylons crackled as she crossed her legs, their indigo-sheathed slimness slipping out from her skirt oh God she’s wearing the black garter belt and she said: “It was so … touching how hard you worked to not let my legs matter.”
You’re around the end of the desk now. Close enough to lunge. Grab her. Standing to her right side. Her eyes are pointed in front of her, but what she’s watching, who she’s seeing, is you.
The dagger lay on her plexiglass desktop. He let his fingers float out. Stroke the length of the shiny blade. Her hand resting beside the dagger trembled.
Perfume, she smells of opening flowers and magazine dreams.
“What about now?” he said, walking behind her chair.
r /> Now you’re behind her, the smell of her hair, dark roots she has to dye, what good spy doesn’t, a thin gold strand lies on the V of soft white flesh below her bare throat, the necklace hangs down to where he can’t see but you know it holds the amulet given her by a woman trapped & broken in a Darfur refugee camp.
She’d refused to cry when she told you that tale.
We are held together by the songs of our times.
“Now you’re here,” she told the man looming behind her.
She didn’t look. Let him be where he was like it didn’t matter, like that was good.
Condor raked his fingers along the back of the tall black leather chair she sat in at her curved touchscreen desk that was years from being seen by the citizens of the country who’d paid for it. He felt the leather give under his fingers’ scratch, wondered if she felt their pressure cross her back, kneading her flesh near her bra strap. If she wore a bra.
Then he was on her heart side.
She glanced up, blue eyes and a soft smile invitation.
Saw him looking at the technological marvel of her desktop.
Knew he was talking about the touchscreen that made minding the universe so simple a sixth grader could do it: “Seems like we’re always one upgrade behind.”
“Think how I feel,” she said.
And he did.
“After all,” she said, “I’ve been around a little longer than you.”
She turned her lean V face toward the man bent over her desk. Slowly—oh so slowly—raised her left hand to brush away the red hair falling across her sky eyes.
Said: “Being older is more interesting. I’m glad you never minded.”
He raised his gun-empty right hand. Held it palm out toward the inclined desktop screen. Said: “Like this?”
He felt the chi in her change even as the screen in front of his right palm lit up from the heat of a human. Tension flowed from her as she stretched her head toward heaven to better see over his hand with its remembered stroke of her flesh.
Condor karate-chopped her throat.
Her crimson head bounced off the black leather executive chair.
Grab her skull and chin whirl & twist!
He heard the snap of her spine and let go, let go, staggered away from the chair.
And what he’d done. What he hadn’t delegated. Done not because it was part of a program. What he had the honest humanity, the guts to choose.