by James Grady
The red car drove around the dragon facility from the Northbound entrance. A Japanese brand built in Tennessee that glided ever closer to two men standing by a gray van near the white gazebo.
Where the red car parked.
She opened the driver’s door. Let them see no one rode with her (unless they were laying on the back seat floor or huddled in the trunk). Kept her hands in sight as she walked toward them and yes, it was only a cell phone in her left hand.
Statistically, most people shoot right handed.
“Hey,” she said: “Aren’t you friends of Gary Pettigrew?”
“Don’t know the guy,” answered Doug. Said guy and not him or man.
“So where you from?”
“Where we’re going,” answered Doug, sounding ordinary enough for any eavesdropper (none around) but not a likely response from a random stranger.
“Then I’m in the right place.” She grinned. “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”
Her left hand showed them the package’s picture in her cell phone.
“You must be Condor,” she said, extending her right hand to shake his.
“Vin,” corrected Doug. “But yeah.”
She was young. Short black hair. Clean caramel complexion and bright ebony eyes. Dark slacks and a white blouse under an unbuttoned navy blue jacket.
Said: “Want to see my credentials?”
“If you’re bogus and got the recognition code, you’ll pack fake flash,” said Doug.
“Damn it! I’ve been dying for a chance to whip out my I.D.: Homeland Security, up against the wall!”
“Rookie,” said Doug.
“Who else would get stuck with a one -day road trip up to here and back to DC?”
Her voice stayed easy. “I’m Malati Chavali, and is that guy walking this way one of us?”
Doug smiled: “Yeah, Rook’, he’s with us.”
Brian drifted to her red car, glanced in the back seat, turned and said like that was the reason for his detour: “Where do you want his two bags?”
“What do you think?” she said to Doug—looked at Condor. “I’m sorry! I should ask you, it’s not like you’re …”
“Just a package?” said the man who could technically maybe be her grandfather.
“And you want me to call you Vin, right?”
He shrugged. “Mission requirements.”
“Speaking of,” said Brian. “We gotta hit the road.”
“Brooklyn calls,” joked his partner.
Condor’s suitcases went in the red car’s trunk.
He and its driver Malati watched the gray van pull out of its parking space and drive onto the Northbound ramp … gone.
“Can I ask you a favor?” she said to the silver-haired man as they stood in the cool morning air. “I know you’re probably anxious to get to your new apartment—row house, actually, on Capitol Hill—your Settlement Specialist will meet us there, we’ll call her when we hit the Beltway and … The thing is, I’m dying for coffee.”
“Wouldn’t want you to die,” said Condor. “How would I get where I’m going?”
“There is that,” she said.
They walked toward the rest stop’s facility.
“Before we get where there are ears,” he said as they moved between parked cars lined in rows of shiny steel, “you’re Home Sec’, not CIA?”
“Actually, detailed to the National Resources Operations Division of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—there’s CIA on staff there, too, but me … Yeah, I’m in Home Sec’. For now. Grad school at Georgetown—”
“Don’t vomit your whole cover story—first chance you get,” said the silver-haired man as they neared the main doors. “Even if it’s true. Maybe especially if it’s true.”
Laughing coworkers in Groucho Marx glasses strode past them.
Malati whispered: “Sorry.”
He held the building door for her. “Shit happens. So far, ours works.”
She smiled thank you as she stepped past that older gentleman.
Heard him say: “Should you have let me behind you?”
A chill claimed her amidst the thick air inside the rest stop facility.
She answered: “I don’t know.”
Condor shrugged. “Too late to think about it now.
“I’m going in there,” he said, pointing to the MEN’S room. “Get your coffee and we’ll meet at a table.”
“I thought I was in charge.”
“Good,” he said. Walked into the bathroom, left her standing there. Alone.
Five minutes later, he spotted her sitting at a table in the food court facing the restrooms, the gift shop, and the main doors. Tactically acceptable. The wall of eateries waited to her right, the windows to the parking lot on her heartside. Her eyes locked on him as he walked toward where she sat with two cups from ’bucks on the table.
“Please,” she said, “sit. We’ve got time.”
“You sure?”
“No. But we can make it work.”
He settled on the black steel chair facing her.
“Look around,” she said. “Most people are tuned out. Plugged into their cells or tablets. Not really here. Plus there’s nobody behind me, right? Nobody behind you. Nobody close enough to hear even if we’re not careful what we say.”
He gave her a nod and the smile that wanted to come.
“I’d like to start over,” she said. “The coffee’s a peace offering.”
“OK. We’re probably going to have to stop at least once before DC anyway.”
“When you want, when we can.” She took a sip from her cup, left no lip stain.
Don’t think about red lipstick. Gone. That’s the forever. This is now.
Malati said: “Somehow now I don’t think you’re just, say, a former asset or KGB defector who’s been in a retirement program and needs routine relocation.”
“What do you know?”
“The codename I’m now not supposed to use.” Malati shrugged. “Vin. Weird first name, but whatever, Vin: I volunteered for this nobody wanted it gig. Extra duty. Trying to prove I’m competent, trustable, a team player with initiative.”
“What do you want?” he said.
“To do more than earn a paycheck. Serve my country. Do some good.”
“And under that essay answer?”
“I don’t want to be somebody who doesn’t know what’s really going on.”
“Reality,” he said: “I’ve heard of that.”
He sipped his coffee. She’d gotten black and a couple to-go creamers so he could decide. He popped the lid off the cup, poured in cream, thought: Why not?
“Yesterday, our bosses decided I was no longer crazy.
“Or,” he added, “at least not so crazy that I couldn’t be released to a kind of free.”
Though most people would have seen nothing, Condor sensed her tense up, but she sat there and took it.
Malati said: “Are you?”
“Not so crazy or kind of free?”
“It’s your answer.”
And that made him like her. Told him she might be worth it.
“Guess we’ll see,” he said. “You’re my driver.”
“Just for this road trip.” She blurted: “I want to learn.”
Motion outside pulled his eyes from her to look out the window.
A school bus: classic yellow, slowing down out front. The school bus seemed to wobble, stopped haphazardly near the rows of citizens’ parked vehicles.
He nodded toward the school bus. “Did you ever ride one of those?”
“I’m not supposed to vomit my cover story. Even if it’s true.”
“Lesson one,” he told her. “Give trust to get trust.”
“That’s not my first lesson from you.”
That acknowledgment made him like her even more as she added: “Yeah, I did bus time in Kansas City.”
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” he quoted.
“Hey!” she said. “We’re talking Kansas City, Missouri. Whole different place.”
They laughed together and as she relaxed into this is where I’m from stories, he looked around at where they were.
Sitting at a table by himself was a forty-ish man munching a morning cheeseburger, tie loosened over a cheap shirt already straining against too many such meals, a franchise manager who couldn’t figure out why his boss hated him. Two tables away sat a thirty-ish mom leaning her forehead into one hand while the other held the cell phone against her ear for the report from the school on her daughter who’d been the teenage pregnancy that ended in getting out of what was now both their hometown. Two male medical techs in green scrubs munched on fried chicken, one was white, one was black, neither wanted to get back to the hospital where they could only give morphine and more bills to a cancer warrior. There sat a down vest over a white sweater blond beauty, like, OMG machinegun texting her cell phone and being super careful to not say she was scared to death because she had no clue about what came after nineteen. The gray-haired couple barely older than Condor sat staring everywhere but at each other and seeing nowhere better they could go. The two years out of college man who worked the night shift at a factory job one level above the summer work he’d done to help him pay for school sat drinking Diet Coke against the yawns, dreading tomorrow with its first of the month loan bills coming to the clapboard house where he lived in the basement below his working parents who loved him so much. Like Malati noted, many of the road-dazed travelers seemed hypnotized by screens.
We’re all packages transporting from some there to another where.
And yet, thought Condor, we find the hope or the dreams or the responsibility, the dignity and courage to push ourselves away from the tables at this nowhere transit zone, get up, get up again, go outside, get in our cars and go, go on, get to where we can, tears yes, but laughter at it all and at ourselves, because if nothing else, this is the ride we got and we refuse to just surrender.
The Nick Logar Rest Stop.
These are the highways of our lives.
“… so my parents wanted me to go into business, but,” Malati shrugged, “profit doesn’t turn me on as much as purpose.”
Children. Chattering. Squealing. Half a dozen of them running through the main doors TO THE BATHROOMS! ahead of a woman teacher shouting: “Stay together!”
Condor and Malati looked out the window.
Saw a straggling line of second graders, marching across the parking lot from the school bus. Some kids wore Halloween glory—a witch, a fairy tale princess, a ghost, a cowboy, Saturday morning cartoon costumes. All the kids carried an orange “Trick or Treat!” plastic bucket in the shape of a pumpkin stenciled with black eyes, a toothy grin, and a corporate logo from the chain drugstore that accidentally ordered too many of the buckets to sell but cleverly recouped a tax donation to their local elementary school. As the children marched, those pumpkin heads swung wildly on wire loop handles gripped in their tiny hands.
“Time for us to go,” said Condor.
Didn’t matter who was in charge, they both knew he was right.
At the main entrance, Condor—no: Vin, his name is Vin—the package brushed her out of the way as he held a door for a man not much older than Malati, a guy in a wheelchair who was rolling himself up the ramp, a Philly vet named Warren Iverson who wore his Army jacket from the 10th Mountain Division and a smile on his boyish face.
Malati realized Vin didn’t just notice the vet with wasted legs, Vin saw him.
Said: “Better hurry, man. A stampede of short stuffs is coming up behind you.”
“Always.” Warren rolled past the silver-haired man in a black leather jacket.
Malati leaned close to Vin as they stepped outside and aside to let the parade of costumed kids squeal their way into this wondrous rest stop oasis.
She whispered: “You keep doing stuff like that, you’ll ruin your tough guy act.”
“Be your cover,” Vin told her. “Besides, looks like he’s one of the men and women who pay when we fuck up our job. Or some politician fucks it up for us.”
He shrugged.
“Do what should be done, nothing special about that,” he told her sounding so much like her father.
But only he heard the beep … beep … beep of machines webbed to a hospital bed as he said: “Probably I owe guys like him something beyond coulda and shoulda.”
She understood what he said but not what he meant.
Just walk beside him. Figure out what you can.
“My car’s still there,” she said as they started down one ramp to the parking lot.
The red Japanese motion machine, squatting way over by the north border fence and the white gazebo where exiting the Turnpike Southbound came a black hearse.
The black hearse parked in a row of cars near Malati’s red ride. As the hearse glided to a stop, Condor envisioned the YOU ARE HERE map mounted on the wall between the bathrooms. Nick Logar was one of the few rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike that serviced traffic going both directions. The padded black-clad driver got out of the hearse, opened its back door. If he’d forgotten something at this rest stop from when he left earlier behind the Southbound suspect cell phone photo couple, Mr. Black Costume would have had to drive about ten miles before he could exit, get back on the Turnpike north, then drive here, but … But then he would have needed to drive past this place or through it, go further north to another exit turnaround, again maybe ten miles away in order to come back and exit southbound back into the rest stop, into here.
Why make that long circle drive?
What’s that sound? thought Condor as he and Malati neared the bottom of the ramp to the parking lot where two burly men stood with unlit cigarettes dangling from their lips. The man wearing the COUNTY SCHOOLS windbreaker pulled a silver lighter from his left front shirt pocket, clicked it open and thumbed its wheel to summon a flame and ignite the white papered cancer sticks, barely a pause as that bus driver said:
“Couldn’t believe it, twenty minutes from the school if the traffic held, sure as shit ain’t holding now, shut down and backed up behind me, so I got off lucky, whump—bus starts to shake, what the fuck, get it to this exit and wrestle it down over there, at least get the kids where they can pee, but my tires got four little black steel like … like stars or some other pointy things, and with three flats, we barely made it here.”
Malati felt Vin drift her away from her waiting car, into the front parking lot.
“Listen!” he said. Made them stop and stand still, absolutely still.
“To what?”
“There’s no whooshing.”
He faced the unseen empty lanes of the expressway going south, turned to look past the hulk of the rest stop facility to the unseen empty expressway lanes going north.
Heard that silence.
Felt his own thundering heart.
From deep inside Malati came the whisper: “We’ve got to go now.”
They looked across rows of parked vehicles toward her distant red car.
Saw ordinary human beings, everyday people strolling to and fro, the guy in black walking toward the facility from the hearse. A honeymoon couple laughed.
The new husband aimed his cell phone camera.
The happy bride raised her face to the open sky.
Like a red mist flowered her skull as she flipped to the parking lot pavement.
The husband almost dropped his cell phone before a crimson fountain from his spine burst out of his blue-shirted chest.
Time became a child’s clear marble dropped into a swimming pool …
… to slowly sink.
Not seeing what I’
m seeing! Malati’s mind registered her package, her responsibility, her … Condor call him Vin: he lunged before the second shot’s Crack!
What she saw over rows of parked cars at an ordinary New Jersey Turnpike rest stop on an ordinary autumn Halloween was the not-so-far-away guy in black.
What she saw was that ordinary American boy face behind an assault rifle.
A gorilla roared from where the bus driver and the salesman were smoking.
The gunman sprayed bullets at what he heard.
The salesman and bus driver dropped twitching, bleeding, moaning, dying near the concrete ramp to where the children were.
Condor pulled the young fed’ down between two parked cars.
Yelled: “Can you get a good shot?”
“I don’t have a gun! I’m not that kind of spy! And you’re a crazy old man!”
Machinegun fire. Screams.
“Fucking Brooklyn.” Condor waved her between two cars, stayed low as he scrambled two more cars over, eased his head above the hood of steel shelter.
The shooter looked like the robot of death. Padding under his black shirt and pants: Had to be ballistic armor. Working the assault rifle, thumbing the release to drop the spent magazine to the parking lot pavement, reaching in a pouch to pull out an expanded capacity mag’ and slap it home: that movie star reload let Condor see a combat pump shotgun strapped across the robot’s chest.
The robot stalked toward where Condor and Malati hid.
Gotchya! whirled the other way to rat-a-tat-tat a line of bullet holes through the food court’s wall of windows. Condor spotted a pistol SWAT-style strapped to the shooter’s right leg, a combat knife sheathed on his left ankle, strapped-on pouches. Is that a computer tablet dangling from his belt?
Condor dropped between the cars.
Malati said: “What’s he doing?”
“Killing people.”
“Why?”
“Because he can.”
The machinegun buzzed like a monster’s vibrating tongue.
“Did you see his hearse?” said Condor.
Malati started to rise—
Got jerked down. “You don’t know where he’s looking! You got no diversion!”
She shuddered in his grasp.