Last Days of the Condor (18 page)

“Can I help you?” he said.

“I'm visiting my father,” she said, and even though she rode the Metro at least three times a week, asked: “He said there's one stop on the Red Line that after rush hour gets deserted on the platform and that I should ride to the next one. Is there a Red Line stop where, like he said, not many people are on the platform after now?”

The Metro worker blinked. “Really?”

She gave him her friendliest
What can you do?
shrug.

“Could be … I don't know. This one, or this one … Maybe that one.”

And Faye pictured
that one
: an underground platform. One set of escalators, the upper entry level with turnstiles visible from the red-tiled platform between the two sets of train tracks, a gray cement cavern with dark tunnels for the trains at either end.

She thanked him.

Rode the first train there.

“DOORS OPENING.”

One person got off the train at that stop with Faye, a businesswoman who barely looked up from answering the endless stream of e-mails in her smartphone as she rode the escalator up, out through the turnstiles, gone.

This is the picture.

A woman standing alone on the red-tile platform in the gray concrete tunnel.

Me
.

Wearing the black raincoat I had on when we met. Coat unbuttoned, Condor'd expect that, believe that. Could see me as any train he rode slowed into the station.

Faye calculated it made more sense to set the backpack purse on the red tiles in front of her shoes.
Sure,
not as in her control, but also, one more thing for his eyes to process. One more thing for her to worry about, but the weight of it during her waiting and the energy that would cost seemed worth avoiding.

What if
s raced infinitely down each set of tracks.
What if she was wrong and he hadn't chosen to be a moving target on the line he liked? What if a Metro patrol scooped him up? Why hadn't they? What if he didn't see her waiting on the platform or did and rode on anyway or jumped out of the Metro car blazing away with Peter's stolen gun?

She let all that go.

Waited to deal with what the steel rails brought her.

A train rumbled roared
whooshed
into the station, rectangular windows of light dotting the long silver snake like scales as it slid past her facing eyes, stopped.

“DOORS OPENING!”

No one got off.

None of the three people she looked at through the train windows looked back.

“DOORS CLOSING!”

The train whooshed away.

She refused to look at her watch.

Or count the number of times trains whooshed into the station, stopped, let one or two or three or mostly no one off to ride the escalators up and out into the night.

A rumble roar whoosh, silver train sliding to a stop.

“DOORS OPENING!”

No one getting off, no one—

Standing in the subway car's open doorway twenty paces from her.

A baseball-capped, fatboy freak in brown skin, hands by his sides,
empty, are they empty?

The freak stepped off the train.

 

13

Dragons fight in the meadow.

—The
I-Ching,
K'un/The Receptive

A man and a woman stand alone on a red-tiled subway platform.

He's stepped out of the silver train on the track behind him.

She's keeping her stance soft and still, facing a maroon-jacketed, big-bellied apparition with a baseball cap, absurd eyeglasses, brown skin. He knows
she knows
.

“DOORS CLOSING!”

Rubber-edged doors
ca-thunk
shut behind him.

The silver train streaks from the station.

She said: “If I wanted you dead, you would be.”

Her hands stay at her sides, fingers splayed open to show
empty
. The thirty feet of red tiles between them represent the optimal kill zone for a handgun.

What's that bag on the tiles near her feet? Remote-detonated flash-bang? Gas?

“How are you, Vin?”

“Call me Condor. That's why we're here.”

“Do you remember who I am?”

“Your work ID is Faye something.”

“Faye Dozier. And it's more than a work name, a cover.”

“Who are you right now?”

“Your rescue. Your chaperone. Your minder to bring you in. Get you safe.”

“I think I remember I've been told that before.”

Take a step toward her.

She didn't move. Reposition. Shift her weight. Draw her gun.

Take another step closer. Close the gap.

She said: “My partner got whacked at your place. I need to know all about that.”

“And you think I know.”

“The white car,” she said as he was three steps from being able to hit her. “That makes me think you don't know
enough
. So we're stuck on the same bull's-eye.”

He stopped two paces from her. She was out of his striking zone. But close. If she moved to draw a weapon,
theoretically,
at least now he had a chance.

Condor said: “What's in the bag?”

“Proof you can trust me.”

An electronic marquee on a hollow brown metal column listed glowing lines of train schedules. Rush hour was over, the next train was due in nineteen minutes, the one on the opposite track due three minutes after that. Empty escalators whirred up from and down to this platform where only the two of them stood.

He imagined she heard the slamming thunder of his heart beneath his maroon nylon jacket. Imagined he heard her muffled thunder, too. Inside her black coat that no doubt covered at least one pistol, under her blouse, he saw the thickness of a bulletproof vest.

Where they stood was the lowest level of the subway station. The closed orange doors of the “Handicap Accessible” elevator leading up to the street waited near the escalators that connected this passengers' platform to an entrance level twenty feet above the top of their heads, an apron of red tiles inside orange turnstiles that
whumped
open & closed. Beyond those turnstiles were fare card machines, and mere steps beyond them, a forty-one-second-long escalator ride connecting our world to these underground arteries. Condor couldn't see much past the top of the escalator up to the entrance level, couldn't see the orange turnstiles, certainly couldn't see the main escalators up to the night.

Faye said: “How long are we going to just stare at each other?”

“My chaperone.”
What does she think of me: the dark skin, the baseball cap and big glasses, the fat-man jacket?
“I liked slow dances in high school.”

“This isn't high school, Condor,” she said.

She's worried I'm losing it.

Next train: eighteen minutes.

Concrete columns five times as thick as Condor's fat-man suit rose from the red tiles to the curved gray ceiling. He remembered two FBI agents and two bank robbers in …
Miami,
who'd chased each other around a parked car, all four of them blasting away with semiautomatic pistols, two of them reloading on the run, all the bullets missing flesh. The two columns on this subway platform needed fewer steps to race around than a parked car. And down in this tunnel, the perils of ricochets canceled out any advantage the concrete gave over bullet-porous car metal.

“Hey, chaperone,” said Condor: “Slow dance.”

He took two steps back.

Faye took two steps forward to preserve the distance he'd chosen between them.

Her shoes stopped beside the backpack purse on the red tiles.

Condor said: “Pick it up. Both hands.”

Oh so slowly,
she did.

No BOOM! No
flash-bang
stunning light. No eruption of tear gas or smoke.

“See?” she said. “So far, so good.”

Green eyes, he thought. Her eyes are green.

“Don't see only what's in front of you.”

Who taught me that?
Let that go. Let that ghost dissolve.

Faye said: “What now?”

“Unzip it. Make sure the opening is toward your face, not mine.”

The zipper
zuzzed
a slow opening of the backpack purse.

Condor said: “Show me—
easy
.”

She tilted the backpack so he could peek into the bag. “Take what you want.”

He flicked his eyes up from the bag to meet hers.

“I was right,” he said. “One way or another, you're how I'm going to die.”

“Not now,” she said. “Not with me. Not if I can help it.”

“And this is your help?”

She shrugged. “And my bona fides.”

He took the last step to be close enough to her.

Slid his right hand into the backpack. She didn't close it. Trap him. Try for some aikido or judo throw, she just … let him do it.

Feel cool steel, textured wood, the terrible weight of choice.

Condor filled his right fist in the bag with a snub-nosed .38 revolver.

He pulled out the hand-sized pistol. Let its death hole drift aimlessly and casually from side to side, but showing him the gold glint of brass cartridges in the wheel cylinder that implied the gun held ammunition that worked.

Faye said: “I thought you'd go for the .45 in there. The updated 1911, but still like you said you—”

Thunk!
The cold steel bore of the snub-nosed revolver dug into her forehead.

“—prefer,” she finished.

Her green eyes blinked.

But she didn't back away. Whirl/sweep her arm up to beat a bullet to her brain.

A man and a woman stand alone on a red-tiled subway platform.

His arm extended to press a gun's death bore against her third eye.

“I prefer to be murdered with my partner Peter's weapon,” she said.

“Sorry, I don't have it.”

“Then you'd be stupid to shoot me.”

“Stupid comes easy.”

“Here I thought you were a hard guy. If you don't have my partner's gun, then you didn't kill him and somebody took it to package you as armed and dangerous.”

“Great minds,” he said. “Theirs. Yours.”

Slowly the steel barrel backed off her skull.

Still she didn't counterattack.

Condor put the revolver in his jacket pocket.

Smiled
.

Lifted the holstered .45 semiautomatic out of the backpack. That gun came with a pouch of two spare ammunition magazines. He awkwardly shifted the bulk under his jacket to clip both the ammo pouch and the holstered .45 to his belt.

She shook her head. “You look ridiculous.”

The marquee read fourteen minutes until the next train arrived.

“Moving,” she told him. “Getting my phone.”

She used her left thumb and forefinger in an overly formal pincer grip to lift her cell from the blouse pocket over her heart.

Told Condor, “I'll put it on speaker.”

Empty escalators whirred to and from this red-tiled station platform.

The cell phone buzzed once. Buzzed twice.

Condor heard faint background noise coming from the phone.

Faye told the device in her hand: “Someone's here to talk with you.”

“Who?” said a man.

That voice! Here! D.C. National Airport. A little girl—Amy. A bomb.

Be sure
: “Tell me something.”

Eagerness came through the man's voice in the phone: “
Always Be Cool!
Condor, it's Sami!”

The question ripped from Condor's bones:
“Where have you been?”

“Trying to bring you home. Where are you—both of you?”

Condor thrust his hand to block Faye's reply. “
Here
. Where's
there
? Langley?”

“No, our friend Faye, she knows where I am. Doesn't matter. GPS says our exfilt team will be to you in fourteen minutes.”

“We'll be gone. See you.”

Condor lifted the phone from the woman's hand and she let him, but her eyes flashed questions as he thumbed the phone here, there …

As Sami's voice in the phone said: “Faye, come—”

… Condor killed the call. Gave her back the phone.

“Turn off the power,” he said.

She did.

“We've got to go now.”

“Sami is—”

“Not here. We are.”

Condor took a backward step away from her, his eyes on her as an image, his hand near his maroon nylon jacket's pocket, sagging with the weight of the gun.

Saw her green eyes decide before she gave him a nod.

“Okay, Condor. You're the star.”

The marquee told them twelve minutes before the next train.

“You got a car?” he said as he gave her his back …

… and she didn't shoot him as he hurried toward the
UP
escalator.

“No,” said Faye.

He climbed the escalator steps as they carried him up.

Heard her footsteps right behind him.

They hurried across the entrance level toward the orange turnstiles. Condor and Faye slapped their electronic SmarTrip cards over the data-reading strip in side-by-side turnstiles. The turnstiles jumped open to set them free.

Alone in the station, the man and woman quick-walked to the bottom of the three basketball-court-length, forty-one-second-ride
UP
escalators stretched through a slanting giant straw of concrete to D.C.'s neon blue night sky.

Condor hesitated. Stepped on the rising metal stair … and stayed there.

Sighed: “I wish I was in better shape.

“Or younger,” he added as Faye climbed to ride up on the step below him. He felt energy coursing through her, her strobing urge to run up the stairs, move on, DO IT!