Last Days of the Condor (28 page)

No cars roared out of the high-noon sun to drop a snatch team on him.

No bullet cut Condor down as he entered Merle's building.

Give him five minutes.

When she'd waited and watched and no Op team appeared, Faye eased out of the car she'd vandalized, joined Condor and Merle in the apartment.

The older woman glared at Faye: “You didn't trust me.”

“We don't trust our situation,” said Faye.

“Like I told you,” added Condor, “you could have been grabbed—”

“Or called someone
just
to betray you,” snapped Merle. “That's what you think.”

“That's how we have to think,” said Faye.

Condor said: “It's all about the smart move. That was the smart move for us.”

“Guess I should have thought of a smart move for me,” said Merle. “For us.”

“Sure,” said Faye. “And you—”

“Got lunch.” Merle lifted one of the sacks on the kitchen counter.

Faye focused on the four disposable phones from the other sack.

“I got more cash, too,” said Merle. “From my ATM.”

Faye frowned. “That's—”

“Not a risk until she's IDed as with us,” said Condor. “Smart. Now or never.”

“Yeah!”
Merle told Faye with a defiant look.

Fay programmed the three expensive phones'
CONTACTS
with initials: C, F, M.

“Do you want to see the receipts?” asked Merle. “Like you said, I bought them as separate cash transactions. Got the cheap phone in another store. Wore my baseball cap and sunglasses. You can check the receipts against your change. I paid for lunch.”

“You were worried about us doing an audit?” said Faye.

Merle smiled. Met Faye's probing eyes. Said: “Be prepared.”

They ate carryout plates of deli bar food from an upscale grocery store.

Faye knew the cold noodles she ate were sesame, knew the broccoli still had its crunch. Watched the older couple share bites off each other's plate. Faye stuffed lunch trash and the cell phones' wrappings into a sack, carried it, her backpack purse and the credit card she sneaked out of Merle's purse to the bedroom, said: “I'm going to check our gear and trash for the burn bag, grab a shower.”

“I'm on watch,” said Condor.

Then like he and Merle expected, Faye shut herself behind that white door.

Took Faye eleven minutes to log on to the Web site she'd found while sitting Charlie Sugar—counter-surveillance—in the burgled car outside the apartment building, use the credit card stolen from Merle, do what she did and hope that it worked. She crammed trash into the sack, forced herself to take a real shower, and for a moment,
for just a few moments
as the hot water beat down on her face, freed sobs of tears to wash her cheeks, ease the pressure in her spine, the weight gripping her heart.

Composed herself, her gear, her backpack, rejoined her comrades.

She sent Merle into the bedroom to pack an overnight bag.

When the older woman was out of sight, put the credit card back in Merle's purse.

Condor gave Faye a frown. Said nothing.

A rebel but a pro.

The three of them walked out of the apartment seven minutes later.

An ordinary April Thursday, 2:17
P.M.

Beautiful Rock Creek Parkway curves through Washington, D.C., alongside the Potomac River from the Navy Yard with its former espionage centers, past memorial gardens for FDR and the broken souls of the Depression who resurrected themselves through the horrors & heroism of WWII, around marble monuments for murder victims Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, flows a rifle shot from the Vietnam Memorial's mirror black wall of names and statues of American soldiers from the Korean War who march through the riverside trees like ghosts. The Parkway passes under the multiauditorium albino complex named after one of our assassinated presidents and past what was an apartment/hotel/office complex called Watergate and the rehabbed former hotel where button men of that scandal staged one of their covert operations. As it flows toward Maryland suburbs, the Parkway passes Georgetown streets haunted by Rose Men, then comes the zoo where at dawn you can hear lions roar while off to the right rises the now gentrified neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant where brown-skinned Latinos rioted against mostly black-skinned D.C. cops in the last days of the twentieth century. The Parkway then widens from a tree-lined road to an urban canyon, a green valley with paths for bikers and joggers, tabled picnic sites and grassy stretches for volleyball games, shadowed glades that cloak dump sites for homicide victims both functionally famous and forever forgotten. Before the Parkway crosses the District line, roads lead out of its valley to neighborhoods of million-dollar homes, embassies surrounded by black steel fences and invisible electronic curtains, a public golf course nestled in the forest between the Parkway and Sixteenth Street that creates a straight drive south to the White House and north to Maryland past the legendary tree-lined grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center that on this day was slated to end its hundred-year reign as America's most famous military hospital for “commercial redevelopment” Faye believed was prompted not so much by facility obsolescence or tax-saving economics as it was to move wounded warriors out of the city so urban-dwelling policymakers need no longer routinely see wheelchair-captured and amputee and burn victim veterans of their decisions wandering the glorious capital city streets.

Merle drove her red Ford north on Rock Creek Parkway.

Condor rode shotgun.

Faye lay across the backseat.

A quick glance profiled this car as two aging, innocent civilians out for a drive.

The red Ford turned off the Parkway and onto the golf course road.

Faye heard Condor call
“Clear!”
and felt Merle brake the car to a crawl.

The red Ford was almost stopped when Faye leapt out of the backseat.

The Ford sped up, drove away, left her alone on the road.

Two minutes later, she'd walked out of the Parkway at the intersection of the golf course road and Sixteenth Street. She turned right, put the 209-meters-away specter of Walter Reed and its security cameras behind her, walked toward the 50-blocks-distant White House past blocks of apartment buildings where
maybe
no fish-eye lens recorded her passing. Two hundred paces that direction and she jaywalked across the busy divided city street, walked back the way she'd come—but now on the other side of the road, headed north for any cell tower tracking analysis.

She used the cheap disposable cell phone. Kept walking as she dialed the cell phone number she'd memorized less than forty-eight hours before.

Second buzz and her call got answered with unresponsive silence.

Into her phone as she walked, Faye said: “Say it ain't you, Sami.”

“Where are you?” said his voice. “Are you okay? What are you—”

“Why'd you sic a wet team on me, Sami?”

“Not our people! They beat us there. Do you have Condor? Are you—”

“Who were they?”

“Unknown.”

“Bullshit! You're in the belly of the beast—
you are
the beast. They were trained, equipped, targeted and briefed pros and
the fuck
you don't know!”

“Never seen anything like it. One guy, sure, maybe two. But we've got four bodies we can't find in the system. Any system, including NATO and Interpol. No prints. No facial recognition. No forensics. No intercepted chatter about MIAs. Sterile gear, no consistency. All we got are ghosts.”

“What's going on, Sami?”

“You tell me and we'll both know, kid. It's all we can do here to keep the world from flying apart, the cover from exploding.”

In the street, somewhere far off to her right, Faye heard a distant police siren wail.

Nothing, it's nothing, routine, too soon to be connected and targeted to me.

And one siren in Washington's
D
istrict of
C
rime wouldn't be enough to give any listeners on Sami's call a quick bead on her.

“There's at least two more opposition gunners out there, Sami.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you
not
know?”

“Condor: is he okay, is he functional, what's his state of mind, where—”

“And here I thought you cared about me.”

“We care about the same things, Faye. You know that. Know me.”

She didn't respond.

Sami said: “Think, Faye. I told you something was off, wrong, screwy. That's why I sent you out there on your own. And I was right!”

“Congratulations.”

“How are we going to—”

“What ‘
we,
' Sami? It was just you and me and then
we
included that wet team.”

“I don't know how we got compromised. I don't know that we were. Maybe the opposition got lucky. Maybe you got…”

“Give me something I don't know, Sami. ABC: All Bullshit Considered.”

“Whoever they are, why-ever they are … I got the tingles, the creeps that I can't promise you I'm not compromised in ways I can't see. So you tell me: what do we do?”

“I'm coming in.”

“Yes! Where? How? With Condor, right? What should I—”

Faye hung up. Pulled the battery from that phone, tossed its parts into a trash can, crossed the street, walked back down the road to the golf course and Parkway.

The red Ford rolled back onto that same road when she was twenty steps into the trees, slowed to let her climb in, then sped off.

“Got nothing but denials,” she told Condor as she lay on the backseat. “He's lying or telling the truth, maybe compromised, maybe not, but at least he and whoever he trusts now have to assume I—
we
—are coming in. They'll swarm the streets,
sure,
track the call to that neighborhood, but they'll concentrate on the two locations I'm most likely to exploit: Complex Zed and CIA HQ at Langley. The good guys will make perimeters to get us inside, the bad guys will stake those sites out to snipe us when we show.”

Merle whispered: “
We
means…”

“I don't think they know about you.”

“So I could just…”

Faye and Condor finished her thought with their silence.

“I can just drive,” said Merle. “Where you tell me to.”

They found an underground parking garage with rates by the hour, day or month two blocks from the target. Faye paid a vacant-eyed attendant for three days in advance.

The underground concrete cavern echoed with the closing of the car doors from the red Ford they parked in its designated yellow-striped slot. They stood in flickering artificial light. Smelled burnt gas, oil, cold metal from a dozen other vehicles crouched on this level. Shadows obscured the distant cement walls.

“Never liked these places,” whispered Merle.

Faye said: “At least you can't get spotted by drones.”

“Unless they've already cross-haired the building above us,” said Condor. “Rubble buries anything.”

“You're such cheerful people,” said Merle.

The best Op formation called for Merle walking on the street side of the sidewalk, Faye between her and Condor, the collar turned up on his black leather jacket, not enough to obscure his face for later identification via any security camera they passed, but odds were, no lens in any of the storefronts or flat faces of the modern buildings they passed on this classy Washington street had cameras linked to the NSA grid.

Two blocks. They had to cover two blocks and not get spotted, caught, shot.

Midafternoon foot traffic was light, but they weren't alone enough to stand out. They reached their target address and caught a break: no security guard was on day duty at the building's front desk, no one was lurking in the lobby, no postman spotted them.

“The mailman,” said Condor.

“What?” said Merle.

“Never mind,” he said.

Faye herded them into the elevator, punched the floor button.

“Tool up,” she told Condor.

Merle's eyes widened as the man she'd embraced filled his hand with the .45.

Condor kept the pistol pressed low along his right leg.

Faye heard the
click
as he thumbed off the safety.

The elevator stopped.

Those cage doors slid open.

Faye rolled out first and fast, checked both ways as Condor whirled behind her, his eyes probing the opposite direction as hers until she whispered: “Clear!”

Merle nervously stepped off the elevator.

“Stay between us,” Faye told her as they hurried down a corridor of closed doors.

Stay closed stay closed stay closed!

At the target door, Condor gestured for Merle to stand against the opposite wall of the corridor, rooted himself near the target portal, held his gun in front of him, ready to whirl whichever way they'd need to send death.

Faye worked on the lock with her picks and tension bar for thirty seconds before the first
click
. The second lock took half that time, then she pushed the door open, stepped in, whispered for the others, Merle coming in fast and Condor bringing up rear guard. Faye eased the door shut, had to disturb the corridor's silence with the relocking
click
.

But they were in.

Merle whispered: “That was fast.”

Faye said: “I've done this before.”

 

25

Put yourself.

—Citizen Cope, “A Bullet and a Target”

Condor aimed his .45 at the blond man's face, said: “You're not who I expected.”

Blue eyes blinked behind the blond man's glasses as he stood there in his own apartment, his eyes locked on the gun held by a stranger who'd surprised him, pushed the door closed behind his after-work entrance and zeroed him with what the suit & tie blond man would forever after think of as
“the biggest black hole in the fucking universe.”