Last Days of the Condor (14 page)

Condor shuffled over roads paved through this cemetery in the heart of the city. Found the locked office building. Its windows mirrored this empire of the dead. A stranger emerged in those windows' reflection as he rubbed HipGirlz cover-up over his face, his hands. Turned his skin some disgusting color of mud.

You look marvelous!

And then they
laughed.

At 8:02 on the other side of the building, steel gates creaked open, let in workers.

Only ghosts saw Condor walk out of the cemetery.

One formula made sense.

Fuck with them.

Find some chance in the chaos.

Figure out what you can't remember or don't know, who and why.

Fix it. Or at least go down fighting.

He spotted an orange-plastic-wrapped
Washington Post
tossed in front of a house like it was still the twentieth century. Nobody'd come outside to claim this delivered reality while water boiled on the stove for morning coffee.
I would kill for a cup of coffee,
so stealing someone's newspaper seemed like an acceptable moral stretch.

When he started this life, it would have taken Condor twenty minutes to skim
The Post.
That morning, he scanned the newspaper in less time than it took to walk a block.

War in Afghanistan that was officially almost over. Car bombings in Iraq that weren't officially war. Slaughters in Syria that started as hopeful Arab Spring. Strong moves by the strong man in Russia. North Korea ranted. Europeans raged in the streets. Sound bytes shouted on the Senate floor. Hong Kong had coughing chickens, we all had whacky weather. Wall Street wages were up for the thirty-first straight year. A factory closed in Indiana. Traffic sucked. Divorcing Hollywood stars vowed to remain friends.

Nowhere in the newspaper did Condor spy a story about a crucified federal agent or a manhunt for a missing Library of Congress employee.

A handmade sign hung taped to the screen door of a corner grocery:

COFFEE.

The grizzled black man behind the store counter blinked at the entering freak.

“'Need coffee,” said Condor.

The counterman filled a cup from the urn. “Take this one on me and walk on.”

Vin shuffled down an access street parallel to North Capitol, here a used furniture store, there a nail salon he could imagine no one frequenting except “beauty students” scamming a few cents out of cash-strapped federal job-training programs.

A Hispanic man wearing a tool belt glanced at the weird gringo sipping coffee beside him while they waited for the traffic light, then watched his fellow crew members on scaffolding across the street. The light turned green. The workman hurried toward the scaffolding. Didn't feel Condor steal the cell phone out of his tool belt pouch.

A pickup truck hauling debris from a house gut idled at the red light.

Padding jiggled under his maroon nylon jacket as Condor hurried toward the idling pickup while tapping the secret CIA Agent In Trouble digits into the stolen cell phone.

The traffic light's changing—

Made it,
behind the pickup, in front of a car that honked at his jaywalking as he thumbed
SEND
on the cell phone he tossed into the pickup's cargo box.

The Panic Line Center at Langley won't recognize the caller ID. Won't hear a voice on the call. Will activate a GPS track. Divert headhunters off Condor. Maybe find the cell phone still
on,
maybe find fingerprints on it, maybe chase
maybes
all morning.

First time you called the panic line was from a pay phone.

Condor blinked. Cooling black coffee trembled in the paper cup he clutched.

Remembering, you're remembering.

Up ahead a man stepped outside of a glass-fronted store:

CYBER WEB D.C. A poster read
CYBER CAFE
. Orange calligraphy on the store's glass read:

NEW AND USED COMPUTERS! LAPTOPS & COMPUTERS & CELL PHONES REPAIRED HERE! DISPOSABLE CELL PHONES!
SE HABLA ESPANOL!

A man stood outside his store, smoked a cigarette, licked the street with his eyes.

Chicago. California Street, a Friday-night table in a dive bar, sitting with ebony-hued Ethelbert. He wears a perfect suit, Cary Grant confidence. Watches you sip the second shot of Scotch that he insisted you drink as he says:

“Do you think I care about any of that bicentennial happy 1976 going on out there in the good old U.S. of A.? I'm working the deal, two years of schooling you amateurs on short cons, then I'm out of a go-to-jail jacket.”

“I'm a couple tough Ops past being an amateur.”

That's you. That's Condor.

“Yet you just blew your cover to show me you've got a big dick.” Ethelbert finished his Scotch. “But you also got some savvy. Didn't freak when I walked you in here, only white face around, and
yes,
maybe those days are over, but this has never been about white or black, it's about where you belong, whether you're an insider or an outsider. These are hard-line folks. They been put on it, they walk it and expect you to do the same. You spotted those two bad motherfuckers who are considering clobbering your ass
just because
. They're gonna clobber somebody tonight, might as well make it easy on themselves and clobber the outsider.

“You've got no money,” said Ethelbert. “No guns. No knives. Not a two-way wrist-radio the comics keep promising we're going to have someday. You don't have a dime in your pocket for a pay phone, can't pay the tab for our top-shelf Scotch that I'm walking out of here leaving you holding.

“You want to learn, you got to do. You can't do, I can't teach you, so then tell our boss you're quitting the
knock-knock who's there
school. NOC,
‘Non-Official Cover'—
Hell
:
everything is official out here in the street.

“Now con your way safe downtown by midnight.

“Remember, if you're an outsider, try working The Sideways Slide.”

Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C., when we have
“two-way wrist-radios.”

The man outside this cyber store lets the smoke drift from his cigarette.

Condor walked up to him. “I been robbed.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“You sell used cell phones,” said Condor. “Good chance one of them is mine.”

“We aren't that kind of store. We sell disposables. Burners.”

“Whatever I buy, you're giving me my money's worth after what been stole.”

The man laughed. Dropped his cigarette. Made a show of grinding it out.

Flicked
gonna fuck-you-up
eyes onto this freak.

Condor strobed back:
So what?

Said: “I'm gonna buy a phone from you, twenty bucks fair, but what I'd really like to buy is what else they stole.”

That Sideways Slide sank the hook into cigarette man.

So it was he who said: “What else you looking for?”

“My gun.”

“What'd you lose?”

Like that matters.
“An Army .45. Brought it AWOL back from 'Nam.”

“Sentimental guy?”

“Practical,” said the man with the weird dark skin in the Redskins cap and fucked-up glasses and some soft gut under his maroon jacket. “What works, works.”

“If we did sell guns, we'd do it in the law. We don't do it here.”

“But you might know somebody, and if they kick back to you, who cares.”

Cigarette Man shrugged.

“Here's that twenty. I'm gonna tap on your keyboards in there, and the phone you sell me's gonna work.”

Cigarette Man took Condor's twenty-dollar bill, gestured for him to enter.

Condor swept his hand toward the visibly empty cyber store:
After you
.

Cigarette Man added such caution to whoever he thought this freak was, went into the store's back room, out of sight.

Gonna happen how it's gonna happen.

Condor picked the computer workstation that let him watch the back room. Like he guessed, the desktop machine needed no password: such a legitimate feature created a record for income tax, money laundering, or fraud audits.

His first search engine result dropped him onto the “Ask Us!” page for the city government's Advisory Neighborhood Commission covering Capitol Hill, a window on the computer screen into which he typed:
“What happened with that murder in his house on Thirteenth Street, SE, of a Homeland Security agent last night?”

The second search zapped him to the Web site for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where he skipped the thirty-second Hollywood-level movie highlighting the Committee as a streetwise defender of every American voter and found the “Contact the Committee” click:
“Why is the CIA overstepping its jurisdiction and investigating the murder of a Homeland Security agent on Capitol Hill last night?”

Nine clicks in the third search revealed a “conspiracy center” Web site that ranked high on popular search results
and
had a flowing “HAPPENING NOW!” message board system where each posted “citizen's report” had a click for comments that spun into rants and cross-links to other Web entries. Condor typed:
“Who's running the cover-up of the murder of a Homeland Security agent in D.C. on Capitol Hill last night that the CIA is somehow involved in, too?”

His next two searches led him to phone numbers Condor wrote on scrap paper.

Cigarette Man came out of the back room waving a cell phone. “Cheapest one is thirty dollars. Say … four hours of use. The strip of white tape on the back shows its number.”

“Say exactly four hours.” Condor cleared his search history, exchanged another of his few bills for the cell phone. “Say I'll be pissed off if it doesn't. And on that other thing, say I'll be back around four this afternoon to see what's what and who's here.”

“You will or you won't.”

Condor left the store.
You will or you won't. What more is there to say?

Ten minutes later, he stood in a bus stop, its three plexiglass walls filled by public service posters in Spanish. Condor understood the top banner of a poster that exhorted readers to call 911 in case of emergency, but didn't know that the
Jamas tendras que pagar!
line meant: “You never have to pay!”

He stared down the street to the entrance of a Metro station—D.C.'s subway.

Sure, there'd be security cameras. He'd done what he could about that.

Washington's subway doesn't run twenty-four hours. Last night, cover teams would have ridden the last train, swept the locking-up stations with Metro cops. Spy shop headhunters probably swept the system again when it opened before dawn. But now it's morning rush hour, deep into double shifts for spook agency headhunters, day shift for straight cops who'd be working only off a “regular” high-alert BOLO.

No uniformed cops stood scanning the commuters swiping their fare cards through the orange turnstiles. No men or women with
soft clothes & hard eyes
lingered by the escalators up to the platform. Could be patrols, cover teams he didn't see, but could be the hunt for him now focused on Facial Recognition and other search programs across Big Brother's grid.

A bus braked at the stop sheltering Condor. Bus doors freed morning commuters to flock toward the Metro subway stop. Condor slid into that pack of professionals carrying backpacks, a muscled man carrying a hard hat, a white-haired guy who wore a blue blazer and the gaze of someone who sits behind a downtown lobby desk with no hope of a pension.

Condor kept his head down, his cap obscuring his face as he swiped his way into the station, as he rode the
UP
escalator. His arms swung up from his sides whenever it seemed like someone might brush against his belly-bulging maroon jacket.

Back-to-back security cameras hung from the cement awning over the train platform. Condor stood directly under the cameras, hoped it was a blind spot.

A hundred bodies waited on those red tiles with him. The crowd formed two groups, each facing one of the two sets of tracks and beyond them, the open spaces looking out over low buildings, trees, into block-away high-rise office windows.

But no one else waiting on the subway platform was really there.

They read smartphones held in one hand. Tablets colored their faces with rivers of broadcasting TV or movies or YouTube clips of bacon-loving dogs. Earbuds closed and glazed eyes. A dozen people talked on cell phones Condor could see, a dozen more babbled into cell phones he couldn't spot, seemingly solo chatter as though they, too, experienced ghosts. Dozens of people used thumbs and fingers to text messages. All his fellow travelers existed in data flows they thought they controlled.

Condor cupped his empty left palm toward his face to look like everyone else.

He tapped his left palm with his right finger, with each tap thought:
This is me
.

A silver
whoosh
knifed through the sunlight above the tracks.

This is a train of now. A
whoosh,
a hum, a whine like an electric current, not the
clackety-clack
rhythm of Woody Guthrie, not the clatter on steel rails of bluesmen from Mississippi or settlers headed West to prairie won from the Cheyenne or soldiers coming home from guarding the Berlin Wall. The train of now slides in and out of stations with a whoosh, a whir, a rumble through this new world.

Bells chime. Train doors jump open. The brown-skinned man in the baseball cap and ridiculous glasses and maroon nylon jacket snapped over his big belly got on board.