by James Grady
Shook with the anger and terror of knowing how the world could—might—treat her.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Thel’d told him one day out of the blue as if she read his mind. “I’ll run hard and make it all rhyme even if I can’t make it all make sense.”
Eleven-year-old Bo sat at the kitchen table with his second-grade brother Nate, telling him how it was time to set Pokemon aside and concentrate on the Marvel Superheroes universe—and history, of course, added Bo when he saw Dad’s home.
They all saw it in him.
Bess spotted it first and he felt her heart settle its dread deep in her dantian, but Rick couldn’t tell if Thel read the vibe of Mom or the coil of Dad that told her oh-oh, step up strong. Everyone saw Bo send his kid brother Nate the It’s gonna be OK smile.
They sat around the kitchen table and ate dinner, fresh rainbow trout marinated in raspberry vinegar and green beans that had never tasted so good and so useless. Rick felt himself falling away from the kitchen’s perfect yellow glow illuminating everything he had to lose.
The kids went to their bedrooms early without quarrel or complaint. All of them hugged Dad goodnight. None of them mentioned how long they all held on.
Bess waited until their bedroom door was closed.
Until he’d closed his bedside table drawer on his stashed gun.
Waited until they brushed their teeth with mint toothpaste and wore what they slept in and lay in their bed held by the darkness that still let them discern each other’s shape in the glow streaming through their second-floor windows from stars, from whatever moon was out there, from the house lights of neighbors who never knew.
Bess lay her head on the bones caging his heart.
“This promotion meant you were supposed to be done with things like … whatever.”
“I am,” he told her.
“Can you tell me why it doesn’t feel that way to me or the kids?”
“No.”
“You’re not in the field now. You’re a top boss. The buck stops with you, not bullets.”
“This isn’t—might not be like that at all. Not about bullets. That you can see.”
The woman he loved whispered in the dark: “All I care about seeing is you.”
“And our kids. And the world we make them live in. And everybody else’s kids.”
Bess tried to smile as she said: “Why did I have to fall in love with a good man?”
“If I am, you made me that way.”
Bess curled on top of him, her leg slid up over both of his as she folded herself into the straddling, her loins pressing down on his. He cupped her face in bedroom darkness that cloaked her brown eyes from his yearning even as he felt glistenings on the soft warm of her cheeks.
Gray clouds threatening rain and chilly air made the next morning, but Rick decided not wearing a topcoat was a more justifiable risk than putting another layer of clothing over his weapon’s access. He chose not to wear his ballistic vest—that would cause questions and any question increased risk. The news in his cell phone told him about President Obama getting an outpouring of emotion when he visited Flint, Michigan, and drank the local water that had been poisoning the town’s children with lead for years because of corruption. Headlines screamed Hillary Clinton Email Probe and Trump Takes GOP’s Reins.
“Long lunch,” Rick told Hargesheimer when he left the office at high noon. Left his personal and Bureau cellphones locked in his desk drawer, the former an isolation of his heart, the latter a direct and actionable violation of Procedure.
Rick left his issued BuCar parked in Hoover’s underground garage.
Walked the city blocks around FBI headquarters that when Nixon was President, held burlesque houses and strip bars starring legends like Tempest Storm, and that like the porno movie theater then two blocks from the White House, laundered cash to the Mafia.
Brick agent savvy shaped his steps. Even in his dread of this day he felt the welcome back surge of that knowing, this doing, a tingle of schooled savagery he knew most Americans never owned and with good luck would never need.
By 12:44 he’d zig-zagged through streets of lawyers and lobbyists, chroniclers and cops of badges or bureaucracies. Walked amidst convincers and crusaders and come along for the ride women and men wearing suits of power for charming and coddling, channeling and challenging this city’s marbleized air. He reached Metro Center in its canyon of flat faced office buildings regulated to be shorter than the towering white stone obelisk of the Washington Monument. If some cover team was on him, they were far better than any he’d run or run from.
He joined a line at a food truck that sold him energy for as a meat ‘n’ tomatoes sandwich, tasted nothing and washed it down with a bottle of water. If he’d been naked deep cover, he’d have gone to a museum with metal detector security screenings that had public bathrooms for him to use, benches for him to sit on while he pretended to study the art on the walls instead of seeking any art stalking him in those halls, but yeah, he had an iron on his hip.
That’s why God and Seattle gave us coffee shops, he told himself. As long as he bought, he could sit with what he got and rest through the tick-tock to when.
Rick flagged down a blue taxi at 1:49. Had the black driver who was old enough to be his father drop him on the big money’s K Street, walked two blocks, flagged down a cab that took him to the Mall—the once-open turf of visual freedom now getting choked by pressure groups’ deserving monuments stretching through the city from the white icing Capitol Dome, past the long Reflecting Pool to the wise, sad eyes of Abraham Lincoln’s marble statue.
Rick gauged how long it would take him to walk from where he stood in the trees by the Korean War Memorial’s larger than life stone statues of grim-faced American soldiers on patrol, get to the Lincoln Memorial’s steps, climb them to where a black opera singer denied the venue of the lily white Daughters of the American Revolution once stood and sang free for everyone.
Semper fi haunted Rick. Fidelity Bravery Integrity. Honor. Duty. The rule of law. The way things should be. The way they are. Oaths he swore. Promises made. Proper Procedures. What was right. What was wrong. What to do with what came along.
He marched out of the trees, along the Reflecting Pool, up the levels of white marble stairs to the entryway columns of the open front stone cavern honoring a man who gave his life for freedom, justice and country only to get gunned down in an ambush.
Rick unbuttoned his suitcoat as he climbed those steps.
Was a slow day for tourists. Rick estimated the Monument hosted maybe a hundred visitors. A group of senior citizens nervously staring at the heart-pounding stairs they’d have to climb to say been there, seen that. Two handfuls of middle-aged family and friends—one speaking Japanese, one with men wearing Kansas City Chiefs jackets.
As Rick reached the second long and wide flat stone landing before the final set of stairs, giggling elementary school children dashed up the stone steps. St. Paul, Minnesota, senior class trippers slouched and swaggered and OMG-d as like teenagers everywhere, they ignored a tag-wearing woman while that obvious chaperone gazed upon history. Her hair the color of the raspberries in the vinegar from his dinner last night caught Rick’s eyes, but he had more important things to see.
At 2:29, four minutes from contact, Rick was fourteen steps from where Abe Lincoln loomed and the three walls boxing him in were carved with his words about truth, justice, patriotism, compassion. A dozen paces to Rick’s right on a marble step stood a bald man scanning the Mall with binoculars, seemingly oblivious to what Rick thought when he saw that squat man’s face with a new stubble mustache and shaved off eyebrows.
Rick crossed the threshold and entered the cavernous gray stone chamber.
Figure thirty, thirty-five people wandering around in here. Multiple possible’s. Multiple innocent collateral casualties, far more than that New Jersey night whe
n he soft clothes sat at the bar waiting for some connected moke named Seba who claimed he was ready to flip so he could dodge his clip. Rick’s partner that night—Harry Gossett, good Bureau—sat with a stevedore’s beer in his hands as his corner chair leaned against the wall and his eyes scanned everything.
You’ve got no backup now, Rick told himself as he scanned this Op Zone.
Where are the Harry Gossett’s of the world when you need them?
Oh yeah, that’s who I’m supposed to be.
Am, motherfucker.
And like that … there he was.
Has to be him, thought Rick. Half a dozen “unknown to you Old Man” possible’s, but this guy, this silver-haired citizen has the edge, plus he’s walking toward me soft pad like a mountain lion. The paws I’ve got to watch are his hands stuck “innocently” where I can’t see them in the side pockets of his faded black leather bomber jacket.
That silver-haired man smiled.
Stood just out of striking range. Nodded to Rick. Turned like a tourist to stare out of Memorial at the long Reflecting Pool. The Washington Monument’s hard and rising obelisk. The horizon glisten off the Capitol’s white dome. Flapping American flags.
The silver-haired man said: “Hell of a sight, huh?”
Not the recognition code!
Rick just said: “Yeah.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be here today,” said the silver-haired still could be. He turned from what world waited outside and put his blue eyes on Rick’s face. “How about you?”
Rick shrugged. Saw nobody else who might be the contact. Saw nobody paying them any mind. Nobody standing in earshot.
“Odd how free will compels us through the circumstances we can’t choose,” said the old maybe innocent and just lonely guy. “Life’s such a mixture of gotta and oughta and wanna.”
“‘Least it is here,” said Rick: Break contact or let it ride?
“Ah, here.” The old man smiled. Turned to face the outer world. “Like here is so real.”
“It’s what we’ve got.”
“Unless what we’ve got is a multiverse.”
“You sound like one of my sons.”
“Which one—Bo or Nathan?”
Don’t shoot don’t grab him don’t jam your pistol under his jaw until he talks just DON’T!
Don’t let the motherfucker even think he’s got you rattled.
Let him come out to play.
“Our here could be one of infinity’s jokes,” said the old man. “Scientists who took us to the moon talk about how our real might just be one version. That perhaps hundreds more versions of all this exist in a swirl of dimensions, a multiverse where each verse is different. Timelines and what happened become different versions of themselves. Many of the same people and things here are there and there and there, too. What you ‘know’ is real, but what if there are different versions of real that are equally true?”
The silver-haired Unknown Hostile smiled: “Your boys would say that’s how and why we have superheroes.”
Give him nothing.
“Then, of course,” said the old man, “a butterfly you never see flaps its wings and all your everything changes. Your scene starts with the same elements then …”
Hands! He’s pulling his hands out of black leather jacket pocket … empty.
“… the butterfly routinely flaps its wings and everything from then on changes.”
The silver-haired man watched his right hand float up to eye level between them.
“Maybe it’s not the butterfly’s fault. Maybe ‘fault’ isn’t the right word. That’s both an intent and an outcome-based word. And maybe it’s not the butterfly. Maybe you’re the butterfly. Something insignificant that you do. Maybe choose to do. Free will and all that.”
The old man fixated on his brown dotted, pale-skinned right hand as it slowly turned this way and that, like it had a life and will of its own.
“Maybe you do one small thing with your hand one Thursday morning, and that ripples out through everything and every second thereafter.”
“So where are we now?” said Rick. Open the door, let him walk in to you.
“How the fuck should I know,” said the old man. “Have you been to the Wall?”
Make the beat between long. Let him know not to fuck with you like that.
“I try to stay off of there,” said Rick.
The old man said: “Let’s take a walk in the sun.
“Mind your step,” he added as they marched outside to the glow.
They walked side by side in a scattered crowd. Grade schoolers. High schoolers. Tourists with cellphone cameras. No one walked close enough to hear their low spoken words.
“Who are you?” said Rick.
“You want a name?” said the old man whose rock ’n’ rolled ears seemed to work just fine.
“A name is nothing. I want your number.”
“I’ve spent a lifetime resisting being a number.”
“Are you from over the river and through the woods?” Langley. CIA.
“I’m the V,” said the old guy. “Or the V is me. Or both. And now you.”
“What the hell is the V?”
“Virtual. Not what you see around us. We exist and operate in and from the Internet. Online. No there there. There is no us. We’re not trolls or cyberwarfare sharks, we’re swimmers who use the data seas to run Ops with nobody noticing.
“No payrolls or offices other than where you have your screens—though sometimes that can become what it was never supposed to be, a place you always need to work out of, and that place can become an acquired target of whatever oppo’ buys a mistaken glimpse.
“Picture it this way: When what we do requires a plane to take X from Y to Z, zapping through some military group or even a private airline comes an order in their own data flood. If you’re a V chasing a bad guy in Phoenix and need some unwitting help, the Marshall’s Service scrambles, experts at the manhunting job they don’t know started and ends outside their chain of command. Need an extract of a C.O.—Conscious Operative—need to get him and what he’s done home, and a nearby otherwise deployed Special Ops team in Niger hits the silk.
“There’s not many C.O.’s. Mostly the V are Actors—components of the V who work for other power centers, who feed the V and when necessary, give hands-on support. And it’s all kept humming by a hive of Handlers.”
“With you as the Queen Bee.”
“I’m Control Function, yeah. Conceptualized the program, too. Way back when.”
Rick shook his head NO: “This is now and I’ve never bought the whole ‘super-secret intelligence apparatus, deep cover command, phantom agents’ bullshit.”
“America’s almost always had secret phantom spy groups. In Vietnam, we had MACV-SOG. The Phoenix Program. Then phantoms emerged from ’Nam, like the Intelligence Support Activity that now has a garrison at Fort Belvoir. Or Blue Light, the 1970s nobody saw it out there ‘anti-terrorism’ Special Forces group that became Delta Force. Or Task Force 157 that ran from 1966 until a black ops crook blew its cover in 1977. And of course, we had the Plumbers back in Watergate.”
“Oh, please: don’t give that ‘deep state’ bullshit that’s just started up again,” said Rick.
“I’d laugh,” said Condor, “but the joke is on us. That ‘everything happens for a human planned and controlled reason,’ is narcissistic, conceited, self-flattering bullshit. The closest thing America’s got to a ‘deep state’ is Washington’s crowd of 30,000 lawyers and 12,000 lobbyists and big political donors who pay to play and whoever’s out there kicking back at them, plus the hordes of got-a-cause crusaders.”
“And you say you’re legit,” said Rick.
His silver-haired companion said: “Do you think the General would serve anything that wasn’t known by him to be righteous?”
/> “Hell of a voucher,” agreed Rick.
“Just for you. He was the best Actor to get you.”
“You mean recruit me.”
“This is the twenty-first century. Don’t think recruit—think link. The ultimate way to overcome bureaucratic walls and tunnel vision bullshit and to be invisible to everyone.”
“Not enough for me,” said Rick. “Beyond verification I confirm, I need to know, to have, something about you from you. Like what to call you.”
The silver-haired man stopped.
So did Rick on that step, meeting that hard blue-eyed gaze as the stranger said:
“Call me Condor.”
They turned together to walk down toward the next white stone level. Rick remembered: “You’ve got to learn the true names of the birds.” Took no notice of bald binocular man walking ahead of them and off to the left like he was a leaf blown by their wind.
Condor told the decades-younger man beside him: “The V needs you. To be an Actor.”
“Why me?” said Rick.
“Rising star for Bureau counter-intelligence. Former SAC in the heartland. Brick agent. Worked O.C. when The Godfather’s mob became just one of the killer packs in our streets and corporate suites. Semper fi with a combat Silver Star. Guts. Savvy, smart, schooled. Not some data cruncher or legal eagle or bean counter: a philosophy M.A. that muscles you up so you can visualize beyond data plus all its how’s and why’s and oh-oh’s.”
They reached the sidewalk in front of the steps leading back to where they’d been. Rick let his companion casually drift to the left so they headed toward the Wall, just like most tourists. The raspberry-headed chaperone drifted behind them.
Condor said: “It’s the Russians.”
“I’ve been working the Chinese.”
“They’re out there, too, but their game is long and they’re already sure they’re going to win. Absorb us like a billion grains of sands on the global beach, each of them different as they let us sink into them. Classic soft style gung fu: yield, turn, dah.
“The Russians are more hard style Western history minded, overwhelming force, punch you in the face or stab you in the back, gut you with a smile.