Now it’s now!
No shit, he told the new ghosts that Wednesday morning as he sat at his desk framed by the open doorway of the Grave Cave. At 9:51 he tossed a novel about a gunfighter come home to a small town on Cart B, then stared out his open door.
Waiting.
Clicking heels came up the hallway on the other side of his wall, to his left, his heart side. Footsteps coming louder, drawing closer to his view through the open door.
Here she comes.
You’ve been here before.
Here and now spy-you spend hours tracking her data. The more you know, the more you need to know. She’s fifty-three. Born in the year of the dragon. Never married, no dependents. That makes no sense. Employed by the Library of Congress for eighteen years, plus a three-year loan-out to the Smithsonian. First employment line on her résumé: U.S. Senate staff for five years when she was young & smart & schooled and snapped her way over the sidewalks while taxi passengers gawked at her. She rents an apartment in a building not yet transitioned from run-down to hip. Two promotions during her years here at the Library.
She heel-clicks into view beyond your open door.
Curly blond hair with gray roots falls off a widow’s peak to brush a sigh of breasts under her form-fitting business black dress. Navy blue trench coat slung through her shoulder purse strap. She’s thicker round the waist than she can change, black-stockinged legs yoga-muscled past trim, metronome-swinging arms and black shoes. Her face is softly lean, rectangular, tan skin that pulls sunlight. Smile lines scar her wide, thick-lipped unpainted mouth. Her eyes stare straight ahead and not at you.
She marches past the open doorway. Out of sight.
Heels click on the hallway floor. The elevator whirs.
There you sit.
Again.
Still.
Find out or fail forever.
Vin whirled from behind his desk. Charged out of the Grave Cave in time to see the elevator close. His fingers woodpeckered the brass call button. Magnets pulled his eyes above the elevator to its floor indicator bar: “G” lit up.
The parallel elevator whirred open.
Vin jumped into that cage, pushed the button labeled “G.” Got—
There she is! Clearing security. Slipping into her navy blue trench coat.
Once Vin walked behind her and her coworkers as she said: “I hate the cold.”
She’s going out the tall shaft back door.
Condor made it outside to the cool spring air in time to watch her turn right at the end of the Adams Building’s U-shaped driveway.
No white car parked across the street.
You don’t see the Oppo because they’re street smart.
She’s walking toward Pennsylvania Avenue with its wall of cafes and bars.
Vin tried not to run, knew he was born to this no matter what he could remember.
Get closer behind her. She’s got the light, the WALK sign with its white stick man flaunting his freedom and for you turning orange fuck him scurry across the street. Call it twenty, call it fifteen steps from the drift of curly blond hair on her navy blue coat as she crosses Pennsylvania Avenue, opens the dinging-bell door of a Starbucks.
Coffee, thought Vin. She’s going for coffee.
The world flowed around him. A silver-haired man standing still on the sidewalk as tourists and troopers used their time to walk past him. He made a perfect target.
Opened the tinkling-bell door of the Starbucks.
Ten o’clock, coffee hour, but it’s only her standing in the line at the counter.
Sapphire blue eyes lightning-bolted him.
She said: “Sometimes you go crazy if you don’t get outside the walls.”
“Screaming doesn’t help,” said Vin.
“You’ve been hawking me for five months and that’s the best you’ve got?”
The espresso steamer hissed.
He said: “You give what you can.”
“And get what you get.” Her smile seemed sad. “Not bad.”
“What do you see in those old movies you catalog for the Library?”
Words whispered through her thick, soft lips: “It’s what you don’t see.”
Walking toward them on the other side of the counter with a green apron over her white blouse came the young barista whose parents had fled El Salvador’s right-wing death squads. Their daughter dreaded the refugee-spawned, international MS 13 gang that now ruled her family’s suburban turf five miles away from this Capitol Hill Starbucks. The gang used its Web sites and Facebook tattoos to stalk for victims and volunteers and you never knew until. The barista told the gringa who spent drugstore dollars to stay blond: “Here’s your cappuccino, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” brought a different smile to the blond woman. She took the steaming white paper cup from the barista, walked to the Starbucks door.
Turned back, looked at the man watching her go, said: “So who are you?”
“How ’bout Vin?”
“How about Vin.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t … all the way right with what I said before.”
“Confessions don’t impress me anymore,” she told him.
“It’s not about impressing you. It’s about being true.”
He met her sapphire stare.
Said: “Sometimes screaming lets you know you’re there.”
Sapphire eyes blinked.
She said: “Vin. Huh.”
Turned and left the cafe with the tinkle of the bell above her exit.
“Can I help you, sir?” The barista stayed a patient professional.
“I’ll take whatever she had.” Vin did not chase the blonde who watched movies.
Some foggy instinct told him too bold now might generate never.
Plus if his cover team were active, he’d paint her with cross hairs.
Standing outside the Starbucks window, shrouded in black Giselle presses her hands and face against the glass and screams.
Waves of I don’t know what or why but I’m sorry! washed Vin back to work.
The barista returned to the counter with a steaming white cup in her hand and before she realized she didn’t see him there said: “Here’s your coffee, sir.”
All she ever knew about that and what came after was the strange man’s gone.
All his empty sidewalks led him from the Starbucks back to the Grave Cave. He ate lunch in the library’s cafeteria hoping to spot her at her usual table but knowing he wouldn’t and being right. He sat in his office and stared at the open doorway. Come five o’clock, he stepped out onto the Adams Building stoop.
No white car.
No new ghosts.
His gray wool sports jacket kept the cool of the evening away from his bones. Concrete pushed his black shoes toward the home he’d been allowed. Cars rushed past him on Independence Avenue, their headlights turning on to probe the coming dark. The air smelled like spring. No cover team, no brick boys on his tail, no snipers on the rooftops, no white car, there was no white car now but there was one yesterday.
Of course there was. Sure there was.
A green leaf fell from its protective wedge when he opened his turquoise door.
As it should.
As it would—if everything is safe.
Condor stepped into his living room. Shut the door behind him. Thought he was merely hallucinating again as he saw the limits of safe.
Bald secret agent Peter sat slumped on the floor in front of the fireplace.
His arms spread wide across that place where Condor would burn wood.
His hands nailed to the fireplace, blood flowing from his palms pierced and nailed to the mantel by knives from Condor’s kitchen carving set.
Blood soaked the dead agent’s white shirt inside his sports jacket and tan raincoat.
Probably before the killer nailed Bald Peter to the fireplace, he cut the man’s throat along that crimson gash above the knot of a dampened dark necktie.
Probably the assassin gouged
out Peter’s eyes after the crucifixion.
Call him Vin, call him Condor, a man who came home from work on an ordinary Tuesday to find a blood-soaked American agent nailed to a fireplace with knives.
Vin saw a crucified man, the corpse’s gaping mouth, his cheeks slickened red, eyes gouged to gory black holes.
Condor saw the trickling of freshly freed crimson tears.
8
The slow parade of fears.
—Jackson Browne, “Dr. My Eyes”
What a glorious Tuesday spring morning it was for Faye as she walked across the plaza toward Complex Zed. She didn’t know Condor was right then offering his heart in a Starbucks, but she knew she was going to rock the limbo’s floor and—
Walking across the plaza toward her: a stocky, tan-skinned, black-haired man.
“What are you doing here?” said Faye.
They both knew that only Zed’s security cameras kept her from hugging him.
“Good to see you, Faye,” said Sami. He gave her a fatherly smile. “I don’t want to hold you up, make you late.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll say my run took longer than usual.”
“Did it?”
“No.” A forgivable lie of omission. She hadn’t run that morning.
“You can tell them we ran into each other. It’s natural, and you’re cleared.”
“Am I getting off the limbo level? Coming back online?”
“There’s cleared and there’s cleared,” he said.
“So you’re not here about me?”
“Wish I was.” He looked around the midmorning-lit plaza. Looked for who was there. Who wasn’t. “Remember RTDs?”
“Real-Time Drills.”
“Necessary risk even before Boston. A random day. Flash alert. Race to some game scenario site designed to see how you can do better. By noon, every crisis-clear East Coast headhunter worth his bullets will be in your building. But one real bomb go BOOM! under the right conference room table, and it’s a great day for the bad guys.”
Sami sighed. “Oh well, at least I got to run into my most charming colleague. She’s kind of okay on the bricks, too.”
“If it weren’t for the cameras,” smiled Faye, “I’d drop you.”
“A B C,” grinned Sami. “Always Be Covered.”
Risk it, she thought as they walked toward work. Told the man beside her: “You’ve been around a long time.”
“You wouldn’t have gotten odds on that back when I was a kid in Beirut.”
“Rumors, legends, whispers: you’re who knows.”
Sami stopped an arm’s length away from a security door in the wall of black glass that reflected the images of him and a younger woman with short hair, slacks, Op shoes.
He said: “Only three types of people are susceptible to flattery: men, women—”
“And children,” finished Faye. “I don’t want to talk to a child.”
She said: “There are rumors about an agent who got caught in the shit in denied territory and called in a drone strike on himself.”
“We’re spies, Faye. Starting rumors is one of the whats we do.”
“Come on, Sami. It’s me asking.”
“No matter what you heard,” said her friend and former boss, “something like that happens, guy like that … Forget about him getting one of the no-name stars on the wall out at Langley. He’d be Congressional Medal of Honor material.
“Or completely nuts,” added Sami. Smiled as he said: “And dead.”
The breath of spring morning that Sami took seemed completely natural. He let his hand touch her arm. A mentor-to-protégé touch. A soft, sensitive touch. Innocent.
He looked straight into her green eyes. “Have you got some reason for asking?”
“I don’t know what I got,” said Faye. “If it is something, I’ll play it straight.”
“Never a doubt in my mind,” said Sami as he held the door open for her.
Like he held the door for her that day eight months before when they didn’t pillory her in the soundproofed, plexiglass “fishbowl” conference room of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That when morning, Sami looked away from the two Senators sitting across the table from him and Deputy Directors from both the CIA and the ODNI, looked at Faye in her chair, told her: “Would you step outside, please?”
Then he got up and held that door for her.
As if her wound might require special care and attention.
Sami loved subtle.
She left that fishbowl deep in the windowless office complex for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Perhaps a dozen cubicles and other executive offices waited between where she stood outside the fishbowl and the Committee entrance. CIA task forces on paper clips have more personnel than this Congressional oversight force charged with keeping track of America’s war status intelligence community.
Faye glanced back into the fishbowl. Sami with four strangers wearing business suits, deciding what they’re going to do to me, with me.
She looked left, saw him standing by the coffee bar holding a white Styrofoam cup.
She’d seen him before—one of five Senate staffers in that morning’s meeting with Sami, the two spy agency execs, and a Senator from each political party. And her. For the CONFIDENTIAL-level briefing about Paris. Then he’d been sent out with the other Senate staffers, with Faye and Sami still in there as the quorum of two Senators got briefed on America’s spies’ TOP-SECRET version of blood on le rue de cobblestones.
Et moi, thought Faye.
She looked at that Senate staffer. Just a guy, tall, blond, gray suit. Her age.
Fuck him, fuck the doctors, I need coffee.
He didn’t retreat when she put a dollar bill in the Styrofoam cup by the coffeepot, filled her own Styrofoam cup. Indeed, he came closer, and fuck trusting the Committee’s metal detectors, she eyeballed him for a hidden weapon, saw his cup contained only water.
Over the burn of long-heated coffee she had to admit he smelled good. She was drenched in nervous sweat, hoped the perfume she seldom wore covered that with a scent of lilacs. He sent a bespectacled nod to the Senators and spy execs in the fishbowl.
“So,” he said, “after I left, what did you guys talk about in there?”
“Seriously?”
“I know you’re CIA so I had to say something that would shock a real response,” he told her. “Because if talking about what’s really going on is out, we have to resort to some kind of disembodied chatter where I start out asking you safe things, like which camp were your parents, Rolling Stones or Beatles.”
“That’s your chatter?”
“I was hoping for our chatter, but yeah. What else can I say to you?”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“If I tried to hit you, you’d break my arm in like six places.”
“Probably only two.”
“Thanks for your restraint.” He shrugged both hands into the air and smiled with his blue eyes. “And while I’m not hitting on you, per se, the intent is clearly growing.”
“Per se?”
“Sorry, I talk like that sometimes when I’m nervous.”
“I make you nervous?”
“Since the moment I saw you.”
“This oughta be good.”
“It’s the way you stood—stand. You’re here. Stepping right up and taking it. And true to that. Whatever it is.” He waved his fawn-suited hand. “Blew me away.”
“So you decided to recruit me.”
“There’s an idea. Do you play Ultimate?”
“What?”
“Ultimate Frisbee. Like soccer. Only with plastic discs. A stoner sport.”
Faye said: “So you’re a stoner? And think I am?”
“I’m a randomly drug-tested federal employee. Yesterday is gone if not forgotten.
“It’s a simple game,” he said. “You toss, you catch, you run. No contact.”
“Rules,” she said.
“Honor code,” he repl
ied.
“Sounds like a pastime for sophomores.”
He nodded to the fishbowl where Senators frowned to show they were serious. “I spend all day up on this hill chasing back and forth after whatever gets thrown into the air by them, so getting to catch and toss something real while running in what passes for clean air … Yeah, that feels pretty good. And I’m a long way from being a sophomore.”
“Which way?” Don’t stare at the fishbowl!
And he laughed. Just … did it. Laughed. Out loud and in the open.
Said: “Some days that’s open to debate.
“You should come,” he said.
“What?”
“More or less seven o’clock tomorrow night unless we get a freak September storm. Down on the Mall, the grass alongside the east wing of the National Gallery.”
“You want me to play?”
“I want you to give you the chance.”
“You’re all heart.” She gulped the bitter coffee. Tossed the white cup in the trash, couldn’t pretend anymore to ignore what was going on in the fishbowl.
“I’m Chris,” he said. “Chris Harvie.”
She walked away.
As he said: “Can I ask your name?”
Faye refused to turn around. Watched the fishbowl that trapped her tomorrows.
Traps my today, she thought that Tuesday seven months later as après Starbucks Condor walked back to work over empty sidewalks and she walked across the cubicle-crowded, blue-lightning-bolts limbo level and into NROD’s clear-walls corral.
“Where’s Peter?” she said to her half-dozen men and women colleagues.
“Did you lose your partner?” said Harris with a snide look that lied and said he knew more than he did.
He’s not worth the bullet. Faye claimed an empty desktop computer, checked the online agent duty roster. Frowned. Saw one of the two bosses in NROD’s inner office.
Stuck her head in, said: “Why is my partner detailed to Admin this morning?”
The section co-commander who insisted you call her Pam checked the computer at her desk, shrugged. “Probably some data-processing glitch.”
“Is it about me?” asked Faye.
“Why, did you do something wrong?”
Faye returned Pam’s shrug, said: “Naw. You know me, boss.”