by James Grady
Alone with you in this 9:47 a.m. locked third floor lemon ammonia corridor.
Push her to the wall. Nora gasps.
Drop to your knees. Your unworthy hands circle her ankles. Slide up her calves, her white slacks. Her thighs tense like a mare. Caresses her crotch. Cup the moon of her hips. Your hands travel her spine to heaving shoulders, the front of her uniform, down and oh! Your grasps fill with her heavy now, better than any dream and Yes! she’s concealing no phone, no weapon. Let go and where you touched burns.
Nora hisses: “Ten minutes until Half ’n’ Half. And that’s the last time you ever touch me like that!”
Tell a truth. Tell a lie. “I hope so.”
She makes you lead the way, buzzed into the Dayroom ruled by orderlies with barbell muscles. Hope none of them are the spy. Two orderlies unfold chairs in a circle for Group as five of your fellow whackos and psychiatrist Dr. Cohn watch. Nora heads to that shrink. Will she rat you out? You walk to the duty desk where Administrator Josh flashes a what’s-up? smile.
Tell him: “Nora sent me to get you.”
“Thanks, man.” Josh. Mr. Friendly. Mr. pictures of my kids Guy.
Who saunters from behind the desk toward his colleagues.
Quick! Pull the pink messages pad from down your pants where you shoved it after you pickpocketed it from groping-shocked Nora. Use a blue crayon stolen from Art Therapy—writes, but can’t be sharpened into a weapon beyond what you scrawl on the pink message slip you stick under the lock-secured desk phone.
Join the group settling in the folding chairs’ circle.
Half ’n’ Half:
Half short-timers pulled from meltdowns in today’s cloisters of national security.
Half longtime lock-ups like white-haired Green Beret Zane whose sanity never came back from Saigon and CIA Victor who blew preventing 9/11 while getting his lover butchered.
And you. Condor. What happened to you?
Theory is, mix still potentially productive superstars of spook world with brilliant burnouts who are never going home and the Group Therapy will help the short-timers see that they don’t have it so bad, make them want to get better.
Three short-timers.
There’s mangy-haired, scab-picker Clare, a legendary CIA analyst who wakes up screaming that Osama bin Laden isn’t he isn’t! dead.
And got-the-shakes Paul, Chief of Station Kiev, who had to keep smiling at a cocktail party as he realized the infilt’ team of Ukrainians he’d Green Lit into Russia were sneaking straight into a Putin ambush.
The last short-timer is the only one besides frisked Nora who you know is not the spy: pudgy Weston who wrangled Big Data for the NSA until he started seeing human ears crawling on the floor.
He’s not the spy because he’s the spy’s target.
Because in yesterday’s Group, Dr. Cohn said: “Next time, Weston, you share.”
Then the cell phone disappeared.
To report whatever Weston will say today, now.
Count the suspects: Josh. Four muscled orderlies. Dr. Cohn. Scab-picker Clare. Got-the-shakes Paul. Even white-haired vet Zane or 9/11 haunted Victor: Weston’s NSA secrets share might be worth more than money, might negotiate a way out of here.
“Weston,” says Dr. Cohn: “Go.”
That NSA genius whispers: “There are ears everywhere!”
Victor says: “Tell us what we don’t know.”
Is it him?
By the wall with four orderlies and Josh: Nora, sad eyes. Did she tell?
Weston whispers: “I’m not here because the ears listen.”
Josh drifts back toward the control desk.
“I freaked out because it only takes three steps to make the ears talk.”
Josh reaches the control desk. Spots that pink message slip.
“Trick the ears, an easy three step hack, then any villain knows corporate plans, billionaires’ bank accounts, presidents’ scams, that website you visited!”
Josh frantically unlocks the desk’s phone, punches in the number blue crayoned on the pink message slip above: “yr kids’ school, active shooter rampage”
“First hijacking step: get a great laptop.”
Watch the orderlies. The shrink. Your fellow whackos circled with you on folding chairs. Not pawed and cleared Nora. Or tricked and thus eliminated Josh listening to the buzz from calling the this-device number you sneaked off the stashed phone.
“Second step: transmit something the ears hunger to hear.”
Vibration.
Coming from suddenly pale CIA exec Paul getting a surprise call.
We are what we do.
Your only play is crazy.
Charge across the circle. Palm-strike Paul’s forehead. Screaming not just you two screaming. Paul grabs you—backwards-somersault judo foot in his stomach. He whirls over you. Paul crashes through panic-abandoned chairs, hits the tiles and skids over them as you yell: “Did you betray your infilt’ team, too?”
Orderlies swarm and pin you.
Rip the shirtsleeve off your trapped left arm.
Nora points: “On the floor!”
A cell phone trailing a gray duct tape strip stuck to Paul’s combat-bared stomach.
Weston screams as he runs in circles: “Ears! Ears!”
Two orderlies roll off you to chase him.
Victor, not going to blow it again, chops Paul’s neck as that traitor tries to rise.
Prick burns your left arm. Hypodermic needle. No matter what, rules send you to padded cell lockdown for violence, minimum a month, and as you melt into a drugged blur, your last conscious maybe crazy vision is of smiling ruby lips.
Jasmine Daze
of the Condor
First published in Playboy, 2015
You’re crammed into the backseat of a banana-scented Toyota rumbling through a battered city’s night. Riding shotgun is the cleric Ahmed. He holds a cellphone: its glow shows you’ve got just 47 minutes to make it to the Exfilt.
So abort trying to identify the Firm’s target amidst the six people jammed into this car with you. Otherwise, if the bad guy doesn’t get you, then your crazy will.
Streetlights work but darkness fills the flat glass buildings and shuttered stores streaming past the car windows. A trash barrel burns on a street corner. A white dog trots through the headlights 45 minutes before your only chance for rescue.
Mashed beside Ahmed in the front seat is Travua, he claims to be a geek. Nour drives, her college coed hair flying wild. On your left sits Skander, says he’s a mortician. On your right, Renee strobes she hates your guts. Silver threads lace her black hair. Then comes Zied who smells of goats as he says: “We thought you were dead.”
Answer: “Just locked up.”
“Guantanamo?” asks cleric Ahmed.
“No. The CIA’s secret insane asylum.”
Maine forest, bare trees swaying like skeletons. A castle. Hypodermics.
“How’d you get out?” asks geek Travua.
“Broke the rules.”
Six days ago. A suit from Langley sends the white coats out of your padded cell. Says: “You’re our optimal chance.”
Because of 1989. Berlin Wall falls. The Soviet-Afghan war you’ve been helping fuel ends. You leave Paris. Leave Renee.
But she’s still a street dreamer. Now helping invent Arab Spring. And NSA ears have discovered her local Council On Freedom has been infiltrated by a gunner from the band of terrorists who killed fifty-eight people when they attacked a Catholic church in Baghdad four months ago on Halloween, 2010:
“… and so our soldier will steer those unenlightened rebels to jihad.”
In your padded cell, you tell the CIA suit: “You’re optimally screwed because I’m fucking nuts.”
“The docs can shoot you full of meds, functionalize you.
This is a bad group aborning. Breaking off from al Qaeda Iraq because they’re too soft. Us on their hate list. We got no shoes in those protest streets. White House rules say hands off, so we’ve got to be cleverer, so you’re our only spy shot even if …”
“Even if what?”
“You’ll only have six days to actualize the target and exfiltrate before your meds wear off. Then your … your crazy will escape, probably get you killed, definitely lost to us. Plus, even when you’re medically stoned enough to hold it together, you’re so wacko you’ll only be able to tell the truth.”
No one in your padded cell comments on such a concept.
“And this gig is my ticket out of here?”
“Sure,” lies the suit.
What the Hell. No ride lasts forever.
Now in the backseat of the Toyota, mortician Skander gestures toward streets sparkling with shattered glass. “Breaking rules is what this is all about.”
“No!” Driver Nour fingers hair off her face. “This is about making rules!”
Goat-stench Zied says: “After centuries of dictators, we don’t know how to do that.”
“All is written,” intones Ahmed. “The tyrants crushing us have got to go.”
Old enough to be these rebels’ mother Renee says: “Our Council must help make this revolution work for love, not hate.”
Travua mumbles: “I just want a job.”
Too many names. Too many faces. Can’t keep them straight.
Remember who you are.
Travua shakes his head at you being crammed into the car he chose. “Gotta admit this is cool. I mean, you’re a legend. You’re Condor.”
A codename. A face in your mirror. Some him in a movie called your life.
“Ha!” snaps Renee.
Four days ago, she opened the door to her mouse hole office, saw him standing there. Pounded his chest like she was stabbing his heart. “You should be dead!”
“Yes.”
Tears oceaned her blue eyes. “Why did you do that to me? I believed in you!”
“Me, too.” Condor shrugged.
“I help you rescue mountains from communists, you give them to monsters who turn girls into slaves. The Russians slink away and so do you, you leave, leave me!”
“I wasn’t all there and you were all too much.”
She slapped him. “Twenty years I’ve wanted to do that!”
“Then do it again.”
Renee blinked. Slapped him, slapped him, hammered his ribs—crumpled. Condor held her on her feet. Buried his face in her silver-laced long black hair that smelled of jasmine, the official flower of this rebellion. Her flowers-and-flesh musk filled his skull. Her eyes fluttered, those full lips parted and he risked/won that kiss.
Outside, 100,000 men and women pack the city square. Helicopters whump-whump above the crowd. Army soldiers stare down black uniformed secret police thugs. Banners flap. Signs, some in English: Don’t bomb us. Democracy like USA. Facebook. Laptops YouTube global rock ’n’ roll. Chants echo: “Lib-er-te! Lib-er-te!”
Renee pulls off his jacket. His shirt. Pushes his pants down. Then hers. Their trembling hands unbutton her blouse, she shrugs it off, turns to offer him her bra clasp—undone. His hands slide over her woman warm smooth back. Follow the forward curve of her ribs. Fill with thick flesh, feel her swellings. Oui! Tears slick her cheeks, slick on her thighs. She folds across the political posters-cluttered desk, raises her round hips to him and yes he can he does yes then no, turning her so her spine presses on slogan signs as he says: “I want you to see me.” Her legs scissor him yes and oui and YES.
Draped over her, panting, heart slowing, Condor heard Renee say: “Lay here with me for a moment before you tell me what you really want.”
She said no.
“But you know who the infiltrator is,” said Condor.
“We’re all infiltrators. All voices must be heard to make this movement work.”
“My target hates every voice except his own. He—”
Renee snapped: “Why must a man be who you fear?”
“Not my rules,” said Condor. “The bad guys are too afraid of women to let them do any more than work, weep, and die. Their name keeps changing but not who they are. Now they call themselves ISIS. And they’ll steal your movement.”
“If no one can trust me, then you have stolen me from the movement.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter what we say. What we do is our real politics. If I serve you and not the movement …”
“You don’t want them stealing this show either. I understand being cautious about helping us. No one will know.”
“Except me. You. Your masters. The wind, the stars. If I betray what I believe—”
“—to keep it from being betrayed …”
“If everything is treachery, we’ve already lost. I will at least keep my soul clean.”
But she let him stay. Slept naked beside him. Stuck to his legend: introduced him to the rebels who came ’round her office as the whistleblower from Way Back When, the notorious man in the newspapers who opposed the CIA in the name of truth—and so, he saw in the eyes of those he met, was someone they could use for their own … truths.
Now your eyes ride trapped in the rearview mirror of a banana-stinking Toyota rumbling through the sixth night since national security sprang you from its nuthouse.
This morning, this convulsing country’s top general resigned rather than order troops to shoot the protestors. Cell phones and laptops played his speech as you stood in the city square surrounded by thousands of jubilant rebels. The North African air shook as if it were a fruit bowl held by a Godzilla-sized monkey who’s laughing at you as his hairy finger fire graffitis the blue sky:
Functionalization fades!
Uh-oh.
Still, you convinced Renee and all five of her group to ride with you to the drop site. No one hangs back, becomes innocent.
You can do this. Maintain or at least fake it. Finish the mission. Get out alive.
Thirty-seven minutes until Go or Gone Forever.
“Are you sure crates of first aid kits will be in that building?” Nour steers the Toyota around the blackened metal skeleton of a burned-out car.
“All the right bribes were paid.” Don’t say by who.
“How will we know who to bribe after the revolution?” asks geek Travua.
“The revolution means no more bribes,” says goat-smelling Zied.
“Things will be as they say they are,” says Skander.
“The law will be the law,” says cleric Ahmed.
Renee’s words agree with them, target you: “No buying and selling of right and wrong.”
“We will choose what’s right and what’s wrong!” yells the college coed.
Answer her with words for Renee: “Free to choose doesn’t make choices free.”
Headlights blast the Toyota’s windshield.
A pickup truck converted into an ambulance races past, another mission in the revolution’s night.
Your mission.
Priority Option means “actualize” the target from UNKNOWN to secretly photographed, videoed and recorded by your next generation CIA cell phone. Call his phone so NSA web spinners can reveal his links, follow his phone, turn it on for their ears. Reconfigure him as an unaware vessel for your not-so-crazy colleagues to use to penetrate an emerging empire of terror.
Fallback Option puts the target’s name on the Authorized Kill List the moment after he’s, say, fallen from some roof.
Failure is everything else, even if Condor gets out alive and back to the nuthouse.
Exfilt launches in thirty-one minutes. You still don’t know which rebel is your target. Worse, Day Six is bleeding what’s real from what you see.
“Can’t be Nour,” slips from your lips.
“No,
” says mortician Skander as the car swerves, “she’s really doing quite good.”
Skander tells the woman working the steering wheel: “We’re proud of you.”
Nour brakes. Turns to ask you: “This is where, oui?”
A nine-story white stone and black glass monolith pierces the night sky.
Your eyes are wide open. See yourself answer: “OK.”
Exfilt in twenty-one minutes.
Everyone climbs out of the parked Toyota like clowns in an amateur circus.
“Look!” Zied points down the urban canyon to the city square built by French colonists who ruled here in the black and white TV days before the last revolution. A pulsating rainbow fills the end of that canyon from cell phones and laptops and lanterns, from security spotlights brought by the secret police on trucks bought before the current regime’s love affair with torture turned off foreign aid faucets.
Rene’s swollen lips whisper: “That glow never goes out.”
You hear yourself say: “—hope not.”
“Insha’Allah,” whispers Ahmed.
Renee’s blue eyes press on you.
“Condor,” says Zied: “We love what America says it is, but why does your country do such stupid things?”
“I don’t know.” Is he the fanatic who wants to blow up the Statue of Liberty or is he just like the fifty-year-old white guy in an Iowa City Starbucks who votes red-white-and-blue conservative and says the same thing? Shrug. “We’re just people.”
Zied who smells of goats wrinkles his nose: “Politics.”
“Politics is the how, not the why.”
“We must be better than that,” says geek Travua.
“Insha’Allah,” intones Ahmed.
Is one of you two the CIA target?
Nineteen minutes until Exfilt.
Zied points: “What’s in your jeans’ pocket?”
Next thing you know, in your hand is a gray metal, spring blade knife. Your palm obeys invisible stars, offers what you were issued to Goat-guy.
Who takes it, shoves the gray sword into crack above the building’s door lock, wiggles the thin blade—
Snap!
Geek Travua stares at Condor. “Do you have any more lethal devices?”
