The Short Takes

by James Grady

Ended the Facetime connection and left him staring at his reflection in a black screen.

  On that Washington street, Merle whispered to him: “Chris Harvie’s dead. You … We were … She loved him, Faye loved him.”

  They heard a subway rumbling into the station at the bottom of a nearby escalator.

  Condor spotted an orange sedan with black lettering on its door cruising up Wisconsin Avenue toward them while an unmarked SUV pulled up so a cellphone-waving woman could open its backdoor and climb in. Condor beckoned the orange sedan to the curb.

  The Middle Eastern–looking driver whirred down the front passenger window: “Yes sir! Taxi sir! Anywhere you want!”

  Condor pushed Merle into the orange taxi, climbed in and told the driver: “Just go!”

  He looked back to the sidewalk where they’d been: saw no one who.

  Looked to the taxi’s rearview mirror. Found the driver’s eyes.

  Said: “First intersection, take a left. Go one block, left again, then one block and left. Take a right, head back down Wisconsin Avenue.”

  “Right turns or even a U would be easier.”

  “Easier’s not always the way to go.”

  Condor stared into the rearview mirror. The side mirrors. Turned to look behind them.

  No car obviously followed the orange taxi.

  He let himself sink into the backseat beside trembling Merle.

  “Take Massachusetts Avenue,” said Condor. “Go to Capitol Hill, by Union Station.”

  “Whatever you want, Sir,” said the taxi driver. “And thank you for using one of us professionals and not some loner who gets to you through your cellphone.”

  The orange taxi slid through traffic, rolled past the gray stone Washington Cathedral, motored down Massachusetts Avenue through the neighborhood known as Embassy Row for its mansions housing foreign ambassadors and their staffs. They drove past a statue of WW II hero Winston Churchill holding his hand up to make his trademark V.

  Condor sighed as the orange taxi curved around one of Washington’s traffic circles where on a beautiful September Tuesday morning in America’s Bicentennial Year of 1976, assassins for the US-backed right wing Chilean military dictatorship used a car bomb to blow up and murder a Chilean diplomat from the overthrown leftist regime who had political asylum in America. Condor’d been working his unrelated fifth Op, walking four blocks away. He heard the boom.

  Merle said: “Why did you sigh? What’s wrong? What’s—”

  He lied. He told the truth.

  “I always wanted to kiss a girl in a taxi.”

  Merle shook her head. “Where were you going with that taxi kiss?”

  “Where it would be better than this,” he said.

  They rode in the back seat, stared out their own windows.

  “Up ahead,” said Condor. “There’s a small park between the Capitol Dome and Union Station. Let us out there.”

  Condor dropped two $20 bills on the front seat. Slammed the door on the driver’s thank you’s. Led Merle onto turf where seventeen months before, along with Faye, they watched California-blond Senate staff lawyer Chris Harvie catch a bullet in the head because of knowing them. Condor scanned business suits: men and women quick-walking through the shortcut of the park. Some there for position, some for policy, some for profit, some for power, and all of them who worked for the taxpayers—and perhaps even the Wall Street and labor union lobbyists—all their shoulders carried slivers of some American dream. But none of them knew Chris Harvie’s name, or if they did, he was just another tragic street shooting, not a KIA from a spy war.

  Condor led Merle through the half-square block park.

  Turned this way. Turned that. Walked a slow circle as if in gung fu’s bagua.

  “She’s not here,” he whispered. “They’re not here. No cover team. No exfilt team.”

  He and Merle stood still in an unseeing crowd on Thursday morning a rifle shot away from the white icing dome of the US Capitol.

  An anonymous car pulled to the curb across the park from where they stood.

  Out of the front passenger door climbed a man with a black cane.

  “Run!” yelled Condor. He wanted to rocket Merle safe. Wanted to wave his hands Help police! Wanted to draw a .45 and blast killers who only he in the crowd recognized.

  The anonymous car was to their left, driving to the curb where they were headed.

  “We gotta make it across the street!” said Condor. “Get to Union Station!”

  The anonymous car slammed to a halt in the traffic lane in front of them.

  Condor glimpsed the driver—a stout bald man with giant bushy eyebrows.

  HONK!—a city bus controlled its angry surge at the anonymous car’s rear bumper.

  Condor ran Merle behind the bus, waved and begged crazy old man jaywalking. The bus screened them from the park, honked again as they ran toward the gray stone castle of Union Station. From behind them came the hiss of brakes released, the grrr of a bus engine.

  Condor’s legs hurt. His lower back hurt. His chest heaved and his lungs burned.

  Don’t let my sore heart be my killer!

  He kept his right hand free, wrapped his left arm around Merle. Staggered them past the subway entrance where there would be no escape if a train didn’t come at exactly the right second. Hustled them into Union Station, to a corridor toward the train yard tracks.

  Saw no white shirted, blue uniformed Amtrak employees

  Slammed into a door’s EMERGENCY ONLY push handle.

  He pulled Merle through the door after him.

  No one on the tracks. Rows of parked—and empty—passenger trains.

  He grabbed her hand, hurried them around the front end of a silver dragon Amtrak passenger train. Around a second such train’s rear car.

  A gliding bird watched a man and woman flee over gray stones between empty trains.

  Ahead, far ahead, Condor saw the curved roof and brick walls of a tube building for shared work spaces, cubicles full of dreamers, quants, drones, and desperation housed in a renovated sports coliseum where back in the Cold War’s Apocalypse Any Second era, The Beatles played their first ever American concert to screaming fans.

  Merle gasped as they’d staggered alongside an empty passenger train. “You … you’ve run us into a funnel! We’re trapped!”

  The round yellow light atop a dormant signal arm five feet to Condor’s left exploded.

  Came a male voice from behind Condor: “If I want to shoot you now … dead.”

  Condor held his hands out from his sides.

  Turned to face that voice.

  Black Cane Man strode toward them, a silencer-equipped automatic pistol pointed at them from his right hand, the black cane carried like it was nothing in his left.

  “One shot for the sniper cane, yes? But we have much more than one shot now.”

  Black Cane Man stopped out lunging range.

  Condor doubted he still had any such fight left in him.

  “This could be quick. Professional. She could even be let to run away. After all, she’s already officially crazy and no one believes her.

  “Our mutual friend,” said Black Cane Man.

  “Not professional enough,” said Condor. “Not good at mokroye delo.”

  Black Cane Man didn’t flinch at “wet work” and thus validated Condor’s guess.

  “Dead?” Black Cane Man shrugged. “He was a good buy. Full of stories about the crazy old woman who still looked like a good fuck and how him and others like him came every day to take care of her while the strange man of the house, a man who even though he’s so old, still he trolls Internet for the CIA like a commanding Surfer Joe who they’ll miss big time.”

  “I’m not CIA,” said Condor.

  “So, what then? Tell me. Mercy doesn’t come cheap. NSA out of Fort M
eade? That’s where our friend was stationed.”

  Condor shook his head no.

  “The Pentagon? Homeland Security? FBI? Surely not the State Department.”

  The pistol staring at Condor shifted its gaze toward trembling Merle.

  “Your value is an already established trigger squeeze. But her, the woman you take away from your work to care for, the woman you stare at with moon eyes when she’s not looking—or not seeing—she is optional. Our optional. My optional. You must—”

  A red mist flowered the gunman’s head.

  He crashed to the ground.

  Red-haired Faye walked toward them. Her no ring left hand dangled a pistol.

  “I knew he was tracking your cell phones,” said Faye. “Like us. Like we did to him, once NSA tech broke the USB stick’s coding and back-hacked it.”

  An approaching engine hummed behind Condor: a motorized Amtrak golf cart raced their way filled with men wearing hard hats and fluorescent yellow official vests, looked back to Faye and her face told them that faux work crew belonged to the V.

  “We didn’t have much time to set up,” said Faye. “Lucky I live on the Hill.”

  “Lucky you’re great solo,” said Condor.

  Merle shook her head: “How … here … how …”

  Faye fought her still-pounding pulse to send a reassuring smile to the older woman.

  “First mentioned ‘ground’ rendezvous is the O.Z., the Observation Zone. Second set is the real destination. Commo’d in descriptors only a few know, like ‘downbound’ from the song ‘Downbound Train’ meaning roughly here.”

  “Shit,” whispered Merle.

  Faye looked at the body on the gray cinders. “Wish we could have taken him alive.”

  “It’s the Russians,” said Condor.

  “Again?” said Faye.

  Condor shook his head: “Still.”

  Looked at the train yard world under Washington, DC’s gray sky.

  Said: “Why?”

  CHAMBER TWO

  A Walk in the Sun

  FBI Special Assistant to the Associate Assistant Director for Counter-Intelligence Rick Applegate sat behind his desk in Washington, DC’s J. Edgar Hoover headquarters at 10:07 on that Thursday, May 5, 2016, morning reading a no wireless connection computer tablet display of an inter-agency report on China’s Ministry of State Security’s penetrations of a five billion dollar international corporation when his outer office aide Hargesheimer yelled: “Oh, shit!

  “No!” blurted Hargesheimer. “Sorry, Sir, I …”

  “That’s alright, son,” said a man’s deep voice Rick maybe recognized. “Understandable reaction. Tell your boss the Marines have landed.”

  Rick reached the outer office in two heartbeats.

  There stood Marine Corps Major General David Wood, six-foot-three of packed muscle with two stars on the shoulders of his uniform, which held half the medals he deserved.

  “Hey, Rick,” said the unexpected Marine. “Good to see you again.”

  “You, too, Sir.”

  They’d talked a few times five months before at a joint Marines-FBI Task Force on securing Corps bases against mass shooters and/or domestic-based terrorist attacks. Plus, after Rick’s promotion to Headquarters, they’d nodded at a couple formal receptions, Washington show up because affairs that Rick—and he was pretty sure the General—hated.

  “‘One of those days,” said General Wood. “Left the Barracks up on 8th, headed west for a stop on the Hill where everybody loves the uniform and nobody likes to listen to what it’s got to say, rolled down here for a quick check in Upstairs with you know who to let him know his rear is covered on this and that, figured: Why not pop in and see one of my favorite Marines?”

  “I’m honored,” said former First Lieutenant, USMC, Rick Applegate.

  “Let me get you to throw a little help,” said the General.

  “Whatever I can,” said Rick.

  The General angled his head to Rick as Hargeshemeir watched and listened. “My plumbing says I’m not the young man you are. I’m wondering if you can escort me to the nearest men’s room so I won’t be fidgety when I go Upstairs. We got time.”

  “Ah … sure, Sir. It’s just down the hall. Let me grab my suitcoat—”

  “You’re fine as you are, son. I only want to take your time that’s absolutely necessary.”

  The General nodded to Hargesheimer, led Rick out of his office and into the hall.

  Ridiculous to feel like I need my gun, thought Rick who unclipped it from his belt and locked it in his DC desk after he arrived at headquarters every regular morning.

  The General—and Rick couldn’t even imagine this verb until they were almost there—prattled on and on about many things Washington mixed with everything Grampa mixed with some things Corps, non-stop talking as he pushed open the men’s room door …

  … still loudly prattling the everything of nothing in this tiled echo chamber as he marched past the three silver metal commode stalls, pushing open their doors to reveal empty.

  General Wood gestured to three side-by-side urinals. “You could use this step-up, too.”

  The General claimed the middle urinal.

  His upper body was visible above the aluminum privacy divide.

  Rick heard the General unzip even as that Marine nodded the order for Rick to claim the urinal beside him. The General kept tapping his chest above his heart while glaring at Rick’s.

  Blink, and Rick tapped his blue shirt’s pocket that held a cellphone.

  Still talking—something about the good old days of Ronald Reagan when cops with machineguns didn’t patrol the streets outside Congressional office buildings—General Wood nodded, both an affirmation and an appreciation that Rick got it.

  “Sorry, son. It’s probably gonna take a bit for me to get things going.”

  Then at Rick’s eye level on the tiled wall they faced beyond their urinals, General Wood’s hand slapped and held there a white piece of paper with hand-inked black letters:

  No notes. No records. ORCON. No report to any Bureau

  boss including Director and Attrny. Gen. No e-entries

  any kind. No verbal anything. Stay shut the fuck up.

  White House level T. Secret. Tomorrow. 2:33 p.m.

  Meet unknown to you Old Man. Bring NO CELL PHONE or

  electronics. At top Lincoln Memorial. Deep cover. Fullest

  authority. My full vouch personal & Corps. He’ll say:

  “Have you been to the Wall?” Recognition code

  response you: “Trying to stay off there.” GO SOLO.

  Tell nobody nothing forever!

  The General kept talking about nothing relevant—baseball, a Congressman caught pawing female staffers, why classic boxing was more aesthetic than modern mixed martial arts.

  Rick burned the note into his memory.

  “ORCON”—Originator Controlled. “Tell nobody nothing forever!” FBI speak plus punch you in the balls do-or-die Drill Instructor fury.

  Wasn’t the lemon-scented antiseptic air conditioning that chilled Rick to his bones.

  He nodded to the General.

  Who crumpled the note in his hand.

  The sound of General Wood peeing echoed through this tiled bathroom.

  Prompted Rick to need to and do the same.

  All the while over the sounds of water trickling onto white porcelain, the General kept talking. Kept talking as he flushed his urinal. Filled their there and then with audible verification.

  Rick finished and zipped, flushed.

  The prattling General stepped into a stall, dropped the crumpled note in the toilet bowl’s water, proclaimed: “Don’t you hate it when other people don’t flush?”

  Then he practiced what he’d preached.

  The stall’s t
oilet whooshed and gurgled, whined to silent.

  The water in the bowl held nothing but vanishing trembles.

  “Persistent little turd,” said General Wood and flushed that toilet again.

  Told Rick: “Let’s wash up and get the Hell out of here. We each got big shit to do.”

  Side-by-side at the sinks, General Wood said: “How’s your family, wife, and three kids?”

  Electricity tightened Rick as he washed his hands.

  No reason the General would know shit about Bess and their kids.

  “All fine … Sir,” Rick said to the he bleeds, too mere mortal man standing beside him.

  Met the General’s stare in the bathroom mirror with his own eyes of steel.

  They were done talking.

  Until in the hall outside the bathroom, the General reached out his hand Rick didn’t hesitate to shake as the General said: “I’m proud of you, son. All great luck. And Semper fi.”

  Rick got home at 6:52 that night—not late, not early. Such scheduled definitions were more common since he’d left his Special Agent in Charge post at an Ohio field office and joined the Hoover. He unlocked the front door to his suburban Virginia family home, walked to his chattering family in the open kitchen.

  Didn’t take off his gun.

  Bess sat on a stool at the open kitchen’s counter, her laptop screen showing the photo of a black bird—a crow, she’d corrected him: “You’ve got to learn the true names of the birds” then shook her thick, shoulder-trimmed midnight hair in mock shock that most married couples would recognize. The crow photo—a black bird spreading his wings to take off, his beak open to caw—was one of nine of her photos picked for a gallery’s “Emerging Artists” show in three weeks.

  She started emerging since long before I knew her, thought Rick. He smiled at a memory from their wedding—a man who’d known her and her siblings in college, “the fabulous Wong sisters.” Rick felt proud that Bess was finally getting the world to see the full glory of her.

  Seeing the glory of their teenage daughter Thel scared the hell out of Rick. She was smarter than everyone else in the family, a poet, a long and lean cross-country racer who let her glistening black hair ripple behind her as she ran not for medals that she won, but because.

  Rick loved her with limitless pride and joy.