Last Days of the Condor (2 page)

The silver-haired man peered past the cop outside his cruiser and the yellow detour arrow. Told himself that through the bare trees and over two blocks away, he could see the edge of the Capitol building; visualize its dome, white and slick in the rain.

Before and for a while after Watergate, the FBI maintained a covert station on Pennsylvania Avenue in the first block of private commercial buildings he saw as he turned back from staring at Congress's domain. That former FBI lair had been a flat-faced concrete building with an underground garage, always shut. He'd learned about the building back when
this life
began. That the three-story gray building belonged to the FBI was gossiped about by all sorts of people who worked on Capitol Hill, including many of Congress's members and staffs. If any of them had the guts and power to ask the Bureau about the building at the corner of Congress & the world, the official FBI response labeled the substation “a translation center.”

Sure,
he thought:
And how does that translate?

He stood on the corner of the block where he now worked, obeying the traffic light, faced down Independence Avenue with his head turned in its blue hood just enough so his peripheral vision might pick up the appearance in traffic of,
say,
a white car.

The
DON'T WALK
traffic signal he faced glowed orange with a line slashed across the orange stick-figure image of a walker and counting-down flashes:

… 30 … 29 … 28 …

On the way to his rampage in 1998, a lone gunman from Montana who killed two Congressional cops while trying to shoot his way into the U.S. Capitol visited the for-decades town house headquarters of a fringe political group across the street from where the silver-haired man now stood. What the diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic gunman wanted from that political group is unknown, but he was drawn to them. The since-moved political group's revered but deceased founder kept a life-sized black metal statue of Adolf Hitler at the foot of his bed and the group openly but illegally sold the same phony cancer-curing drug that failed to save movie star Steve McQueen.

… 3 … 2 … 1 …
WALK
flashed in traffic-light white and freed a white stick figure.

Hope you get where you're going,
telepathed the silver-haired man to the white stick figure in the signal light as he himself crossed the road for his eight-block journey with the traffic flowing along Independence Avenue.

He didn't flinch when his peripheral glimpse of the intersection showed the rain-slick black street reflecting a red light and an idling white car.

At the next corner, Fourth Street, he let the green light send him to the right, across the road. Didn't look behind him up that street to
where it happened back then
. Didn't look sideways to see the white car he hoped was blocked a few vehicles back, not at this crosswalk revving its engine to roar off the slick street, smash into his blue-hooded figure, hurtle him to his death or under crushing wheels.

Rundowns are tricky.

What's the Mission Risk Allotment for the cover team in the white car?

He made it to the curb. Didn't look back as he turned left, his usual route.

Don't let them know the weight of your eyes.

The rain stopped two blocks later as he slogged past the long low barn of Eastern Market where J. Edgar Hoover had worked as a grocery delivery boy before his left-wing subversive hunting days during the last century's Palmer Raids.

Cars whooshed by his lone man walking. Homeward-bound citizens.

Four blocks later, as he neared his corner of Eleventh Street, he spotted the white hat and dark blue sweater of a Navy officer leaving the neighborhood dry cleaner's that often served personnel stationed at the nearby Commandant of the Marine Corps. Flashed to cradling a Marine corporal shot in Afghanistan as that man,
that boy,
who'd saved his life flopped, gurgled, and died without ever knowing the truth about his fellow American or having it told to his family back in Oklahoma.

The Navy officer at the dry cleaner's that evening drove away in a minivan outfitted with an empty child's car seat.

The silver-haired man noted the red neon sign in the dry cleaner's barred window:

ALTERATIONS

If only
.

He focused on an address just past the corner: 309, a two-story blue-brick town house, four black metal steps up to its turquoise door, walked one step after another until
finally,
as he slid his key into the lock, he looked behind him, checked his four to eight.

The white car cruised past him, made a languid U-turn into one of the parking spots across the street, tinted windshield facing where he stood on his front stoop.

The white car's engine turned off.

No one got out of the white car. Those tinted windows stayed closed.

He slid his key into the turquoise door, unlocked it, turned the doorknob. His eyes caught a downward flutter by his thigh, as low as he could reach without showing what he was doing every day when he put a stolen leaf in the crack of that door he pulled closed. Last summer, he'd worried his neighbors might notice their bushes being nibbled in this neighborhood that had yet to be invaded by the deer who bred madly in D.C.'s Rock Creek Park.

But no one mentioned that to him. Not even the wild-haired witch next door who often stood inside the low black iron fence around her front yard with her yippy filthy white dog to scream:
“This place ain't near nothing like North Carolina!”
She was wrong, but like everyone else, he never risked correcting her.

Today's torn leaf fluttered from the doorjamb.

But it could have been replaced.

Someone could still have opened that door. Be inside.

Fuck 'em
.

Then he was in the house, his back pressed against the door he slammed shut. Sundown pinked his landlord's lair, the furniture she'd left when she had to rush move to her new GS insurance & pension federal job in Boston on seventeen days' notice in order to hold her place for computation in the next budget. The flat-screen TV his Settlement Specialist insisted on delivering to him hung over the fireplace in which he burned papers along with pine wood bought from pickups from West Virginia that cruised the city during the cold months. The green sofa belonged to the landlord, as did the brass bed upstairs in the front bedroom where he slept. The rest of the household contents—a couple chairs, a little of this and less of that, what was on the walls, a satellite radio with speakers, those things belonged to him.

No one attacked him in pink light streaming through the house's barred windows.

Yet
.

This row house with common walls was six paces wide and twenty-one paces deep. That journey from the front door back to the kitchen took a jag around the bathroom under the stairs leading up to where he showered and slept. He walked toward the kitchen, glanced at the brown wooden stair eye level to him, and saw that the clear dental floss strand strung there had not been blown or pushed away by a passing shoe.

Or the strand had been replaced.

If they were that good, that compulsive, waiting upstairs in his bedroom or in the junk-filled back room, hiding in a closet, then
fuck it: call him already deleted
.

He checked the downstairs half bath: toilet seat up. Only his reflection haunted the mirror above the sink. He pushed the blue hood off his silvered head.

No one waited in the kitchen, the inside back door still shut and the outer iron-bars door locked in place. Beyond those black iron bars waited a wooden slab deck in a tiny fenced backyard with nothing but a waist-high Japanese maple tree rising from an engineered square opening in the deck. The hook & eye latch on the weathered gray back gate looked in place, but anyone who walked past that wooden fence in the alley knew such security was a joke.

They let him have knives.

For cooking.

The Settlement Specialist casually mentioned that need as she filled his shopping cart on their Household Establishment visit to the Fort Meade PX between D.C. and Baltimore where the National Security Agency keeps its official headquarters. He had a set of steak knives, plus a kitchen counter wooden slotted “display holder” with a knife sharpener, a rapier-strong fileting blade, a serrated-edge bread knife, a monstrous isosceles triangle–bladed
tres Francais
carver, and a butcher blade that reminded him of Jim Bowie and the Alamo.

He refused to clutch one of those knives, sit
waiting
like a doomed fool on the living room couch.

His blue shell mountaineering coat was soaked. He shivered with that chill. Took the coat off, started back toward the living room—

Stopped in the bathroom to urinate. Told himself that wasn't nerves.

Heard the flush shut off as he hung his wet coat up on the living room coatrack.

They were out there.
Of course they were out there!

But they might not come tonight.

Or ever.

The cover team might be taggers on a Sit & See, or—

The turquoise front door boomed with a knock.

 

2

The ones we don't know we don't know.

—U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Faye Dozier eased the front passenger door shut on the car they parked on Washington, D.C.'s Eleventh Street, SE, unbuttoned her mid-thigh black coat and kept her eyes on the blue brick town house with the turquoise door. She flexed her empty bare hands. That comfortable metal weight rode on her right hip.

Her partner, Peter, slammed his driver's door shut, didn't give a damn who heard it or looked through the evening light to see her walk around the car to him. He wore a tan raincoat with something bigger than a book bulging its inside pocket and carried a silver briefcase.

“Remember,” he told Faye. “You're lead on this one.”

“Why him?” she said as she stared at the house, calculated approach angles. “Why now? He's not on today's action list.”

“After that thing we just did over across the D.C. line in P.G. County, the Taliban guy who was fucking worried about his son getting into college, this guy is between there and base, due to hit our screen, so …

“We got a shot,” said Peter. “Might as well take it now.”

Like two hawks dropping off the same tree branch, this man and woman stepped together across the street toward the blue brick house.

“Not like you've got anything better to do with your night, right?” he said.

Then laughed.

Like he knew,
thought Faye, knowing he didn't, no one did, no one could.

Peter said: “Heads up on this one, rookie.”

“When did I become a rookie?”

“Out here, with me, rookie is who you are. You're lead on this one because I say so. Because it's time for you to pop your cherry.”

“You're such a charmer.”

“So people keep saying.”

They reached the side of the street of the blue brick house with the turquoise door.

“Listen,” he said to this
Okay, so she wasn't a rookie
partner he'd never asked for, never wanted. “Take your time. Do it smart, do it thorough, do it right.

“And then,” he added as they reached the four black iron steps leading up to that narrow row house on the edge of Capitol Hill, “do the same for the report.”

“
Wait
: What are you going to be doing while I'm doing that?”

“My report, my identifier,
your
work, my seniority time off-line, because, like you said, you got nothing better to do with the rest of your night.” He smiled.

“I didn't say.” She held the palm of her left hand low where anyone but another professional like him might have missed the
hang back
signal.

Peter retreated from the black iron steps. Stood where optics let him catch
movement
in the windows on both floors of the blue brick town house, where his sight line included her on the black iron stoop:

As she knocked on the turquoise door.

 

3

Runaway American dream.

—Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run”

This is how you live or die.

Answer the knock on your front door.

That turquoise slab swung open to the rush of the world and
they
filled his vision.

Woman
standing on front stoop.

Man
posting on the miniscule front yard made of dirt and stone inside the black metal fence.

She's the shooter if this is a Buzz & Bang.

But she just stands there on the front porch, green eyes reflecting him.

Call her thirty, maybe older. Black coat unbuttoned. Pretty, but you might not spot her in a crowd. Brown hair long enough for
styled,
not so long it's an easy grab. An oval face from the stirred ethnicity of modern America. A nose that looked like it had been reset above unpainted lips. She carried her shoulders like a soldier. Her hands hung open by her side, her right strobed
gun hand.
No rings. Dark slacks. Sensible black shoes for running or a snap kick.

She waited in this sundown that smelled like rain on city streets.

The hardest thing.

Waiting.

For the right moment. The right move. For the target to appear.

Her backup man cleared his throat.
Familiar, he seems …
Older than her, say fifty, a bald white guy. Muscle in the mass under his tan raincoat. Silver metal briefcase in his left hand, right hand open by his side. He posted backup, a line of sight past her to whoever opened the turquoise door or moved in the front windows, yet the way he cleared his throat marked him as a boss, or maybe—