Last Days of the Condor

  “Weird,” said Alex. “The DMV check says that plate belongs on a green Jeep Cherokee, not a white Nissan like you got here.”

  Faye suppressed the urge to grab her cell phone.

  The white car knows we—somebody—was there. Drove away. If it comes back, it won’t come back until it’s sure it’s safe, so time, I—we—Condor’s got time.

  He’s a crazy old burnout who no opposition cares about, she told herself.

  And if I bust protocol, go around my Supervising Agent Peter before officially filing the report I’m inputting in his name, trigger Alarm Status because of a license plate anomaly … First, given my status, nobody will do anything except cover their ass. Second, another strike on me, and I’ll be lucky if I end up nailed to a PITS.

  Plus she only had eighty-four minutes until then.

  Took Faye twenty-three minutes to finish the F409 SIDER—Subject In Domicile Evaluation Report. She used the desktop her partner Peter favored, his sign-ins, prose style. Noted Condor’s occasional irrationality yet lucidity and mainstream functionality, the log number for his urine sample, even their discussion of marijuana, and in Recommendations, after describing Condor’s “possible paranoia” about the white car and its license plate anomaly, keyboarded: “My partner Agent Faye Dozier strenuously urges immediate elevated security response and follow-up to potential hostile surveillance of subject as inferred by observation & verification of suspicious vehicle.” Clicks of the desktop mouse attached iPad shots of Condor and his house, plus the white car video and DMV files.

  She read the electronic report one last time.

  Saw nothing that would get her into trouble she couldn’t handle.

  Addressed it to the proper data submission points, cc’d it to her NROD agent e-mail account and her CIA agent account, plus her legendary CIA crew chief who, after her horror show, fought to be sure she only got detailed from the Agency to Home Sec’s NROD and the limbo’s floor. She cc’d Bald Peter’s agent e-mail account, wondered whether he’d spin on whatever bar stool he’d snuck off to and check his phone when it pinged! with this report he’d officially written. Whatever shit he’d give her because of her recommendation would stay between them. Unless he believed in payback. If so, that would come at her as if by chance, without his fingerprints. But they’d both know.

  She stared at the text on the glowing computer screen.

  Made sure the F409 SIDER designation read CONDOR.

  Clicked SEND.

  The report shot into the cyber ether like a bullet into the darkness.

  She needed five minutes to log off duty, leave the limbo level, ride the elevator down to the ground floor, get through exit security screening and visibly not hurry out the revolving door in the plexiglass walls that separate Complex Zed from a stone plaza with its anti–truck bomber cement planters and sentinel lights that hold back the night.

  Security cameras recorded her walk from the building to her car in the bottom level of the employee garage. She employed no obvious countersurveillance measures. Drove her middle-American maroon Ford clear of the parking garage.

  Forty-nine minutes. I’ve got forty-nine minutes.

  Faye lived in an apartment building on the edge of the cupcake emporiums, art theater movie chain, and yoga businesses district known as Bethesda-landia. That “landia” slang suffix came to life early in the twenty-first century when the middle-class but staid Maryland suburb of Bethesda morphed into one of the ritziest inside-the-Beltway ’hoods as Georgetown and upper northwest D.C. became too crowded to house all the lawyers & lobbyists & corporate & media stars who turned America’s Martin Luther King assassination riot–scarred capital into the big-money burg it became beginning with beat-an-assassin President Ronald Reagan.

  She scanned her mirrors as she drove.

  Jumped a red light. Careened through a quick left she didn’t need to take, another right, another left, zoomed down an alley past green Dumpsters like the one tech guru Alex expensively backed an Agency car into after two too many beers at a Thai dinner with Army officers from that country who he was training and who the case officer masquerading as his assistant was scouting for recruitment.

  Faye’s mirrors revealed no yellow-eyed cover team beasts behind her.

  Security cameras logged her driving into her apartment building’s underground parking lot with thirty-eight minutes to go. She backed the Ford into her space on the second level, pushed the wee-oo lock button on her key fob as she marched through the gasoline-musty light of the concrete car barn to the elevator, rode it to the LOBBY. Found nothing in her snail mailbox, but it could have looked suspicious if she hadn’t checked.

  Faye guessed right: no one presided at the front desk. Night clerk Mr. Abdullah was probably sneaking onto the manager’s computer, searching for news about his family in Somalia who were trapped amidst drought, famine, pirates, a United Arab Emirates funded anti-pirates army with its own Washington, D.C., law firm, fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries, and twelve thousand blue-helmeted African Union peacekeeper troops trained by outsourced CIA contractors operating from a razor wire–surrounded complex at Mogadishu’s airport that Somalis called “the pink house.”

  She spotted no one else in the lobby. Security cameras for the front door, the lobby, and the rear exit logged her as she walked past the elevators to the stairwell. A routine analysis might conclude she was an office worker who felt in need of exercise.

  Stairwell security cameras only covered the first flight of concrete steps and the top-floor stairwell with its roof exit. She floated up two flights of stairs, her heart pounding hard but not from the climb—every day before work, she ran a paratrooper’s six miles on a park trail and then home here to run up and down the building’s nine flights of stairs.

  Faye stopped at the cinder-block walls’ switchback between the fourth and her fifth floor. Used her cell phone to link with the computer in her home, checked the log of her computer’s camera she’d interfaced with motion detectors aimed at her unit’s entrance and the sliding-glass-door balcony for her one-bedroom apartment’s living room: NO ACTIVITY. The computer camera via her cell phone screen showed the inside of her locked apartment door and the shadowed living room empty of any intruder.

  She went to her apartment. Slid inside. All was silent. Shadowed.

  Faye stared out her balcony’s closed sliding glass door to the purple night shotgunned with twinkles of city lights. Imagined that off in that darkness, she could see the glow of the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and Capitol she’d driven past earlier that day, the place where she’d once escaped termination.

  A wall switch snapped on a lamp of here & now. The couch, the chairs, the coffee table from some garage sale. A chin-up bar filled the top of her bedroom door.

  The clock read 8:31—twenty-nine minutes until.

  Risk a shower.

  She tossed her black coat over a chair, hurried to the dark bathroom, snapped the light on and shed her suitable-for-running-or-kicking shoes. The holstered .40 Glock on her right hip went on the back of the closed toilet, hilt toward the open shower. The cell phone and her credentials went on the sink. She unbuttoned her blouse.

  The bathroom mirror captured her image. She wore a black bra. The thick pink scar slashed from her sternum to her right hip. Her slacks opened easily: a year after the last surgery, she still liked to wear them loose. They drifted to the floor. She laughed as she imagined insisting to some Boss In The Sky that black bikini underwear is indeed professional attire suitable for the office and less likely to bind if you throw a kick. Those black panties peeled off as she stood tall in the mirror. Black bra, arms like thick silk curtain sashes, smooth stomach. That scar.

  She unhooked her black bra. Let it fall.

  This is me.

  Head of short hair. Green eyes special only in how they see, not how they look. Mouth special only for what it never will be allowed to say. No wrinkles on my neck, not like Mom, not yet, and there’ll be a “yet,” t
here will be and … Breasts some guys think are too small but only afterward. She felt her nipples pucker with the chill in the apartment.

  Turned the shower on full blast, as hot as she dared, tried to lose what she had to do and an old man named Condor or Vin in the steam and the wet. She spun the shower handle. Icy water flooded her to focused.

  Drying with a white towel, standing in the tub, tossing the towel over the shower rod, stepping out of the tub, pulling on her slacks, slipping into the blouse and buttoning the four buttons up to her neck. Unfasten the top button.

  She shoved the black bra and panties into the hamper.

  Tossed her shoes into the bedroom, heard them clunk against the wall, the floor.

  Stared into the bathroom mirror.

  Be you.

  But a little lip gloss wouldn’t be wrong.

  The mirror watched her slide the gloss tube’s smooth tip over her lips.

  A snap off of the bathroom light and that reflection became only a black shape.

  She took her credentials and gun with her, put them in the bedside night table drawer. Slid the drawer shut. All the way shut.

  Don’t think about the black pistol-grip shotgun in your closet. The Glock rigged under the other side of the bed. The snub-nose .38 revolver hidden for a quick grab in the kitchen, or the 9mm Beretta strapped under the couch. Or where the knives are.

  You gotta do this with your own hands.

  Nine minutes until nine o’clock.

  What if he’s late? What will that tell you? What will that mean?

  What if you can’t go through with it?

  She was never supposed to need to do this.

  Her left hand floated to her bedroom doorjamb like it was the dance studio bar across a mirror as she straightened her spine, rose to her full height in Third Position, let that motion float her right arm up to a graceful half-moon curve above her head, then sank straight down with her knees bending out and her bare heels rising off the bedroom carpet with Le Grand Plié. She held that deep crouch, felt her inner thigh muscles stretch and loosen and then up she came with a swoop of her hand as the ballet motion became grabbing & pulling the incoming punch of an invisible attacker while smashing her palm strike into his hyperextended elbow.

  The digital clock on her night table read 8:53.

  Seven minutes.

  The lamp in the living room cast more shadows than light. Scant illumination came from the white bulb under the metal hood over her stove.

  Faye unlocked her door to the world.

  Stood far enough away not to get overwhelmed by a charge-in breach.

  Stood in the flow of the indigo night beyond her walls of glass.

  Stared at the unlocked wooden door. At the chain dangling from its mount.

  You spend your life waiting for whoever walks through your door.

  The tick-tock world fell away as she stood there. She made herself breathe from her belly. Made herself not look at any clock. Made herself wait.

  The knock—one two three, soft but strong.

  She stretched from her neck cords to her at-her-sides empty hands.

  “Come in,” she said.

  The door swung open. There he stood, backlit by the yellow light in the hall.

  He said: “How’s my timing?”

  “You’re here now,” said Faye.

  BOLO (Be On Look Out for) data: male, Caucasian, early thirties, six foot two, 177 pounds. California-surfer prematurely thinning blond hair, face like a handsome eagle, glasses over blue eyes giving him a scholarly look, but muscled, graceful.

  She faked a light tone: “Shut the door behind you. And lock it.”

  He even put the chain on.

  The government lawyer–like black shoes he wore were a workweek away from their last shine. His dark blue suit complemented his classic blue dress shirt and nicely offset his red cloth tie that dangled like a leash knotted around his neck.

  The best move against a man wearing a tie is to charm your way in close, half your arm’s length away. Smile. Slide the tie into your loose two-handed grip and lift it off the man’s chest like you’re admiring—

  —grip the tie, whirl & duck so it’s pulled across your shoulder as you slam your hips back into him and snap forward/down, jerking the tie toward the floor. Odds are, he’ll flip over your back like judo’s Morote-seoi-nage throw, crash at your feet as you go with inertia, drop your knees into his chest. Even if your knees don’t explode his heart, his skeletal shock, vertigo, and blasted-away breath let you grip the tie’s knot with one hand as your weight presses through that fist to his throat and your other hand pulls the slack end of the tie. His face turns purple, seventeen seconds to unconsciousness if the strangling tie cinches the right blood vessels as you choke off rescuing air.

  Other options include ring the bell, the quick grab & jerk the tie to slam him bent over/down, but it’s easy to miss the debilitating knee-to-face contact. The garrote from behind technique is more likely to fail and put you in position to get fucked up by his spinning counter than it is to be your clean kill.

  Still, grab a man by his tie and you’re halfway home.

  He filled his eyes with Faye, said: “How was your Monday?”

  “Same-old, same-old.”

  “I’ll pretend that’s good.”

  He watched her barefoot pad toward him, nine steps away, eight.

  “Getting to see you,” he said, six steps away, five, “that’s not good, that’s the best.”

  Faye slid her arms under his suit coat, along his empty belt until they met at his spine. Her face pressed against him. Her head reached the knot on his tie, his red cloth tie that smelled like wool and smell, she could smell him, his heat, his skin.

  Arms wrapped around her—strong, eager.

  She said: “Did anybody see you come here?”

  “I hope the world.”

  When she said nothing, he told her: “I saw nobody who knew they saw me.”

  “Did you tell anybody?” she asked.

  “I know your deal,” he said.

  Your: Subtle assertion through a possessive adjective.

  Faye mimicked a TV game-show host: “And the answer is…?”

  He moved her just far enough away so they could see each other face-to-face.

  Said: “We’re our secret.”

  Then he kissed her. She felt his surprise—joy—as she opened her lips and flicked her tongue to his, led it into her mouth. Lifetimes later as she pulled her face away from his, her hands still holding his sides, their chests heaving, he brushed her cheek with his right hand, said: “So you said tonight has got to be special?”

  He watched her nod as she said: “One time.”

  “Not just one-time special,” he said. “We’ve got—”

  She pursed her lips. “Shhh.”

  Her hands slid from his spine, under his suit coat, along the sides of his blue shirt.

  “I have to know something,” she said.

  “What?”

  Faye’s fingers found his tie, his red cloth tie. Held it. Stroked it.

  “If I can trust you.”

  “I’ve—”

  Her fingers closed on the tie with a slight tug to snap short his sentence.

  She said: “It’s not you, it’s me. I have to know I can allow myself to trust.”

  “What more—”

  Her finger covered his lips as if now he were supposed to say shhh. She slid her fingers to his shirt collar. Watched his blue eyes dance behind his minimalist-frame glasses that would have been dorky on anyone else but on him …

  Just right.

  He blinked as he felt her undo the knot of his tie.

  Pull it off his neck with a snap!

  She turned and walked away from him, barefoot, red tie dangling from her hand.

  As she walked toward the open-door bedroom where he, where they’d been before, yes and yes and even yes, but now …

  She felt him pulled into her wake. Felt the burn of his eyes
as she unbuttoned her blouse and let it fall, her back naked as she reached the bedroom. She unfastened her slacks, stepped out of them. Knew he was close behind her, his eyes on her bare ass, like my whole world’s globe he’d said to her once as he ran his hand over its curve while she lay on her stomach hiding her smile, as his lips pressed against her flesh there.

  The lamp on her night table glowed.

  Naked, on her knees, she worked her way to the black iron headboard, heard his shoes hitting the floor, the zip of his pants as she lashed the thick end of the tie to the black iron. Kept her back to him as she knelt on her bed facing the wall where she’d mounted a framed poster-sized sepia art photograph, a wild horse plunging through a blizzard. She knotted the skinny end of his red tie around her wrists with loops she’d learned at E&E (Escape & Evasion Course). Her teeth tightened the last loop.

  Trapped, unable to undo the tie alone, she turned, the short bond making her stretch out on her back, lie naked there in front of him.

  He’d undressed. Put his glasses somewhere. Stared at her with wonder.

  Said: “What—”

  “Now be who you are,” she said. “Do whatever you want, not what you think won’t piss me off or will make me happy. Forget about me—fuck that, fuck me. I’m tied up because I have to know that I can’t guide or stop you. I have to know that I’ve still got the ability to trust. To tie myself up without a chance, without a choice.”

  He climbed on the bed beside her, rose on her right side as she lay stretched out naked, her hands lashed up to the bed above her head.

  And he kissed her oh and she kissed him back—

  —nothing in her need said she couldn’t take what she could get on the way to what she had to know—

  —deep wet kisses, probing gnawing each other’s mouths, faces, neck, he’s kissing my neck, down and oh yes, squeeze I’m not big yes yes I am squeeze oh! he sucked her nipple into his mouth, his tongue rubbing it, lush and full and wet, she was so wet as his kisses marched down between her breasts, past the scar, not dwelling on it, not ignoring it yes, kissing down she saw his blond hair as he pushed her thighs wider—

  Spun like by a strong wind, Faye felt and watched him pull her to the edge of the bed, stretch her out from her hands lashed above her head, turning her so she was straight, legs dangling over the edge of the bed where he knelt between them and oh, oh yes, his mouth, his tongue and then his hands on me, liquid fire caressing my breasts heart going to explode his hands won’t stop don’t—