Last Days of the Condor (21 page)

The .45 rode holstered on his right side, the ammo pouch on his left.

Condor checked his vials of pills, muttered that it felt like they were all there.

Looked at her.

Faye whispered: “Who did we just kill?”

“Who's trying to kill us?” answered Condor.

“Now?” she said. “Everybody.”

 

15

The way I always do.

—Warren Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns and Money”

Taxi, you're in the backseat of a yellow taxi.

Smells like burnt coffee and pine-scented ammonia and passengers' sweat.

Your sweat.

A cool breeze through the driver's open window bathes your sticky face.

Look out your rolled-up window.

The street-lit night streams surreal images. Sidewalks. Stores. Bar lovers hurrying into their neon cathedrals. The window catches your blurred reflection sitting beside someone you barely know. The glass vibrates from your pounding heart.

Condor and Faye stumbled through blocks of alleys toward a 7-Eleven, caught a break when Faye waved down a long-way-from-home taxi.

Condor lied to the cabby about where they were going.

The cabby lied about the shortest way to get there.

Drove through Georgetown.

The yellow taxi glided through that zone of boutiques, bars and restaurants, clothing franchises just like in most malls
back home,
sidewalks where charm mattered less than cash. Houses off these commercial roads sold for millions and still held graying survivors who'd pioneered Georgetown for Camelot's glory of JFK, but the streets now belonged to franchisers with factories in Hong Kong and Hanoi.

The cabby turned up his radio—loud, brassy music not born in the U.S.A.

Condor stared out the taxi window.

Saw
him
holding a red flower amidst unseeing strangers on the sidewalk.

“Rose men,” whispered Condor.

“What?” Faye's eyes darted from sidewalk to sidewalk to side mirror to side mirror to the rearview mirror to the taxi's windshield and back again.

“Jimmy Carter was President. Middle Eastern guys popping into Georgetown restaurants, table to table, selling single roses for a dollar. They were spies. Savak, Iranian secret police brick boys working for the Shah, tracking dissidents, exiles, allies.”

“Way before my time,” said Faye. “I'm a Reagan baby.”

“So who are the rose men now?”

“You tell me.”

The taxi rumbled through dark residential streets. Blocks of apartment buildings lined main avenues. Town houses and cramped GI Bill homes filled the side roads.

They drove two blocks past their true destination.

Condor and Faye scanned cars parked along the curbs. Looked for vans. Looked for hulks in the bushes, lingering inside alleys or stairwells to basements. Looked for security cameras. Tracked rooflines for silhouettes under the dark sky.

The cabby stopped at the intersection Condor'd requested.

Said: “You sure this where you want to go?”

“Sure,” said the old man in the black leather jacket as the woman who could be his daughter paid the fare they all knew was bogus. “This is where she grew up.”

“Feels familiar.”
True
&
False
intertwined from this woman who slipped into her backpack as the cabby hesitated so the change from the corrupt fee became his tip.

Condor and Faye watched the cab drive away into the night.

Stepped back out of the cone of light from the corner streetlamp.

Faye scanned the surrounding darkness. “You sure this where we should go?”

“Everything about you will be lit up in crosshairs,” he said. “You told me nothing about this is in my target packet for Sami's headhunters.”

“Do you think this is the right thing to do?”

“It's the only
do
I got left,” he told her. “Don't ask me any more than that. Or come up with a better idea and come up with it fast. I'm dead on my feet.”

“Not yet,” she said. “Not on my watch.”

Then she let him lead her where he'd never been before, where he'd dreamed, where he already felt falling into déjà vu.

“Nothing's ever like it used to be,” he muttered as they walked through the dark.

He heard concern in her voice as she said: “Concentrate on here and now.”

This residential neighborhood smelled of bushes and grass and sidewalks damp from the previous night's rain. Freshly budded trees lined the boulevards, spread their thickening branches like nets poised over where Faye and Condor walked.

TV clatter floated from an open window as someone surfed their remote—sitcom laughter, crime drama sirens, dialog from fictional characters viewers could trust.

Coming toward them across the street: a woman in a yellow rain slicker muttering encouragement to the rescue mutt scampering on the end of her leash:
“Come on now, you can do it, yes you can.”

Out of the apartment building next to their destination came a clean-shaven man zipping up a leather jacket that was brown instead of Condor's black. He didn't notice they slowed their pace until he drove away in a car with taillights like red eyes.

“You sure this is the right address?” asked Faye when they stood outside the glass lobby door to a seven-story apartment building built during the Korean War. Through the glass entrance, they saw no one in the lobby, no one waiting for the elevator.

Condor pointed to the label beside the buzzer for Apartment 513:

M. Mardigian

Because you never know, Faye pulled on this main glass door: locked.

She tapped the “M. Mardigian” label. “If we buzz and get a
no,
we're fucked.”

They looked behind them to the night street.

“We can't stand out here exposed, waiting for a chance to try a hitch-in,” she said.

Condor pushed his thumbs down two columns of buzzer buttons for the seventh floor.

The door lock buzzed as a man's voice in the intercom said:
“Yeah?”

Faye jerked open the heavy glass door, told the intercom: “Like, thanks, but never mind, I found my key!”

Condor and Faye hurried into the lobby.

“You'd think people would have learned the spy tricks by now,” said Faye.

“If they did, we'd be stuck out in the cold.”

Steel silver elevator doors slid open.

He hesitated. Felt her do the same.

Then she said: “Come on. We've got nowhere to go but up.”

They got in, pushed the button for five.

Steel doors slid closed. This silver cage rose toward heaven.

Make it work, you can make this work. And nobody will get hurt, it'll be okay.

Faye watched him with skeptical eyes.

Inertia surged their skulls as the elevator stopped. Silver doors slid open.

A lime green hallway. Black doors, brass apartment numbers over peepholes. Dark green indoor-outdoor industrial carpet that smelled long overdue for replacement.

Apartment 513. No name label, no door decorations, nothing to set it apart from other slabs of entry into strangers' lives in this long green hall. The round plastic peephole stared at them, a translucent Cyclops eye beneath brass numbers.

This is where I want to be never wanted this shouldn't do this déjà vu.

Poetry
. Clong.

Condor whispered to Faye: “Try to look like just a woman.”

Faced the slab of black.

Raised his fist …

Knocked.

 

16

Survival is a discipline.

—United States Marine Corps manual

Let us in.

Faye watched the black door swing open & away from her in this musty green hall. Smiled as she secretly coiled to charge or draw & shoot or …
Or
.

Let us in!

But the woman who opened the door just stood there—blocking entry.

M. Mardigian.

She looks younger than fifty-three.
Condor mining her data isn't creepy, you've done that.
M. Mardigian's hair is gray highlighted blond, and unlike most women in Washington, she wears it curling past her shoulder blades. She looks like the part-time yoga instructor Condor says she is, a slow flow, subtle but stocky, strong. Her face is a pleasant rectangle, big nose, unpainted slash of lush lips. Her eyes are set too wide. She lets the two visitors standing in her hall tumble into their slitted blue gaze.

“
Wow,
” she deadpanned. “You never know who's gonna knock on your door.”

Faye felt the disturbing force of her and Condor in this empty hallway.

Felt peepholes on the other apartment doors staring at them.

LET US IN!

The yoga woman scanned Faye, then her blue gaze settled on Condor, a wrinkle crossing her brow as she said: “You show up here with your daughter?”

“We're not that lucky,” said Condor.

“Who's ‘
we
'?”

Faye flashed one of her three sets of credentials. “Homeland Security. Let's step inside, Ms. Mardigian. You're not in any kind of trouble.”

“If you're here, we all know that's some kind of not true.”

Condor asked the graying blonde blocking the door: “Can I call you
Merle
?”

She stared at him.

Said: “Word around work is that you're some kind of spook.”

Bust in, push in, bowl her over in ten, nine, eight—

Call her Merle
stepped back out of the doorway and pulled Condor in her wake.

Faye edged between Merle and the black door, wrapped her fist around the lock-button knob, closed that black slab to block out the world. Faye glanced away from their hostess only long enough to shoot the deadbolt home, fasten the door's chain.

Merle's husky voice said: “Somehow that doesn't make me feel safe.”

“Sorry,” said Condor. “You're not.”

“Thanks to you?”

“Guilty. At least, in the personal sense.”

“This is personal?” She sent her eyes to Faye. “So what do you want with me?”

Already got it, got in here,
thought Faye.
Just need to stay in control
.

“Would you do me a favor, please, Ms. Mardigian? Sit over there on the couch.”

Yoga woman wore a gold pullover and dark blue jeans. Was barefoot. She settled on her couch. Faye saw the woman force herself to relax, to sit back from poised on the edge of the black leather sofa, to act as if nothing was too wrong.

Faye followed Condor's lead. “Thanks. Mind if I call you Merle?”

“You've got the credentials to do a whole lot no matter what I mind.”

Condor claimed one of two swivel chairs across the glass coffee table from Merle.

Good, thought Faye. The chair closest to the door. He could probably grab Merle if she made a break for it, definitely catch her before she could defeat the locks and chain.

“Con—
Vin
will keep you company while I follow procedure. Take a quick look through your apartment. To be sure we're alone. To be sure we're safe.”

“Does
safe
come with a warrant?”

“You don't need to worry about that,” said Faye.

Her eyes swept the kitchen: no visible knives, a landline phone on the wall.

The fifth-floor windows showed the night—Jesus, it's only ten o'clock!
Call her Merle
had a balcony big enough to stand on. Or jump from. A wet team could rappel down from the roof, swing
crash
bust through the glass with blazing machine guns.

Faye walked to the bedroom as Merle asked Condor:
“What do you know about me?”

Faye kept the white bedroom door open so she heard him answer:
“Not enough.”

In the bedroom. Windows with another suicide-sized balcony. A queen-sized bed. Dressers. Clothes hanging in a closet where a dozen pairs of shoes lined the floor, tidy couples waiting to be wanted.

Voices drifted in as Faye quietly slid open bureau drawers.

Merle asked again:
“What do you want from me?”

Condor replied:
“That's … complicated.”

Underwear, leotards, sweaters. Jeans, yoga-type tops and pants. No gun.

“Complicated is never the answer you want.”

“Let's wait until Faye—”

“So she's the boss? Who I should pay attention to?”

Framed photographs on the bedroom bureaus: Mother. Father. A middle-class house somewhere beyond the Beltway. A 1960s little girl jumping rope. A near-thirty Merle, fierce and glowing as she marches down the steps of the Capitol building. A cell-phone shot of this-age her stretching into a yoga pose while the class watches.

“You should pay attention to what's smart.”

“Who gets to decide ‘smart'? You?”

No wedding picture. No pictures of children. No pictures of men. Or women. No group photos from an office party. No snapshots of friends' kids, nephews or nieces.

Thumbtacks held picture postcards above the bedside table where a cell phone rested in its charger beside a landline extension. A piazza in some Italian city. The theater district of London at night. The gargoyles on Notre Dame in Paris.

Faye's stomach scar burned when she saw the postcard of Paris. America's trained spy lifted the edge of the Paris postcard, then each of the others: no stamps on the backs, no written notes or Merle's address. Had she gone there, gotten them for herself?

“Please, trust us.”

“Gosh, nobody's ever said that before.”

The bedside table that held the phones had two books—fictions,
Beautiful Ruins
by Jess Walter, a woman named Maile Meloy writing
Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It
. The bedside table's bottom drawer rattled with tubes of this and jars of that, moisturizers, Vitamin E oil. Bottles of headache meds, over-the-counter sleep aids.