As she walked away, Faye heard Boss Pam say: “No, I don’t.”
No, Faye hadn’t planned on going to that Ultimate Frisbee game the night after Sami worked a miracle, covered everyone’s ass with the Senate oversight committee and cut some deals that eventually sent her to Home Sec’s NROD in Complex Zed, but that next day she couldn’t, she just couldn’t stay in her new Bethesda apartment staring out at the autumn leaves of the political metropolis she’d need to get used to again.
She went for a late run like she often did, but that evening she and her backpack cleared any brick surveillance, only ran as far as the Bethesda Metro before she caught a train, transferred to the Blue Line, spotted Frisbee players on the grassy Mall, walked to them and watched him watch her (and miss a catch) as she took something from under her sweatshirt, put it in her knapsack that she secured to a tree with a bicycle lock.
He called out: “She’s with us!”
But he cut her no slack when players switched around so they were on opposite sides. Between the post-surgery push-ups, pull-ups, and running, she was in better shape, but he never hesitated to play as hard against her as he could.
Standing beside him as he caught his breath, she said: “So this is what people do?”
“What people?” he gasped.
“People our age. Normal people.”
“Nobody’s normal,” he said. “You know that.”
Somebody yelled Go! They ran to and fro on the green grass under Washington’s evening sky. The ivory Capitol dome rose a few blocks beyond one side of their playing field, while a quarter mile from the other sideline rose the Washington Monument topped by blinking red lights.
Faye had her cover story ready, a driver’s license from Ohio, but no one hit her with Washington’s ubiquitous defining question of “What do you do?”
She thought: They’ve carved out this time from their imposed reality.
Still, she deduced that many players were Congressional aides, that one handsome guy with curly hair worked for a telecommunications giant, a woman was a waitress waiting to hear about law school, two other women already were beginning associates in some D.C. legal factory where they’d go back to their desks and work toward midnight.
After the last game, Faye caught a ride with strangers to the chosen burgers & beers bar, watched him smoothly cut her out of the crowd to end up sitting with her and their third-round beers at the far end of the jukebox bar where no one could hear them.
“Nicely maneuvered,” she told him. Told Chris. Chris Harvie.
“I am working my hardest here,” he said.
“Not gonna get you anywhere.”
“You mean besides where we already are.” He shrugged. “So I might as well give you the worst of it.”
Which was his father walked into a San Francisco fog one kindergarten night and never came back until another family sent high school junior Chris, his sister, and their mother his obituary for their husband-father. Which was exceeding law school rules on how much outside employment he could take driving pre-dawn bakery delivery trucks while going to Stanford. Which was a car wreck he shouldn’t have walked away from, a few “bonehead” accidents on the summer-job California state highway crew that helped fill his undergraduate scholarship gap at Brown University, some unspecified “loutish” behavior with women. Which was breaking into an apartment a heartbeat ahead of a police raid to flush his buddy’s LSD stash after the buddy’s vindictive ex-girlfriend lied and ratted him out to the police as a dealer on her cell phone right in front of Chris.
“Oh, and I was a virgin until I was twenty-one,” he told Faye.
Shrugged: “I wanted to get it right.”
“What happened to her?”
“Better things.” He drained what he’d said would be his last beer. “And the rest, well, you probably already ran a background check.”
“That’s the kind of thing you’d have a colleague who owes you do off the books.”
“You sure don’t need a lawyer.”
“No, I don’t.” She got off the stool, slung her backpack weighted with her holstered gun she hadn’t slipped back on under her sweatshirt.
Said: “My name is Faye Dozier.”
“For real?”
Left him with her smile as she entered that night alone.
Faye worked alone all that Tuesday morning after the night she met Condor—“morning” being relative, given that NROD agents work staggered shifts and hers started at 10 A.M. She wrote an impassioned report on why Immigration should admit the neighbors of a young man who’d spent three years as an interpreter for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, not one betrayal, several acts of heroism, and all he wanted was to marry the girl next door and be free in Kansas.
At 1:23 P.M., she checked the online duty roster.
Peter was still “Detailed Admin.”
Plus now he was NU/UC—No Unauthorized/Unnecessary Contact.
As per regs, he’d texted his Status Confirm every two hours.
One of the nicer and newer NROD agents, a sharp ex–Brooklyn cop named David, said: “I hope his Admin deal isn’t Internal Affairs calling him out for drinking.”
“We don’t call it Internal Affairs,” said Faye as they stared at the computer monitor screen. “We call it the Office of Professional Responsibility.”
“Oh. Is that what ‘we’ call it?”
“I’m a spy,” she told David. “Not a rat.”
The first Monday night after that Frisbee game, Chris Harvie came home from work to his U Street rented apartment—a neighborhood that went Obama-era tres chic after being Jimmy Carter–era tres noir—and found My name is Faye Dozier standing in his living room.
“I picked your locks,” she said before he could speak. “I could have searched your place, but I didn’t, I won’t. I’ll tell you nothing rather than lie. I expect the same from you.”
September chilled that week. She wore ugly jeans. A ratty old sweater and a green nylon flight jacket with zero patches that she’d got in Kandahar. She unfastened the waistband holster heavy with her newly issued Glock, put it on top of a stack of novels on his sofa’s cheap end table.
“That comes with me,” she said.
She struggled out of her wool sweater.
Faye’d worn her ugliest, most unflattering white exercise bra.
That night her scar still puckered pink and angry.
“This is me, too. I might never tell you about it, but it’s big, you can see, it’s big, and no matter that I’m a hundred percent medically, I fucked up and it fucked me up.”
She watched his blue eyes that hadn’t looked away.
His mouth that hadn’t said a thing.
Faye said: “I can walk out that door. No regrets. No blowback. No tears. Just gone. Or I can stay and we can see what we can see.”
He crossed his room to her. Cupped her face in his hands.
Said: “Stay. You already beat my locks.”
Never gonna forget that, Faye was thinking at 5:28 on the evening after the night Chris cupped her mouth & then … She blinked back into focus, into her computer monitor at a desk, scrolled down all field agents’ mandated daily review of America’s on-average 270+ Actions/Alerts.
“A/A is like a cop shop’s daily lineup of who got popped the night before,” ex–Brooklyn detective David had described it.
“Only it’s all digital, all online, all the time,” Faye’d replied.
At 5:29 P.M. that Tuesday, Faye read the classified A/A report from Los Angeles on how starving sea lion pups who were washing up on Southern California beaches at more than five times the usual frequency had cleared terrorist-linked toxicology analysis and therefore this Event Syndrome’s TSR—Threat Spectrum Rating—had dropped from six to one out of one hundred possible data-rated TSR levels.
“Dozier!” yelled the deputy commander named Ralph from the doorway of his box within a box of NROD’s dioramic squad room. “Get in here! David—”
He yelled to the ex–Brooklyn cop.
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“—Harris,” yelled the commander to the snide asshole. “You, too.”
Faye beat the other agents to the huddle with their boss Ralph.
“Nineteen minutes ago,” said the boss, “our boy Peter missed his two-hour window for routine Status Confirm. His detail contact to Admin gave him fifteen minutes’ grace and had the decency to call me before they upload into the system. We all know that Peter sometimes … His bald head can be lax about things.”
Harris started a snide drinking remark—ex-cop David elbowed him silent.
“Fuck Peter’s ‘I’m a star’ with a new NU/UC status,” said his boss. “I called him. Straight to voice mail. The GPS ping on his phone…”
The boss focused on Faye: “… puts him on Capitol Hill at the address of a PINSS you two interviewed yesterday.”
“Condor,” whispered Faye. Off work half an hour ago. Probably walked home.
The boss said: “Fuck if I know why Peter’s doing follow-up, but that’s what I just found logged into the system. He’s out there, dinging the grid, and we’ve got…”
The boss looked at the nearest row of digital clocks on the wall outside his office.
“We’ve got to cover his ass and beat some rat squad react team there. Since I ordered a car brought out front now, technically we’re already primary on this before the routine look-see goes out. Our team picks up its own shit—hey!”
Faye was out the boss’s door before he ordered David and Harris to go with her.
They caught up with her at the elevator that let them all out at the ground-floor main lobby where they quick-marched past a group of out-of-complex colleagues standing in a friendly cluster to jive about where to go for dinner.
Sami stood on the fringe of that group of headhunters.
Saw Faye emerge from the elevator, and he started to smile …
Saw the look on her face.
Saw her see him.
Saw her clench her right fist by her belt buckle: Running hot.
Sami watched her gunners’ trio stalk outside to a waiting sedan that screamed badges, said to his colleagues: “Let’s go to the closest place.
“And guys,” he added to this mixed-gender group who hung on his every word, “I’m thinking no beers yet.”
“I thought the alert game was over!” said one of the headhunters, who felt the heat from his colleagues for his error of opposing the guru even as those words left his mouth.
Sami said: “You never know.”
At 5:33, the Home Sec/NROD sedan peeled away from the curb—Faye drove, ex-cop David rode shotgun, Harris strapped himself into the backseat.
“It’s rush hour!” yelled Harris. “Can’t take Rock Creek Parkway!”
David snapped his cell phone into the cradle, on speaker to DISPATCH plus GPS.
At 5:41, they pushed the red light at Connecticut Avenue and Nebraska and sped by the last best independent bookstore in America.
Their boss’s voice over the phone: “Team, be advised, a classified protocol activated automatically when the system posted a possible trouble alert under your destination coordinates and the Condor identifier. Nearest hard-duty unit was protocol triggered. A unit launched that should be on scene before you.”
“Order them as backup!” yelled Faye. “No action until I—we get there!”
“Understood, but … I’m not sure I’ve got that authority.”
Faye hit the switch for the red emergency lights in the grille and the siren. David pulled out the magnetic light-spinning cherry, slapped it on the roof of the car.
“What the fuck is going on?” yelled Harris from the backseat as they raced through siren-blasted gaps in the steel river of traffic stretching through affluent D.C. toward Capitol Hill.
“I don’t know!” yelled Faye. “Heads up for a white car, tinted windows!”
Washington rush-hour traffic devours high-speed responses. Any other time of day, red lights & siren, they’d have made it from that last phone call to the Eleventh Street, SE, destination in eleven minutes. Took them seventeen minutes, even with Faye taking every possible risk and Harris screaming: “Look out! Look out!”
Their squad car slammed to a stop outside the turquoise door at 6:01 P.M. Faye’d killed the siren four blocks away, but their flashing red lights beat rhythms on the evening sunlit row of town houses.
“Harris—alley out back, gray wood fence. Post up where you can cover it, don’t pass anybody I mean anybody but me or David. GO! Run, we’ll give you thirty!”
Yippy dog barking—fenced in next door front yard.
Dirty white yippy dog.
Gun out and so is David, must have been there before, too, fuckup like me not a don’t give a fuck, two-handed combat grip the Glock out front—no citizens, lucky break. Eyes on the turquoise door, white curtains drawn over the two stories of front windows.
“Yip! Yip yip!”
Nod to the sidewalk: David moves to that post, eyes on the windows, knowing—
“Freeze!” yells the ex–Brooklyn cop.
Faye whirls—
Male, white, late twenties, gun, he’s got a gun, black automatic zeroed on me!
“I’m Home Sec!” yells the strange man in blue jeans, a blue nylon Windbreaker. “Yellow initials on my jacket back! You’re Faye! Agent Dozier! I’m protocol!”
Seeing him over her gun barrel. Seeing his gun bore zero her face.
“Yip! Yip!”
Protocol is tall and lean. Wears a scruffy brass goatee, chopped-short hair, a poorly groomed surfer look.
He whirls. Aims his gun at the turquoise door.
Keep your gun on him.
Why? thinks Faye. But obeys her instincts.
Protocol says: “That’s the place, right?”
Says: “My partner’s posting our red-lights unit in the alley, block and secure.”
Pauses, listens: wireless earpiece.
Protocol says: “Our two guys have hooked up.”
Harris’s voice in David’s belt-packed, speaker-on phone confirms.
Faye swung her Glock toward Condor’s home.
Protocol said: “You or me?”
Faye followed the flow of her gun sights to the turquoise door.
9
What rough beast.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
A throat-cut American spy slumps crucified by your knives over your fireplace.
Dark tears trickle from his empty eye sockets: Fresh. Recent. Run!
Across town in Complex Zed, Faye Dozier scanned Action/Alerts. Learned the Threat Spectrum Rating for starving sea lions washing up on Southern California beaches.
In the twilight outside a D.C. house with a turquoise door, the neighbor’s dirty white dog yipped once more in triumph, strutted under “her” front porch, the human who’d dared come near her turf successfully skedaddled into its next-door cave.
Shh!
Silence. No one alive in here but you. No one in the kitchen. No one upstairs.
What kind of cover team is outside watching?
Condor shook his head.
Impeccable timing. T.O.D. (Time Of Death) matches my known schedule.
Peter, the corpse was Peter. Bald, and that pissed him off. Lots pissed him off.
No blood spray high on the walls, so not a slashing samurai.
Picture it:
Peter knocked out. Killer drags him to the fireplace. Probably finishes him first, then crucifies him. Situational genius even if the killer was following some Op script.
If you’re going to frame a crazy, build a crazy frame.
A freshly butchered body smells like steamy ham. Feels like a warm beach ball that’s lost a breath of inflation. Condor slid his hands around the dead man’s waist.
Holster—empty.
So officially, you’ve taken his gun.
Are now obviously armed and dangerous. A trained and crazed murderer.
There’ll be a fast behavioral science profile of the fugitiv
e—you: “Crucifying the victim indicates a severe psychotic break. Gouging out the eyes means our subject doesn’t want to be seen. And will attack anyone who seems to be stalking him.”
Shoot on sight won’t be the Operational Order.
But it will be the street-smart move.
What did the wet-work artist do with the murdered man’s eyes?
Mumbo jumbo mind mappers will say: “Call them trophies or what he didn’t know to discard, like a kid saving his graded exam paper.”
If they find the eyes on you or linked to you …
So the artist assassin is still active. With a pocketful of eyeballs to plant on you after somebody—anybody—takes you off or shoots you down, which means …
He’s inside the machine.
That’s how he got Bald Peter here.
How much time do you have before they nail you?
Across town on the limbo floor of the Office of National Intelligence’s Complex Zed, an NROD deputy commander stood in his glass-walled office door and yelled: “Dozier! Get in here. David, Harris: you, too.”
Condor made himself check the rest of the crucified corpse.
No ankle-holster backup gun to take and be the actual threat you officially are. Forget about the dead man’s phone, his IDs maybe imbedded with GPS chips, his credit card, his cash: That’ll look like you panicked, didn’t scavenge resources.
A bald, gouged-out-eyes, throat-cut agent of America slumps crucified with your knives over your fireplace.
You are so fucked.
On your way to Killed While Resisting.
Or BAM! Extraordinary rendition. No trial, locked forever in some asylum box.
Across town in the lobby of Complex Zed, a headhunter guru named Sami sees one of his protégés scrambling with a team toward a car waiting in the street beyond the glass walls. She spots Sami, clenches her right fist by her belt buckle: Running hot.
Condor ran to the kitchen, grabbed a canvas shopping bag from between the refrigerator and the counter, ran back toward the living room—
Stopped. Stared at his collage wall. At his triangle-marked images.
Tell me what I’m trying to say!
Nothing. He heard nothing.
No creaking boards.
No yipping from the dog next door.