by James Grady
“We got it!” I yelled. “Let’s go!”
And we ran out of burgled Mail 4 U!, Zane charging on our heels as we dashed back to the shadows and the path along midnight railroad tracks.
The white Caddy carried the six of us through the night. Red lights flashed to green. Taillights in front of us disappeared into suburban darkness. Headlights coming towards us on Georgia Avenue winked past our car. Hailey drove, Cari beside her with Zane riding shotgun. I rode the hump in the back seat. From my left, Eric held the flashlight on the stapled sheets of paper I’d found in the stolen file:
Mail 4 U!—Box Rental Application
Filled out fully and completely for the Berlow corporation. Including the blank where a bold print instruction read:
“Federal law requires all boxes or convenience addresses rented or leased for the purposes of receiving public and/or privately delivered mail, packages, etc., be leased to persons or entities by/from a verifiable land address.”
Verifiable land address.
“Seven-Oh-Nine Eastern Avenue,” read Russell. “Suite 402. Washington, D.C.”
Eric worked a map on his lap while I held the flashlight.
“Close,” he said. “Mile south, less than a mile east. On border with Maryland.”
Zane said: “What else is in that file?”
“A photocopy of the check used to pay for a year’s rent dated… 5 weeks ago.”
“Cashier’s check,” I said. “Drawn on a bank from… Parkton, Maryland.”
Cari said: “That’s a two-traffic-lights town near the ocean and the Eastern Shore. Half a day’s drive from D.C.”
“Cashier’s checks only show the bank, not whose money it is,” I said.
“Not much intell take to show for committing felony burglary,” said Cari.
“We’ll see.” I checked the map, gave Hailey directions to the verifiable land address for Nurse Death’s Berlow corporate connection.
Our white car slid through the city night.
“This looks familiar,” said Cari.
“Should,” I said as homes flowed past us on the wide two lane street. “You’ve been stationed out of Langley headquarters in Virginia, but everything inside the Beltway—whether or not its Maryland or Virginia—is one city. Langley being further out is only the geography of deniability from the White House.”
“That’s not it,” she said. “Here, turn left here!”
Eric swiveled in his seat as I grabbed his arm and told Hailey: “Do it.”
The white Caddy swung a tight turn, headed towards a well-lit juncture of five roads alongside a cement overpass for train tracks.
“The subway stop,” whispered Cari.
“Mail 4 U! is walking distance from another stop,” I said. “Good Op planning logically would put—”
“Go that way,” said Cari.
And Hailey did, found Eastern Avenue a block away and turned left to head the same direction we’d been going before Cari’s first command.
“Getting close,” said Zane from the shotgun seat. “Maybe two blocks.”
“Park there,” said Cari.
Hailey slid the Caddy into an open space behind a soccer mom’s SUV.
And I asked Cari: “Are you taking over now?”
“I think it’s too late for that,” she said. “But can I boss one quick Recon?”
“Go for it.” I grinned but she couldn’t see me from the front seat.
“Double date,” she said.
Eric screwed out the dome light bulb, then Hailey opened her door.
Zane climbed out of the front seat with Cari.
Russell and I got out, he slid behind the Caddy’s steering wheel. Two women and Zane met me at the Caddy’s grill. I slid my left arm around Cari’s waist.
Zane said: “Ah…”
“It’s OK,” said Cari and I shot a See! look at Hailey, who shook her head. “This way you’ll be on us from behind, cover and control, just like in the how-to books.”
Zane draped his left arm around Hailey’s shoulders, leaving her hands free, leaving his gun hand free. My embrace of Cari kept my gun hand free, encumbered her draw, but since her pistol had no bullets, nobody cared. In the how-to book, I could maneuver her; throw her out of harm’s way. I held her close, cupped the curve of her ribs in the palm of my hand, felt the press of her back against my inner arm.
We walked like two loving couples on their way home, one couple in front of the other like horses paired to pull a stagecoach. The air was still. Quiet. Cool. Our shadows slid over sidewalks where there was not a smear of dog shit or spatter of blood.
This was the wistful hour. Streetlights lit the moment. All over town, bartenders were saying goodnight to patrons who’d met someone they hoped would still be special in the morning or who’d met no one and hoped that wouldn’t matter in the morning. Diners burned their lights for insomniacs or taxi drivers. TVs in the houses and squat apartment buildings we passed were dark even without a big X of black tape on their screens. An invisible hound barked twice, but he was insincere.
We walked this border of many places, clearly into what you couldn’t call yesterday but not so deep into tomorrow it could be that today. This street was neither postcard city nor cliché suburban, had a subway stop nearby and single dwelling homes with covered front porches, wide lawns. Maryland was on our left, D.C. on our right. Up ahead of us waited a two-block long neighborhood Main Street, with an ice cream parlor and a video rental store, vintage clothing shops, a tailor and an optometrist and a yoga school. We smelled weeds in a vacant lot. The scents of cement, of cold road and metal cars slid past us as our walk counted down addresses on Eastern Avenue.
“It’ll be across the street on our left,” I whispered.
There it was, a giant gray concrete box of a building, five stories tall, filling a corner and a vast span of two perpendicular sidewalks.
“Fuck!” whispered Cari as we drew closer to that building. I held her warmth close, her lilac shampoo perfuming my every inhale. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!
“Cross the street.” Cari led us to the side street running past the target building, to the sidewalk opposite those doors.
“Fuck me,” she whispered as we walked up the side street.
I refused to think about that. Kept my eyes on the target building as we walked past it, past its this-side entrance, past a chain link/locked gate parking lot where four cars and two unmarked vans waited. Past the next building, a squat three story yellow brick affair with a sign for a law firm and a medical insurance company, past the last store on that side street, a huge retail outlet called AWAKE where long faced teak statues from Tahiti shared window space with stone Buddhas and two kimonos.
“We are so fucked.” She led us back to the white Caddy. “Get us out of here.”
Russell drove, Hailey and Eric rode up front.
“That’s one of our places,” said Cari from the back seat between Zane and me. “An accommodation address, an off-the-books set of offices.”
“Who’s ‘our’?” said Zane, though we all knew the heart of the answer.
“I’m not Office of Security, or even Operations. I’m in a street crew, part of the Special Activities Division, the Agency’s paramilitary guys who—”
“Aren’t they using Special Forces anymore?” asked Zane, who’d been one.
“Sure, but now the Agency has its own military capabilities. Me, a few other women, never get dropped into Afghanistan ahead of the Black Ops military units, but in a western city, we rock. We work with the Army’s Deltas. We’re the modern Hotshots. Three person hawk teams, cyber war units, chem-bio gunners, solos—”
“Wait a minute,” said Russell. “The acronym is SAD? You’re a ‘SAD’ chick?”
“I’m a Hotshot,” she said. “Doesn’t matter what bureaucratic label I’ve got.
The organization chart is a blur since 9/11. With our overseas wars, peacekeeping operations, anti-terrorism Red Light crashes, U.N. blue helmet details, joint Black Ops with allies, budget battles and turf wars over the new Homeland Security Department, every federal shop scrambling to get its own counter-terrorism unit so they can still be a player… It’s all so fluid and multi-level classified, I doubt anybody knows who everybody is or what they’re doing.”
Zane said: “But you know that building back there.”
“It’s ours,” she said. “SAD. We rent a few offices on the fifth floor. A field base where we can run an Op away from prying eyes but not far from CIA headquarters. Do our bureaucratic stuff without showing up on any office site listings. I’ve only been in it once. There are different covers: a therapist office and a ‘consultant’ suite to account for foot traffic if any civilian asks questions, but nobody out here does. They live in their own world, think Washington never crosses the border.
“So this means,” she said, “your Nurse Death… Cross-cover. I should have realized when you showed me the address, but…
“Her corporate shell’s verifiable land address is on the Eastern Avenue—D.C. side of the building. The cross-cover is that the SAD site uses the Adele Avenue—Maryland address on the same building’s side street entrance. It would be a huge coincidence for them to both be there and not be connected.”
“Cross-cover is one of the mistakes they teach you to avoid,” said Hailey.
“Then either somebody didn’t pay attention in spy school,” said Russell, “or somebody didn’t care.”
“Except,” Cari said, “that makes no sense. Say this whole mess is one of your can-only-be-two scenarios, some kind of… renegade Op, some spy group hiding in our group of spies. Why send Nurse Death to kill your shrink in Maine? This is Washington. You don’t kill your problems, you promote them. Give them a high profile job that will drag them into failure. Zero their budget. Smear them in a scandal.
“OK, say you do whack somebody, say some creep from your team who’s gone double but you can’t legally prove it and can’t double him back against the opposition. You sanction him where you’re in full control. A federal garbage truck hits a car on the G.W. parkway. A mugging in the Post Office parking lot. A heart attack when nobody else is home. A suicide on your guy’s sailboat in Chesapeake Bay and you cremate the body before the locals do an autopsy.”
“Maybe hitting a target inside a secret Nowhere, Maine mental hospital was somebody’s idea of control,” I said. “And now we’re definitely not talking some bad boy group like al Qaeda or the cartels or North Korea or Cuba or anybody but us.”
“But who us?” Cari shook her head as we drove through the deserted D.C. streets. “Your Dr. Friedman was on his way from superstar to big shot. Even if the Agency went in for an illegal stateside wet job—which they don’t, that’s too… politically naïve and dangerous. The guys who run our government aren’t stupid.”
“That’s a relief!” said Russell.
“Even if this was a way-off-the-shelf Op like Iran-Contra,” said Cari, “you couldn’t get enough bureaucrats to sanction a hit on someone like Dr. Friedman because you couldn’t convince them that their asses would be covered. And there’s no reason to kill a super-star like him.”
“That we know of,” said Hailey.
“He’s a shrink, for God’s sake,” said Cari. “The only people he’d worry are…”
“Crazies like us,” I said. “So we keep looking guiltier.”
Eric said: “What difference does that make now?”
“He’s right,” said Zane as we drove down 16th Street, aimlessly headed straight towards the three-miles-away White House where none of us had ever been, where Dr. F would now never shine. “Doesn’t matter. We are where we are, and that keeps looking more and more like we got wrapped up in a sanctioned Op.”
“Sanctioned by who?” argued Cari.
“If 9/11 has proven anything,” I said, “it’s that the left hand of our secret warriors doesn’t always know what the right hand is doing. And sometimes they fight.”
“I still can’t buy your renegade Op crap,” said Cari. “Doesn’t happen.”
“Has,” I said.
“Times are different now,” she said.
“Oh.”
We topped a rise and the lights of downtown D.C. twinkled in our windshield. Twenty blocks away glowed the white marble institution where the President slept.
“Nothing’s changed,” I said. “We can’t run forever and we can’t go in—we’re whacko escapees wanted for murder of our shrink, plus now kidnapping and assault.”
“Burglary,” said Russell, “with trashing.”
“No fingerprints,” said Eric. “Wore gloves.”
“We need more intell to sell our story to somebody who’ll care,” I said.
Cari said: “What are you talking about?”
51
The next day. Tuesday. Day Eight of our renegade Op. High noon.
Russell’s black trenchcoat flapped as he walked three paces behind me on the sidewalk of the main road past the SAD gray blockhouse. When he’d Reconned that mostly innocent building at 9:15 a.m, he carried a mailing tube, wore his deliveryman uniform. But he changed clothes for our noon hit.
Said: “I am not dying in brown.”
We marched toward the front door.
On the far side of the building, Eric paced towards the side door. His glasses and pudgy shuffle pegged him as a nerd. The gizmo he made from a battery-powered jigsaw hung strapped under his nerd jacket that also held Nurse Death’s Walther PPK. Loaded.
Ten feet behind Eric strolled what looked like a father and daughter. The daughter had just-dyed brown hair. The eagle-like father wore a black knit cap.
Eric and I were Clockers, our watches synchronizing our pace and thus the pace of those behind us walking Drag, their eyes covering our backs and scanning the street.
My hand pulled open the front door to let the trenchcoated man behind me swing inside the building with hands empty as at that exact same tick, a nerd opened the side door for a father and daughter to swoop inside, ‘Dad’ sweeping the entryway corridors with his gaze, ‘Daughter’ zeroing the stairwell.
Inside looked like Russell’s Recon photos developed at the one-hour.
Russell and I entered our stairwell, slowly climbed. Don’t arrive out of breath. Smelled like concrete cinder blocks and carpet cleaner, ghosts of sneaked cigarettes.
Fourth floor. I swung open the stairwell exit: Office corridors… clear.
Eric’s team surfed around the corner on radio waves from an easy music station torturing unseen officer workers. Somewhere a phone rang. Stopped.
Our teams met at a solid brown office door on a sunlit corridor of office doors.
But this door bore the number 402 and the corridor’s only government-issue lock.
A Campbell 21/25 high security lock, Eric’s guess confirmed by Recon pictures. Doors on offices one flight up held identical locks. The Campbell 21/25 is one grade down in quality from the Q Clearance locks on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Dyed-brown haired Cari slid a hardware store plexiglass shimmy out of her left sleeve. A loaded Glock from her old crew rode her right hip.
Eric swung his motel room engineered gizmo out from his jacket.
Zane held his pistol pointed at-the-ready toward the white ceiling.
I drew the tranquilizer dart gun from the weapons vest. Whispered into the cell phone: “Set!” to Hailey who grudgingly agreed to function as Double-E (Evac/Evade) because Cari had to be on the hit: “What good is your witness, your spy, if she can’t see?” From the white Caddy idling beside a nearby church, Hailey transmitted: “Clear.”
Life can come down to one door. A brown slab to no going back.
This brown slab. This door. With it
s lock that said were up against our stronger selves, the sentinels in the shadows who’d created us. We were up against Uncle Sam.
And he had it all. Night vision goggles. Satellites streaming video surveillance from outer space. Infra-red scanners to ‘see’ through walls. Caves of computers calculating faster than a speeding bullet. Stealth warplanes with smart bombs for surgical air strikes. Body armor and flamethrowers. A billion dollars in secret bank accounts. SAD shadow warriors and Trouble Boys & Hotshots carrying silenced machineguns. Black helicopters. The atomic fucking bomb.
All on the other side of that door.
We had a few stolen weapons, a dead man’s white Caddy, a lot of crazy.
My left hand circled the safety spring handle on one of the vest’s flash/bang grenades. Eric pulled the pin so I wouldn’t need to put down the tranquilizer gun. He optimistically tucked the pin in my shirt pocket so we could disarm the grenade when.
We all looked at Russell.
Standing tall. Sunglasses on. Black leather trenchcoat belted shut. Arms stretched down along his sides. His right hand held Cari’s pistol fitted with its silencer: that weapon looked like an ebony samurai sword.
Pride flashed in me was that this was a good day to not commit suicide.
Snick went the cocking hammer on Russell’s gun.
Eric penetrated the lock hole with the gizmo’s re-smithed hacksaw blade.
Cari slid the shimmy into the door crack, wiggled the dead bolt.
Eric’s saw vibrated the lock. Her shimmy tricked the steel dead bolt into the void he made of the tumblers. Eric pulled out his gizmo—turned the doorknob. Pushed.
Cari spun away from the door, drawing her gun to face one hallway corner.
The door swung inward as Eric zeroed the other hallway corner with his Walther.
Russell leapt into the office, his silenced gun scanning like the ultimate third eye.
