What worked better.
Who but you.
Condor staggered backwards. Hit the wall with his hips, the holstered .45 clunked. His left leg bumped something that vibrated: a five-gallon can of gas.
All over the house. Ferried here in the car he’d parked outside by a warrior, some nameless wannabe hero. What was left of dead dinosaurs now waited in war-surplus metal gas cans and ultra-new red plastic jugs to be spilled and sloshed and dumped on this fusion of the smartest we can be.
A roaring fireball of orange flames and black smoke movie in his mind.
Somehow the .45 ended up in his hand.
He lifted it up to consider.
Heard: Who’s left to shoot?
32
Into the vacuum of his eyes.
—Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone”
Faye sat on an American front porch.
She wore a pink hoodie though her sore, scabbed head was bare to the sinking sun.
Gone was the ballistic vest she’d worn for most of the last three days.
Stone-faced handlers had it now. They’d shown up seventeen minutes after cops who’d been radioed to obey Agent On Scene and stay out of the 911 dispatched to residence. Later, inside that house, a sweatsuit medic dressed her wound. Faye didn’t bother to wait until he was gone before pulling the white bandage off, he didn’t bother to tell her no. An innocent-looking moving van showed up, let neighbors watching from their front porches and windows see its crew dolly out a refrigerator box, a washer/dryer box.
Merle …
They took Merle out in a horizontal box labeled mattress.
Opened that cardboard as soon as they’d lifted it to hidden deep in the van.
Sure they did.
Faye didn’t see the movers get rid of the glass jar of eyeballs in the refrigerator. She didn’t want to know about that. She didn’t want to be part of that.
But I do. And I am.
Faye listened while a bone-tired woman from Sami’s team worked out the cover story to dribble to this cul-de-sac’s looky-loos and street ears and tattle tongues and cell phone snappers. Faye became pink hoodie woman became real estate agent shown up to prep for movers, found squatters, maybe a meth head cooking, saw a flash of something as the squatters boomed out the back door, over the fence, gone who knows where, cops checked the woods. How much of that the neighbors got & bought didn’t matter, there was nothing over police scanners to attract an actual journalist who could publish a story.
Faye told the handlers no when they asked for her weapon.
Told them no when they asked what happened.
Told them no when they said okay, time to leave.
No one told her refusals no.
And the 911 cops left.
And the moving van left.
And the stone-faced handlers left.
All except for the bone-tired woman who worked for Sami plus two janitors in blue jeans and T-shirts and medical masks who’d be a long time washing white walls with their sponges and buckets of water & bleach. Well, one janitor was washing walls. The other one seemed only to be watching the bone-tired woman watch Faye.
We’ve all got a duty.
Faye said: “I’ll wait outside.”
Walked out to April’s cool afternoon air, sat on the top stoop of the red concrete front porch like a pink hoodie teenager yearning for that better place to go.
She knew a bone-tired woman or a blue-jeaned janitor watched her from inside the house.
Faye watched the neighbors quit their vigils for what waited inside their homes, TV or computer screens or someone who loved you and you loved.
She watched the shadows of trees and utility poles lengthen across the gray pavement of the suburban cul-de-sac.
They took the car we stole.
And the man duct-taped in the trunk. No doubt he went someplace where it was worth his while never to have a story to tell, including to his bosses.
Someone came home across the cul-de-sac, frowned at a box he found left by a delivery service, but there was no brown van parked anywhere near he could take it to.
Evening’s chill reached through the long sunlight of this Saturday afternoon.
Would be rough to sleep outside in a cemetery tonight.
The car driving into the cul-de-sac could have been anybody’s mobility machine.
Silver paint, four or five years old, nothing special for a steady paycheck. Faye didn’t bother scanning the license plates after the windshield showed her who sat behind the steering wheel, who was alone in that steel and glass. The silver car drove around the cul-de-sac, cranked hard left—braked to a stop facing the center of the cul-de-sac. If the car had a standard transmission, the driver was smooth: white backup lights joined the red brake lights without grinding gears. The car parked with its rear tires touching the curb in front of the house with five red cement steps where Faye sat wearing a pink hoodie.
The older man who drove the car got out and walked toward her.
Faye felt whoever was behind her in the house draw away from the windows, from being able to hear a thing said outside on the front porch. She waited until the man from the silver car reached the bottom of the steps.
Then said: “What took you so long?”
“We’re here now.” Sami gave her sad smile. “How are you, Faye?”
“Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“Your Chris was a good man. Better. There are no words for our kind of sorry.”
“Our kind of sorry? Is that all you’ve got? What took you so long to get here?”
“Twenty steps from the launch car, my cell phone goes crazy. Calls I gotta take. Then a place I gotta be.” He shrugged. “Few places, actually.”
Faye said: “Where’s Condor?”
“That’s what this is about,” said Sami.
He wore a shopping-mall tan Windbreaker plausibly unzipped to the cooling air. His shirt and khakis could have come to him via the Internet and a brown van. Faye knew that under that banal Windbreaker, there’d be a belt and a holster on that belt for a pistol, fuck it, fuck him. He stood there, aged as more than an older brother, less than father, gray-flecked curly short hair, teenage-fled Lebanon fostered in Detroit raised by the Marine Corps. There’d be a gun in an ankle holster, too. Sincerity in his soft sad smile that could cut to your core. And might.
Sami said: “Who’s Condor?”
“Don’t fuck with me.”
“Never,” he said. “But I’ve got to give you a choice.”
“Is he dead?”
“Let’s say there is or was someone by that identifier. It’s been used so much that both yes and no to your question are true.”
“What the … To cover your ass or … or who knows why, you could do a maximum-cover drop on Condor, fog who he really was and what he really meant until all that was more like some novel or movie than real. But why bother, even if it’s to keep cover on the scandal, ‘runaway rogue spy whatever,’ call it V, but…”
Faye blinked.
Sami came back into focus.
“You’re the verifier,” she said. “That’s why it’s you here instead of him. So I would believe. So I would …
“He’s gone back in,” whispered Faye. “He took out the V and the community took him back in.”
“Close,” said Sami.
“There is no close,” said Faye. “He beat them or it—”
“Her,” interrupted Sami.
Faye felt her jaw drop.
Didn’t stop: “He either took out the V and her or they took him out. And if you’re here, he won, but is he fucking alive?”
“Yeah.”
Sunset bled the sky a redder pink than the wrap she wore.
“What’s important for you to realize,” said Sami, “what matters for you, is that he’s alive, and the person who recklessly green-lit the man you loved and risked, that person, that woman … Dead.”
“So I owe him one.”
“Good to hear you say that,?
?? said Sami.
Faye’s stomach went cold.
“You owe yourself, too,” he told her.
The woman in the pink hoodie sitting on an American porch listened to the man who’d come there to … To what?
“The V,” said Sami. “Not one entry in our whole Intelligence Community. Yet it’s everywhere—and that’s saying something. Our IC budget is fifty billion a year.
“That could change.” He shrugged. “Go down some, these things have a cycle. Are keyed to wars, crises. Or us getting caught wild in the streets like … Poor Chris.”
“Whatever you’re doing,” said Faye, “don’t use him. You owe me that much.”
Recognition slid along their stare.
“We were talking about cycles,” said Sami. “The V predicted it, which surprised the hell out of newspaper names I had to meet with instead of responding to your call. All it takes is a triggering event to send a cycle one way or the other. Condor could have been a trigger for the system having to deal with the V and what it is.”
“What it does—did,” said Faye. “All illegal.”
“Illegal is a term of law decided by courts and presidential signatures,” said Sami.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me with that.”
“What, your ‘moral authority’? That seldom triumphs in a Beirut back alley.”
“Targeting Condor and Chris was not a Beirut alley, that was the V not wanting to be accountable for how and why they whack people.”
“High value, high risk, high impact, hostile targets.”
“Everyone qualifies as that kind of homicide to somebody, sometime,” said Faye. “There are laws, due process.”
“Exactly,” said Sami. “What the processes do.
“One of the triggers in the cycles, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, some scandal or leak will blow a window into the IC, say NSA sucking up every e-mail, every phone call, every Web site and traffic. Maybe there’ll be a public uproar, though I think not so much. The public—that great whoever—they already think all this is happening, but they just don’t think it’s happening to them, so who cares, what can you do. And the V is just the logical progression, merging software and necessity and probabilities.”
“Data isn’t truth,” said Faye.
“Right, but we’re damned to knowing only data and damned to having to do something about it. Or have something about it done to us. The V, when has such a wondrous capability ever been discarded? Only practical, smart, to recognize that.”
“You want to be Big Brother, Sami?”
“There is no Big Brother, only Big Us.
“And in that us, there’s u and the s, and the s can mean the system or it can mean the shit not necessarily of how you get to live, but certainly of whether you get a chance to be somebody who is more than just counted, to be somebody who does the counting.
“Being just u sucks, my friend, my comrade in arms, my colleague. But being u connected to the s, being us … That’s a life where you can do something worth doing.”
“The V,” whispered Faye. “Condor didn’t beat it, didn’t destroy it.”
“He is it,” said Sami. “Now. But only partially.”
“Yeah,” said Faye, “he’s got you.”
“You don’t get it yet.” Sami put one foot on the bottom red cement step and held on to the porch’s black steel railing so he could lean closer and confide to Faye.
“The V didn’t get out of hand,” he told her, “the V got into the wrong hands, and that’s been corrected. All the people who know what we know recognize that human error shouldn’t cause us to ignore inevitable capability.”
“There’s always human error, Sami. Unless you turn it all over to the machines.”
“What are we, nuts?”
He pushed his hand against her glare. “Don’t give me yet another singularity scenario. What it comes down to is who’s the heart and mind of us, of control. Someone should have that job who knows just how horribly wrong the whole thing can go.”
“Condor,” she whispered.
“And you,” said Sami.
Call it sundown in a suburban Saturday cul-de-sac.
“What do you mean: me?”
“Who better to be the V than you who knows how bad it can be?”
“Condor … And you…?”
“And you. Three of us. A triangle. The strongest shape.”
“That’s a sphere,” said Faye.
“Fuck your metaphors and mind games,” said Sami. “You know the system is there. You know it went wrong. You know it’s never going to be scrapped. Forget the more than two hundred Top Secret offensive cyber-operations we do a year, things like worms turned loose in a rogue nation’s nuclear bomb programs, TAOs, Tailored Access Programs like the Chinese hit us with all the time. The V is progression beyond that. We’re going to be fighting whole wars like this. Living whole lives like this. We’re all wired in together. Pretty soon it’ll be more about the wire than it is about the we. Doesn’t matter if you think that’s not so smart. We’re so smart we fight wars over burning gas made from dinosaurs that couldn’t adapt and those ignitions cause pollution that’s making the polar ice cap melt so chunks float off and you can watch it all happen with your cell phone, watch the chunk coming.
“You got a chance to do something right now,” said Sami. “You can be part of the process so guys like Chris won’t get shot. You can shape power or…”
“Or what, Sami?” The Glock weighed on her belt. “Or be deleted?”
“Never happen. Not on my watch. Not on Condor’s.
“You’re a hero, Faye. But you can’t do shit about stopping the V or your biggest fans Condor and me. Who you going to tell, who’s going to believe you, who’s going to let you get away with being a traitor? You can go back to the Agency. Get any posting you want in the real world. You’ll be a star without us. You can take their combat buyout, go build sand castles on the shore. Get a lucky not-Chris, get some kids, get old and gray and never know where you might have gone or the good you might have done.”
“Or?”
“Or find out.” Sami smiled. “We want you and need you to be you with us.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I know some of the streets in this night and what should be done.”
“Why him? Why Condor?”
“I think he discovered he’s always been this kind of crazy.”
Sami stood back and settled in his shoes, said: “But it’s up to you. Isn’t that great? That’s what all our fighting and dying is for, so it can be up to you.”
Feels like something is skimming the air above me, watching me.
The man who’d been sent to save her, get her, walked back and got in his silver car that was parked pointed out of this suburban cul-de-sac. Faye heard him key the engine, heard it rumble, purr. And in the gray light, she saw him lean across that car’s front seat.
Heard the clunk, saw the slow swing of gaping metal create a choice for her.
A waiting engine rumbled in that gray light.
As she stared at the car’s empty front passenger shotgun seat.
At that car’s open door.
ALSO BY JAMES GRADY
Mad Dogs
Next Days of the Condor (e-original)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Grady is the New York Times bestselling author of Six Days of the Condor, which became the Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor. Besides working as a screenwriter for CBS, FX, HBO, and major studios, Grady’s journalism includes time as a muckraker for political columnist Jack Anderson and writing a cultural column for AOL’s PoliticsDaily.com. Born and raised in Montana, Grady and his wife, writer Bonnie Goldstein, live inside D.C.’s Beltway.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
LAST DAYS OF THE CONDOR
Copyright © 201
5 by James Grady
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Arcangel (man), Getty Images (flag)
A Forge Book
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-7840-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-6125-1 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466861251
First Edition: February 2015
James Grady, Last Days of the Condor
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