Last Days of the Condor (7 page)

Wearing a torn black sweatshirt over a thermal top, gray sweatpants, white socks and black, hard-soled Chinese
gung fu
shoes, the silver-haired man had to be careful not to slip on the wooden stairs as he came back downstairs to rescue the whistling kettle.

Get your coffee cup later:

If your hands can't be strategically full, be sure they're operationally empty
.

He flipped the locks and jerked open the turquoise door.

No one shot him.

No visible watchers hunched in the cars parked on both sides of the street, in the neighborhood windows, on the roofs. A Metro bus rumbled past:
Commuters. Citizens.

On his front step waited thinly filled plastic sheaths of
The Washington Post
and
The New York Times.
He fetched them inside and locked the turquoise door. Put the newspapers on the breakfast bar in his kitchen. The refrigerator didn't explode when he opened the door to get his carton of milk from cows adulterated with antibiotics. He splashed milk into his cup, added coffee, set the cup on the breakfast bar. Shook
The Post
and
The Times
out of their condom sheaths. Turned on his satellite receiver and the radio blasted dead Warren Zevon singing “Lawyers, Guns and Money” and—

A civvies-clad Marine Recon Major clutches a stack of newspapers in some D.C. room. There's a not-so-secret war in Nicaragua. A murdered secret agent in L.A. The Marine doesn't know you exist, you're his shadow backup, and why,
why
are we reading the newspapers' horoscopes?

Hello!
thought Vin to those new ghosts:
Who are you?

But
like that,
like the steam coming from his coffee cup … Gone.

Must be the drugs not working.

Yes!

He read the news,
oh boy
. Didn't find his name in the reports of what's supposed to be real and who's supposed to be dead. Finished two cups of coffee. Knew he'd miss newspaper comics when they went extinct. Used the bathroom two more times (usual). And never looked in that downstairs mirror, not even a glance.

Outside on the back deck, he flowed through
t'ai chi
. Cool air surrounding him smelled like a city alley but so far D.C.'s stench is not the smog that strangles Beijing like in the three-dotted photo taped to Condor's brick wall.
T'ai chi
moving from his center snapped Condor's arms and hands up & out to
Ji
—press posture.

Victor in the asylum saying: “Power generates from your hips.”

Hips thrusting Wendy's naked body astride him, he's on his back, Wendy says: “They lied to you. I was shot dead in the head.” Her eyes close, she whispers: “You got it! You—”

Gone
. Here, now, whenever: she was really gone.

But good to see her again.
Whoever she was
.

The
remember
caught Condor in his shower:
W
. The Marine Major was named
Wes
.
Wendy
and
Wes
. Wendy was long dead when Wes … when Wes …

Clouds of knowing vanished in the shower's pounding steam where it felt good to shave with hand soap and his own safety razor, not have to shave with a blue-handled disposable razor at one of the mirrored sinks in a communal bathroom watched over by two orderlies who weren't as tough as they thought. Condor considered modifying the shave-off of his morning antipsychotics and anxiety meds—if that's what they were.

Naw. Too late to turn back now.

He razor-bladed his morning
stay-sane
doses down a full two-thirds.

Chose a blue shirt over a clean thermal undershirt. All his pants were black, kept him from getting lost in indecision or fashion indecency. Gray socks. Black shoes suitable for running or kicking.

Walk downstairs. Listen to the radio. Stare at the wall of secrets.

Nothing. Not a whisper. Not a
clong
.

“Well, that sucks,” he told his empty home.

Yesterday the weather report said sunny and it rained. Today the report said rain and the sun shined. He thought about wearing the black leather sports jacket that his Settlement Specialist claimed was out of covert guidelines, too flashy, made him look like someone, made him look … intense.

“Yeah,” he'd told her.

She'd decided not to push.

And that morning, he decided to wear the gray wool sports jacket instead:
You don't want to ring the wrong bells.

Condor locked and left his house to walk to work. It was Tuesday, 7:42
A.M
.

The crazy woman's dog barked at him as he walked to the corner of Eleventh Street and Independence Avenue, turned left and retraced his steps from the night before on sidewalks he'd tramped hundreds of—

Paris
, Hartwell stalking you twenty meters back at your eight o'clock across the cobblestone road. Popped up smack where he wasn't supposed to be. Good that he's a bad brick man, you spot him,
is he alone, what's he packing
, and at the U.S. embassy where you can't go, can never go, they won't give you shelter, embassy walls draped red, white and Bicentennial blue and you're out here quickening through a swirl of French impressionism while behind you, with his every hungry step, with fanatic's fire blazing his eyes, Hartwell yells: “I know who you are, motherfucker!”

Now
here,
standing in the giant doorway of the Adams Building, a castle-like structure, the white-shirted Library of Congress cop wears a brass name tag:
SCOTT BRADLEY.

The cop wears a holstered 9mm pistol you could grab.

But don't.

“Hi, Vin,” says Officer Scott Bradley.

Condor gave him a smile like this was just another day. Emptied his pockets. Passed through the metal & bomb detector archway without setting off a
beep
. Collected his personals and walked to the elevator bank, pushed the lone brass button for
DOWN.
Only then did he glance back at the open doorway's
noir
shaft of tall light where Officer Bradley stood as the first overt line of defense. Saw no ghosts.

As if Badge Bradley could stop them.

Call him
Condor,
call him
Vin
: he rode an elevator down alone.

His underground office waited behind a brown steel fireproof slab he opened by tapping a code into the digital lock that transmitted to the Library of Congress's central security computer linked to Homeland Security's NROD and its data flow to Bald Peter and Faye, the woman who wasn't his daughter.

His watch read 7:58
A.M
.—more or less two hours
until
.

If I'm lucky.

Condor stood in his basement office's open doorway. Reached to an inside shelf for the rubber wedge he'd conned out of the carpenter's shop. Propped the door wide open to secure a view of the hall. Flipped on the lights for his domain.

Regular Library of Congress workers called it
the Grave Cave
.

Janitors had helped him move his scarred gray steel desk so he sat behind a restricted-Internet computer on his left and two carts to his right, everything rigged so he could stare out to see anyone who passed by. Or tried to charge in. As he sat there.

Who cared if propping open his door created a firing lane to his heart.

Some ways we get shot are too sweet to forbid.

Eight in the morning. Underground at the Grave Cave. Two hours
until
.

Plain pine boxes made chest-high walls around his desk. On any given day, there'd be fifty boxes. Condor relished the smell of pine. Appreciated that the aroma of forests covered odors of must & dust & rot from the contents of the crates.

Books.

Blond white pine crates packed full of books.

Books from de-acquisitioning Air Force bases. Books from veterans' hospitals. Books from Army bases in Germany near where their Soviet Union counterparts no longer existed. Books from deactivated ICBM Minuteman silos dotting the northern prairies. Books from black site prisons that considered vetted knowledge about the outside world as acceptable torture more than rebellious escape. Books from classified CIA staging centers and duty stations. Obama-era books already cycling back from the under-construction, $3 billion-plus secret NSA spy data center in the same mountains of Utah that also shelter nine thousand members of the country's leading Mormon polygamous sect. Books snagged & bagged on commando raids of terrorist lairs. Books CIA
closers
retrieved from the rubble of dead spies.

But not just any books.

Novels. Short story collections. Scripts. Barely read books of poetry.

Volumes of what wasn't real—but was maybe,
just maybe,
true.

Histories, technical manuals, biographies,
how-to
s, TV-famous authors' declarations about
what I say really happened & what it means,
self-motivation manuals by parroting strangers, tomes of faith or brilliant insight and other nonfictions were vetted and disappeared further back up the chain of Review & Resolution.

What came to Condor in the one-room underground Grave Cave at the Library of Congress were stories swirled out of our ether by souls who couldn't stop screaming.

Mistakes were made,
sure
.

More than once Condor crowbarred open a crate and found stacks of what the previous century called
record albums,
cardboard-jacketed, flat black petroleum-based discs containing aural transmissions accessible only with technology most American homes no longer possessed. Sometimes he cried for what he found that he knew he knew but knew not from where.
Clongs
seized him. He'd scissor out an album jacket photo of a singer-songwriter or a scene that riveted his eyes. He hid such photos down the back of his pants and carefully walked home through the security detector arches to tape the stolen photos on his wall alongside newspaper salvages and prose or poetry lines also scissor-stolen from R&R crates.

Magazines sometimes survived R&R's usual toss straight to the trash. Condor tore out the
Spy vs. Spy
cartoon page of a satirical
Mad
magazine from 1968 when revolution fired the streets of Paris, of Prague, of Mexico City and Memphis, Tennessee. Two months out of the secret Ravens' asylum and into this job, Condor uncrated a stack of
Playboy
magazines—the publication starring a centerfold of women photographed nude with makeup & touched-up flesh. Many such photo fictions had already been torn from those magazines, but one surviving image nailed his eyes: a quarter-page color snap of a 1970s beauty “revisited” a decade later, a photo of her leaning on a brass bed, the mirror behind her reflecting a tumble of mature honey hair, a black garter belt above her moon of curved hips, black stockings on dancer-long legs in ridiculously decorative black stiletto heels, breasts heavy & low & full maroon
there,
her smile wide as her eyes look to see who's looking at her.

Condor taped that garter-belted photo to his brick wall a respectable distance from his newspaper art portrait of a lone woman with black hair tumbling to her simple blue sleeveless blouse and a pink surreal featureless swirl for her face.

One image reveals so much, one image reveals so little. The space between is enough to drive you mad.

Still, he stole and poked them both with the secret three holes:
Pay attention!

But that wasn't his job.

What
they
'd told Condor to do was glance at each book, each discard of vision, and in as few possible heartbeats, decide which cart claimed the work.

Cart A went to Permanent Storage.

Cart B carried its captives to the pulp machine.

Condor once convinced a transport team to take him along to Cart B's disposal site, a thirty-seven-minute drive in the cramped truck's front seat with two men who argued about professional football and how fucked up the Navy had been and wasn't that the best time and when could they smoke with this
what the hell
stranger sitting between them. Seagulls circled the packed earth landfill, a wasteland where putting a pulping plant probably made environmental sense. Condor watched books he'd tossed onto Cart B get dumped into a green steel maw, heard them sprayed with chemicals and the whining gear clanging crunch as they became a gooey mass poured into vats on other trucks and taken away to be turned into …
What?

Rules prohibited Condor from saving more than one Cart A of books a week.

He agonized over filling Cart B with doomed books. As ordered, flipped their pages. Looked for indications this volume had been the key to a book code. Scanned for spy notes cribbed in the pages or classified documents slid in there and forgotten. He pondered
security risk quotient
amidst coming-of-age novels, con artist swaggers, flesh peddles,
noir
sagas, soul-revealing classics, cop stories, alternative times fantasies or science fictions, heaving bosomed romances about the President's lost love. A book could earn Cart A salvation with its reputation for
getting it right,
for tradecraft revealed or created, secrets shared.

Every workday made Condor unpack crates.

“You're a reader,” said the Settlement Specialist. “This is like your first spy job.”

“You mean it's not something the CIA made up so they know where I am?”

She smiled.

Helped him keyboard cover lies to his Library of Congress employee file.

Now it's now!

No shit,
he told the new ghosts that Wednesday morning as he sat at his desk framed by the open doorway of the Grave Cave. At 9:51 he tossed a novel about a gunfighter come home to a small town on Cart B, then stared out his open door.