Last Days of the Condor (15 page)

Condor found a seat facing the direction the train was going. Even though commuters stood in the aisles, no one chose to sit beside him.

The robotic woman's voice over the loudspeaker called out: “DOORS CLOSING.” Electronic bells chimed. Sliding doors sealed everyone inside. Condor felt himself sucked against his orange padded seat as the train accelerated.

Be more than a moving target.

Condor turned on his new cell phone. Called the
Washington Post
phone number he'd gotten at the
transa
store. Key-tapped through a voice menu of instructions.

The train slowed for a platform of waiting riders.

Could be wet boys waiting to get on board—HURRY!

The robotic woman's voice echoing through Condor's car announced “DOORS OPENING!” just as the robotic woman's voice speaking for
The Washington Post
in Condor's cell phone said: “Leave a message or news tip at the beep.”

“Yeah, are you going to cover how the Capitol Hill ANC is getting the runaround from the cops about a murder of some Federal agent on Thirteenth Street last night?”

“DOORS CLOSING!”

No one shot him and the train whooshed from that station.

Travelers filled the subway car. Nannies with their charges. Parents who'd left their kids with nannies. Men and women of no fame who worked in buildings identified by initials like EPA and NIH, who did their best for places like the Justice Department, who roamed with the excited herd of twenty-somethings who staff Capitol Hill to sweat out laws and loopholes and to lance attacks approved by American voters via the smiling faces they send to this city from available big-dollar-approved selections. A soldier in green fatigues held on to an overhead bar as he rode standing in the aisle, the double bars of a captain on the rank patch on his chest. Here and there rode students, street dudes.

I hope some of them overheard me. Are e-mailing, maybe tweeting or Facebooking:
“Anbdy know bout murdered cop on Hill lst nite?”

Condor dialed the second phone number.

Another robot answered: “You have reached
The New York Times
.”

They know you.

How? Who? Why?

No answers came to him as the train whooshed through its dark tunnel.

Again he worked his way through an automated phone menu:
“Why are your buddies at
The Washington Post
ignoring a story about a Federal agent getting killed last night on Capitol Hill and there's something about a Congressman, too. Fox News has some woman nosing around.”

The train roared into an underground station stop.

Bells chimed. Robot Woman alerted. Doors popped open, clunked closed. People shuffled on and off the train and still no one shot him.

So it went through the morning, Condor changing from one train to another at random underground stations, moving with crowds. Never riding one train long, always facing forward, trying to get the train window with the best view of arriving stations.

There! Two casual-clothes headhunters lurking on the coming platform!

Condor bent over in his subway car seat to tie his shoe.

“DOORS CLOSING!”

The train surged.

He sat straight up in his seat.

Those two headhunters hadn't gotten on this car.
If that's who they were.

He rode this train to the end of its line, a park & ride plaza with blockish stone buildings for county bureaucracies beyond the border for the District of Columbia yet still inside the Beltway. Few people rode to this last stop at eleven in the morning.

Another elevated subway platform, red tiles, blue sky under the awning gaining warmth with the midday sun. He left the train, hit the smell of pine-scented ammonia.

A Metro janitor in his green jumpsuit mopped the red tiles near the escalators.

Two steps from the
DOWN
escalator, Condor spotted two uniformed Metro cops getting onto the adjoining
UP
escalator.

“DOORS CLOSING!” The empty train he'd left roared away without him.

Jumping off the sides of the subway platform meant the tracks, the killer third rail, and after it, a chain-link fence. Then a thirty-foot fall to concrete.

The Metro cops were halfway up their escalator ride.

Condor turned to the mopping janitor, smiled: “Hey man, you okay?”

The janitor blinked. “Ah … yeah, I'm fine.”

“Your family still doing good?”

Radios crackled on the belts of two Metro cops stepping off the escalator, walking behind the freaky fat man in the baseball cap and Redskins maroon nylon jacket—
obviously
a friend of the janitor who was telling him: “Yeah, the family's okay.”

“Good,” said the fat guy as the cops walked past.

The cops were five steps past the janitor when he whispered to the friendly stranger: “What's wrong with your face? Looks streaky, like you been crying or—”

“The burns,” ad-libbed Condor.

“Shit, man—I'm sorry.”

The last those cops saw of the fat man was as he shook hands with the janitor.

Outside the subway station, Condor crossed the street to a franchise restaurant named after a Rolling Stones song. Condor's face horrified the hostess. She gave him a booth in the back. Launched a white shirt/black-tied server—
“Get him in, get him out!”
Condor yearned for the soup and salad bar, couldn't stand that kind of exposure, ordered the biggest cheeseburger he could afford and milk, waddled to the
MEN'S
room.

Shoot him! Shoot him! This is where you shoot him!

Condor blinked into the bathroom mirror. The ghosts vanished. Left him staring at a browned face streaked by teardrops or terror from his sweat. He recolored his image with the last of the makeup.

Sometimes being less of a freak is all you can do.

He wanted to linger over his cheeseburger until the lunch crowd left him behind with only the serious drinkers at the bar who would sit there for hours pretending they were only playing hooky from success. But he couldn't risk staff coming around with
we need that booth
. He paid, slid outside to the midday sun, went next door to a Starbucks.

She's not going to be in here waiting for you. That's so yesterday!

Condor bought a small coffee to justify taking a chair not far from the picture window where he could see across the street to the Metro station.

Steam still floated out of the coffee cup when he spotted them.

An American sedan slid to the drop-off sidewalk near the subway station entrance. The car's rear doors sent a man and a woman into the Metro. They wore open jackets, kept their right hands on their sides as they walked, as their heads swiveled.

The sedan stayed parked out front of the station in a
NO PARKING
zone. Didn't bother to put on its flashers. Two watchers filled the front seat.

So they got badges to show.

Thirty-seven minutes later, after the third train had come and gone, a zebra team—a white guy and a black guy—stalked out of the station to the sedan.

Cover teams traveling both ways between Metro stops. And now leaving their scheduled train patrols for the next Op maneuver.

But the white headhunter marched from the parked sedan toward the Starbucks.

Take your cup, DON'T RUN toward the back of the—

“Excuse me!” The barista pointed to the end of the counter.

Condor scooped up one of two keys there. Hurried down the hall to the back of the store. Slipped into the
WOMEN'S
room as he heard the store entrance bell tinkle.

Hid in a bathroom's shiny stall.

That's where you shot Maronick! Blasted bullets through the metal walls of his stall without even looking him in the eyes.

Water flushed in the other bathroom:
Go when you can
is a cover team creed.

Condor waited five minutes. Left the bathroom, eased down the hall …

Saw only the barista.

Who said: “I thought you were gone.”

“Me, too.” Condor looked out the front window.

No cover team's sedan parked outside the Metro station across the street.

No uniformed cops patrolling inside the station.

He rode the next train out of there.

Maronick turns around in the seat in front of you. Smiles despite the bullet hole in his right cheek. “We know right where you are.”

Riding tracks and tunnels through the city. Blue pinstripe suits means K Street. Tourist shoes in tight groups mean Smithsonian, Capitol Hill and White House stations that lead Americans out of the underground passageways to see How Things Really Work. The Dupont Circle stop near where CIA-funded D.C. cops burgled anti–Vietnam War think tanks and tear-gassed protesters now feeds the train bright-eyed young women with yoga mats and tattoos of Asian calligraphy. Condor rode one train sharing a seat with a double-shift nurse in blue scrubs.

On one run out of Union Station through the reddening evening light, Condor's train slid past a long tube-like concrete building deserted and scarred with graffiti: the Washington Coliseum where The Beatles exploded America with their first U.S. concert.

Wearing black suits, white shirts and jiving by the train car's middle doors:

Bullet-holed Maronick. Bald Peter and Kevin Powell, throats cut above their black ties. The young Marine who'd saved Condor's life.

Singing:

“Kill, kill you do,

You know they'll kill you.

Their aim is true,

So ple—ee—ee—ease … Kill you do.”

The train
whooshed
on.

Toward a Snatch & Stash.

The only play Condor had left.

You've done it before.

Find your mark. Figure a woman. A frail man. Alone. No wedding ring. In the darkening night. Few passengers on the train, on the platform. The end of the line, suburbs of strangers who mind their own business. Exit the station as a shadow. First chance, punch the base of the mark's spine—shocks them forward, knocks the breath out so they can't scream. Grab them, sell: “I've got a gun.”
Should have risked going back to the transa store.
Let the snatched citizen stash you in his or her home.

Kill the chump.

No! That's not who—

The train he rode roared out of a dark tunnel into the gray light of a concrete cavern.

And through the windows … On the stop's red-tiled platform … Waiting for him …

Condor saw how he would die.

 

12

Trouble-Lost Dog

—Chinese Triad slang,
san jia quan

Faye told Sami: “You didn't need to drug me.”

They sat across a card table from each other on gray metal folding chairs in a soundproof glass booth on the vast warehouse floor of Complex Zed.

Sami sat there with his black curly hair, rolled-up sleeves on a rumpled white shirt and shopping-mall khaki slacks.

He shrugged and Faye pictured him as the middle-aged Beirut businessman he could have grown up to be, if not for the pickup trucks full of militiamen who'd driven into his sunny Lebanese neighborhood when he was nine and passed out free AK-47s to all the eagerly waving hands of the young boys who crowded around their coming.

“After we debriefed last night,” Sami told her, “you spent six hours running the streets. Way past midnight, you got frantic, didn't trust the cover teams at his apartment, at his work. That's when I knew you were on adrenaline burn. I need you clear of your own smoke—mentally and physically.”

“So you stood beside my cot and made me take a sleeping pill.”

“Then I went to my cot and took one, too.”

Faye said: “Is that all my pill was, Sami? A knockout?”

“I'm not the kind for date rape.”

“But you are such the pro. Divert me with that horror so I don't ask the obvious.”

“What's the obvious?”

“Interrogation drug.”

Sami cocked his head. “You got me, Faye. I'm that devious. Evidently, so are you. Which is why I need you. But come on:
Really?
Truth serum?

“If the pill was anything extra,” said Sami, “call it a test of trust. I give you a pill. Tell you it's mission critical that you take it. You got needed rest because you trusted me and I get confirmed trust that you'll do what it takes to nail the mission.”

“I didn't dream. All I had to deal with, I should have.”

“Dreamland isn't our turf, Faye. We live in the
gotta do
world.”

“What do I
gotta do
now,
Boss
?”

“I know everything about what's happening and nothing about what's going on.”

Sami looked at his wristwatch, a black metal chronometer with irradiated dials that glowed green in any darkness.

“It's coming up on six o'clock Wednesday evening,” he told her. “And now we got a new problem. Seventh-Floor Langley called. There's buzz.”

“Buzz?”

“Gossip, phone calls, Web traffic, weird alerts, whispers in halls, maybe some reporter from what's left of the mainstream media, I don't know:
buzz
.

“We're sticking with the cover of an ex–FBI agent named Vin had a heart attack last night, critical at undisclosed hospital, sorry for any confusion. So now we're welded to that story. One contradiction gets believed, becomes a meme on the Web, we're lying motherfuckers in a cover-up and facts become irrelevant to fury.”

“I don't understand.”

“Sure you do, but neither of us understands why your partner went back to Condor's place to get killed. There's a text message from his cell phone logged into NROD's system about follow-up on the report you say you wrote under his name.”