Last Days of the Condor (5 page)

The limbo level houses units shuffled off the flow charts of America's sixteen officially admitted intelligence agencies, a catch-all centralization of crews whose duties drift across bureaucratic lines. A dozen desks are designated PITS—Personnel In Transition Stations, sometimes given to an agent, analyst, or exec on the way up some secret ladder, more often assigned as the pre-pension parking place for burnouts or screw-ups or rebels who were right but failed to cover their ass.

At least I dodged the PITS,
thought Faye.

So far.

The hidden flash drive burned in her closed fist.

The National Resources Operations Division she'd been exiled to fills one corner of the limbo level's factory floor, looks like a Smithsonian museum diorama with plastic walls encasing a replica of a police detective squad consisting of twelve workstation desks shared by Faye and nineteen other field agents plus a plastic-walled “inner office” of command stations for the two executives in charge of monitoring defectors, PINSS (Persons In Need of Security Supervision) like Condor, and miscellaneous but unglamorous national security/intelligence tasks shoved by agencies like the CIA, ODNI, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, DIA, and DEA into the post–9/11 beast called Homeland Security.

She glanced at the time display on a workstation's computer: 7:22
P.M.
outside in the real world of Washington, D.C.—ninety-eight minutes until 9
P.M
.

You can make it. If you find Alex, you can still—

She spotted him inside a cubicle where the blue lightning bolts were turned off.

“You got a sec?” said Faye as she plopped down beside the thin redheaded man wearing a white shirt, striped tie, and khaki slacks.

“Barely,” Alex said as he packed tools he'd used to install a hard drive in the cubicle's computer. “I got called off the bench!”

“Good for you.”

“Hey, the Dumpster I backed into still works. I drove by and checked.”

“Great, I'm kind of—”

“Anxious to tell me what you did to end up here?”

“No. What I can tell you is I need to cover my partner's ass to get out of here.”

She handed the flash drive to her instructor, Alex, from a CIA Technical Services' training class whom she'd spotted wandering the limbo's floor the week before.

“That's cell-phone video. A white car flipping a U-turn, twilight. The headlights blur the license plate, but as it drives away, maybe between the taillights' red eyes…”

Took Alex four minutes, most of which was spent pulling software from the classified national security grid onto this cubicle computer's new hard drive.

“Virginia tag,” he said as they stared at the screen's enhanced image. “I live in Virginia. You can tell me if you do, too. It's not like your real name or—”

A new window appeared on the computer screen: a completed government form.

“Weird,” said Alex. “The DMV check says that plate belongs on a green Jeep Cherokee, not a white Nissan like you got here.”

Faye suppressed the urge to grab her cell phone.

The white car knows we—somebody—was there. Drove away. If it comes back, it won't come back until it's sure it's safe, so time, I—we—Condor's got time.

He's a crazy old burnout who no opposition cares about, she told herself.

And if I bust protocol, go around my Supervising Agent Peter before officially filing the report I'm inputting in his name, trigger Alarm Status because of a license plate anomaly …
First
, given
my
status, nobody will do anything except cover their ass.
Second,
another strike on me, and I'll be lucky if I end up nailed to a PITS.

Plus she only had eighty-four minutes until
then
.

Took Faye twenty-three minutes to finish the F409 SIDER—Subject In Domicile Evaluation Report. She used the desktop her partner Peter favored, his sign-ins, prose style. Noted Condor's occasional irrationality yet lucidity and mainstream functionality, the log number for his urine sample, even their discussion of marijuana, and in Recommendations, after describing Condor's “possible paranoia” about the white car and its license plate anomaly, keyboarded:
“My partner Agent Faye Dozier strenuously urges immediate elevated security response and follow-up to potential hostile surveillance of subject as inferred by observation & verification of suspicious vehicle.”
Clicks of the desktop mouse attached iPad shots of Condor and his house, plus the white car video and DMV files.

She read the electronic report one last time.

Saw nothing that would get her into trouble she couldn't handle.

Addressed it to the proper data submission points, cc'd it to her NROD agent e-mail account and her CIA agent account, plus her legendary CIA crew chief who, after her
horror show,
fought to be sure she
only
got detailed from the Agency to Home Sec's NROD and the limbo's floor. She cc'd Bald Peter's agent e-mail account, wondered whether he'd spin on whatever bar stool he'd snuck off to and check his phone when it
pinged!
with this report he'd officially written. Whatever shit he'd give her because of her recommendation would stay between them. Unless he believed in payback. If so, that would come at her as if by chance, without his fingerprints. But they'd both know.

She stared at the text on the glowing computer screen.

Made sure the F409 SIDER designation read
CONDOR
.

Clicked
SEND
.

The report shot into the cyber ether like a bullet into the darkness.

She needed five minutes to log off duty, leave the limbo level, ride the elevator down to the ground floor, get through exit security screening and visibly
not hurry
out the revolving door in the plexiglass walls that separate Complex Zed from a stone plaza with its anti–truck bomber cement planters and sentinel lights that hold back the night.

Security cameras recorded her walk from the building to her car in the bottom level of the employee garage. She employed no obvious countersurveillance measures. Drove her middle-American maroon Ford clear of the parking garage.

Forty-nine minutes. I've got forty-nine minutes.

Faye lived in an apartment building on the edge of the cupcake emporiums, art theater movie chain, and yoga businesses district known as Bethesda-
landia
. That “
landia
” slang suffix came to life early in the twenty-first century when the middle-class but staid Maryland suburb of Bethesda morphed into one of the ritziest inside-the-Beltway 'hoods as Georgetown and upper northwest D.C. became too crowded to house all the lawyers & lobbyists & corporate & media stars who turned America's Martin Luther King assassination riot–scarred capital into the big-money burg it became beginning with
beat-an-assassin
President Ronald Reagan.

She scanned her mirrors as she drove.

Jumped a red light. Careened through a quick left she didn't need to take, another right, another left, zoomed down an alley past green Dumpsters like the one tech guru Alex expensively backed an Agency car into after two too many beers at a Thai dinner with Army officers from that country who he was training and who the case officer masquerading as his assistant was scouting for recruitment.

Faye's mirrors revealed no yellow-eyed cover team beasts behind her.

Security cameras logged her driving into her apartment building's underground parking lot with thirty-eight minutes to go. She backed the Ford into her space on the second level, pushed the
wee-oo
lock button on her key fob as she marched through the gasoline-musty light of the concrete car barn to the elevator, rode it to the
LOBBY.
Found nothing in her snail mailbox, but it could have looked suspicious if she hadn't checked.

Faye guessed right: no one presided at the front desk. Night clerk Mr. Abdullah was probably sneaking onto the manager's computer, searching for news about his family in Somalia who were trapped amidst drought, famine, pirates, a United Arab Emirates funded anti-pirates army with its own Washington, D.C., law firm, fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries, and twelve thousand blue-helmeted African Union peacekeeper troops trained by outsourced CIA contractors operating from a razor wire–surrounded complex at Mogadishu's airport that Somalis called “the pink house.”

She spotted no one else in the lobby. Security cameras for the front door, the lobby, and the rear exit logged her as she walked past the elevators to the stairwell. A routine analysis might conclude she was an office worker who felt in need of exercise.

Stairwell security cameras only covered the first flight of concrete steps and the top-floor stairwell with its roof exit. She floated up two flights of stairs, her heart pounding hard but not from the climb—every day before work, she ran a paratrooper's six miles on a park trail and then home here to run up and down the building's nine flights of stairs.

Faye stopped at the cinder-block walls' switchback between the fourth and her fifth floor. Used her cell phone to link with the computer in her home, checked the log of her computer's camera she'd interfaced with motion detectors aimed at her unit's entrance and the sliding-glass-door balcony for her one-bedroom apartment's living room:
NO ACTIVITY
. The computer camera via her cell phone screen showed the inside of her locked apartment door and the shadowed living room
empty
of any intruder.

She went to her apartment. Slid inside. All was silent. Shadowed.

Faye stared out her balcony's closed sliding glass door to the purple night shotgunned with twinkles of city lights. Imagined that off in that darkness, she could see the glow of the Lincoln Memorial, the White House and Capitol she'd driven past earlier that day, the place where she'd once escaped termination.

A wall switch snapped on a lamp of here & now. The couch, the chairs, the coffee table from some garage sale. A chin-up bar filled the top of her bedroom door.

The clock read 8:31—twenty-nine minutes
until
.

Risk a shower.

She tossed her black coat over a chair, hurried to the dark bathroom, snapped the light on and shed her suitable-for-running-or-kicking shoes. The holstered .40 Glock on her right hip went on the back of the closed toilet, hilt toward the open shower. The cell phone and her credentials went on the sink. She unbuttoned her blouse.

The bathroom mirror captured her image. She wore a black bra. The thick pink scar slashed from her sternum to her right hip. Her slacks opened easily: a year after the last surgery, she still liked to wear them loose. They drifted to the floor. She laughed as she imagined insisting to some Boss In The Sky that
black bikini underwear is indeed professional attire suitable for the office
and less likely to bind if you throw a kick. Those black panties peeled off as she stood tall in the mirror. Black bra, arms like thick silk curtain sashes, smooth stomach. That scar.

She unhooked her black bra. Let it fall.

This is me.

Head of short hair. Green eyes special only in how they see, not how they look. Mouth special only for what it never will be allowed to say.
No wrinkles on my neck, not like Mom, not yet, and there'll be a “yet,” there will be and
 … Breasts some guys think are too small but only afterward. She felt her nipples pucker with the chill in the apartment.

Turned the shower on full blast, as hot as she dared, tried to lose what she had to do and an old man named
Condor
or
Vin
in the steam and the wet. She spun the shower handle. Icy water flooded her to
focused
.

Drying with a white towel, standing in the tub, tossing the towel over the shower rod, stepping out of the tub, pulling on her slacks, slipping into the blouse and buttoning the four buttons up to her neck.
Unfasten the top button
.

She shoved the black bra and panties into the hamper.

Tossed her shoes into the bedroom, heard them clunk against the wall, the floor.

Stared into the bathroom mirror.

Be you.

But a little lip gloss wouldn't be wrong.

The mirror watched her slide the gloss tube's smooth tip over her lips.

A snap off of the bathroom light and that reflection became only a black shape.

She took her credentials and gun with her, put them in the bedside night table drawer. Slid the drawer shut. All the way shut.

Don't think about the black pistol-grip shotgun in your closet. The Glock rigged under the other side of the bed. The snub-nose .38 revolver hidden for a quick grab in the kitchen, or the 9mm Beretta strapped under the couch. Or where the knives are.

You gotta do this with your own hands.

Nine minutes until nine o'clock.

What if he's late? What will that tell you? What will that mean?

What if you can't go through with it?

She was never supposed to need to do this.

Her left hand floated to her bedroom doorjamb like it was the dance studio bar across a mirror as she straightened her spine, rose to her full height in Third Position, let that motion float her right arm up to a graceful half-moon curve above her head, then sank straight down with her knees bending out and her bare heels rising off the bedroom carpet with
Le Grand Plié
. She held that deep crouch, felt her inner thigh muscles stretch and loosen and then
up
she came with a swoop of her hand as the ballet motion became grabbing & pulling the incoming punch of an invisible attacker while smashing her palm strike into his hyperextended elbow.

The digital clock on her night table read 8:53.