“Owen,” she said to me, her voice static-filled over the intercom system. “What’s this all about?”
I gently reached over and grasped her hand. “It means a number of things. It means you and I are going to Portland tonight, for dinner and to see a musical. We’ll also be spending the night at a beautiful bed-and-breakfast near the harbor.”
And savoring the new agreement I had with Cameron, I added, “Why don’t we plan on getting away at least once every month? And you can name the place.”
She nodded, blinked hard a few times and then looked out the side window. She held my hand all the way until we landed.
* * *
—
Some nights later I was in my pickup, engine idling. Next to me, a small rucksack in his lap, sat Len Molowski—or Leonid Malenkov, if you prefer.
“My ears are still ringing from when you shot at me,” he said, looking out across at the barn where he had lived in the upstairs loft for the better part of a week.
“You’re a farmer. Ever hear the proverb of how a farmer gets a mule to pay attention?”
Even in the darkened truck cab, I could tell that he was grinning. “Yes, I have. You strike him over the head with a wooden plank.”
“So consider those shots two whacks over the head, Len. I had to make you understand that you’d been noticed, and that the next guy to come to your farm wouldn’t be as thoughtful or as charming as I was. Frankly, all that talk about being a good Soviet soldier was a bit boring.”
The man sighed. “Perhaps you are right. But after decades of keeping such a secret, I had to talk and talk, and I had to convince you and myself that what I did was right. I had to know that these years had a purpose. That they were not a waste.”
“Did it work?”
Another sigh. “No, I do not think so. When you spread your blood on the floor, told me to play dead so you could put me in the truck in a feed bag, and when you dumped your camping gear in another feed bag and threw it into the river, I was humiliated. A man who was supposed to be my enemy was trying to help me. Why did you do that?”
I rubbed at the steering wheel. “It was a long war, the Cold War. There had to be an end to it, the last two old soldiers coming to an understanding. It just made sense. That’s all I can say.”
I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a thick envelope and passed it over. “Here. Inside’s a goodly amount of cash. Pay me back whenever you can. About a half mile down this road is the center of town. There’s a Greyhound bus station, bus leaves in an hour to Portland. From there…well, you can go anywhere you want. But if I were you, I might head to New York City. Go to a place called Brighton Beach. There’s a lot of Russian emigres who live there. You might find a way to get home if you ask the right people.”
“This money, this is charity, and I cannot—”
“Oh, shut up. You’re still a marked man, and it’s in both our interests that you get the hell out of here. All right? Now, get. Before you miss the bus.”
Len waited for a moment, and then the envelope rustled as he packed it into his rucksack. He held out his hand to me. “I never forget. Do svidaniya.”
“Do svidaniya to you, too.”
He got out of the truck, a stranger in an odd land, and I watched him as he walked down the road, rucksack on his back. I thought about what lay ahead of him. A bumpy bus ride to Portland. Then another long ride to New York, to a city full of strangers. Then…who knows. Perhaps he would try to make a living with the rest of the emigres in that crowded city. Perhaps he would go home, try to adjust to a motherland that had changed so much. It seemed inevitable that he would face poverty and loneliness, with no one to care where he went or where he stayed.
I started up my truck and headed back home.
God, how I envied him.
CONDOR IN THE STACKS
JAMES GRADY
AFTER GRADUATING from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism, James Grady (1949– ), already interested in politics, attended several state conventions and then went to Washington, DC, to work on Montana senator Lee Metcalf’s staff. He went on to work as a journalist, most significantly as a muckraking investigative reporter for columnist Jack Anderson for four years. While living on Capitol Hill, “the seeds of Condor got planted,” he said in an interview.
The reference, of course, was to his most famous novel, Six Days of the Condor (1974), and the series character at the center of the iconic book and the 1975 film that was based on it, Three Days of the Condor. Directed by Sydney Pollack, it starred Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow.
Two ideas converged to give Grady the basis for the novel. His regular walking route in Washington took him past a townhouse that had a plaque in the front that sounded phony to him: American Historical Association. Having watched hundreds of noir films as a boy, he also had carried a dark thought: Suppose I returned from lunch and found that everyone in my office had been murdered? He combined the two; the entire secret division of the CIA located in a townhouse was wiped out while Condor was away on a lunch run, and the rest is essentially a chase novel when the killers realize he escaped the massacre.
Six Days of the Condor, in addition to being an exceptional thriller, and a famous one, is also historically significant as the first major American work to portray the country’s own security agency as the villain.
In Grady’s CIA, “Condor” is a generic coded appellation that has been assigned to several different characters. The young man in his first novel does not appear to be the same fellow portrayed in the present story, who is also young but now is the protagonist in a story set more than four decades later.
“Condor in the Stacks” was originally published in the Mysterious Bookshop’s Bibliomystery series (New York, The Mysterious Bookshop, 2015); it was first collected in Condor: The Short Takes (New York, Mysterious Press, 2019).
CONDOR IN THE STACKS
JAMES GRADY
“ARE YOU TROUBLE?” asked the man in a blue pinstripe suit sitting at his D.C. desk on a March Monday morning in the second decade of America’s first war in Afghanistan.
“Let’s hope not,” answered the silver-haired man in the visitor’s chair.
They faced each other in the sumptuous office of the Director of Special Projects (DOSP) for the Library of Congress (LOC). Mahogany bookcases filled the walls.
The DOSP fidgeted with a fountain pen.
Watch me stab that pen through your eye, thought his silver-haired visitor.
Such normal thoughts did not worry that silver-haired man in a blue sports jacket, a new maroon shirt, and well-worn black jeans.
What worried him was feeling trapped in a gray fog tunnel of numb.
Must be the new pill, the green pill they gave him as they drove him away from CIA headquarters, along the George Washington Parkway, and beneath the route flown by 9/11 hijackers who slammed a jetliner into the Pentagon.
The CIA car ferried him over the Potomac. Past the Lincoln Memorial. Up “the Hill” past three marble fortresses for Congress’s House of Representatives where in 1975, he’d tracked a spy from U.S. ally South Korea who was working deep cover penetration of America by posing as a mere member of the messianic Korean cult that provided the last cheerleaders for impeached President Nixon.
The ivory U.S. Capitol glistened across the street from where the CIA car delivered Settlement Specialist Emma and silver-haired him to the Library of Congress.
Whose DOSP told him: “I don’t care how ‘classified’ you are. Do this job and don’t make trouble or you’ll answer to me.”
The DOSP set the fountain pen on the desk.
Put his hands on his keyboard: “What’s your name?”
“Vin,” said the silver-haired stranger.
“Last name?”
Vin told him that lie.
The DOSP typed it. A printer hummed out warm paper forms. He used the fountain pen to sign all the correct lines.
“Come on,” he told Vin, tossing that writing technology of the previous century onto his desk. “Let’s deliver you to your hole.”
He marched toward the office’s mahogany door.
Didn’t see his pen vanish into Vin’s hand.
That mahogany door swung open as the twenty-something receptionist yawned, oblivious to the pistol under her outer office visitor Emma’s spring jacket. Emma stood as the door opened, confident she wouldn’t need to engage her weapon but with a readiness to let it fill her hand she couldn’t shake no matter how long it had been since.
The DOSP marched these disruptions from another agency through two tunnel-connected, city block–sized library castles to a yellow cinderblock walled basement and a green metal door with a keypad lock guarded by a middle-aged brown bird of a woman.
“This is Miss Doyle,” the DOSP told Vin. “One of ours. She’s been performing your just-assigned functions with optimal results, plus excelling in all her other work.”
Brown bird woman told Vin: “Call me Fran.”
Fran held up the plastic laminated library staff I.D. card dangling from a lanyard looped around her neck. “We’ll use mine to log you in.”
She swiped her I.D. card through the lock. Tapped the keypad screen.
“Now enter your password,” said Fran.
“First,” CIA Emma told the library-only staffers, “you two: please face me.”
The DOSP and Fran turned their backs to the man at the green metal door.
Vin tapped six letters into the keypad. Hit ENTER.
The green metal door clicked. Let him push it open.
Pale light flooded the heavy-aired room. A government-issue standard metal desk from 1984 waited opposite the open door. An almost as ancient computer monitor filled the desk in front of a wheeled chair. Rough pine boxes big enough to hold a sleeping child were stacked against the back wall.
Like coffins.
“Empty crates in,” said Fran, “full crates out. Picked up and dropped off in the hall. It’s your job to get them to and from there. Use that flatbed dolly.”
She computer clicked to a spreadsheet listing crates dropped off, crates filled, crates taken away: perfectly balanced numbers.
“Maintenance Operations handles data entry, except for when you log a pick-up notice. They drop off the Review Inventory outside in the hall.” Fran pointed to a heap of cardboard boxes. “From closing military bases. Embassies. Other…secure locations.
“Unpack the books,” said Fran. “Check them for security breaches. Like if some Air Force officer down in one of our missile silos forgot and stuck some secret plan in a book from the base library. Or wrote secret notes they weren’t supposed to.”
Vin said: “What difference would it make? You burn the books anyway.”
“Pulp them,” said the DOSP. “We are in compliance with recycling regulations.”
CIA Emma said: “Vin, this is one of those eyeballs-needed, gotta-do jobs.”
“Sure,” said Vin. “And you’ll know right where I am while I’m doing it.”
The DOSP snapped: “Just do it right. The books go into crates, the crates get hauled away, the books get pulped.”
Vin said: “Except for the ones we save.”
“Rescuer is not in your job description,” said the DOSP. “You can send no more than one cart of material per week to the Preserve stacks. You’re only processing fiction.”
The DOSP checked his watch. “A new employee folder is on your desk. We printed it out. Your computer isn’t printer or Internet enabled.”
“Security policy,” said CIA Emma. “Not just for you.”
“Really.” The DOSP’s smile curved like a scimitar. “Well, as your Agency insisted, this is the only library computer that accepts his access code. A bit isolating, I would think, but as long as that’s security policy and not personal.”
He and brown bird Fran adjourned down the underground yellow hall.
Vin stood by the steel desk.
Emma stood near the door. Scanned her Reinsertion Subject. “Are you OK?”
“That green pill wiped out whatever OK means.”
“I’ll report that, but hey: you’ve only been out of the Facility in Maine for—”
“The insane asylum,” he interrupted. “The CIA’s secret insane asylum.”
“Give yourself a break. You’ve only been released for eleven days, and after what happened in New Jersey while they were driving you down here…
“Look,” she said, “it’s your new job, first day. Late lunch. Let’s walk to one of those cafes we saw when we moved you into your house. Remember how to get home?”
“Do you have kids?”
Her stare told him no.
“This is like dropping your kid off for kindergarten,” said Vin. “Go.”
Emma said: “You set the door lock to your codename?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Condor.”
His smile was wistful: “Can’t ever get away from that.”
“Call you Vin, call you Condor, at least you have a name. Got my number?”
He held up his outdated flip-phone programmed by an Agency tech.
She left him alone in that subterranean cave.
Call him Vin. Call him Condor.
Ugly light. The toad of an old computer squatting on a gray steel desk. A heap of sagging cardboard boxes. The wall behind him stacked with wooden crates—coffins.
Thick heavy air smelled like…basement rot, paper, stones, old insulation, cardboard, tired metal, steam heat. A whiff of the coffins’ unvarnished pine.
He rode the office chair in a spin across the room. Rumbled back in front of the desktop computer monitor glowing with the spreadsheet showing nine cases—pinewood coffins—nine cases delivered to this Review Center. He clicked the monitor into a dark screen that showed his reflection with seven coffins stacked behind him.
Only dust waited in the drawers on each side of the desk’s well. The employee manual urged library staffers to hide in their desk wells during terrorist or psycho attacks. Like the atom bomb doomsday drills when I was a—
And he remembered! His CIA-prescribed handful of daily pills didn’t work perfectly: he could kind of remember!
Tell no one.
He slid open the middle desk drawer. Found three paperclips and one penny.
From the side pocket of the blue sports jacket he fetched the stolen fountain pen.
Sometimes you gotta do what you do just to be you.
He stashed the stolen pen in his middle desk drawer.
Noticed the monitor’s reflection of seven coffins.
WAIT.
Am I crazy?
YES was the truth but not the answer.
He turned around and counted the coffins stacked against the back wall: Seven.
Clicked open the computer’s spreadsheet to check the inventory delivery: Nine.
Why are two coffins missing?
The CIA’s cell phone sat on his desk.
This is your job now. No job, no freedom.
Condor put the cell phone in his shirt pocket over his heart.
Suddenly he didn’t want to be there because there was where they brought him, transporting him like a boxcar of doomed books. He counted the coffins: still seven. Walked out the door, pulling it shut with a click as he switched out the light.
The wide yellow-bricked hall telescoped away into distant darkness to his left. To his right, the tunnel ran about thirty steps until it T’ed at a brick wall.
He turned left, the longest route that let him look back and see where he’d been. Floated each stepping foot out in front of him empty of weight like Victor’d taught him in th
e insane asylum: aesthetically correct T’ai chi plus a martial arts technique that foiled foot-sweeping ninjas and saved you if the floor beneath your stepping shoe vanished.
Footsteps! Walking down that intersecting tunnel.
He hurried after those sounds of someone to ask for directions.
The footsteps quickened.
Don’t scare anybody: cough so they know you’re here.
The footsteps ran.
Pulled Condor into running, his heart jack hammering his chest.
Go right—no left, twenty steps until the next juncture of tunnels.
Whirr of sliding-open doors.
Dashing around a yellow brick walled corner—
Elevator—doors closing! He thrust his left arm into the doors’ chomp—they bounced open and tumbled him into the bright metal cage.
FIST!
Without thought, with the awareness of ten thousand practices, his right forearm met the fist’s arm, not to block but to blend with that force and divert it from its target.
The fist belonged to a woman.
And in the instant she struggled to recover her diverted balance, the palm of Condor’s left hand rocketed her up and back so she bounced off the rear wall of the elevator as those metal doors closed behind him.
The cage groaned toward the surface.
“Leave me alone!” she yelled.
“You punched me!”
His attacker glared at him through black-framed glasses. Short dark hair. A thin silver loop pierced the right corner of her lower lip. Black coat. Hands clenched at her sides, not up in an on-guard position. She had the guts to fight but not the know-how.
“You chased me in here!” she yelled. “Don’t deny it! I finally caught you! Stop it! You keep watching me! Doing things!”
The Big Book of Espionage Page 125
