Last Days of the Condor (17 page)

Doesn't matter that they know where you are if they can't touch you there.

The elevator let her out at the main lobby.

Our world waited beyond those walls of glass.

Faye pushed her way through the revolving door, walked across the plaza to the sidewalk curb and raised her hand for a taxi.

He's presumed to be on foot, so I should be, too.

A taxi slid to a stop, she got in, told the driver where she wanted to go, didn't recognize him as one of Sami's soldiers—but he'd have used a face unknown to her.

After all, she wasn't
supposed
to have a cover team.

The backpack purse rode heavy on the seat beside her.

Cuts your speed and stamina. That weight better be worth it.

“Rush hour,” said the cabby, a black guy with an accent of where:
Nigeria?
“Always rush hour where you got to get to, to get where you got to go.”

“Yeah.” She turned so he saw her face in the rearview mirror point toward the sidewalks they whizzed past and no more conversation. Let her eyes scan his side mirror.

The route he chose took them all the way down Wisconsin Avenue to the tricky left-hand turn onto Massachusetts Avenue by the fenced grounds of the Naval Observatory and the vice president's official residence.

Mass Avenue below the vice president's house is Embassy Row, the sprawling brick estate with Winston Churchill's V-fingered bronze statue out front for the Brits, the black glass castle-sized box of Brazil that had seemed
ultra modern
before Faye'd been born, gray stone mansions for European powers, the Islamic Center seized and held bloody hostage along with the headquarters for B'nai Brith and a D.C. government building by radical Hanafi Muslims in 1977.

A few blocks later, her taxi flowed with traffic around Sheridan Circle where in America's bicentennial, the year before the Hanafi siege, a wet squad including a former CIA agent from Waterloo, Iowa, remote-control bombed a car during the rush-hour commute in order to murder a former Chilean diplomat, also killing one American and wounding her husband as part of Operation Condor, the secret spy collaboration between six right-wing South American nations.

Faye had the taxi drop her at the corner of Third Street & Pennsylvania Avenue, SE. The Capitol waited behind her, Condor's Library of Congress office loomed a block-plus off to her left. Pennsylvania Avenue stretched away from the Congress's turf with blocks of cafes and bars and restaurants, there a Starbucks, there a two-story brick building with a street door listing offices for three different groups, all with public policy–sounding names that guaranteed nothing about what they really did.

This was your turf, Condor.

Faye corrected herself: Is
your turf.

See me,
she wished as she stood there, the last cars of rush hour whizzing past her, the crowd of Congressional staffers who'd headed somewhere after work now thinning.

Besides Starbucks, whose interior she cleared with a quick scan through its picture windows, the “social business” that appeared most in Condor's credit card bills waited down the block near Fourth Street.

The Tune Inn. A flat-fronted beer & burgers saloon sunk like a shaft into the block's wall of coat & tie–friendly restaurants and bars.

Two steps into The Tune and Faye knew why Condor came here.

Three steps into the saloon and she spotted Pulaski sitting at the bar to her left as she walked toward the back end of booths before the bathrooms and kitchen. Pulaski was pure Special Ops, a scraggy beard that would have let him drop from this stakeout cover team mission to the streets of Kabul without much more than a minor wardrobe adjustment from his dirty blue jeans and soiled cloth Windbreaker Faye was sure covered two pistols in shoulder-holster rigs. He kept his eyes on his bottle of Miller beer.

Three stools away from Pulaski sat Georgia, an ex-cop from Alabama, dressed like a hard-luck drinker who didn't take her eyes off the half-full glass of white wine in front of her and kept her hands resting lightly on the scarred bar beside her cell phone.

Sami wouldn't have called off the dogs of Standard Operating Procedure just because he'd sicced her solo into the streets. Beyond headhunter patrols, there'd be cover teams at Condor's house, at his work, at—
say
—the top five places he'd been known to frequent. Faye wondered who she hadn't spotted in the Starbucks, but maybe that cover team coded in the Op plan as an exterior post surveillance, maybe a van parked where the watchers could cover the Starbucks doors and also scan more of the target's turf.

She walked past her colleagues without a sign of recognition amongst them.

Knew one of them would text Control that she was on-site. As if the bosses didn't already know from pinging her cell phone.

“You want a booth, hon?” asked the strong but slumping sixtyish waitress with rusted hair and a face that as a teenager slowed all the pickup truck traffic in whichever small Maryland town she'd gotten this far from. “Wherever you want.”

This is what Condor sought, thought Faye as she took an empty, black-cushioned booth. The Tune's brown-paneled walls were hung with stuffed animal heads and a rifle rack of guns that clearly wouldn't work, pictures and plaques and beer signs from truck stops along the highways of Out There, America. She smelled beer, cooking grease from the kitchen beyond a half-door, the scent of evening drifting in from the city street.

This was a bar an American could call home. A place that felt like those post–World War II days when everything still seemed possible. You could wear a torn T-shirt or a tux here, and probably both came in during the course of any business week. A sign said the bar had been here longer than any other alcohol stop on Capitol Hill. Faye believed it. Most of the other stools at the bars where Pulaski and Georgia sat held people who'd not gotten where they were on easy roads.

One booth held two facing-fifty women whose blond dye jobs and white mohair sweaters and strings of pearls cost a lot of alimony, while their college-age sons, trying not to look bored or embarrassed, were clearly being shown where it used to be happening
back when
. Try as they might to maintain their aloof, Faye knew those college boys were tracking three scattered groups of Congressional aides who couldn't be more than a few years older than them, “men” and “women” who'd beaten the odds, gotten jobs, maybe'd gone to Harvard on Daddy's rep & billions or worked their way through heartland state universities on student loans they'd be repaying for decades,
but whatever,
they'd made it, they were here, “on the Hill.”

In a bar that felt like the America they all wanted to believe was in their blood.

Faye didn't need to listen to the music above the bar chatter or check the jukebox to know Condor'd come here hoping for his
clongs
amidst sounds of Hank Williams and Dusty Springfield, Bruce Springsteen and a handful of country & western songbirds flying the same skies as Loretta Lynn and other icons Faye recognized only by name.

“What can I get you, hon?” The rust-haired waitress leaned on the back of Faye's booth and gave the customer a real smile—what the hell, we're stuck here, might as well go for the happy we can get.

Faye ordered a hamburger and a Coke. Protein and caffeine. Fuel and fire.

“Not Diet, right? Good for you, hon.” The rust-haired waitress yelled the food order back to the kitchen, swayed toward the bar to get Faye's drink.

Let me count the ways I'm trapped,
thought Faye as the jukebox played.

Don't know where I'm going, don't know how to do what I've got to do, don't know how to get found by a killer—the right killer, anyway. Don't know how I ended up here—well, ended up here like this.

Don't know how I can warn off the man who loves me.

Years ago, there'd have been a pay phone in this bar. If there was now, Faye still couldn't use it. The cover team would catch that, zap the pay phone coordinates to the command center, and NSA's MAINWAY computers would flash
who
or
where
Faye called. Same reason she couldn't use her cell phone to call Chris, leave a message for him at work or get him on his cell. Faye considered stealing a phone from one of the Congressional staffers who were one beer away from being more than a little drunk, but every complication on a mission increases risk and the risk of a stolen cell phone scenario equaled why she wanted to steal a phone: keeping Chris clear of all this, of her.

Or so she told herself.

Had nothing to do with wanting to reach out and touch him, know he was safe, know he was there, know he still cared.

Last thing I need,
she told herself sitting in that black upholstered bar booth, sipping a Coke as the jukebox played some Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion song,
is to worry about him worrying about me.

Sunset pinked the front windows at the end of the bar as she forced herself to finish the hamburger she couldn't taste, the Coke that didn't quench her thirst.

Her stomach gurgled. She told herself it wasn't nerves, had to be the bar food, maybe the drug she'd swallowed the night before.

She took the heavy purse/backpack with her through the scruffed & scarred brown wooden door labeled
WOMEN
.

The hook & eye lock would stop a polite customer's pull but not much more.

If only it would be Condor jerking on that door!

But it won't be. And if it were, her two colleagues at the bar would claim him. Not her. Not just her and Sami and what the two of them needed.

She didn't shut the door on the metal stall when she did what she had to do in there: if someone burst into the bathroom, she wanted a chance for a clear shot.

Washing her hands in the white sink, she raised her eyes to the mirror.

Saw the face called hers staring back.

Saw the chance.

Stupid,
sure.
Crazy,
sure.
Corny,
sure.
Risky
. With all that, still her best shot.

She found her mission toiletries in the backpack purse, the gold tube of cheap bright red lipstick, the kind Faye as herself would never wear, the kind of
notice me
lip paint that dominates a witness's perception, cheap tradecraft she'd never used.

She turned the dial so the glossy red tip slid up and out of its gold sheath.

On the glass of the mirror she made appear in bright smear cherry-red letters:

Call Chris 202 555 4097

Tell him better roads r

around this bend. Tnx F

Then surrounded her lipstick plea with the outline of a red heart.

Slashed a long bloodred line under her heart on that mirror and—

Saw her second shot.

Do. Not. Run.

Walk out of the bathroom.

Go back to your booth.

She let her eyes sweep over her
sisters
who were in this bar, who were yet to come there tonight, would use the bathroom before the janitor mopped up with his ammonia cleaner and tired eyes. Surely some woman would come to that mirror who had a romantic soul, the courage of her curiosity. And a cell phone.

She counted out the cost of her dinner plus a great tip.

Showed she wasn't hurrying by standing there, dipping a last French fry into the plop of ketchup on her plate. She put the straw between her lips for a last sip of Coke.

Sure, that's all anyone sitting at the bar would see.

And she walked out without showing or saying a thing worth reporting.

Gray twilight muted by streetlamps swallowed her as she stepped onto the sidewalk. Could have turned to the right, but the formula of her epiphany mandated Condor being a sentimental guy, so she turned left as she cell-phoned Control.

Sami's voice in the cell phone pressed to her ear: “What have you got?”

“A hunch.” Faye quickened her pace past a lucky mother who was her age and pushing a laughing baby boy in a stroller from
Me-ma
. “Give me room to play it.”

“How?”

“Have cover teams pull back if they spot me come into surveillance Op zones.”

“I'll do what I can, give you as much slack as is Op safe. Tell me—”

“Whatever you know, you'll try to plan ahead of, and that might mess me up.”

“Then don't miss.” Sami hung up.

Faye muttered
“ABC to you, motherfucker”
as she returned her cell phone to the shirt pocket above her bulletproof vest, but she meant it in the nicest possible way.

The white-icing dome of the Capitol slid past her heart side as she marched to Union Station where she thought she saw a homeless woman rolling her shopping cart of rags and remnants away with more purpose than prayer. Could have been a headhunter pulling back as ordered, could have been just another nobody in the night, Faye couldn't let herself care. Rode Union Station's exterior escalator down to the subway platform and stood in front of the poster-sized stations-and-routes map for Metro's subway, the names of the stops in black letters, the subway lines drawn between them in thick colored connectors of orange and blue and green and yellow. And red.

Red like blood.

Red like lipstick.

“I like the Red Line.”
She'd chalked that up to Condor sounding crazy.

Now hoped he'd told the truth.

Faye saw a man with a Metro patch on the shoulder of his blue sweater giving directions to two tourist-clad senior citizens—
older even than Condor,
thought Faye, buying that both the tourists and the Metro worker were true to those identities. The Metro worker finished with the grateful tourists and Faye caught his eye.