“No, I comply with the conditions. And you know my cell phone is barely smart enough to call the Agent In Trouble line, plus you’ve got all its records.”
From inside the bathroom came FLASH!
“Hey, Condor!” yelled Peter. “You know what’s going to come out in the pee test, so tell us: you still buying pot from that anthropologist at the Smithsonian?”
FLASH!
“Jah provides.”
The grin Peter carried out of the bathroom held no sympathy: “You get busted, you’re busted and gone.”
“Guess we all better be careful then.”
Faye said: “What does the pot do for you?”
“I get stoned. On my own terms. Well, at least on the terms of my own drugs. I also drink a couple glasses of red wine now and then, but that’s almost on doctor’s orders. Clean out my All-American arteries and veins.”
“Whatever,” said Peter as he clicked open the silver briefcase on the floor. “Drop your pants so I can be sure your business is your business, fill this plastic cup for me.”
Peter’s black marker pen wrote CONDOR on a specimen cup’s white label.
“Sorry. I went right before I answered your knock on the door.”
“Motherfucker!” said Peter.
“Are you talking to me?”
Faye freed the wisp of a smile.
Does she know that movie? Or is that just about you? Or is it all swirling data?
Peter shook the thirsty specimen cup at the man he’d come to see: “There’s a glass pot of cold coffee on your kitchen stove, figure it’s from this morning. I’m going to microwave a cup of it, you’re going to drink it pronto, no matter how hot it comes out of the zap, then you’re gonna fill this cup so we can go!”
“Milk.”
“What?” said Peter.
“I like milk in my coffee. Won’t take much longer to zap.”
“Motherfucker.” Peter clumped down the stairs.
Vin said: “Motherfucker. I wonder if I ever got to have kids.”
He blinked. Stared at her. “You could have been my kid.”
“You’re nothing like my father.”
“Why not?”
“You’re here,” she said. Too quickly looked away. “We should go with Peter.”
“If I’d have asked, would your credentials have matched his?”
“What do you think?” she said.
“He’s Homeland Security, has been for so long before doesn’t matter. You’re … You’re with the Firm. My old Firm. The CIA.”
“We’re both with Home Sec’s National Resources Operations Division.”
“By choice?”
“Let’s go downstairs,” said Faye.
“And speaking of going,” she added as her inertia pulled him away from where he’d been: “Where’s your car parked?”
“You know my release disallows having a car,” he said at the top of the stairs. “My driver’s license is just so I carry passable pocket litter. But I remember driving. The car skidding sideways on black ice.”
“Me, too.”
They clumped down the stairs.
“Lucky for you,” she said as they stood alone in the living room, “the Metro has a subway stop nearby.”
“It’s a Blue Line.”
“Yeah, but it connects to—”
“I don’t like to ride the Blue Line.”
BEEP! The microwave in the kitchen.
“So…”
“The Blue Line is blue. I like the Red Line.”
She closed her eyes. Rubbed the bridge of her nose with a pinch of her fingers. No nail polish. She smelled of no perfume. Stretched her eyes open wide.
“Eyes tired?”
She shrugged.
“Glare off your white car even with the tinted glass?” asked Condor.
Faye said: “We didn’t come here in a white car.”
4
Zombie Jamboree
—The Kingston Trio
Faye swung open the turquoise door, stepped out to the twilight target zone.
The safest scenario put her walking down this side of the street, the line of cars slumbering along the curb putting at least some metal between her and the white car with tinted windows parked down the block and across the road.
She stepped off the black iron stairs.… Slid between two parked cars.
Thought she heard Peter shouting curses from where he was covering her—crouched behind the cold glass of the blue brick house’s front upstairs bedroom window.
Figured he always took the safest scenario as she marched onto Eleventh Street to stride a direct diagonal intercept angle toward the white car, eleven, now nine vehicles away.
She heard a car engine start.
Keep both hands down! she ordered herself.
Power steering whined. Tires cried.
The white car snapped on a dragon’s yellow eyes.
She froze like a deer caught by the headlights.
The white car whipped out of its opposite-curb parking, swung through a U-turn, a 180-degree speed-away gone, red-eye taillights vanishing into the coming night.
Faye thumbed STOP on the iPhone she’d kept hidden in her low-hanging right hand and pointed toward the white car.
“You got nothing about nothing,” Peter told her five minutes later in the kitchen that smelled like hot coffee as they watched the replay in her cell phone:
The waist-high wobble view of the sidewalk …
Parked cars she’d slid between …
This neighborhood’s long line of cars slumbering across the street …
Two seconds of wild-shot bare trees and rooftops/jerk back to the parked cars—
Blinding yellow headlights, a blur of white, red taillights zooming away.
Condor said: “The white car is something. And turns out, real.”
“Real?” said Peter. “You say a white car followed you home. We didn’t see that. Then gee, what are the odds? A white car really was parked out front, but … went away.”
Condor looked at her. “What do you think?”
“What I think is, I don’t know,” she answered.
“That’s something.”
“Oh yeah,” said Peter. “Maybe actionable data will come to her in a clong on the way back to base. Me, I think you hit your herbal medication before we knocked on the door. Now take this cup, drop your drawers and give us the sample so we can go.
“And for the record,” he added as Condor took the plastic cup: “Is there anything we representatives of a grateful nation need to do for you?”
Condor said: “You’ve already done me.”
He told Faye: “I don’t care, but you don’t need to watch.”
Unbuttoned his pants, let them fall to the kitchen floor.
She left the two men, walked back to the living room through the gauntlet of ripped newspapers, book pages, and torn trinkets taped or thumbtacked to the walls.
Maybe because of what she knew she had to do later, when those two men joined her, she let Condor shimmer into Vin. Saw him as a silver-haired man, blue eyes she figured the Agency fixed with laser surgery to increase his operational index. Strong cheekbones, clean jaw. Fit like she’d said, but showing six decades of wear & tear. Yet electricity crackled through him: Is he more than just his diagnoses?
“Vin,” she said, “I put my Home Sec card on the mantel.”
Peter packed up his silver briefcase: “He’s got more Agent In Trouble and help-line numbers than he can use, plus shrink team monitors. Let’s go.”
“If you see that white car again,” said Faye as Bald Peter’s impatience pulled at her, “or anything else … Call.”
She left Vin with a real smile she lost as soon as she heard the turquoise door slam behind her, locked onto the tan raincoat back of Peter.
Faye stormed her partner: “What the Hell! Why were you such a dick to him?”
Peter stopped in the middle of the street. Whirled to face her. His briefcase cut a
silver streak in the night. “There are only two kinds of people—”
“Bullshit! There are as many kinds of people as there are people. Don’t sell me some ‘us and everybody else’ crap to justify you doing our job like a jerk to that guy!”
“What I was gonna say is, there are only two kinds of people who end up doing our job: agents who fucked up and agents who don’t give a fuck.
“We’re so fucking essential to national security. We check on old men who defected from the Soviet Union that has been gone almost as long as you’ve been alive. We make sure an al Qaeda guy who came over to us in Morocco six years ago is getting his checks while sitting on his ass with nothing to tell us now we don’t already know. And now from what I saw back there with Condor, you give a fuck.”
Peter shook his bald head. “That means they stuck me with a fuckup. Once a fuckup, always a fuckup, so woe the fuck is me.
“What did you do, huh?” he said. “Give a fuck about the wrong thing?”
“Maybe I shot my supervising agent.”
“Like I care,” he told her. “Like you could now. Hell, you’re too busy wasting energy on a long-gone-to-crazy-town stoner like Condor.”
“You saw that medicine cabinet. It’s more like he’s being stoned.”
“Lucky him. He’s got his legs, arms, his dick. He’s together enough to bring in a paycheck plus agent down benefits. And teams of us check on him to see if he’s all right.”
He stabbed his forefinger at her: “Who’s gonna check on me and you?”
“Maybe he deserves it. Earned it when he got fucked up on some mission.”
“Or,” said Bald Peter, “maybe we’re just babysitting to keep Condor from fucking up. I don’t give a fuck, so fuck him, I don’t have to make nice to stoner fantasies.”
He gave her his back and walked toward the car, whose keys he had.
“There are three kinds of people,” Faye called out in the night: “The living, the dead, and the turned-off. Guess which you are. It’s this era’s big thing. Movies, TV, political metaphors, fashion shows in New York. You’re a ‘don’t give a fuck’ zombie.”
“Yeah,” said Bald Peter. “And there are a lot of us. Get in the car.”
5
A candy-colored clown they call the sandman.
—Roy Orbison, “In Dreams”
Condor stared at his reflection trapped in the big-screen TV above the fireplace. That dark screen flowed with ghosts.
He looked at the business card left by the woman spy: Faye Dozier. Is any of her data true?
She and her bald partner had seen his walls. Uploaded flashing photos.
Flashings swirled Condor to a warehouse in some American nowhere.
Where one room held a sweat-stinking wrestling mat.
Where the schedule had him make gunshots bang! inside the baffled Shoot Room.
Where in the musty upstairs office amidst empty desks and silent typewriters stood a blurred man who had Saigon scars in his heart and a white Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee in his hand as he told twenty-something Condor: “Learn to live your secrets in plain sight so when the bad Joes go looking, there’s nothing to find.”
Then he tossed the scalding coffee in Condor’s face.
On that rainy 2013 night in Washington, in his rented home, Condor flinched.
Scanned what he’d hidden amidst oddities taped to his wall—newspaper photos, pages cut from books or magazines. So he’d remember, he poked tiny triangles into the “intelligence indicators.” Other articles taped to his bricks also had holes, but only items patterned with three dots were clues hidden in plain sight on his seemingly mad wall.
If only he knew what the clues meant:
A New York Times photo of a black Predator drone flying in a blue sky with a silver full moon and a cutline that read: “Like our other less-lethal high-tech toys, unmanned crafts feed our addiction to instant gratification.”
Cut from a book, a photo of a black-hooded British SAS commando peeking over the roof wall of the Iranian embassy in London during 1980’s terrorist siege.
The 9/11 smoke-billowing World Trade Towers.
A 2013 newspaper photo showing Chinese citizens wearing white medical masks as they practice t’ai chi in a Beijing smog so thick people standing ten feet apart were barely visible to each other or the camera.
A movie review’s black & white photo showing the black leather trench coat hero in a swirling sci-fi kung fu battle.
A Washington Post portrait of Bruce Springsteen that claimed “The Tao of Bruce” transcended the bitter battles of America’s two ruling political parties.
A news service snapshot of a running man ablaze with orange flames from gas he poured over himself in the streets called Arab Spring.
Newspaper photos of paintings: Edward Hopper’s lonesome American gas station, another artist’s portrait of a woman, black hair tumbling around her shoulders, her face a pink blur.
The one easy triggering image: a newspaper photo of a soaring condor.
If only.
Call him Vin as he microwaved leftover Chinese food, ate a meal that tasted like cardboard and soy mush.
He carried a glass of water and a razor blade upstairs.
Strung a web of clear dental floss across the top of the stairs—a flimsy barricade, but it might startle an assassin, create noise of his arrival.
Vin used the razor blade to shave that night’s prescribed pills, his gamble that a low but correct percentage of those drugs in the Home Sec/NROD urine test could pass as a testing, marijuana masked, or other aberration within Tasers & straitjackets–enforced limits. He swallowed his chop-shopped pills, flushed their shavings down his toilet with a pang of conscience for the fish swimming at the end of the sewer pipe in the Potomac River.
Condor raised his gaze from the bathroom sink.
Through his diminishing medication state saw the bathroom mirror reflecting a face that somehow had become his. He saw his eyes: impenetrable whites surrounding scarred blue orbs centered by zooming-ever-wider black pupils.
6
We deal in lead.
—Steve McQueen, The Magnificent Seven
Faye hid the flash drive in her closed fist as she navigated through a maze of cubicles in search of her target on the limbo level.
Or as it is officially known: the Situation Center for Task Force Umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the SC for TFU of ODNI, a vast spy factory that fills the fourth level of the ODNI Complex Zed building in Washington, D.C., not far from Wisconsin Avenue’s “upper Georgetown” strip of stores and a private high school with an annual tuition that exceeded the cost of two years at the state university where Faye punched her ticket.
Call it the limbo level.
She always had, back when she was at the CIA.
Now I’m in limbo, she thought as she searched for her target in this windowless cavern’s overhead lighting. Blue lightning bolts pulsated atop the walls of green cubicles. The blue lightning bolts zapped upward like Jacob’s Ladders, only instead of being designed to inspire intellectual curiosity in hormone-frazzled teenagers, these blue lightning bolts block hostile rays beamed at the cubicles’ computers. The limbo level hums and crackles like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Electrified ozone wafts through the cavern’s smog of cubicle-caged office workers.
The limbo level houses units shuffled off the flow charts of America’s sixteen officially admitted intelligence agencies, a catch-all centralization of crews whose duties drift across bureaucratic lines. A dozen desks are designated PITS—Personnel In Transition Stations, sometimes given to an agent, analyst, or exec on the way up some secret ladder, more often assigned as the pre-pension parking place for burnouts or screw-ups or rebels who were right but failed to cover their ass.
At least I dodged the PITS, thought Faye.
So far.
The hidden flash drive burned in her closed fist.
The National Resources Operations Divi
sion she’d been exiled to fills one corner of the limbo level’s factory floor, looks like a Smithsonian museum diorama with plastic walls encasing a replica of a police detective squad consisting of twelve workstation desks shared by Faye and nineteen other field agents plus a plastic-walled “inner office” of command stations for the two executives in charge of monitoring defectors, PINSS (Persons In Need of Security Supervision) like Condor, and miscellaneous but unglamorous national security/intelligence tasks shoved by agencies like the CIA, ODNI, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, DIA, and DEA into the post–9/11 beast called Homeland Security.
She glanced at the time display on a workstation’s computer: 7:22 P.M. outside in the real world of Washington, D.C.—ninety-eight minutes until 9 P.M.
You can make it. If you find Alex, you can still—
She spotted him inside a cubicle where the blue lightning bolts were turned off.
“You got a sec?” said Faye as she plopped down beside the thin redheaded man wearing a white shirt, striped tie, and khaki slacks.
“Barely,” Alex said as he packed tools he’d used to install a hard drive in the cubicle’s computer. “I got called off the bench!”
“Good for you.”
“Hey, the Dumpster I backed into still works. I drove by and checked.”
“Great, I’m kind of—”
“Anxious to tell me what you did to end up here?”
“No. What I can tell you is I need to cover my partner’s ass to get out of here.”
She handed the flash drive to her instructor, Alex, from a CIA Technical Services’ training class whom she’d spotted wandering the limbo’s floor the week before.
“That’s cell-phone video. A white car flipping a U-turn, twilight. The headlights blur the license plate, but as it drives away, maybe between the taillights’ red eyes…”
Took Alex four minutes, most of which was spent pulling software from the classified national security grid onto this cubicle computer’s new hard drive.
“Virginia tag,” he said as they stared at the screen’s enhanced image. “I live in Virginia. You can tell me if you do, too. It’s not like your real name or—”
A new window appeared on the computer screen: a completed government form.