Risk it: Dark night, two miles from the Op epicenter, wearing sports camouflage, you can shuffle up North Capitol’s bright-lights commercial zone and not get tagged.
Vin walked past a rehabbed check cashing store, glanced through the front picture window, saw the new space sparsely filled with surplus government metal desks, tables that could have come from a church bankruptcy sale, two desktop computers where no one sat and a college-vintage laptop that lit the face of a woman in her mid-twenties with light brown hair. Working late. The white letters over the swirling blue wall poster behind her had a logo for The Public Trust Project and the words:
Today we’re losing the fish, tomorrow…?
Condor walked on from the sight of a young woman trying to save the world.
Left, left, left right left …
Ah, fuck.
We’re back!
Vin focused on the yellow glow from a carryout restaurant on the next corner. The red neon sign above the picture windows read:
FULL DRAGON YUM
You step into that Chinese food carryout, into its yellow spotlight box. The L-shaped walls of picture windows make you visible to any cruising-past cars. There’s a sense of steam, warmth beyond the humid cool outside, smells of sweat and grease and soy sauce and maybe something from the trash can against one wall. That trash can shows its black plastic bag. Above the trash can hang fourteen faded color pictures of food with labels like Foo Yung and Lo Mein. You face the bulletproof plexiglass separating customers from stoves covered by pots and pans and coolers stacked with soft drink bottles no shoplifter can reach. The white-clad cook wears some kind of hair net, keeps his back to the plexiglass and you, leaves the lookout for the taut tan face of the counterwoman wearing a flower-print blouse who eats you with her ebony eyes.
Watches you watch the black fly buzzing on your side of the bulletproof partition.
The black fly walked across the wall’s color photo of Beef With Broccoli.
Vin stepped to the slatted speaker slot. Ordered the beef with broccoli, felt his stomach rumble and added a beef fried rice. Felt the cash dwindling in his black jeans pocket but still asked for a plastic bottle that advertised it contained REAL ORANGE JUICE! and thus, perhaps, a dash of Vitamin C and other actual nutrients.
The Chinese woman barked his order back to him, got his nod, yelled something in what Vin thought might be Mandarin to the white-clad cook.
If you can’t shoot them through the plexiglass, they can’t shoot you either.
There are no stools or chairs or tables for customers to sit down and stay awhile.
Outside cars whiz through the city.
“Hai!” The ebony-eyed woman stands on the other side of the plexiglass. The brown paper sacks on the Lazy Susan pass-through in the partition need only a spin from her steady hand to come clear of the smudged plexiglass.
Vin put the exact change for the price she barked at him in the pay slot.
Wait.
He held up an extra dollar bill, pointed to the trash can against the wall: “I want to buy … say five of those black plastic trash can liners, the big thirty-gallon ones.”
Her brow wrinkled. She stood on her tiptoes. Pushed herself up farther with her hands pressing down on the counter, a demonstration of strength Condor feared he barely still had in him. She saw two bags on the floor beside where the man waited, wearing a jacket over a jacket and a smile she didn’t believe for a heartbeat.
She told him: “You san jia quan.”
Turned and disappeared behind the cooler.
Came back into view clutching a wad of black plastic in one hand, put those bundled-up garbage bags beside the brown paper sack on the Lazy Susan and spun the lot through the bulletproof partition to Vin’s waiting hands.
“You keep dollar,” she said. “Sometime everybody is trouble-lost dog.”
He knew better than to force the dollar or a tip on her. But gave her a smile that this time she believed. Her face stayed fixed. Her ebony eyes rode him out the door.
He tramped north like his favorite fictional character—mouse Stuart Little. Shuffled over residential sidewalks. Two foreclosed houses he passed were nailed shut too securely to repurpose. A birthday party pinwheel stuck in a postage-stamp front lawn spun slowly with this cool spring night and fried-rice-smelling air.
Down a street sloping to his right rose a brick high school with a cop car parked out front, its engine idling on watch, just like there’d be armed cops waiting inside the metal detectors of the front door come tomorrow morning.
Streetlights silhouetted trees clustered at the crest of the hill, turf surrounded by a black iron fence. Metal letters arcing over the chained entry gate bars read:
EVERWOOD CEMETERY
A sign on the gate read: WE PROSECUTE ALL TRESPASSERS.
This garden of the dead covered a dozen square blocks of the city looming above North Capitol Street. Commuters to Congress drove past it every day. So did the bus to a Veterans Center where briefly Condor’d been sent to get his drugs—his medicines.
If only I was still as strong as that Chinese woman.
Condor shoved his two bags through the bars of the gate—tossing them over would have dumped everything on the entrance road asphalt.
Got no choice now. Dinner’s on the other side of the bars. With your gear.
He jumped, grabbed as high as he could on the bars, flopped to the other side.
Again he dangled above the earth. Again he let go. This fall only jarred him.
Vin adjusted his cap. Took his two bags in one hand, filled his other with the Maglite that sent a pale white cone of light to illuminate the darkness.
Fog. Pale wisps snake through the flashlight beam.
Feel: Wet on your face.
Smell: Wet grass. Stones and pavement. A whiff of cooling fried rice.
Hear: Faraway, city traffic. Rustles of trees. Silence from stone angels on pedestals blowing horns, spreading their wings, beckoning.
Walk behind your flashlight beam over paved paths wide enough for a black hearse. Walk a random path past family plots, marble slabs. MOTHER. LOVING HUSBAND. PRECIOUS DAUGHTER. VETERAN. Amidst stone crosses and angels atop gravestones Vin spotted dozens of ten-foot-tall stone obelisks, miniatures of the Washington Monument rising hundreds of feet into the sky on the not-too-distant Mall.
No moon beamed down on him. No stars dotted the sky. Fog enveloped him. Now and then he glimpsed muted streetlights far off beyond the invisible black iron fence. He mostly saw only as far as his Maglite shone. Didn’t worry that some sniper waited off in the darkness, drawing a bead on the wink of the light in his hand.
His shoes crunched pebbles on the looping black pavement path.
Toolsheds he came upon all had locked doors. He discovered an artificial hill with crypts built into its face, but those stone shelters had steel doors and bars and chains with solid padlocks to foil their prisoners’ escape.
Out of the fog and darkness loomed an Asian pavilion. Open walls around a handball-court-sized circle topped two pancaked layers of roof, the smaller one above the larger with a gap in between that come morning would let in the sun. Pavement for a floor and on the down slope, a pebbled Zen garden with a plaque that read:
FREEDOM’S GARDEN OF SCATTERED MEMORIES
This is where they give the wind the ashes of the cremated.
Like a burnt spy.
On the pavilion floor, Vin sat atop his bundled-up blue raincoat. His Maglite created a cone of visibility as he used a plastic fork to eat cold beef with broccoli and fried rice. He drank all the orange juice. Ration the water. The flashlight led him to the edge of the pavilion so he could relieve himself on the shadowed sea of grass.
He made his bed beneath the pavilion roof. Stretched two plastic trash bags lengthwise on the pavement, atop them put the blue blood-splattered raincoat from Peter’s iPad pictures and the gray sports jacket he’d worn to work that day.
Cold. Spring, sure, but out here tonigh
t: cold.
Vin stripped in the glow of the Maglite until he wore only his socks.
Ghosts mocked a burlesque striptease: “Wha-wha wa, wha-wha-wha wha…”
Condor pulled on thermal underwear, redressed in his shirt and black jeans, shoes. Used one swallow of the bottled water to take his need-to-pee pill, his heart-soother pill, a keep-calm Valium and a pain pill for aches and soreness that made him want to moan. Zipped into his black leather flight jacket and snapped the maroon nylon football jacket on over that, laid on his wilderness bed with his cloth shopping bag and the Kangaroo Love baby carrier for a pillow. Stuck his feet and legs into one black plastic shopping bag, patted another trash bag over his torso, pulled on the yellow rubber gloves.
Condor thumbed out the Maglite.
Snugged on the maroon cap, lay on his back with its bill sticking straight up.
Bet my target silhouette looks like a duck lying on its back in the darkness.
Vin heard it first.
Pattering on the metal roofs above him.
Pattering becoming drumming like thousands of bullets strafed from the stars.
Then wind that spun down a monster tornado in far-away Oklahoma came through the open walls on all sides of him. Wind cool, cold, then wet blown across and on him as the dark opened with torrents of rain.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!” yelled Condor, yelled Vin to whatever heaven was out there this stormy night. “Couldn’t you pick another time to cry?”
10
Gonna fall.
—Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”
Faye leaned against the white wall opposite the brick fireplace where Peter, Bald Peter, her partner—a jerk, sure, but her partner—hung crucified by kitchen knives, his throat cut so he could not speak, his eyes stolen from their stare.
My fault. How much of this is my fault?
From outside came the incessant barks of the dog next door: “Yip yip! Yip!”
Lean against this wall. Not gonna fall. Just lean against the wall. Breathe.
She dropped her gaze to her watch: 6:42. Still light outside.
Emergency lights on top of unmarked cars beat blasts of red against the house.
“Yip!”
White flashes. Another of the gun-toters crowded in here, taking cell phone pictures of the murdered man nailed over a fireplace by fucking kitchen knives.
One of us.
Faye’s instincts told her not to stare at the horror that had redefined her life, to focus instead on the whispering cluster of three men and one woman who wore suits that could have come from the same tailor. Through the shifting crowd, Faye kept her eyes on that quartet of bosses who thought they had the power to decide her fate.
“Yip yip!”
Sami.
Walking through the turquoise door with three men and two women, all wearing street clothes not unlike his shopping-mall slacks and tan Windbreaker. He gave a concerned glance to where Faye leaned against the wall even as he stepped past her, marched to close quarters with the command cluster.
“Yip yip!”
Sami demanded: “Yes or no?”
The black executive who played college ball glared at Sami: “Excuse me?”
“The question you gotta decide right now,” said Sami. “Yes or no? Yes, I and my people are the umbrella covering this scene, in charge of everything, or not—No.”
The chewed-lipstick frown on the cluster’s lone woman curved like a scimitar as she told Sami: “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“Yeah. You’re a Deputy Director of my CIA who jumped on this rollout because you know this bites our Agency—speaking of which … Harlan!”
Faye’d worked with the lanky man in Sami’s cadre who replied: “Yo?”
“You got your silencer?” Sami kept his eyes on the command quartet.
“Sure,” said Harlan.
“Shoot that fucking yippy dog.”
Harlan stepped toward the door, one hand suddenly full of steel, the other reaching into his jacket pocket.
“What!” chorused the quartet of commanders.
“Cancel, Harlan,” said Sami. “They’re right, not my show. If they weren’t smart enough to neutralize a dog attracting a whole lot of public attention, that’s on them.
“So,” said Sami to the glaring bosses, “I know who you all are. You’re the dead man’s CO from NROD in Home Sec, sorry, I know what it’s like to lose a man. Standing next to you, we got Supervising Special Agent Bechtel of the FBI, nice to see you again, Rich. I’ve never met you, Deputy Director Martinez, but the whispers are you seem to know how to navigate the ODNI mess you got.
“But our question is: Are you putting me in charge of this or not?
“Our luck means I got nineteen of the best headhunters ever carried a sanction posting up right here in the Action Area, coincidental training gig for a shit storm like this. What I see here and now, you’re already behind on the ABCs.”
Deputy Director Martinez from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who only knew the legends about Sami said to him: “What alphabet?”
“A,” said Sami. “Action. This isn’t one of our Ops, so any Action we do is part of somebody else’s chain of cause and effect. Look at their Action: our guy nailed to the wall in the home listed to a High-Alert disabled vet of ours who’s gone nobody knows where. Whatever our Action is, it needs to break free of the other guys’ chains to do any good, so it’s gotta be big and fast and hard all the way up to extreme prejudice.
“B,” said Sami. “Bounce. How’s this thing gonna bounce around, how are we going to control everybody’s everything so nothing more gets broken than it has to.
“But what you’re most worried about is C,” said Sami. “Cover. How are we going to put a cover over all this so it doesn’t hurt U.S. national security or hurt the U and S that spells us.
“You want to start?” said Sami. “Get half these people outta here. There’s a school parking lot to reconvene at somewhere near here…”
A blond woman agent in his cadre shouted out the school name and address.
“Get most everybody gone before the crowd of citizens outside gets any bigger,” said Sami. “And call an ambulance.”
ODNI DD Martinez said: “He’s—”
“Dead,” said Sami. “Let’s get him down from there, show some respect.”
“Crime Scene Investigators haven’t gotten here.”
“If they’re en route, wave them off. We’re not cops. Unless Rich here is claiming this for the FBI, does anybody really think any of this is going to go to lawyers and rules of evidence some public fucking trial?”
ODNI DD Martinez blinked.
Ordered an ambulance called. Ordered “all nonessentials” out.
“Hold up.” Sami looked at Faye. “Who rolled on this with you?”
“That would be me,” said David, the ex–Brooklyn cop.
Asshole Harris pleaded with both hands raised: “I just got logged onto their ride.”
Sami told him: “Now you’re logged on for CPR.”
“What?” said Harris.
“Ambulance gets here,” said Sami, “bundles up our boy, you get on top of him, on top of the stretcher, ride it all the way into the ambulance, kneel on each side of our man down and make big show of giving him CPR chest compressions.”
Ex-cop David got it, volunteered: “I’ll work squeezing the breathing bag.”
No one—not Faye, not Harris or the ex–Brooklyn cop David, not any of the four national security executives—no one contradicted Sami.
Who said: “Everybody else except for my team and Faye, drift out of here. Hang around outside. You’re concerned. Upset. Responded to one of those commercially available panic alarms for help from a disabled vet, a—ex-FBI, explains the badges, guns, the too fucking many red lights. What was our guy’s work name?”
“UNN!” grunted one of the suits as he pulled the knife out of dead Peter’s left hand. The bald m
an’s body slumped toward the floor.
His pale former Home Sec NROD boss said: “The knifed agent is—was—”
“Not him,” said Sami. “What was Condor’s work name?”
Faye called out: “Vin.”
Frowned. Asked Sami: “Do you know him?”
“Vin,” Sami told the agents inside the murder house. “Every TV watcher knows every badge rolls on any ‘officer down’ call. That’s why so many of you came here, kicked in the door. Found our guy Vin, our colleague, your buddy, lying on the floor. No knives. Heart attack. Still alive. Now it’s Vin going out of here on the stretcher to the ER. Old guys, heart attacks: ordinary news. Be like the cell phone cameras out there, watch them take a’ old guy getting CPR away in an ambulance, listen for any dangerous leaks or rumbles gossiping in the bystanders, follow it up soft but certain. Let it be heard out there how the cops’ association is asking for volunteer badges—who are gonna be us—to sit on Vin’s stuff because of the busted door. Go!”
Without waiting for confirmation from the official executives, the herd of America’s security and intelligence agents did as Sami said.
That ex-Marine who’d thrived as a teenager in the sniper streets of Beirut turned to the quartet of his fellow Americans who all outranked him, said: “So?”
Four intelligence commanders looked at the legend in front of them.
Knew there was no more time for phone calls.
Knew they were on the line.
Knew how to hand off to a fall guy.
Martinez of the umbrella agency ODNI got the nods. Told Sami: “Green light.”
“Full sanction.” Not a question from Sami, but his stare demanded confirmation.
“Yes,” said Martinez.
Within two minutes Sami’d made sure everyone on-scene had the phone number of a command center he’d set up but not activated at Complex Zed before he’d raced from there to here with carloads of his cadre.
“I’ve got two-man teams already working a wheel-out from here,” said Sami. “They’re driving in circles, progressively working their way out from the house. They got the iPad photos from yesterday’s home visit report, the data on Condor.”