Last Days of the Condor (13 page)

“So,” said Sami to the glaring bosses, “I know who you all are. You're the dead man's CO from NROD in Home Sec,
sorry,
I know what it's like to lose a man. Standing next to you, we got Supervising Special Agent Bechtel of the FBI, nice to see you again, Rich. I've never met you, Deputy Director Martinez, but the whispers are you seem to know how to navigate the ODNI mess you got.

“But our question is:
Are you putting me in charge of this or not?

“Our luck means I got nineteen of the best headhunters ever carried a sanction posting up right here in the Action Area, coincidental training gig for a shit storm like this. What I see here and now, you're already behind on the ABCs.”

Deputy Director Martinez from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who only knew the legends about Sami said to him: “What alphabet?”

“
A,
” said Sami. “
Action
. This isn't one of our Ops, so any Action we do is part of somebody else's chain of cause and effect. Look at their Action: our guy nailed to the wall in the home listed to a High-Alert disabled vet of ours who's gone nobody knows where. Whatever our Action is, it needs to break free of the other guys' chains to do any good, so it's gotta be big and fast and hard all the way up to extreme prejudice.

“
B,
” said Sami. “
Bounce
. How's this thing gonna bounce around, how are we going to control everybody's everything so nothing more gets broken than it has to.

“But what you're most worried about is
C,
” said Sami. “
Cover
. How are we going to put a cover over all this so it doesn't hurt U.S. national security
or
hurt the
U
and
S
that spells
us
.

“You want to start?” said Sami. “Get half these people outta here. There's a school parking lot to reconvene at somewhere near here…”

A blond woman agent in his cadre shouted out the school name and address.

“Get most everybody gone before the crowd of citizens outside gets any bigger,” said Sami. “And call an ambulance.”

ODNI DD Martinez said: “He's—”

“Dead,” said Sami. “Let's get him down from there, show some respect.”

“Crime Scene Investigators haven't gotten here.”

“If they're en route, wave them off. We're not cops. Unless Rich here is claiming this for the FBI, does anybody really think any of this is going to go to lawyers and rules of evidence some public fucking
trial
?”

ODNI DD Martinez blinked.

Ordered an ambulance called. Ordered “all nonessentials” out.

“Hold up.” Sami looked at Faye. “Who rolled on this with you?”

“That would be me,” said David, the ex–Brooklyn cop.

Asshole Harris pleaded with both hands raised: “I just got logged onto their ride.”

Sami told him: “Now you're logged on for CPR.”

“What?”
said Harris.

“Ambulance gets here,” said Sami, “bundles up our boy, you get on top of him, on top of the stretcher, ride it all the way into the ambulance, kneel on each side of our
man down
and make big show of giving him CPR chest compressions.”

Ex-cop David
got it,
volunteered: “I'll work squeezing the breathing bag.”

No one—not Faye, not Harris or the ex–Brooklyn cop David, not any of the four national security executives—no one contradicted Sami.

Who said: “Everybody else except for my team and Faye, drift out of here. Hang around outside. You're concerned. Upset. Responded to one of those commercially available panic alarms for help from a disabled vet, a—ex-FBI, explains the badges, guns, the too fucking many red lights. What was our guy's work name?”

“UNN!”
grunted one of the suits as he pulled the knife out of dead Peter's left hand. The bald man's body slumped toward the floor.

His pale former Home Sec NROD boss said: “The knifed agent is—was—”

“Not him,” said Sami. “What was Condor's work name?”

Faye called out: “Vin.”

Frowned. Asked Sami: “Do you know him?”

“
Vin,
” Sami told the agents inside the murder house. “Every TV watcher knows every badge rolls on any ‘
officer down
' call. That's why so many of you came here, kicked in the door. Found our guy
Vin,
our colleague, your buddy,
lying on the floor
. No knives. Heart attack. Still alive. Now it's
Vin
going out of here on the stretcher to the ER. Old guys, heart attacks: ordinary news. Be like the cell phone cameras out there, watch them take a' old guy getting CPR away in an ambulance, listen for any dangerous leaks or rumbles gossiping in the bystanders, follow it up soft but certain. Let it be heard out there how the cops' association is asking for volunteer badges—who are gonna be us—to sit on
Vin
's stuff because of the busted door.
Go!
”

Without waiting for confirmation from the official executives, the herd of America's security and intelligence agents did as Sami said.

That ex-Marine who'd thrived as a teenager in the sniper streets of Beirut turned to the quartet of his fellow Americans who all outranked him, said: “So?”

Four intelligence commanders looked at the legend in front of them.

Knew there was no more time for phone calls.

Knew they were on the line.

Knew how to hand off to a fall guy.

Martinez of the umbrella agency ODNI got the nods. Told Sami: “Green light.”

“Full sanction.” Not a question from Sami, but his stare demanded confirmation.

“Yes,” said Martinez.

Within two minutes Sami'd made sure everyone on-scene had the phone number of a command center he'd set up but not activated at Complex Zed before he'd raced from there to here with carloads of his cadre.

“I've got two-man teams already working a wheel-out from here,” said Sami. “They're driving in circles, progressively working their way out from the house. They got the iPad photos from yesterday's home visit report, the data on Condor.”

He sent teams to Union Station to cover the tracks, its subway entrance, food courts and upper parking lots where buses left for Baltimore, New York, Boston. Made sure TSA at area airports had photos of Condor on their cell phones and alert screens. Made sure Condor's photos got Priority Match status with Facial Recognition Software programs on the grid of federal, state, and local Big Brother cameras.

“Circle a perimeter five blocks out so it won't hit the
looky-loos
who are here,” said Sami. “Get the D.C. cops to help FBI guys, flash badges, describe Condor, see if him being around tonight hits with any witnesses
without
polluting their timeline credibility of having seen him around before. If we get a hit, confirm with pictures.

“Get our people to the homeless shelters,” he told one of his cadre who was coordinating his commands. “One inside, backup outside. Stay the night. Gonna be cold out there. Gonna rain. He's not going to hide under bridges because he knows cops drive past with the spotlights on, and make sure they do. Hospitals, museums, any place that's been open since Condor got off work. Come back every four hours. Agents who officially approach gatekeepers should use a … a Department of Social Services rap, a lost Alzheimer tourist—
maybe
: say we don't want to create a false press report in case it's just an old guy sneaking off from visiting his grandkids to get laid.”

The cadre's Harlan asked: “What Intensity Level?”

The room held its breath.

Sami said: “One of our guys got cut down. We lose no more people. We let no bad guys get away. Locate, cover, call in a collection team and back up. We got
zero
solid that Condor is a killer, though no doubt he cruises Crazytown. He's a person of extreme interest. We want him. Want to talk to him. But don't let him get away.”

Sami pointed to a woman in his cadre. “I skimmed the visitation report from yesterday by our dead guy on the way here. A white car, stolen license plate. Go with uniformed cops from that jurisdiction, Virginia suburbs. A low-key investigation, but brace everybody associated with that license plate about a white car, smell out who they really are. If you don't get anything, smile, say thank you, just routine, drive away. But no matter what, full-spectrum geographic and behavior profiles, full cover teams on them.”

He designated three agents to sit on this house, a fourth who was ex–murder police from Baltimore to “run the janitors, suck up the scene,” bag any physical evidence beyond the bloody knives pulled from Peter's crucified palms.

Walked to where Faye leaned against the wall, said: “How are you doing?”

“Wasn't him,” said Faye. “He's crazy, but he's more clever than this.”

“Easy to buy either way, given his record.”

“What record?” she said.

“What you know now is what's important. We'll go over that back at your HQ building. You're in quarantine. There's an ambush team already in your apartment.”

And a squirrel team,
she thought. Knew there was nothing there they'd find she couldn't live with.
Nothing in there about Chris
.

Faye said: “I want the streets.”

“After we debrief,” he said.

She said: “Do you know Condor?”

“What you don't know won't get in your way,” he told her. “I want you running free and hard and full-on after you tell me what you can tell me.”

Faye said: “Besides my two guys you put on the ambulance CPR scam, there were two Homeland Security hard guys who breached this place with me. The guy with the scraggy blond goatee, the other guy—”

“Can they tell me anything about Condor?”

“I don't see why.”

“Then let's keep them on the streets. We want every gun looking.”

“You mean every badge.”

“We'll talk when I get back to the Task Force command center.”

Sami walked away, past the ambulance crew muscling a butchered body onto a waist-high wheeled stretcher.

Harlan came to her and she knew to pass him the car keys before he held out his hand. Faye waited with Harlan inside the bloody living room while the ambulance crew and Brooklyn cop David and asshole Harris kneeling on the stretcher played out the CPR farce on a corpse, roared off in the siren-screaming ambulance.

She left Sami staring at Condor's mad collage wall.

Heard him whisper: “What are you trying to say?”

 

11

Secret heart of lonely.
(what Condor always wrongly thought the song says)

—Yardbirds, “Heart Full of Soul”

Screaming someone's screaming! Wet blood on—

Condor realized:
It's me screaming
.

Bolted upright wrapped in wet plastic bags & jackets. Wearing a cap. Butt on the concrete of a cemetery in the gray of false dawn. Fists in yellow rubber gloves.

Every joint, every muscle, everything ached.
Won't survive another night outside.

Morning light bathed gravestones in the cemetery. He smelled wet grass.

You're where you're going to end up. Stay.

Your canvas shopping bag holds drugstore scissors.

These are your wrists.

Right here, right now, cut yourself free from the handcuffs of whoever
they
are.

Condor stood with his ghosts amidst a garden of gravestones in a city of marble dreams where so many somebodies wanted him dead or silent or a servant to what they said was sensible. Wind stirred the trees and the sky was blue and he could not fly away.

The only way you're not a lie is to fight to be true.

You're not going to choose to fucking lose.

Ghosts
watched Vin eat leftover Chinese food, take
be healthy not cured
pills.

The scissors trimmed the three pairs of footpad inserts but only two sets fit under his feet in his black sneaker-like shoes. He felt taller, no worse balance.

Stones from the Zen garden let him break the dark lenses out of the Roy Orbison sunglasses. Condor taped plastic cling wrap into taut transparencies over the lens holes. Search metrics account for sunglasses or empty frames as disguises. The “lenses” he made registered on camera scans as existing, let him see—though with distorted translucence. The huge black frames dominated his face, changed his profile.

Condor kept his thermal underwear on under his blue shirt and black jeans, put his blue raincoat in a garbage bag. They have photos of that coat from that Faye and the murdered man's Monday visit two days ago. Yesterday's surveillance footage from the Library of Congress office building would show his gray sports jacket. He dropped the sports jacket into the trash bag. By now, squirrel teams would have cataloged his closets. Two missing jackets/coats doubled the data they had to BOLO.

Condor strapped himself into the Kangaroo Love baby carrier. Stuffed his black leather jacket into the baby pouch over his stomach. Hid that under his maroon nylon jacket.

Maybe discerning eyeballs will notice the jacket isn't really covering too many beers and fast-food hamburgers, but Facial Recognition Software in security cameras around town will register my fat guy as 0 not 1, signal NO MATCH to the grid.

He pulled on the baseball cap: amateur, but every bit of bad data helps.

Bottles of makeup clinked in his jacket pockets as he policed the pavilion. His pill bottles bulged in his shirt pockets. Everything not in the Kangaroo Love or his pockets went into a trash bag he ditched behind a tree.
Keep your hands free.