Last Days of the Condor (9 page)

He didn't retreat when she put a dollar bill in the Styrofoam cup by the coffeepot, filled her own Styrofoam cup. Indeed, he came closer, and
fuck trusting the Committee's metal detectors,
she eyeballed him for a hidden weapon, saw his cup contained only water.

Over the burn of long-heated coffee she had to admit he smelled good. She was drenched in nervous sweat, hoped the perfume she seldom wore covered that with a scent of lilacs. He sent a bespectacled nod to the Senators and spy execs in the fishbowl.

“So,” he said, “after I left, what did you guys talk about in there?”

“Seriously?”

“I know you're CIA so I had to say something that would shock a real response,” he told her. “Because if talking about what's really going on is out, we have to resort to some kind of disembodied chatter where I start out asking you safe things, like which camp were your parents, Rolling Stones or Beatles.”

“That's your chatter?”

“I was hoping for
our
chatter, but
yeah
. What else can I say to you?”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“If I tried to hit you, you'd break my arm in like six places.”

“Probably only two.”

“Thanks for your restraint.” He shrugged both hands into the air and smiled with his blue eyes. “And while I'm not hitting on you, per se, the intent is clearly growing.”

“Per se?”

“Sorry, I talk like that sometimes when I'm nervous.”

“I make you nervous?”

“Since the moment I saw you.”

“This oughta be good.”

“It's the way you stood—
stand
. You're here. Stepping right up and taking it. And true to that. Whatever it is.” He waved his fawn-suited hand. “Blew me away.”

“So you decided to recruit me.”

“There's an idea. Do you play Ultimate?”

“What?”

“Ultimate Frisbee. Like soccer. Only with plastic discs. A stoner sport.”

Faye said: “So you're a stoner? And think I am?”

“I'm a randomly drug-tested federal employee. Yesterday is gone if not forgotten.

“It's a simple game,” he said. “You toss, you catch, you run. No contact.”

“Rules,” she said.

“Honor code,” he replied.

“Sounds like a pastime for sophomores.”

He nodded to the fishbowl where Senators frowned to show they were serious. “I spend all day up on this hill chasing back and forth after whatever gets thrown into the air by them, so getting to catch and toss something real while running in what passes for clean air …
Yeah,
that feels pretty good. And I'm a long way from being a sophomore.”

“Which way?”
Don't stare at the fishbowl!

And he laughed. Just …
did it
. Laughed. Out loud and in the open.

Said: “Some days that's open to debate.

“You should come,” he said.

“What?”

“More or less seven o'clock tomorrow night unless we get a freak September storm. Down on the Mall, the grass alongside the east wing of the National Gallery.”

“You want me to play?”

“I want you to give you the chance.”

“You're all heart.” She gulped the bitter coffee. Tossed the white cup in the trash, couldn't pretend anymore to ignore what was going on in the fishbowl.

“I'm Chris,” he said. “Chris Harvie.”

She walked away.

As he said: “Can I ask your name?”

Faye refused to turn around. Watched the fishbowl that trapped her tomorrows.

Traps my today,
she thought that Tuesday seven months later as
après
Starbucks Condor walked back to work over empty sidewalks and she walked across the cubicle-crowded, blue-lightning-bolts limbo level and into NROD's clear-walls corral.

“Where's Peter?” she said to her half-dozen men and women colleagues.

“Did you lose your partner?” said Harris with a snide look that lied and said he knew more than he did.

He's not worth the bullet
. Faye claimed an empty desktop computer, checked the online agent duty roster. Frowned. Saw one of the two bosses in NROD's inner office.

Stuck her head in, said: “Why is my partner detailed to Admin this morning?”

The section co-commander who insisted you call her
Pam
checked the computer at her desk, shrugged. “Probably some data-processing glitch.”

“Is it about me?” asked Faye.

“Why, did you do something wrong?”

Faye returned Pam's shrug, said: “
Naw.
You know me, boss.”

As she walked away, Faye heard Boss Pam say: “No, I don't.”

No,
Faye hadn't planned on going to that Ultimate Frisbee game the night after Sami worked a miracle, covered everyone's ass with the Senate oversight committee and cut some deals that eventually sent her to Home Sec's NROD in Complex Zed, but that next day she couldn't, she just
couldn't
stay in her new Bethesda apartment staring out at the autumn leaves of the political metropolis she'd need to get used to again.

She went for a late run like she often did, but that evening she and her backpack cleared any brick surveillance, only ran as far as the Bethesda Metro before she caught a train, transferred to the Blue Line, spotted Frisbee players on the grassy Mall, walked to them and watched him watch her (and miss a catch) as she took something from under her sweatshirt, put it in her knapsack that she secured to a tree with a bicycle lock.

He called out: “She's with us!”

But he cut her no slack when players switched around so they were on opposite sides. Between the post-surgery push-ups, pull-ups, and running, she was in better shape, but he never hesitated to play as hard against her as he could.

Standing beside him as he caught his breath, she said: “So this is what people do?”

“What people?” he gasped.

“People our age. Normal people.”

“Nobody's normal,” he said. “You know that.”

Somebody yelled
Go!
They ran to and fro on the green grass under Washington's evening sky. The ivory Capitol dome rose a few blocks beyond one side of their playing field, while a quarter mile from the other sideline rose the Washington Monument topped by blinking red lights.

Faye had her cover story ready, a driver's license from Ohio, but no one hit her with Washington's ubiquitous defining question of
“What do you do?”

She thought:
They've carved out this time from their imposed reality
.

Still, she deduced that many players were Congressional aides, that one handsome guy with curly hair worked for a telecommunications giant, a woman was a waitress waiting to hear about law school, two other women already were beginning associates in some D.C. legal factory where they'd go back to their desks and work toward midnight.

After the last game, Faye caught a ride with strangers to the chosen burgers & beers bar, watched him smoothly cut her out of the crowd to end up sitting with her and their third-round beers at the far end of the jukebox bar where no one could hear them.

“Nicely maneuvered,” she told him. Told Chris. Chris Harvie.

“I am working my hardest here,” he said.

“Not gonna get you anywhere.”

“You mean besides where we already are.” He shrugged. “So I might as well give you the worst of it.”

Which was his father walked into a San Francisco fog one kindergarten night and never came back until another family sent high school junior Chris, his sister, and their mother his obituary for
their
husband-father. Which was exceeding law school rules on how much outside employment he could take driving pre-dawn bakery delivery trucks while going to Stanford. Which was a car wreck he shouldn't have walked away from, a few “bonehead” accidents on the summer-job California state highway crew that helped fill his undergraduate scholarship gap at Brown University, some unspecified “loutish” behavior with women. Which was breaking into an apartment a heartbeat ahead of a police raid to flush his buddy's LSD stash after the buddy's vindictive ex-girlfriend lied and ratted him out to the police as a dealer on her cell phone right in front of Chris.

“Oh, and I was a virgin until I was twenty-one,” he told Faye.

Shrugged: “I wanted to get it right.”

“What happened to her?”

“Better things.” He drained what he'd said would be his last beer. “And the rest, well, you probably already ran a background check.”

“That's the kind of thing you'd have a colleague who owes you do off the books.”

“You sure don't need a lawyer.”

“No, I don't.” She got off the stool, slung her backpack weighted with her holstered gun she hadn't slipped back on under her sweatshirt.

Said: “My name is Faye Dozier.”

“For real?”

Left him with her smile as she entered that night alone.

Faye worked alone all that Tuesday morning after the night she met Condor—“morning” being relative, given that NROD agents work staggered shifts and hers started at 10
A.M.
She wrote an impassioned report on why Immigration should admit the neighbors of a young man who'd spent three years as an interpreter for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, not one betrayal, several acts of heroism, and all he wanted was to marry the girl next door and be free in Kansas.

At 1:23
P.M
., she checked the online duty roster.

Peter was still “Detailed Admin.”

Plus now he was NU/UC—No Unauthorized/Unnecessary Contact.

As per regs, he'd texted his Status Confirm every two hours.

One of the nicer and newer NROD agents, a sharp ex–Brooklyn cop named David, said: “I hope his Admin deal isn't Internal Affairs calling him out for drinking.”

“We don't call it Internal Affairs,” said Faye as they stared at the computer monitor screen. “We call it the Office of Professional Responsibility.”

“Oh. Is that what ‘
we
' call it?”

“I'm a spy,” she told David. “Not a rat.”

The first Monday night after that Frisbee game, Chris Harvie came home from work to his U Street rented apartment—a neighborhood that went Obama-era
tres chic
after being Jimmy Carter–era
tres noir
—and found
My name is Faye Dozier
standing in his living room.

“I picked your locks,” she said before he could speak. “I could have searched your place, but I didn't, I won't. I'll tell you nothing rather than lie. I expect the same from you.”

September chilled that week. She wore ugly jeans. A ratty old sweater and a green nylon flight jacket with zero patches that she'd got in Kandahar. She unfastened the waistband holster heavy with her newly issued Glock, put it on top of a stack of novels on his sofa's cheap end table.

“That comes with me,” she said.

She struggled out of her wool sweater.

Faye'd worn her ugliest, most unflattering white exercise bra.

That night her scar still puckered pink and angry.

“This is me, too. I might never tell you about it, but it's big, you can see, it's big, and no matter that I'm a hundred percent medically, I fucked up and it fucked me up.”

She watched his blue eyes that hadn't looked away.

His mouth that hadn't said a thing.

Faye said: “I can walk out that door. No regrets. No blowback. No tears. Just gone. Or I can stay and we can see what we can see.”

He crossed his room to her. Cupped her face in his hands.

Said: “Stay. You already beat my locks.”

Never gonna forget that,
Faye was thinking at 5:28 on the evening after the night Chris cupped her mouth & then … She blinked back into focus, into her computer monitor at a desk, scrolled down all field agents' mandated daily review of America's on-average 270
+
Actions/Alerts.

“A/A is like a cop shop's daily lineup of who got popped the night before,” ex–Brooklyn detective David had described it.

“Only it's all digital, all online, all the time,” Faye'd replied.

At 5:29
P.M
. that Tuesday, Faye read the classified A/A report from Los Angeles on how starving sea lion pups who were washing up on Southern California beaches at more than five times the usual frequency had cleared terrorist-linked toxicology analysis and therefore this Event Syndrome's TSR—Threat Spectrum Rating—had dropped from six to one out of one hundred possible data-rated TSR levels.

“Dozier!” yelled the deputy commander named Ralph from the doorway of his box within a box of NROD's dioramic squad room. “Get in here! David—”

He yelled to the ex–Brooklyn cop.

“—Harris,” yelled the commander to the snide asshole. “You, too.”

Faye beat the other agents to the huddle with their boss Ralph.

“Nineteen minutes ago,” said the boss, “our boy Peter missed his two-hour window for routine Status Confirm. His detail contact to Admin gave him fifteen minutes' grace and had the decency to call me before they upload into the system. We all know that Peter sometimes … His bald head can be lax about things.”

Harris started a snide drinking remark—ex-cop David elbowed him silent.

“Fuck Peter's ‘
I'm a star
' with a new NU/UC status,” said his boss. “I called him. Straight to voice mail. The GPS ping on his phone…”

The boss focused on Faye: “… puts him on Capitol Hill at the address of a PINSS you two interviewed yesterday.”

“
Condor,
” whispered Faye.
Off work half an hour ago. Probably walked home.

The boss said: “Fuck if I know why Peter's doing follow-up, but that's what I just found logged into the system. He's out there, dinging the grid, and we've got…”