Last Days of the Condor (36 page)

With Merle.

She was naked. Slumped with her spine against the support beam, arms limp at her sides, wrists stuck to strips of white tape. Condor'd cut her free from the beam. Her cheeks were red from ripped-away white tape stuck over her mouth. Blond-gray hair hung matted and tangled to her slumped bare shoulders. Faye smelled that Merle sat in her own waste. Condor'd been whispering to Merle as Faye followed her gun down the stairs to the basement, but by the time she joined them, he'd stopped. Merle's eyes were open but whatever she was seeing wasn't there.

“Did they drug her or…” Faye found no more words.

“Doesn't matter,” whispered the suddenly old-looking man. “She's gone.”

Faye heard him strangle a sigh, or maybe it was a sob.

He told her: “Maybe Maine. The hospital. Maybe she'll come back there.”

Then …

Oh then!

… he softly so softly pressed his lips to her forehead.

Clumped back up the stairs, the .45 dangling limp and impotent in his hand.

They found Merle's phone on the kitchen counter.

Faye never knew what made her open the refrigerator door.

But she did.

The only thing she found in that cool-air refrigerator waited on its top shelf:

A clear glass jar where two eyeballs floated in pink lemonade-like liquid.

She felt Condor come stand behind her.

He said: “Your partner. What they took to frame me after they crucified him.”

Faye whispered: “Who are these people?”

Condor reached around her, closed the refrigerator, said: “They're us.”

When she looked at him, he added: “Only let's hope we're better and luckier.”

“This isn't who I wanted to be,” said Faye.

“Me either. But here we are.”

Faye said: “We've got to decide—”

Condor dropped to his hands and knees beside the suicide corpse, sniffed the curled-up body like …
Like a werewolf,
though Faye.
Or a … vulture
.

“Smells like gasoline.”

He spotted the bulge in the dead man's front pocket, pulled out an iPhone.

“There's a GPS in it, right?” he asked the younger woman.

She showed him how to access the GPS and its search request. She went to the bedroom, to the other KIA enemy, got the cell phone from beside his bed and didn't look at him, at what she'd done, no she didn't.
Deserved is deserved and dead, Chris is dead.

Faye got back to the living room as Condor headed toward the front door, car keys he'd scooped off the counter in one hand, the suicide man's iPhone in the other.

Is his .45 in the holster under his black leather jacket?

Siren: coming closer.

Neighbors
.

Not such an ordinary suburban Saturday.

“Wait!” said Faye as Condor walked outside, as she chased after him.

He stood on the red concrete front porch. Pointed the car key's fob at the parked vehicles other than the stolen car he'd scouted the night before then gotten the tools for at the drugstore and broken into with Faye at dawn three peaceful neighborhood blocks away from the hotel. Condor pushed the
LOCATE
button on the fob.

Lights flashed on a new-model Japanese-designed car built in Tennessee to politically appease Americans. Faye heard its driver's door unlock with a
clunk
.

Faye asked Condor: “What about the delivery van driver we hijacked and taped up and stuck in the trunk of the car we stole?”

Bald Condor said: “Let him breathe.”

Then he roared away in the car that had been the killers', the Vs'.

Siren: maybe five blocks away.

Faye held the
HOMELAND SECURITY ID
folder out and open in her left hand.

Used her right thumb to work the cell phone from the man she killed,
I killed him, I killed him,
call the number she knew.

After two buzzes—he's checking caller ID, launching trace—Sami answered.

Faye said: “Guess who.”

A police car topped by a spinning red light sirened into the cul-de-sac.

 

31

Gonna take someone apart.

—Richard Thompson, “I Feel So Good”

You're driving a stolen car where it's supposed to go.

A robot woman talking out of a cell phone tells you so.

“In fifty feet … turn right.”

Of the last seven locations this phone had mapped, five had been gas stations near on/off ramps for the Beltway.

The sixth address belonged to the Crash House where Condor'd stolen this car.

Where Merle.

Location seven had to be it.

Familiar streets
.

He wasn't sure if he remembered where he was, and if so from
when,
or if he'd just driven so many American suburbs that the streets now all looked the same. Certainly nothing outside the windows of his car showed a geographic or cultural individuality, an unmistakable identity, an easy clue that this “town” claimed its turf alongside quick highways to CIA headquarters and the Pentagon. To the National Security Agency, FBI headquarters, Complex Zed.

Once upon a time, these streets hosted a satellite veterans' hospital for Walter Reed—rumor had it, the psych ward—but that facility had been shut down, as had the 1950-something faux castle complex where two buildings were still surrounded by a gray cement wall complete with parapets to look like a local hustler's version of what in that
way back when
had been a brand-new futuristic dollar magnet called Disneyland.

A railroad track slid by Condor's view outside the driver's window, steel rails that made him think he heard a lonesome whistle blow.

You're done with hallucinations.

Stuck in this
real
.

With the graveyard the robot woman guided him past.

Gardens of the dead are everywhere.

The stolen car he drove smelled like gas inside its passengers' compartment.

Figure that one out.

He drove past old houses, some sagging, some rehabbed by the latest hopeful generation of Moms & Dads with kids, so there was a playground, another set of empty swings. Front porches, a seedy apartment complex from some pale lime stucco-walled former motel. Lawns led back from the street. Lots of space between the houses. Hard to hear what was happening next door.

“Arriving at destination … On left, one hundred feet.”

He parked the car at the curb across the street and half a block from
destination
.

Looked like a horror-movie country house this capital city grew up around and forgot. Two stories, probably three bedrooms upstairs, downstairs dining room, study, front parlor maybe, kitchen, bath. Probably a basement for a furnace. Or whatever.

Almost looked like a real home.

Until you settled it in your eyes
just so
.

Saw the black iron fence around the double-lot property was more than hip-high to discourage hoppers without encouraging stares. Saw that though the house's white peeling paint looked like it could use another coat, there was a sheen over the whole structure, a reflective lacquer you couldn't buy in any hardware store. And the first-floor windows: tinted isn't the right word, for though they shone a quiet blue in both sunshine and moon glow, those windows let in light but not sight, let out vision but not voltage. Their glass was thick, far beyond the muscle of any rock-throwing neighborhood hooligan. The two doors over the front portal looked no more formidable than the doors you drive past in any crime-conscious American neighborhood, but looks …

Well,
looks are as looks see.

What else Condor saw from the parked stolen car let him know the robot woman hadn't erred in bringing him here. A shed twice the size of that brown van from this morning rose a prudent distance from the house. Though no thick black wires connected the shed to the house, Condor knew the windowless and lightning-grounded shed held an emergency generator and sat on a vast underground fuel tank, just like he knew the glass rectangles on the house's roof that he could barely see through strategically planted trees, those glass panels were solar converters,
just in case
or even
just because
. And there was no mistaking one—
no
: three satellite dishes amidst the gables pointing up from the top-story windows where bedrooms awaited sweet surrenders of
yes, yes, yes
.

A nine-year-old dented tan American sedan sat in the pebbled driveway.

The car looked like it seldom saw any extended roads.

Why leave when you're already there.

Here: Tier Zero.

Like a movie director, Condor whispered: “And …
action
.”

Opened the stolen car's door and climbed out to the street.

Knew security cameras watched him walk toward the house.

Worried not so much: he could have been made dead when he drove up.

Bet every badge & Black Ops gun is now dispatched to stay away from here.

Still, after he unlatched the black iron fence gate and crunched over the pebbled path to the front porch, he filled his hand with the .45.

If you're not bringing flowers …

His left fingers brushed the handle on the aluminum storm door.

No blast of electricity.

No trapdoor sprang open under his shoes to swallow him into the long fall.

No sound of an alarm.

The aluminum door creaked when he opened it. He wrapped his gun-free left hand around the inner door's brass knob …
that turned,
opened the door.

A whiff of gasoline came out to the front porch.

Then—as fast & smoothly as a battered sixty-something shaved-bald man could—Condor charged into the house, into the long front hall, his back slamming the inner door shut, his .45 swooping left, right, aiming up the empty stairs leading to the second floor.

Hooks on the hall wall held a rain slicker, a parka retired by increasingly mild and snow-less winters, a faded brown (
not candy-pink
) hoodie and a New York designer hip-length brown coat of quality leather.

Some security camera's showing you crouched here, black leather jacket, gun.

Against one hall wall stood two red plastic five-gallon jugs labeled
GASOLINE.

Combat stalk down the hall.

Scan your target environment over the barrel of your .45.

Brown hardwood floors, scuffed but kept dust free by an undercover janitorial crew from the NSA's complex at not-far-away Fort Meade who had no idea why they climbed into phony “Maid Machine” vans to drive nearly to D.C. and clean a private house. But they knew the penalty for talking about this job fell under provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917 with a
maybe they'd skip the trial
penalty of death.

The walls were painted a soothing shade of ivory.

Dead ahead, at the end of the ten-steps hallway and before stairs to the second floor, the walls opened up, ceiling arches that in a regular house would reveal,
say,
a formal dining room off to the right, while off to the left would be the sitting room, the living room, the family room: call it what you will, what it was here wasn't that.

Condor kept his back against the hall wall as he eased toward the open rooms.

What he saw in that room to his right
: a twentieth-century whiteboard wiped clean, file cabinets, stacks of computer disks, CPUs or Internet servers.

Two Vietnam-era five-gallon metal gas cans squatted near those cyber slaves.

Condor cradled his heavy gun in the two-handed grip, elbows bent so the .45 that had served America for more than a hundred years pointed toward the ceiling. The cold black barrel rose past the centerline of his face, his eyes looked over the steel shaft's hole, the scent of gun oil & fired bullets, the hard tang of metal close enough for his lips to kiss as he double-gripped the thick butt and his finger curled on the curved trigger.

Now or never.

He leapt into what could have been a living room—zeroed the .45.

At her
.

She sat cupped in the C-curve of a touchscreen desk.

That flat C-shaped desk surface tilted up to face her eyes and hands with vermillion fingernails, short for keyboarding. When,
like now,
the desktop's touchscreen was in sleep mode, rather than go dark, the desktop became translucent, so Condor could see her mostly bare desk held a double-edged dagger.

A letter opener on a desk without a single scrap of paper.

Her hair looked like rusted steel streaked with silver wires and curved on each side of her face but … but like it often wasn't brushed, not like today when it was glorious and red. Her skin was pale white. Call the dark blue outfit she wore a business dress, open at her neck, trim tailored waist, a comfortable skirt that knew how to cling and ride above her knees to reveal slim black-stockings-sheathed legs. From the room's open arched doorway where he stood aiming his gun at her, Condor couldn't tell if she still had freckles, though time would never have let her lose the laugh wrinkles on her face, high cheekbones, clean jaw, burning blue eyes. Her thin smile was a fresh lipstick slash of midnight crimson.

She dressed up for this.

For you.

Every great strategy begins with a diversion.

Her voice was a strong tenor.

“You could have been a rock 'n' roll star,” he'd once told her. She'd smiled.

Here and now, the words from her smile said: “You always wanted a big gun.”

“I've got what I've got.”

“I hope that's enough.”

Nothing on her desk but the dagger that's at least six inches from her hand. Scan the room, the walls: shelves, books displayed like antiques, objets d'art or were they mementos,
both, whatever,
guns: no visible guns.