Last Days of the Condor (33 page)

“If it's not any uncle Sami,” said Faye, “then who?”

“Maybe it is us,” said Condor, “and maybe it isn't.”

More
all back
every second, Faye said: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Condor whispered:
“The Vs.”

 

29

A walk in the park.

—The 1972 across the street from the White House presidential aides' huddle on covert ops, including the (
unsuccessful
) murder of muckraker journalist
Jack Anderson

What a rush.

The clarity of a blue sky spring morning.

Sitting on a grassy knoll.

“What are you talking about?” Faye said to Condor.

Merle glared at them: “
Who are you people?
She's been shot, Chris is dead, we're … You almost got us killed! I did everything I could and it didn't work. Now we're worse off and he's dead, and I can't…”

Her rant ran out, she took a breath, whispered: “Who are we?”

“No,” said Faye, looking right at him, right at Condor: “Who are Vs?”

They sat there on a city park–smelling grassy knoll that April morning, Condor and two women he'd never even talked to the week before.

And he asked: “
What would you do?

“New York City is two towers of smoke. The Pentagon's wall is crashed in. Corpses cover a field in Pennsylvania. And except for a few novelists and one ex-spook living outside the Beltway, all our tomorrow people, the ones who are supposed to be looking ahead and seeing what's coming, their eyes didn't see or their mouths went unheard or their hands couldn't stop the horror.

“So a lot got done that we now can hardly believe. Forget about torture, renditions, secret prisons, us invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. That's old news and this is about what's new.

“How would you create a new spy service? We created Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence and got puzzle boxes on top of puzzle boxes.”

Faye pressed: “The Vs?”

“Vapors. It's all vapors. No name, no headquarters, no gear, no IDs, no Web site or e-mail address, no data chains, no flow chart because there is no organization, no budget, no mention nowhere. No box. No credit. No blame. No existence, no personnel. Maybe seven policy czars know about it, maybe by now V is all automated.

“Because it's vapors. Software. The logical transitional constellation of a quintillion data points. Dark web. Deep web. Hidden web. Vapors running through it all. A regular agency good guy enters a bad guy on a ‘threat ladder or watch lists. Threat identified. The software starts to work on him, or the group, or the money-laundering bank, or … whatever, whoever, he's targeted in the machine.”

Merle said: “Machines don't shoot people.”

“That's rather definitional. Armies and librarians are all part of some machine that sends pension credits and drones with missiles.

“The software computes that a guy named Seba Pezzani is a growing threat, but he isn't fitting into a doable profile for our ‘
real world
' spy or security agencies. So a plane ticket vanishes from some billion-dollar federal contract. An ATM activates. A pistol gets delivered from an Air Force base to a cafe in Rome and an action unit V with whatever credentials or authority and knowledge he needs. Who knows where our orders come from, who's really in charge, how all our needs actually got created. It's not ‘
need to know,
' it's knowing
only
what
seems
to be needed.

“The V uses people and systems to get things done and they never realize it. Soldiers or cops or office managers or guys on the street never know who put them there. They do the job they're supposed to do. No extra pay, no full knowledge, no big picture the V doesn't control. The best puppets don't know they have strings.

“Maybe a Level-One Action Operative knows he's a V, but he never knows the whole system. Maybe he thinks he's detached from Delta for sanctioned Special Ops. Maybe he's an ex–Navy SEAL who works as a personal trainer at a Missouri YMCA until he gets a text. A CIA brick agent whose Case Officer isn't really in charge of her. A retired FBI agent, a homicide cop who gets an extra thousand bucks a month from a CIA black account that records as part of the regular bribe to a Mexican general and it's all covered by IRS's computers, though Level-One Vs don't do this for the money. They believe.

“And what gets done, gets done. Only extreme cases. Only high necessities.”

“Targeted killings,” said Faye. “Illegal assassinations. Other … neutralizations. Like throwing troublesome people into insane asylums, frame jobs.”

“Beautiful system,” said Condor. “An evolution from how the Intelligence Support Activity got its start, though the V will never become a Pentagon office.”

Merle said: “It would never work.”

“Facebook knows what ads to show you. Marketers profile what you'll want. Facial recognition systems plus behavior analysis, reconfiguring police reports and maintenance schedules on an airliner …
You get it
: if you link the vapors, you can see what needs to be done and you can do … amazing things. Not often, but when you do, nobody knows it was you, nobody knows it
was
done. You rewrite the record as you change it. Reality becomes what the data says it is.”

“Case officer,” said Faye. “The Green Light. The decider. There has to be—”

“A dead man's switch? A heart amidst the brains of the machines? The human touch?” Condor nodded. “There wouldn't
have
to be, but we still made one. But just one. One human entity as a fail-safe Level-Zero
control
with full knowledge programmed and final-say. Paychecks not on any audit. A quiet life with an intuitive desktop in an ordinary house in an American hometown. It's the twenty-first-century model. You work from home. The neighbor everybody waves to and nobody knows.”

“Who did this?” whispered Merle.

Condor said: “I think it was me.”

The woman he … he … call it
whatever,
Merle stared at him.

The woman warrior who sacrificed her life for his stared at him.

“Street years,” he said, “the week before 9/11 and I was ready to walk away, not old, but there're only so many scars you can carry. Then
boom
. And as I recovered from … from one rough Op, I had a great idea, a reputation and clout, some access to a place where everybody wanted answers.”

“But you went crazy,” said Faye.

“Well …
yeah,
” said Condor. “The sheer rush of it, the knowing of what you could do and had to do and
did
.”

“So why do they want you dead now?” asked Faye. “Jesus, back on Tuesday, they would have settled for you getting locked back up forever as a crazy murderer.”

Condor shrugged. “Maybe somebody's pulling the plug on the whole system.”

“Or the whole system is trying to be sure nobody pulls the plug on it,” said Faye. “And you, fighting their
forget-it
meds … Your data metric would register high risk.

“But,” she said, asking the investigator's ultimate question: “How do you know?”

“The lone shooter on a bike,” said Condor. “Like a
clong
only no music. Seeing him made me
realize
. Realize it wasn't Sami or Uncle Sam Ops. Because they only sent one shooter. Had to be a system short on personnel. A small Op, small team—

“And
that
flashed me on remembering the V. We dropped four out of six at the subway. No replacements, especially if the V is getting shut down. All that fit with my cover team having made the first move. The V originally brought in every
street meat
unit they had for my neutralization. Pre-position every Level-One Action V to be ready, to be ahead of you and Sami and the real guys, to be in them but not of them.”

Faye said: “The Homeland Security guy who showed up at your house, the guy I almost shot! He was the gunner on the subway platform who got away!
The biker!
”

“Got your partner working on orders V created, killed him, waited. Knew I'd be home from work. Knew you or a team would come. I'd get taken out by the good guys.”

“But this morning,” said Faye. “How did they know our play this morning? We're off all grids, no data for them to hijack, but even with only one guy—”

“Probably two guys,” said Condor. “Six at the subway attack, two left. A spotter somewhere, plus the shooter on the bike. But somehow knowing we were coming, knowing Chris was taking us to the Senate Intelligence Committee offices where there'd be too many plugged-in people to hijack or control so then we couldn't be hit and we'd have gotten to Sami safe. And maybe figured all this out.”

“Two guys,” said Faye. “How?”

Merle whispered:
“Me.”

Faye and Condor chorused: “What?”

“Oh God, I'm sorry!
Me me me!
”

Merle said: “You people with your guns and your secrets, your claims that what I know isn't the real world, wasn't my world. Not after you came. Even if I … even if we …

“I'm smart. Savvy. In politics, in life, always cover your ass. I believed you, wanted to be with you, but I bought myself a protection policy. An outside alliance. You had me buy
four
phones, I went to my ATM and got money and bought
five
.

“I played my one
ask,
” she said. “The smart thing to do, not just meekly obey my way into some shit storm. I did what would have worked and would have made our chances better and maybe covered me if you … If I got dumped or duped or set up.”

Condor said: “You called him.”

“Who?” said Faye.

“The Senator who owes me,” said Merle. “Called him yesterday. Told him to be ready, that he was going to help me with a whistleblower from the CIA, a guy I met at the Library of Congress, that maybe this would make the Senator a hero but if it didn't, it would cover his ass.”

“And you said—”

“And I said
Condor
. I spoke the word. I should have guessed what he must have done. He covered
his
ass. Probably made a call, generated a query, created a
Condor
data link so that by last night … Your V trolling the grid knew he was linked.”

“They just didn't know how,” said Condor.

“Just before we left Chris's apartment this morning, I went to the bathroom, cell phone hidden in my panties … Sent the Senator a text. Told him hell or high water, hearings or constituent or fund-raiser meetings be damned, he had to show up at nine fifteen at the main entrance to Hart and wait to escort me and mine to the Intelligence Committee offices. Safety in numbers, right? Especially when one number is a U.S. Senator. That's what was so smart. Hiding behind him.”

“Your phone!” Condor told Merle. “They were tracking that as soon as you texted the Senator. GPS knew where we were, the parking lot, knew we were coming on foot. One spotter on a laptop relaying data, the other … How he got a bike…”

Merle flowed to her feet before Condor or Faye could stop her.

“Oh God, they're on us now!” said Merle.

“The phone! Get it out, pull it—”

“No,” she said.

“No,” she whispered.

Her eyes focused far away as Merle said, “Me being smart got Chris killed. Me being smart might let you stay alive.”

Merle's cheeks glistened.

Condor stepped to comfort her, took his hands in hers, she cupped his face—

Merle kneed him in the groin.

Condor collapsed to his knees on the grassy knoll.

Blinding pain gagging gasping …

Hearing Merle: “I wish I could be who you want me to be!”

His eyes opened to a teary blur of Faye in a pink hoodie struggling to stand.

As up the slope from the grassy knoll ran Merle, up to the busy D.C. street …

Gone.

She's gone.

“Come on.” Faye pulled Condor to his feet, the wounded helping the lame. “You can't catch her. She did what she did. Now she's trying to make up for it. She knows they're on the phone she's got, they'll track her, so she's running until…”

Faye caught her breath. “She got Chris killed. And she bought us our
until
.”

She and Condor pulled the batteries of the cell phones Merle'd bought them, tossed the debris into the woods. Late-morning sun warmed them as they shuffled off a grassy knoll, the wounded leaning on the old & lame.

“I want to shoot her,” confessed Faye as each step made her lean more on him.

“I want to shoot me,” said Condor as a greater ache replaced the one in his groin.

They kept their guns holstered out of sight as Condor helped Faye toward the hotel's taxi & shuttle bus–crowded horseshoe driveway. He adjusted the pink hoodie to cover the mess on her head, didn't need to tell her to keep her face down because she could barely hold it up, barely keep walking beside him.

Nervous families everywhere,
thought Condor as he shuffled toward the hotel's sliding glass doors, a female form in a pink hoodie wrapped in his left arm, his right hand pressed against his black leather jacket.
Dads. Moms.

Half a dozen suits & ties fretted in the airplane-ride-dressed crowd of …
More than tourists
. Condor dodged an overstacked luggage cart, pushed through loud families.

College kids,
he thought, then,
No: soon-to-be college kids
.

School visits. Lots of universities, colleges in D.C. Everybody should see Washington. Bring the whole family, make a vacation of it and
no,
we won't embarrass you, we deserve to see the place we'll mortgage our future to so you can learn how the world works and get a recognized passport to a tomorrow of paychecks and promises.