Last Days of the Condor (31 page)

27

Better roads.

—Lipstick graffiti on a bathroom mirror

You're driving the car.

Spring morning. Friday. Washington, D.C.

A cocked & locked .45 as heavy as a heart attack rides in the inside left pocket of your unzipped black leather jacket for a
while-driving
grab.

City streets. Rush hour. Gliding with the flow of Metro buses and dark SUVs. Minivans, family sedans. Taxis. Kamikaze bicyclists wear swooping plastic helmets and cubicle clothes. Through your open windows come car honks, street shouts, amped-up music. You smell exhaust, city pavement, the sweat of fear.

Merle rides behind you. Her hands are empty. Nothing under her jacket but hope. Says she can work as left spotter. She's not schooled in what to see.

In the backseat next to Merle, Faye rides shotgun/right-side spotter. Holds her Glock, has the optimal post to shoot any shark cars.

Chris Harvie sits on the front passenger cushion of this vehicle he owns. He knows the way. Might be the face that needs to smile at some man with a badge & gun.

Call it a one-point-seven-mile drive from where the car is parked in the underground garage of an apartment building rising out of streets once walked by Duke Ellington.

Call it a nineteen-minute trip.

You're gripping the black padded steering wheel.

The traffic light ahead turns RED.

“Watch your zones!” Faye,
tense
.

Standing on the corner beyond your driver's side window:

Faded black baseball cap atop snowy hair. Scraggly white beard. Filthy green hoodie, worn blue jeans. Crinkled crimson skin, vacant blue eyes, dirty hands that hold a white sign black-marker scrawled:
HOMELESS

Condor knew the man on the corner was really there.

Thought:
Nobody's hunting him
.

Earlier that morning.

Chris's apartment.

Gearing up, and Faye says: “We don't
think
they know about this
us
. Don't
think
they've figured our play. The good guys are expecting Condor and me to make a move. We don't know the bad guys. Their only agenda we care about is they want us dead.”

Merle said: “You mean you and Vin.”

“Who's Vin?” said Chris.

“Now I'm me,” said Condor.

Chris
got it,
asked Condor: “Any words of wisdom?”

“Everybody needs a way to die,” said Condor.

“You're a horrible leader,” said the man who worked for the U.S. Senate.

Condor said: “We also all need a way to live.

“And this,” said Condor, his smile cupping them all, “this is our best shot.”

Faye said: “Let's go.”

“Wait!” Merle blushed. “Sorry, I … I need to use the bathroom again.”

Nerves
.

Five minutes later they're all riding down in the cage of Chris's elevator.

A slammed door boomed through the concrete cavern of his underground garage.

Roofs of parked cars. Empty parking slots. Flickering fluorescent lights wave shadows on concrete walls. Oil stains. Invisible rancid garbage.

Call the slamming door
nothing
. Call it
normal
. Get in the car's assigned seats, boom your doors shut. Lock them. Your job is to grind the engine into life,
GO
.

Now in traffic on the street, the overhead signal light flashes GREEN.

Drive Massachusetts Avenue east to Capitol Hill.

Check your mirrors. No cars change lanes with you. No smoke-glassed SUVs surge into your wake. No motorcycles zip alongside for a
confirm
look. Or a quick shot.

Mass Ave led to North Capitol Street, curved around the front of the giant Union Station center for trains and subways, Metro buses, double-decker tourist movers.

But Condor turned their car right onto North Capitol, past an Irish pub that caters to Congressional staffers, lobbyists, policy wonks and other white-collar workers who fill the flat-faced, mirror-windowed, multiple-storied office buildings rising off to the right of this moving car. Half a football field later, he turned left on Third Street …

Cranked a quick right turn through the unguarded vehicle entrance for a man-high black chain-link fence:

LOT 11

SAA AUTHORIZED PERMITS ONLY

U.S. Senate Sergeant At Arms

Unauthorized Vehicles Will Be Towed

As Condor followed Chris's directions to an empty parking slot, Faye said: “Congress has its own army-sized police force. Why no cops on this gate?”

Chris shrugged. “This is a staff lot. Mostly, the police guard the buildings.”

“And the Members of Congress,” said Merle in the backseat. “The Senators.”

In the parking slot, front bumper almost kissing the black chain metal fence, Condor said: “Windows up. Look normal.”

All four of them got out of Chris's car.

Across the parking lot by the open pedestrian gate stood a second wood kiosk—empty, no white-shirted cop or even a civilian political appointee with a steady if mind-numbing job checking IDs. Near that gate was a steel-boxed phone topped by a blue light. Bold blue letters down the side of the phone box read:
EMERGENCY
.

“Cameras?” said Faye.

Chris casually looked around. “Probably.”

“Officially,” said Faye, “BOSS [Biometric Optical Surveillance System] won't be on line for two more years, but we all know what
officially
means. Even without BOSS zapping real-time facial recognition scan results into the grid, if they know we're coming here and are up on or hacked this zone's cameras … They'll spot us first.”

“Then they're already on us,” said Condor. “We are who we are.”

“A three-minute walk?” Faye asked Chris as they stood by his parked car.

“At most. You saw the map, the Google street view.”

“The real terrain always surprises you,” said Faye.

Condor said: “Let's go.”

They stepped into the formation they planned at dawn.

Chris took
point
. Wore a suit, his Senate Staff ID dangling around his neck.

Faye walked two paces behind and to Chris's right:
forward fire position
.

Unarmed Merle walked behind the younger woman, and to her left.

Condor took
drag,
hands dangling alongside his unzipped black leather jacket. Two spare ammo magazines filled the back left pocket of his black jeans, their empty pouch and the .45's holster clipped to Faye's crowded belt under her black coat.

Don't let my pistol pop out of my belt.

Plan is, slip the .45 and ammo to badge-packing Faye before the metal detectors.

Don't let me need my gun until then.

“Two choices for our on-foot,” Chris explained that morning when they were still safely in his apartment studying his computer screen. “Well, two
logical
choices.

“Out of Lot Eleven's pedestrian entrance on the diagonal Louisiana Avenue, maybe twenty steps to D Street. Go left two blocks. Right a short block. Walk up the white marble steps and we're at the Russell Senate Office Building. Most everybody takes that route.

“Or, detour through the park alongside D Street. From where we come out of Lot Eleven, cut through the park on crisscross diagonal sidewalks. Could be other pedestrians. Tourists. Union Station commuters. Staffers. Joggers. Bikers. Now and then you see a homeless person sleeping or slouched in the grass.”

“Security cameras?” asked Faye.

“I doubt it. No place in the park to mount them, no pre–9/11 existing poles or structures. Every inch of land up there is historic preservation.” He shrugged. “D Street is wide. Major sidewalks. Quicker, straight shot. You can scope out the cars driving past. See the first police checkpoint two-plus blocks away. See somebody coming.”

“We're four somebodies,” said Faye. “We'll stand out. Easier to spot, ID.”

“Okay,” said Chris, “one block through the park, zigzag sidewalks, then we gotta step out to D Street, but by then, we'll be right under the eyes of the police checkpoint.”

“A walk in the park,” said Merle. “To Hart's main entrance, right?”

“Yeah, the staff and public entrance,” said Chris that morning in his apartment as he finished his cup of coffee. “We should time it so we get there after rush hour's long lines at the security check, white-shirted cops and metal detector arches. Sometimes they have a dog. We should show up between nine twenty and nine thirty.”

Now it's nine fifteen on a beautiful spring Friday morning.

Carillon bells chimed atop the one-hundred-foot tall, thirty-foot wide white cement Robert A. Taft Memorial a few blocks from where they stood in the parking lot.

“Who's he?” said Condor after Chris named the source of the bells.

“Who cares?” said Faye.

They marched out of Lot Eleven to cut through a manicured urban oasis. A circular garden filled the center of that park with spring flowers and holly bushes whose emerald leaves cut like razors. Bushes and trees flanked their path, tunnel walls of intermittent foliage that dappled all views of Condor and Faye and Merle and Chris marching on that tan sidewalk toward the known necessity of a head shot.

Condor walked
drag,
the cowboy term for the last rider behind the herd.

Who says post–9/11 America has forgotten its heritage.

Merle marched two paces ahead of him. He knew the tactical folly of watching the rolling sway of round hips in her blue jeans, but
damn
. Walking ahead and off to Merle's left, out of line to increase the odds that one bullet won't drop two members of the patrol, came Faye in her black coat under her backpack purse, scanning the vacant path they're following, the path that runs past where Chris walks point.

Not as good as those Marines in the 'Stan, but they get the idea,
thought Condor.

A bicyclist whipped around the cement circle surrounding the garden in the center of the park. Pedaled toward them on a ten-speed steed. Even at forty meters, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, Condor noticed the biker's a man, not wearing a safety helmet, has only the hood of his black sweatshirt pulled over his bent-down skull.

Call it thirty-two meters and like a show-off seventh grader, the whizzing-closer biker … sits up to ride with no hands.

Condor and Faye heard cinema archivist Merle who walked between them mutter:
“I've seen this movie.”

See the biker sitting tall twenty-nine meters & closing, riding with no hands—his hands coming together out in front of him holding—

“Gun!”
yelled Condor.

Faye'd been looking back to Merle, whirled forward to face—

Great shot
.

Black hoodie male,
no-hands,
balancing on a bike. Sitting tall. Racing twenty-seven, twenty-six meters toward Primary Threat/Priority 2 Target who's broken her expected motion to look away/whirl back and it's a silencer-handicapped 9 mm pistol two-handed shot,
propelled shooter
to
evading target
profiled as wearing a ballistic vest, a
phutt
-whine.

The bullet ripped across the right side of Faye's skull.

Her cry turned Chris around to see her staggering as double-tap follow-on rounds punched into her chest, her ballistic vest.

Chris charged their attacker:
“No!”

The biker snapped a
phutt
shot that whined a bullet past Condor's right ear, then that black hoodie gunman needed to zero the suit & tie charging his bike.

Phutt! Phutt! Phutt!
Silenced slugs punched red holes in Chris's center mass.

He crumpled on the sidewalk to become an island birthing its own maroon lake.

Biker one-hand grabbed his handlebars as he flew past the fallen man. The first target he shot is staggering. He scans to acquire Priority 1 Target, a guy in a black leather jacket who's crashed through a bush, off the path but not hidden and certainly not bulletproofed by foliage and—

Merle shoved the biker blowing past her.

Forward momentum plus inertia plus trained athleticism. They're not enough. The black hoodie killer somersaults over the handlebars of the bike as it flips into the air. He breaks his fall with a forward judo roll, but the sidewalk knocks the gun from his hand as he crashes into a bush opposite the foliage wall where Condor dived.

Faye staggers to a shaky combat crouch, claws her Glock into her right fist—

Spots Chris in a scarlet lake.

Condor's on his feet, .45 in fist, booms a shot toward a black shape scurrying on the ground beyond two mulched bushes.

Faye blasts a round toward their attacker, her shot even more wild than Condor's. As Merle runs into their field of fire.

Condor swung the black barrel of his .45 from Merle to
where's the black hoodie biker
? Condor glanced left, behind him: Faye's wobbling toward where Chris is …

Is dead.

No doubt.

Faye's got a crimson smear matting the hair on the right side of her head, dazed eyes, she's trying to aim, shoot.
She'll kill us with wild fire!

Condor pulled Merle behind him as he kept his gun zeroed to the last place he'd seen the assassin biker.

No other fire! No other shooters! Where are they? Where are they?

“Grab Faye!” he yelled to Merle.

Merle yanks Faye away from the sticky red lake surrounding Chris.

Condor backpedals across the park, pulls the two women with him.

Faye lunges toward where the killer should be. Fires two blasts from her Glock, bullets crashing through brush, the booms echoing off the marble of Union Station blocks behind them, the sound fading against the marble buildings of Congress.