The story continues with LAST DAYS OF THE CONDOR. . .
Chapter 1
A cover team locked on him that rainy Washington, D.C., Monday evening as he left his surface job, flipped up his hood and stepped outside the brass back door for the Library of Congress's John Adams Building.
A white car.
Indicator One on the white car as a cover team: Tinted windows and windshield.
Indicator Two: A car engine suddenly purred to life as raindrops tapped the blue mountaineering coat's hood over his silver-haired skull. He spot- ted the white car parked illegally at the Third Street corner of A Street, SE, a town house–lined road that ran from Congress's turf through Capitol Hill's residential neighborhood.
Indicator Three: The chill in the rain let him see wisps of gray exhaust from behind the purring white car. As it didn't pull out into traffic. As it sat there, wipers off, heaven's tears dotting the tinted-glass windshield.
Indicator Four: No one hurried to the white car from a nearby home. No commuter leaving work splashed through the rain toward it to be greeted with a spouse's kiss.
Indicator Five: He felt the cover team. Chinese martial artists talk about the weight of a stalker's eyes, feeling the pressure of an enemy's chi. Kevin Powell-who got his throat cut in an Amsterdam brothel the year the CIA-backed Shah fell in Iran and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan-Kevin insisted you must pay attention to your guts, your feelings. Or you'll get butchered on some midnight street. Or wake up screaming in a windowless steel room. That Monday D.C. evening, the silver-haired man standing on hard cement in the chilly spring rain knew what his tingles meant.
One, two, three, four, five. Like fingers of a hand, a hand that meant cover team.
He looked to his left along the sidewalk running past the Adams Building with its six stories of white stone plus basements of knowledge and secrets. The brass door behind him could withstand a car ramming into it or a giant gorilla banging on its locked metal.
Walking down Third Street as if to pass the Adams Building came a man: Caucasian, dark hair, late thirties, white-collar-warrior suit and tie under a tan coat, brown shoes not built for running, holding a black umbrella in one brown-gloved hand, the other holding a cell phone pressed to his face as he said: "Where are you located?"
Could have been a cover team communications ploy. Feed data via a phony phone conversation.
But the silver-haired man didn't think so: Too unnecessary.
Suit & Tie Cell Phone Umbrella Man walked closer, now nearly perpendicular to him, brown shoe step by brown shoe step rippling puddles on the dark, wet sidewalk.
A stream of strangers joined Mister Cell Phoning Suit & Tie, all looking like innocent Americans headed somewhere after work on a Monday evening.
If your cover team is there for wet work, sometimes a better option than running from them is to imbue your assassination with Elevated Exposure Costs.
The silver-haired man in the blue hooded coat put his hands in its storm pockets as he stepped away from the Adams Building. Run, he did not run. He joined that stream of eight pedestrians, five of whom walked under umbrellas. Like a blue penguin, he wove a crooked course to the center of the umbrella group-innocent bystander casualties being a classic EEC.
The smart move.
Unless the cluster of strangers he'd slid into belonged to the cover team.
The Israelis used a twenty-nine-member cover team for the Dubai hotel room assassination of one Hamas executive back in 2010.
Of course, a cover team didn't necessarily mean a hit or mere surveil- lance: these strangers walking with him under their umbrellas on a Washington, D.C., Capitol Hill sidewalk could be a snatch crew who he'd now let surround him.
But none of his fellow pedestrians vibed hunter as they marched toward the restaurant row on Pennsylvania Avenue just up from the House of Representatives's three castle-like office buildings. He flashed on sixth grade, walking to school with other kids. He remembered the smell of bicycles.
We're all kids on bicycles, he thought. A flock of birds.
Wondered if whoosh his flock of umbrella strangers would sense a shift in the universe and bank another direction and no, he hadn't run to join them, though he remembered the joys of long-distance jogging before his knees, back, and the bullet remnants in his left shoulder all conspired against him.
Back then, he'd been passing through Washington as the powers that governed this hydrogen bomb–blessed country argued about blow jobs in the White House. When he jogged during that work trip, his aches & pains decoded as no more running for fun & fitness. He accepted that evolution.
But like he remembered blow jobs, he remembered how if you run fast and there's a littler kid near you, you've got a better chance because Beirut snipers prioritize wounding the littlest kids to tempt rescuers. Run, you can make it to that doorway if only that doorway were there instead of the intersection of Third Street, SE, and Independence Avenue where it's tonight, you don't have a bicycle, and there is no sheltering doorway or black-smoke stench of burning rubber tires at street barricades.
Focus: This is here. This is now. Washington, D.C. A chilly rainy evening.
Hold on to that.
You can hold on to that.
Sure.
There's a cover team on you.
If nothing else, have some pride. Make them work for it. Whatever it is.
