Last Days of the Condor (10 page)

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 fugitive—
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.

No
ghosts.
No
clongs
. Only the
whoosh
of time outside in the evening street.

Vin grabbed his blue hooded raincoat off the wall hook in the living room, noticed dark splatters of
not rain
on it as he bounded upstairs, ignored whether the dental floss strand had been snapped.
The killers are gone and on their way.

Three cardboard boxes stacked in his bedroom closet held Vin's junk. Most of it came from who knew where, who knew why, but the middle box …

Weighed about forty pounds. Inside were books he could conceivably care about. And a black leather zip-up bomber jacket wrapped around something heavy the size of a loaf of bread. He unwrapped the jacket to reveal a black plaster statue of the Maltese Falcon. But who cared about that bird: he freed his scruffy black leather jacket, the secret he'd been hiding by making it look like mere padding around a fragile treasure.

Or so he hoped any squirrels who black-bagged & tossed his home had thought.

No iPad photos of this jacket, of Vin in it. No data for a BOLO alert.

Condor stuffed the black leather bomber jacket in his shopping bag. Restacked the boxes. Grabbed thermal underwear top and bottoms from a drawer. Clean socks.

Look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror.

Running scared.

Again.

“Yeah,” Condor told his image, told the ghosts. “But I was young then.”

Grab the pill bottle of pee medicine, pain tablets, beta blockers and baby aspirin for your hyper heart, multivitamins. Drop them and the low-dose Valium into your shopping bag: you'll need to sleep if you live long enough. Take your toothbrush.

Rows of antipsychotic sedations stared at Condor.

Make them kill the real you.

Vin slammed the medicine cabinet door shut.

Grabbed yellow rubber gloves from under the bathroom sink.

Remembered to pocket his Maglite, a black metal flashlight the size of a fat tube of lipstick, perfectly acceptable and prudent for any PINSS-resettled home.

Condor pushed a stepstool against the blank white wall at the top of the stairs where he'd often been tempted to violate
Operational Readiness
and hang a picture or a movie poster of,
say,
Magnum-toting Lee Marvin and
noir
blonde Angie Dickinson in
Point Blank,
or maybe an art print like the ones tourists buy in the Smithsonian gift shop, Sargent's
Girl in the Street of Venice
, a black-shawled, white-dressed brunette walking past two men, one of them raises his head to—

Focus!

Vin snatched the cloth belt off the black & red checked bathrobe hanging in the bathroom, the seemingly innocent robe he bought for this cloth belt, and
it will work
.

He threaded his leather belt through the canvas handles of the shopping bag so it now both carried the shopping bag and held up his pants.

Vin took off, then tied his laces together to dangle his shoes around his neck.

Tied one end of the bathrobe belt through a slat on the stool, left as much slack as possible when he tied the other end of the robe belt around his left ankle.

Almost forgot!

Condor tossed his cell phone clattering down the hall to the floor of his bedroom.

Pulled on the yellow rubber gloves.

“Yip! Yip yip yip!”

Outside—the neighbor's yippy white dog:
Barking at who?

Condor climbed on the stool next to the bare
oh so clean
white wall, reached up—

Yellow-rubber-gloved hands left no smudge marks on the white ceiling panel they pushed open to the crawl space between Condor's hallway and his roof.

“Yip! Yip yip!”

Vin grabbed the lip of that portal, stood on his left foot, bathrobe-belt-lashed and with the bag behind him, put his stockinged right foot on the bare white wall, took a deep breath—

Propelled himself up into the crawl space, his elbows held his weight on the frame of the passageway, his left leg stretched below him lashed to the stool launchpad.

In the trapdoor's maw, Condor dangled above the house floor tied to a stool.