by James Grady
22
Our Recon Stage One unfolded in Manhattan as the maturing dawn gave us enough light to see and enough waking-up traffic to not be noticed.
Then we triggered Hailey’s on-the-street plan.
The Starbucks Hailey chose for us was a deathtrap. Set in the middle of a block, the coffee shop had one front door, no back exit, and a street wall of glass.
Zane had our lone gun. He slipped $10 to a flower vendor across the street to let him hunker inside his booth. Teenagers swarmed outside the private Marat School near the Starbucks, so Zane told the flower vendor that he needed to keep an eye on his crazy daughter.
Eric roamed the corners at the other end of the block. We ordered Eric to defy strangers. Worried: if a piano fell from the sky, he’d refuse to obey a civilian’s “Look out!” We put Eric on a four-count surveillance: One, check the Starbucks. Two, confirm our Toyota was still safely parked. Three, scan for hunters—Uncle Sam’s Guns, NYPD, Keepers, or Random Trouble Boyz. Four, watch out for our team—especially Hailey.
Russell and I timed our arrival at the Starbucks door to look like coincidence. Stranger-to-stranger, I held the door open for him.
He nodded thank you, and as he passed me, whispered: “Can she pull this off?”
“Got a better idea?” I replied.
Inside the Starbucks, steam hissed, milk bubbled. The air smelled of coffee.
Russell got in line to order while I strolled to the backroom and made sure no ambushers hid behind cardboard boxes of coffee beans. Found no one hiding in either bathroom. Mirrors above the bathroom sinks caught my reflection: I looked like a ghost.
Russell was waiting at the beverage pick-up bar when I walked out front. I saw a green-aproned college grad barista hand him a steaming café mocha with one hand while with the other, she gave him a thumbs-up.
Russell! What have you done? I wanted to scream as he claimed a window seat where he could watch the street, the door, and all of us inside the café.
Suddenly the café’s speakers switched from playing a mellow CD for sale at the counter to the operatic sound of Springsteen’s ‘Jungleland’ and I knew Russell had charmed the barista into playing one of his Castle-burned CDs. As Bruce sang about the magic rat, I got a café au lait, claimed a perfect table, sat with my back to the rear wall of bathrooms and no exit for retreat.
My watch read 7:37.
Outside in the street, Hailey made her move.
She studied the teenagers jostling on the steps of the Marat School from the corner near the flower stall. The traffic light turned green. She strode across the street.
Sixty-some kids crowded the Marat steps, hanging out before morning classes. The lean, white boy Hailey locked on had beaten pimples, wore his brown hair shaggy but natural, didn’t push at her with his blue eyes but didn’t look away. What cinched him for Hailey was the paperback he carried: Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key.
Hailey stopped in front of the school. She shot her gaze at the Hammett lover… and angled her head for him to join her.
Took him ten seconds to meet her on the sidewalk. Before the catcalls of his gawking schoolmates broke her hold, she said: “Buy an alumnus a cappuccino.”
Then she walked towards the Starbucks where he’d feel safe, giving him the choice of being left standing on the concrete like a doofus or stepping into the wake of an exotic older woman. When he was by her side, she said: “You got a cell phone?”
“Yeah, but—”
“And so do your buddies whispering and watching us walk away. Call the one you trust.” Hailey’s diamond eyes wouldn’t accept no for an answer. “Now.”
He fumbled in his jacket for the phone as they marched past the wall of closed stores between the school steps and the Starbucks. Hailey hammered words at the boy.
“That plaque on the wall as you go up the main stairs? The Literature Award? Run your buddy inside to check out the winner for 1993.”
They reached the Starbucks while he was cell phoning her instructions. Hailey stopped at the entrance. Waited. The teenager grabbed the door.
Her thank you smile was dazzling as she walked through the portal he opened.
Two men in business suits ogled the classy Black woman gliding past them into the Starbucks. They were no threat so Russell didn’t blast out of his chair. Their attention shifted to her escort—registered white teenage geek. The boy felt a primal surge as those adult males could only glare at him and walk away.
Then she was inside, he was beside her, his buddy chirping in the phone. Hailey watched his face register the report. Beat him to its delivery by saying: “Clare Marcus.”
The boy nodded as Hailey spoke the name of her best friend in high school.
“Tell him to hang tight, you’ll call him soon.” She ordered two cappuccinos, turned back to him. “So what’s your name?”
“Nate—Nathan.”
“Well, Nate Nathan, you’ve got lunch money. Pay the cashier.”
She left him fumbling in his pockets, already in the habit of going-along, of obeying, of believing. She sat at the table I just then coincidentally vacated.
“Bring the coffees, Nathan,” she said as I drifted off. As the boy sat, Hailey told him: “We don’t have much time. Who’s your buddy?”
“Ah, Brandon.”
“Of course his name is Brandon. Can we trust him?”
Nathan nodded.
“Here’s the deal, Nathan, and if you’re cool enough to not fuck up, the least that will happen is you’ll get your lunch money back. Is your coffee good?”
“You haven’t given me a chance to—”
“I’m your chance, Nathan. This is your chance. And you worry about coffee?”
“No, I—”
“Get your balance. Get your head in the game. Are you cool? Can you be cool?”
“Yes!”
Hailey said: “So aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Wha-what—”
“Use my name. We’re not strangers, we’re friends having coffee.”
He blinked.
“Clare,” she said. “Ask: ‘What do you want, Clare?’”
She waited. Her eyes never left his as he whispered that question.
“Good job, Nathan. Maybe you are the right man. Let’s see if you can get me what I need.”
“I’ll do—”
“Don’t promise. Sincerity without action is bullshit. Don’t be a bullshit person.”
“No way!”
“We need to score, Nathan. You and me.”
He blinked.
“Drugs.”
“Why—You came back to our school looking for—”
“You, Nathan, I came looking for you.”
“But you don’t know me! And… I mean sure, of course, yeah, I’ve been high and I know guys who got pot and some guys say they have Ex or acid, or even—”
She leaned away from him. Made him flow forward to follow her. “I thought you knew that stuff was shit. Thought you knew that messing with your mind before you’ve built one is as dumb as smoking corporate shit where the only high you get is cancer.”
“But drugs… If you don’t want—”
“I need what’s in your pocket.”
Nathan blinked.
“If it’s not in your pocket, it’s in Brandon’s. Plus the two of you know a hundred kids in our school who are carrying. Hell, at our high school, it’s not who’s high, it’s who isn’t. Zoloft, Valium, Ritalin, Risperdal, Zanax—street cools call it ben-zo—Prozac, Lithium—you guys pack a whole rainbow of helpers to school every day.”
“But that’s medicine!”
“High is high. The good news is you got no law to dodge. You and Brandon get $2 a pill, and we’ve only got 30 minutes to first bell.”
“Why—”
�
��Because I don’t have time to do this any other way. Because you want to do it. Or do you want to stay a book-smart, street-sucker poseur forever? Are you cool? Somebody who hungers for real adventure, not just a geeky kid video game? Use your balls and live now. Don’t just suck on the bullshit promise of some maybe later.”
He stared past her to a whole new constellation of mirrors.
She reached out and let their fingers touch. “So, who you going to be, Nathan? A boy who sits around drinking coffee, or the man who’s cool?”
“How—”
“Everybody wants to be cool, Nathan. That’s what it’s all about. Not drugs. Not money. Make them want to be as cool as you are. Promise them two bucks a pill, you’ll keep a buck. We’ve only got 25 minutes, so make that your advantage, not your problem. Go so fast they ride your wave. Now hit the road and bring it on home to me.”
He watched her for so many heartbeats she thought she’d failed.
Then he hit REDIAL and dashed towards the door.
Nathan didn’t notice me following him. On the way out, I glanced to the window table where Russell sat as his CD now played Nirvana’s live ‘Come As You Are’. Russell nodded his head with the savage guitar beat, kept his spy eyes working.
Outside on the sidewalk, I walked to Marat behind a fat man who cooed to his leashed poodle. Nathan never looked back. He and a buddy scurried from teenager to teenager on the school steps. Kids dropped things into the clean paper cup Nathan had brought from Starbucks. My watch said 8:17. Hailey told us that first bell rang at 8:30. Kids drifted into the school. Nathan dashed past me.
I walked into the Starbucks just as Nathan plunked down at the table across from Hailey, handed her the rattling paper cup. Drifted past them as he said:
“Seventy-nine, got 79 pills. Anti-depressants, sedatives, speed, stuff I don’t know! Miranda dumped in her whole prescription bottle, said she could use her mother’s. Jenny never takes hers anyway. Alex had two different kinds plus some antibiotics that I made him keep, wanted to know if tomorrow… I did it!”
“Did it great!” Hailey told him. She peeled bills off our wad. “But you’ve only got a few minutes to get to class. I owe you—”
“I don’t want your money.”
“It’s not mine or all yours. You’ve got to pay what you owe. A deal’s a deal.”
She made him take enough cash. Stood. “Thanks. You really helped me.”
“No I didn’t.”
That stopped her walk-away.
Come on! I telepathed to her. We gotta get out of this deathtrap!
“This isn’t helping you,” said Nathan. “But I will. Help you. Anything. Anything but… bullshit like this.”
Hailey’s gaze collapsed to the floor. Her lips moved in silent mumbles.
Rescue her! I was five steps from them. Two steps…
The Black woman willed her eyes up from the floor to capture Nathan.
“Just tell me what you need,” he whispered, not noticing me abort my rescue charge to feign sudden interest in a sales display of mugs on the wall.
“What I need,” she said, “is for you to get back to school but never forget it’s not about making it to the bell. It’s how you do it. Do good, be happy, stay true.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
She smiled. “All the time.”
Then she led him outside and cut him loose.
As we walked to the Toyota, Hailey and Eric linking up ahead of us, Zane stalking our rear guard, Russell gave me a grin, said: “Everybody must get stoned.”
23
Our New York hotel was nine stories of nickel-dime grim wedged into a block of million dollar condo buildings on 23rd Street far from where we’d ditched the Toyota. Walking into the hotel lobby put us in a smog of dust and tobacco smoke. Somehow I didn’t think we were the first crew of desperate souls to come there looking for a fix.
As we climbed the stairs, Zane whispered: “Risky to go to ground as a group.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But we don’t do so well on our own.”
We turned one room into our Operations Center. Morning sun fought its way through the shade we pulled over the smudged window.
We rationed our buzz, inventoried our GODS, and built matricies.
Rationing our buzz came first—had to come first.
We worked from memory: Zane and Hailey sorted the 79 pills into four categories—anti-depressants, stimulants, sedatives, unknown.
“Those three little white ones?” said Russell. “I’m pretty sure they’re like Ritalin, some sort of new generic speed to calm kids’ brains.”
“Teenagers,” said Zane: “The cutting edge of American culture.”
“The cut edge of American culture,” I said.
“There’s none for my HIV cocktail,” said Hailey.
We didn’t bust her delusion. The lies we live are our own business. Or our shrink’s, and he was taped to chain link fence.
Guesswork gave us each doses akin to what we’d been pumped full of.
“How will this effect our countdown?” asked Hailey.
Zane shrugged. “All this home brew med mixing can do is smooth out our edges. Buy us a grace period where we’re gone but don’t realize it. Hell, maybe even mask how much we’re really falling apart. Or kickstart some craziness we never had before.”
“So we still may have only three more days of truly functional madness left,” I said. “We have to run this thing as hard and as far as we can.”
Russell swallowed his rationed known pills with bottled water. Picked up one of the unknown tiny white pills. Popped the stranger. “Let’s get it on.”
Inventorying our GODS took five minutes.
“We’re down to $434,” said Hailey. “That’s a lot of not much in Manhattan.”
“And you’ve still got the gun,” I told Zane.
“But not a full mag,” he answered. “We’re a few bullets short.”
“No kidding,” I said.
Building matricies: the heart of any spy investigation.
Matricies are the webs of data that make up a smart espionage investigation or operation. Intelligence analysts in a modern spy shop use computers to create visual “maps” of known facts and reasonable assumptions, maps that fill computer monitors or are projected onto screens to reveal connections, possible lines of cause and effect, characters who must be more than they seem because they are so interwoven in a matricie’s web.
But we weren’t in a modern spy shop like CIA headquarters. We were in a bottom of the barrel New York hotel. Dr. F’s laptop was our only computer, and it had no software to let us build matricies. We had to do it the old fashioned way.
Russell passed out pens and colored construction paper from a drugstore that we scissored into index cards destined to bear the name of one person, place, or thing.
On purple matrice index cards, Russell listed Bosnia, Serbia, Col. Herzgl, his rock ’n’ roll band and its members, even his Case Officer.
Zane used red paper. Listed Sgt. Major Jodrey. He made cards for Vietnam, Laos, Special Forces/special operations, Pathet Lao, Viet Cong.
Hailey had yellow. She listed Clare, Christophe, Ken, Janna, the Russians, Nigeria, Paris and Prague. She made one card for heroin, another for oil, a third for plutonium. We assumed that many of the names we knew were false—cover identities or work names. But the same lie told independently to two different people creates a truth.
Eric used green paper. Listed Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Major Aman, Eric’s cover connections, Weapons of Mass Destruction. He had the skinniest pile of index cards.
“Come on, Victor,” Zane coached me. “You’ve got to write her name.”
Silver, my color was silver. Russell handed me a pen. They all watched. Waited.
The pen in my hand shook as it inked the
letters for “Derya” on a silver card.
“Way to go, Victor,” said Hailey.
Eric got out: “Dr. Friedman proud.”
My silver index cards filled rapidly with other words: Malaysia. Al Qaeda. 9/11. Counter-Terrorism Center. Two cards for suicide.
We all worked on Dr. Leon Friedman’s pink cards. Listed the CIA. His alma matters. National Security Council. The White House. Eric hacked into Dr. F’s laptop and called out every noun, every name, every address.
“We need to know more about him,” said Hailey.
“That’s why we came to Recon the big city,” said Russell. “Why we’re here.”
“Stage One complete,” said Zane. “Stage 2… Coming up.”
Nurse Death got brown cards. Her Maryland driver’s license gave her name as Nan Porter. Many of the entries in her palm pilot were initials and phone numbers without area codes or addresses. Her wallet had a photo I.D. that gave her “detached” status at the military’s Walter Reed Hospital in Washington.
Our invisible target mastermind killer Kyle Russo scarred a white card.
“White is the color of sorrow in China,” I said.
“And purity here,” said Hailey. “Go figure.”
“Figure Kyle Russo will explain it all to us,” said Zane. “When we get him.”
“Wait!” I yelled. “We forgot somebody—somebody for all our colors!”
They all stared at me.
“Malcolm,” I said. “If nothing else, him helping us escape won him a card.”
We gave Malcolm a gray card, and on it wrote his codename Condor.
Zane and Eric Scotch-taped more than 200 color-clustered index cards on the hotel room’s bare ivory wall. The drafty hotel room trembled the window shade and made waves of sunlight undulate on our rainbow chessboard.
“Wow,” said Hailey.
Russell shook his head. “Up against the wall, motherfucker.”
“That’s us,” said Zane. “That’s where we are.”
“No,” I said, “that’s where we started. We’re way down the road now.”
