Next Day of the Condor (2 page)

The silver-haired man put on his black leather jacket.

Stepped out into the light.

I’m in a parking lot.

Low gray sky, cool sun glistening on rows of parked cars surrounding a tan cement, crouched dragon building. Waves of sound whooshing past.

Slouching from the dragon building came a trio of zombies.

“No fucking way!” muttered Vin, muttered Condor.

Zombies, but their make-up and costumes were so lame you could tell who they weren’t.

“Happy Halloween,” said Brian as he posted beside Vin.

The zombies climbed into a five-year-old car with New Jersey license plates.

Doug said: “Today, everybody else is in costume.”

His partner shook his head: “Don’t be impressed. He’s had the whole ride to think of that one, too.”

“Go figure,” said Doug. “It’s fucking 2011 and everywhere you look,
zombies
.”

“If we’ve got zombies,” said Condor, said Vin, “do you got guns?”

Call it a pause in the cool morning air.

Then Doug answered: “We’re fully sanctioned.”

Condor shrugged. “As long as what you’re full of is sanction.”

The Escort Operatives stared at him with eyes that were stone canyons.

“You expecting trouble?” said Brian.

“Always. Never.” Condor shook his head. “My meds are supposed to suffocate expectations.”

“You just need some breakfast,” said Brian. “Stand here a minute, get your land legs under you, get your breath, then we’ll get something to eat.”

“Want to do
T’ai chi
?” Doug gestured to a white gazebo in the corner of the parking lot. “Get your Form on?”

“That’s not low-profile,” said Vin, said Condor. “Citizens might think I’m weird.”

“Really,” said Brain. “
That’s
what would make you seem weird?”

“Remember,
Vin,
” said Doug: “We can do anything we want as long as nobody ever knows who we are. You know that’s the heart and hard of any Op’, so play it cool. Low key. Absolutely normal.”

“Normal has been a problem.”

“You’re past that now,” said Brian. “Remember?”

“Meanwhile,” said Doug, “welcome to the Nick Logar Rest Stop on the
New Jersey Turnpike
.”

“Monday morning, Halloween, 2011,” said Brian. “Zero-nine-three three.”

Doug frowned. “Who was Nick Logar?”

“Who cares?” said Brian.

Condor surprised them: “Poet. Black & white movies days, tough times, people working hard to just hold on, rich guys on top even after the stock market crash, bad guys savaging the world. Kind of quirky getting a rest stop named after Nick Logar. Rebel politics, road crazy. But nobody likes to talk about that, just his Congressional Medal of Honor and Pulitzer Prize for poetry no one reads, except for that famous one that doesn’t flap the flag like—
God
,
it feels good to just
talk!
”

“And look at you!” said Doug. “Got a lot to say and up on literature and shit.”

“My first spy job was to know things like that.”

Brian shrugged. “My first was a take-out in Tehran. We’re not talking dinner.”

“Let’s talk breakfast,” said Doug.

“Fuck talking,” said Brian. “Let’s eat.”

The silver-haired man brushed his hands down the front of his black leather jacket, amateurishly revealing worry over not finding a gun hidden under there and thus implying that years of confinement had succeeded in making him not
Condor
but
Vin
.

“Chill,” said Brian. “Everything’s normal and OK. Just look.”

Condor didn’t tell his Escort Operative that
normal
and
OK
are not the same.

But he did
look
.

The parked gray van faced a chain link fence that made the north boundary of the rest stop. Beyond the fence, a yellowed marsh filled the median between Northbound and Southbound lanes of the Turnpike. The van sat closer to the Southbound lane, and that route’s exit into the rest stop made a sloping hill behind the white gazebo.

The van’s rear bumper faced four rows of cars parked in white striped spaces on the side of the rest stop’s crouching dragon “facility” building, tan cement walls and a New Mexico meets Hong Kong green roof. The facility sat on a raised knoll to stay above rainwater runoff. Glass doors front & centered the facility, a dragon’s face where a protruding tongue of concrete steps led down to the pavement between a mustache of two sloped ramps. The glass doors reflected the nearly full front parking lot.

People. Lots and lots of people.

A squat bleached blonde woman in a pink mohair sweater rummaged in her car’s open trunk with one hand while her other held a straining leash clipped to the collar of a yippy terrier. The dog’s and the bleached blonde’s pink sweaters matched.

A young guy wearing a padded black costume, hip or horror, Condor couldn’t tell, carried a brown paper sack as he walked toward the facility’s rear and waiting green dumpsters below circling seagulls, plus the entrance to the Northbound road, the direction a mouse named Stuart Little took looking for love and a life to call his own.

A smiling family of Japanese tourists clustered together in the parking lot for pictures one of them took with a cell phone.

Call him twenty-four looking nineteen, baseball cap on backwards, gray sweatshirt, low slung blue jeans, sneakers shuffling toward the facility.

Two men in suits parked their dark-colored car.

A married couple who’d seen fifty in their rearview mirrors stepped out of their parked Chevy, slammed its doors and sighed as they shuffled in to use the bathrooms.

My next is now
, thought Condor.

Brian said: “Let’s get something before.”

“Before what?” said Condor as his escorts walked him toward the facility.

Doug said: “Before your transfer ride shows up. Should have been here already.”

“What about you guys?”

“Places to go,” said Brian, “people to see.”

“Is this the time you’re going to do more than just
see
?” said Doug.

“Shut the fuck up,” said his partner. Lovingly.

Three soda machines selling bottles and cans of caffeine & sugar & chemical concoctions stood sentinel near the ramp Condor and his escorts took to the glass front doors, past a bench where three
probably
just graduated high school girls sat, two of them wearing
hajib
headresses, all of them smoking cigarettes.

What struck Condor inside the rest stop facility was its atmosphere of closeness, of containment. The densely packed air smelled of…

Of floor tiles. Crackling meat grease. Hot sugar. Lemon scented ammonia.

Ahead gaped entrances for MENS and LADIES rooms. The wall between the restrooms held a YOU ARE HERE map and a bronze plaque with lines of writing that travellers hurrying into the bathrooms only glanced at but Condor read:

Off to Condor’s left waited the gift shop, wall racks of celebrity magazines and candy, glass coolers with yet more cans of syrupy caffeine, displays of key chains dangling green plastic models of the Statue of Liberty, T-shirts and buttons that “hearted” New York, postcards that nobody mailed anymore.

He turned right, toward the food court, a long open corridor with garish neon signs above each stop where money could be exchange for sustenance.

There was ‘bucks, the coffee-centered franchise intent on conquering the world.

DANDY DONUTS! came next in line, sold coffee, too, essentially the same concoctions as ‘bucks but somehow not as costly.

The red, white & green logo for SACCO’S ITALIA seen mostly in airports, train stations or rest stops centered the food stops wall.

Italian green gave way to broccoli green letters on a white background: NATURAL EATS & FRO YO, where display cases held plastic sealed salads and silver machines hummed behind the counter.

Last in the line of eateries came BURGERS BONAZA, the third biggest chain of hamburger and fries and cola drive-ins of Condor’s youth, still clinging to that national sales rank partially because a dozen years remained on the company’s 50 year exclusive lease for this state’s Turnpike stops signed with an unindicted former governor.

“Come on,” Brian told Condor.

Gray tables lined the red tiles between the wall of eateries and the not quite ceiling-to-floor windows. Travellers sat on hard-to-shoplift black metal chairs.

Brian took a chair facing those front windows. Condor sat where he could look down the food court to the main doors, or look left out to the front parking lot through the wall of windows, or look right and see Doug shuffling in service lines. Behind Condor, a door labeled OFFICE waited near a glass door under a red sign glowing FIRE EXIT.

“What time is it?” asked Condor.

“No worries,” said Brian. “We’re where we belong and when we should be.”

Doug came to them balancing cardboard trays like a man who’d worked his way through college as a waiter. The trays held ‘bucks cups, plastic glasses of white yogurt and strawberry chunks, containers of raisins and granola, bananas, spoons, napkins, a white plastic knife almost useless for cutting someone’s throat.

“And six donuts?” said Brian.

“The secret to life is knowing how to mix and match,” said his partner. “Evens out health-wise with the yogurt. Gives us some bulk and energy for the ride back. Three classic chocolate donuts, three seasonal special pumpkin maple donuts. In good conscience, how could we pass those up?”

“You guys are driving back to Maine?” said Condor.

“Brooklyn,” said Brian as he sliced a banana into his yogurt.

“Somebody’s insisting on an overnight there,” explained his partner.

Two kindergarten aged boys ran past the table trailed by their harried mother.

“You wouldn’t believe Brooklyn now,” Brian told Condor.

“I didn’t believe it then.”

Doug said: “There’s this ultra-hip coffee shop not far from—”

“Hey!” said his partner.

“Come on,” Doug told his partner. “You can’t just show up hoping she will.”

The silver-haired man who was old enough to be the two gunners’ father smiled.

Said: “We’ve all done that.”

“What’s the worst that could happen if you finally talked to her?” said Doug.

Condor shrugged. “You could watch your dreams die in her eyes.”

“Me,” said Doug, “I was gonna say
alimony
, but troop, if you do not engage the enemy, you create no chance of success.”

His partner whispered: “Who’s the enemy?”

“Ourselves,” said Condor.

Brian blinked at the silver-haired legend. “
My man
: Welcome back!”

Condor ate his pumpkin maple donut as he stared out the window at travelers walking to and from their steel rides. Saw the guy dressed in padded black close the door on…
yes
, it
was
an old black hearse, walking away carrying a gym bag toward the south end of the rest stop and the rows of gas pumps controlled by attendants whose jobs were protected by state law. A yellow rental truck drove through Condor’s view.