Last Days of the Condor (27 page)

She reached behind her back. Passed the .45 to him. Grabbed her coat to cover the gun on her hip and obscure her body armor, took what Merle said were her apartment keys and left the two of them alone.

Low risk, right?

Leaving them alone. Armed. Phones.

The proper option for partners. Giving Condor his best chance
in case
.

Faye eased down five flights of stairs. Opened the
LOBBY
door a crack.

Saw no one, nothing amiss.

No one shot her as she stepped into the apartment building's front entryway.

No corridor security cameras caught her lifting a newspaper off a rack across from the elevator she marched to, tapping the call button and not showing the relief she felt when the doors jumped open and gave her an empty cage to ride. She pushed the button for the floor above Merle's, got out, walked down the fire stairs and knocked on 513's door, her right hand empty by her side.

Condor let her in, took the newspaper from her as she relocked the door.

He held up the newspaper: “My bet is a full-block blackout.”

“No,” said Faye. “Too much street action. Veil.”

Condor shrugged. “With spin.”

From her living room chair, Merle said: “What are you two talking about?”

“All the news that's fit to print,” said Condor, riffing off the motto of
The Washington Post
's then last remaining serious rival as a dead-trees newspaper.

Page one of
The Post
's Metro section.

A boxed story the size of Faye's hand, probably shoved into print at the last possible second the night before: A drug deal gone bad on a subway platform left one innocent bystander stray-bullet dead, woman, identity withheld pending notification of next of kin, one street thug killed by police, one undercover officer shot in serious condition, one cop with minor injuries, no delays expected in morning rush-hour traffic.

“The bodies don't add up,” said Condor.

“Depends on who sees what to count,” said Faye.

“The Red Line,” said Condor. “Janitors commandeer the next train for covert cleanup and removal.”

“This cost,” said Faye.

“The price on our heads keeps going up,” said Condor.

Faye used their hostess's laptop. Found nothing about the D.C. Metro gunfight on the
New York Times
Web site. Read online editions of all Washington news outlets, checked local TV and radio stations' Web sites, many of which carried variations on the original
Post
story or “updates” that implied progress but offered no new details, though a couple sites had cell-phone photos of ambulance and cop cars parked at the subway entrance, their emergency lights spinning red & blue blasts into the night. She found a neighborhood Listserv report about “vandals” racing their bikes through a restaurant “breaking a lot of plates.” The Listserv posted an eleven-second cell-phone video of clattering crockery & unintelligible shouts, showed the back of a man in a red jacket wobbling his bike toward the front of a cafe past stunned diners. One Listserv comment “linked” this “hooliganism” to an increase in graffiti spray-painted on neighborhood walls, while another noted that “incident shows America must have evolved because this not racial 'cause one biker /white one / blk,” then the online discussion veered into rants about restaurants attracting rats.

“So nobody knows what's going on,” said Merle.

“Including us,” said Condor.

“Knowledge comes in levels,” said Faye.

“Next comes a data blizzard,” said Condor. “A shotgun blast of controlled misdirections, all ‘factual,' all riding a big secret in plain sight.”

“So what do we do now?” said Merle.

Faye looked at her, looked at Condor.

Condor looked at Faye, looked at Merle, looked back to Faye.

Shrugged.

Merle said: “No.”

 

23

Too much cunning strategy … and strange things start to happen.

—
Tao Te Ching / The Tao of Power,
trans. by R. L. Wing

“I'm not going to let you two decide
what's next
without me,” said Merle.

Smart,
thought Condor.
Bold
. He told himself to cloak the pride in her he felt.

Faye said: “We don't want to get into an issue of what choice you have.”

“We're there,” countered Merle. “We always are. Right here, right now, I'm either your prisoner or something more.”

“Like what?” said Faye.

“I don't think this has a name. I'm a woman you hijacked who wants out of your trouble. I'll do what I gotta do. You want me as part of your solution, not your problem.”

“You could be a one-bullet problem.”

Condor tensed.

Merle said: “We're all a one-bullet problem.”

The Capitol Hill worker put her empty coffee cup on the glass table. Told the spies in her living room: “You don't know who your opponents are, or what's at the core of them wanting you … like dead. And now what happens to you, happens to me.”

Acceptance and challenge shaped Merle's smile, but
she calls me Vin
wished he knew all that the curve of her lips contained as she added: “I'm the only ally you know you've got.”

“
Ally
is a strong word for a draftee,” said Faye.

“Whatever,” said Merle. “You've got to figure out how to get us safe, like into some kind of witness protection program.”

Faye and Condor laughed.

“Been there,” he said. “Got me here.”

“So find a better program,” snapped Merle. “You—
we
can't just wait on whatever it is your
they
do next. Not if they're as powerful as you say, as they seem.”

Condor said: “You're trying to take us somewhere.”

“You've found an agenda,” said Faye.

“We've all got agendas so what the fuck difference does that make,” said Merle. “What I, what
we
gotta do is figure the best way to stay alive. Politics is about what you do and Washington works on who you can convince to help you.”

Merle put her eyes on Condor as she said: “I got a onetime I've never played with a Senator. Call it a favor, call it quid pro quo for what he'll be afraid I could do if he says
no,
call it his guilt,
whatever
: I've got one
ask
. He's got power. Do the math.”

“You'd do that?” said Condor.

“It's the choice I've got.”

“Senators are button-pushers, not
get you home alive
guys.”

“He can make calls, get—”

Faye said: “Let's say he only calls the right guy. Whoever he calls has to figure out the politics and law of what they can do and what they will do. Even if he jumps when you snap your fingers, he's gotta politic others into getting airborne with him.”

Condor said: “His power is in the suites, not the streets.”

“But keep him in mind for when we're inside,” Faye told the older woman.

“Inside where?”

“Inside our system with a shitload of angels or at least neutral gunners so we can get the good guys to move us off the bull's-eye and hunt what's really going on.”

“You got a better way than me to do that?” Merle asked Faye.

Condor looked at his partner, his fellow pro, the government spook who said she wanted to save, the young woman with a Glock on her hip.

Saw Faye's face tremble with her silent scream
YES
.

 

24

Wheels turnin' round and round.

—Steely Dan, “Do It Again”

Faye hunkered down in the backseat of a car parked a block beyond Merle's apartment building. Cool air flowed over Faye from the curbside front window she'd punched out as quietly as possible seventeen minutes after they'd sent Merle on a run.

Merle on her own. Solo. In her car. Out of their control.

Time elapsed since Merle's launch: two hours, forty-three minutes, and a quarter-circle sweep of the second hand around the watch dial on Faye's wrist.

Time of day in D.C.'s real world: 11:23
A.M
. on an ordinary April Thursday.

Crisp blue sky. Smells of spring green. Parking spaces along the curbs of this residential neighborhood materialized when its luckier residents went to work. Faye'd spotted uncrushed brown leaves banked at both undersides of this car's tires, its windshield dusted with green powder pollen, figured the vehicle belonged to someone who commuted via more economical public transportation where no delays were expected from last night's
incident
on the Red Line.

She's got seventeen minutes left before we pull the trigger,
thought Faye.

They'd kept Merle's cell phone when they launched her.

“But what if something goes wrong?” she'd asked.

Condor'd said: “It's already wrong. This is your shot at making it right.”

“No,” said Merle, “what I mean is—”

“We know what you meant,” said Faye. “Stick to the plan.”

“Stick to what should happen, what we need to happen,” added Condor.

Merle stared at both of them, then focused on him, said: “I'll do my best.”

They gave her a thousand dollars in cash.

Faye'd expected the hug and kiss she watched Merle give Condor. Was surprised when the older woman wrapped her arms around her until Faye hugged her back.

“See you,” said Merle.

She left the apartment, the door closing behind her with a
click
.

One heartbeat.

Two.

Faye slid Merle's laptop into the purse-backpack, dropped in Merle's cell phone along with batteries from the landline phones: that number still worked, took messages, but without the batteries no one could use the twenty-century-style communicators to make a call, connect with 911, with anyone who would listen to anything Merle had to say.

Condor wore his black leather jacket, black jeans and wrinkled blue shirt. Faye saw his thermal underwear top under the blue shirt, black sneaker-like shoes tied with the hard-to-slip knots favored by mountain climbers and Special Ops teams. The .45 rode holstered on the right side of his belt along with a clip-on spring knife while the belt's left side held three stacked & packed spare magazines in a pouch. As long as he kept the jacket unzipped, he didn't
print
—show the outline of
concealed weapon
.

Faye'd strapped on her Glock and two spare magazines.
You had to shoot the gunners at the subway. You had to kill them
. Faye had two of Delta Force's new palm-sized nonpublic flash-bang grenades in her backpack, a silencer for her pistol, a sleek black flashlight, a cigar-sized aluminum tube containing lock picks and tension bars. She left the bullet-heavy speed loader for the lost .38 revolver on the glass coffee table.

They went out to the world.

Hunkered down in the broken-into car, Faye checked her watch: fifteen minutes left.

She stared over the car's front seat, past the sidewalk leading to Merle's building, uphill past the intersection to trees on a playground where chained swings hung empty and still. Condor hid in those trees. He'd have some phony cover alibi in case a nanny showed up with young charges and spotted an older man who could be accused of creepy loitering. But so far this morning, Faye'd seen no children on the sidewalks. Maybe the swings and playground were relics of what had been or totems to what could be.

Don't think about that. They're just empty swings.

Her watch said fourteen minutes to go.

Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror she'd adjusted to capture the view behind the parked car—oncoming traffic plus a glimpse of anyone on the sidewalks who wasn't sneaking forward in a combat crouch and shielded by the parked cars. The passenger side mirror helped her surveillance of that sidewalk. As for across the street, even if she went beyond using the driver's side mirror and turned to look, what she saw was parked cars.

You never have perfect optics.

From his hide on the hill's playground, Condor could cover traffic coming the other way or turning onto this road from either direction on the intersecting street.

Eleven minutes to go.

Ten.

Nine minutes and a red Ford parked in front of the apartment building with a flash of brake lights in the midday air. The driver's door opened. Out climbed Merle.

Alone.

Acting normal. Acting as if she always got out of her car like a refugee. Looking back the way she'd come, then looking the other way down the street toward where she didn't know Faye was hiding, so
not
acting like she was expecting someone.
Good.

Why two sacks in her hands?

Merle walked from her parked car, followed the sidewalk to her apartment building. Ungraceful gait:
Nerves, natural, that's natural
. Entered the front door.

The elevator ride to her fifth floor will take Merle two minutes. Faye scanned the streets, sidewalks, hunting for anyone who'd followed Merle.

She'll find her apartment empty. Find us gone. And do what?

Give her seven more minutes. To see if she stays. To see if she runs outside, flees, tries to signal someone. To see if some cover team she'd summoned had given her a cell phone and would come charging when she called to report
targets lost
.

Give her seven minutes alone in her home.

That was Faye's plan with Condor.

He couldn't wait.

Or told time differently.

Two minutes early, Faye saw him leave the playground, growing bigger and more identifiable with each step he took toward the apartment building. A rebel but still a pro, not looking in Faye's direction—and not
not
looking her way.