Last Days of the Condor (24 page)

She whispered his last name.

Said: “You're the only
Vin
on the Library of Congress's Web site of staff passes.”

Said: “The photo's not that good.”

Warm, so warm under here.

Merle let the word come out again: “Vin.”

Then whispered: “Condor.”

Swirling warm blackness going g—

 

18

Say your life broke down.

—Richard Hugo, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”

What have I done?

Faye lay on the black sofa in someone else's dark apartment. She lay absolutely still, as if that would stop time, as if her stillness could make the last two days disappear.

Lay still and do not, DO NOT tremble or shake or vomit or cry.

Or cry.

A drinking glass stood sentry on the kitchen counter. The door's peephole was an eye of distorted light above the chair pushed against that locked portal to buy a second, maybe two for her to not get killed, not get machine-gunned as she tried to rise from this black leather couch of darkness.

Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Wood later that year would report that the most common medical trauma immediately suffered by American troops who survived combat in Iraq and Afghanistan translated into plain English as “deep sorrow.”

What did I do? What did we do?

Hostiles. The Opposition. A wet team targeting her and Condor.

That's who they were in the subway battle.

Not our guys doing their job, my job, doing their duty, their righteous duty.

Playback
:

Nobody shouts “Police!” or “Federal agents!” or “Freeze!”
Ambush or oversight?

The woman on the escalator shot Condor first—but with a Taser, nonlethal.

Not a classic hit. A snatch move? The first-choice neutralization?

Condor shoots her, and I …

The black man draws, shoots at me … with a silencer-rigged pistol.

You don't use a silencer to take prisoners.

Shot him dropped him he didn't die
. Not from me
.

The team at the top of the escalator stairs threw bullets at us, not selecting who they hit, friendly fire killing their own team member. They didn't care about containing and covering everything as an Eyes Only secret. Taking us out had—
has
—a higher priority than the cost of any casualties or chaos.

The gunner the train hit.

The man I shot on the red-tile platform.

Monkey Man blasted back into a subway car, roared away dead or alive.

Sami said he'd pull our people—
No
: said he'd do what he could. He's the man, the guru, the go-to guy, so if he could, he would, he trusts—
trusted
me that much.

So if not Sami … It's them. Whoever they are.

And
if then
it was or
if now
it's become Sami … We are so fucked. Dead.

What happened to my life, when did the fall-apart start: Paris?

Or with Chris?

When you let yourself have something to lose, you do.

Faye stared at the bedroom holding Condor and Merle behind a closed door.

Bring him in safe,
yes,
call it an objective, but the mission,
her
mission was to nail who killed her partner, who was trying to kill her, who made her kill.

What's worth all this?

My life. What I pledge it to by what I do.

A deep breath flowed into her, pushed her breasts against the bulletproof vest and suddenly she felt like an anaconda was squeezing her ribs, the giant snake crushing her and
breathe, just breathe, got to
—

Faye stopped her hyperventilating.

Fall apart when you're finished. If you fall apart now you are finished.

Not me. Not now. Not yet.

Fuck them. Fuck that.

Oh, but
oh
she was so tired. So heavy with the vest, with the weight of two guns waiting on the glass coffee table beside where she lay on this black leather couch, with the weight of a man crucified over a fireplace, a man getting smashed by a train, a man crumpling to the red tiles of a subway platform beyond the smoke from her pistol.

She imagined floating up from the couch, the ballistic vest falling away from her. And the exhaustion and pain and soreness and seared memories … floated away, gone.

Faye saw herself naked.

The scar erased from her stomach.

Standing in this apartment. Facing the curtains drawn open from the floor-to-ceiling sliding windows. Standing there naked with no
must
s, no
should
s, no
can
s, no
who will die
consequences, no Mission no Op no Duty. With dreams she could believe. Standing in front of a transparent plane as she spreads her arms wide, her chest and heart uncovered as she smiles at the glass that won't shatter from a sniper's bullet.

Or if it does, it won't be her finger on the killing trigger.

Won't be a squeezed betrayal from her
us
.

She stands there, arms spread wide, naked in front of the night.

Waiting for the sound of busting glass.

 

19

The time to hesitate.

—The Doors, “Light My Fire”

From beside you in the dark bed, she says
: “You're awake.”

Condor exhaled the sigh he'd been holding back. She was already awake. His disturbing motion wouldn't matter now.

He told her: “Yes, but you can go back to sleep.”

“It's almost dawn. You got up in the night—bathroom, I know, it's all right. Sometimes it's nice to hear you're not alone. Are you okay?”

“Are you kidding?”

The bed trembled with their quiet laughter.

“You have to go again.” Not a question from her. Matter of fact.

He slid from the sheets without looking back. Inside the bathroom, door closed, light blasted on, he did what he did, washed his hands.

Looked in the mirror.

You're here. This is real.

Snapped out the light.

Opened the bathroom door to find she'd snapped on a nightlight.

“You look better than before,” she told him.

“Better than before isn't much. He shrugged. “Six hours' sleep in a real bed.”

What should you do?

He got back in bed. Under the covers. Lay on his right side. Facing her.

She'd propped herself up on two pillows, lay on her left side, facing him. Her shoulders in the blue sweatshirt were out from under the sheet.

“This could be my last good sleep,” she said. “Today all your
this
could kill me.”

“Today can always kill you.”

She tossed her head to get strands of long hair off her face. “Are you scared?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Of dying?”

“Sure, but … I'm more scared of you dying. Of not doing what I can right.”

“How's ‘
doing what you can
' working for you so far?”

“Evidently not so good, I ended up here—I mean: putting you here.”

“So I noticed.” Her smile lacked joy. “Though I get some of the blame.”

“Why blame?”

“What I
coulda shoulda
to not be here. Where I could have ended up.”

“Where's that?”

“Not stuck in all this alone, waiting for trouble to knock on my door.”

“Why are you alone?”

She stared at him.

“That was one thing I couldn't figure when…”

“When you were stalking me.”

“No malice, but … okay, I hacked your employment cover sheet. You checked SINGLE. No children. Not married, widowed, divorced. I don't understand why.”

“Why what?”

“No woman as … great—”

She laughed.

“… like you should be single.”

“I know a dozen women my age and younger who are smarter and more accomplished and way
way
prettier and believe me: far,
far
nicer, but who are walking around with only their shadows. Like me.”

“But why you?”

“You want to know,” she said. Not a question.

“You want to tell me,” he said. Not a question.

“Maybe I don't want to ruin my image in your eyes,” she said. “Could be risky.”

“I want to see the real you.”

“Your real is crazy.”

Oh so slightly came a smile to his lips.

“I'm a member of the jilted mistresses club,” said Merle.

“Do you want to know
who
?” she said.

Condor shrugged. “If he's gone, who cares.”

“Who he is makes the story.”

And he guessed. Said: “You mean
what
he is.”

“Oh, he's an asshole, but made for this town.

“I was twenty-four, nowhere near as smart as I thought. I was born when JFK got elected, thought that was somehow … magical. I got here in 1984 when Reagan ruled and things were going to be right, based on principles, an America for everybody.

“He was a freshman Republican Congressman from one state over. Young enough to be cool, old enough to feel like he was more substantive than me. I knew his district, parlayed an internship with my own Senator into working for—for David.”

She told Condor—told
Vin
—the man's last name.

Meant little to Condor, to
Vin
: another cosmetic face on TV.

“His daddy had medium money, the country-club set. David mastered the sincere look, rumpled Ivy League polish. Knew where to stand to catch the light. Great hair. Could make you feel like you were the one in the crowded room he was talking to.

“In college, he knocked up a hometown princess. Her folks had money, too, so they had a white wedding extravagance, a merger, a kid, big fish in a small city, but he …

“He didn't have a spy war, an operation, a mission, a
whatever
you're stuck in. He had big ideas. Or so I thought. Nobody knows how to work a sound byte better than David, whether he's talking to TV cameras or across a pillow.”

Vin's cheek burned on the pillow that held him.

“He was crusading, that was why he couldn't leave his wife. A divorce would wreck his reelection. He couldn't jeopardize his chance to serve. How dare I be selfish. Then it was the first Senate race. Then the second Senate race, the one that would set him up to
really
do what had to be done even if by then I wondered what that meant. But I hung in there—
Yeah
, don't tell me: apt image. On camera, he was a no-divorce religion, no abortion, though he didn't blink when it came to paying cash for…”

She looked away.

“I'd go to movies alone to be not waiting by the phone or the clock.

“He had great timing,” she said. “I'd finally admitted he was one of the herd who come here to
be
rather than
do,
that he only followed the big bucks and floodlights and
the right kind of people
. But for ‘
us
,' I was going to give him one more chance, one …

“One day. That's all it took to end thirteen years. One conversation in a fucking underground parking garage where nobody could see if I made a scene.
‘These things happen.'
And by the way, best
for me
if I left his Senate staff, left Congressional staffing, the only work I knew.
‘You like movies, right?'
He'd engineered an archivist post in the Library of Congress. Where I could even earn a pension. As long as he protected my job at the budget table. He made that sound like kindness.

“Two months later, suddenly divorce became okay. Weeks after his, he married a divorcee. They'd been fucking long before either his first wife or I were gone. The bitch's first husband was an Internet genius from the defense contractors' sprawl out by Dulles Airport who thought life's reward for his hard work was a willowy model nine years younger than me. She walked with his millions all the way to queen for the now-distinguished white-haired Senator I'd paid my youth to.”

She sighed. “Still think I'm worth looking at?”

“You're worth a lot of seeing.”

Condor swore she blushed in the soft light as she said: “What about your exes?”

Flashes.

“Whoever they were, they got me here.”

“In trouble. On the run.”

She closed, then opened her eyes. “Can I get out of this okay?”

“If we're all lucky.”

“You just got to find the best deal—right?”

“We're meat on some table. I don't know if there's any deal.”

“This is Washington,” she said. “There's always a deal. If you've got clout.”

“Me, Faye out there: What you see is what we've got.”

“Then maybe you don't know how to look. Or who you have on your side.”

“Besides her?” said Condor.

“Guess that's where we start.”

“We?”

“You don't give a girl much choice.”

He said: “Why did you stay in D.C.? You had experience, education—probably a little clout you could have leveraged from
David
. You could have gone to…”

Condor blinked. “I think I always wanted to live in San Francisco.”

“L.A.,” she said. “Warm. No fog. You drive away from what goes wrong. And in L.A., people are honest about pretending to be somebody else.”

“Why didn't you go?”

“The falling-apart years,” she said.

“I know about them,” said Condor.

Merle gave him a smile. “So you said.