Last Days of the Condor Read Online Free PDF

you?”
    â€œMaybe he deserves it. Earned it when he got fucked up on some mission.”
    â€œOr,” said Bald Peter, “maybe we’re just babysitting to keep Condor from fucking up. I don’t give a fuck, so fuck him, I don’t have to make nice to stoner fantasies.”
    He gave her his back and walked toward the car, whose keys he had.
    â€œThere are three kinds of people,” Faye called out in the night: “ The living, the dead, and the turned-off . Guess which you are. It’s this era’s big thing . Movies, TV, political metaphors, fashion shows in New York. You’re a ‘ don’t give a fuck ’ zombie.”
    â€œYeah,” said Bald Peter. “And there are a lot of us. Get in the car.”

 
    5
    A candy-colored clown they call the sandman.
    â€”Roy Orbison, “In Dreams ”
    Condor stared at his reflection trapped in the big-screen TV above the fireplace. That dark screen flowed with ghosts.
    He looked at the business card left by the woman spy: Faye Dozier. Is any of her data true?
    She and her bald partner had seen his walls. Uploaded flashing photos.
    Flashings swirled Condor to a warehouse in some American nowhere.
    Where one room held a sweat-stinking wrestling mat.
    Where the schedule had him make gunshots bang! inside the baffled Shoot Room.
    Where in the musty upstairs office amidst empty desks and silent typewriters stood a blurred man who had Saigon scars in his heart and a white Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee in his hand as he told twenty-something Condor: “Learn to live your secrets in plain sight so when the bad Joes go looking, there’s nothing to find.”
    Then he tossed the scalding coffee in Condor’s face.
    On that rainy 2013 night in Washington, in his rented home, Condor flinched.
    Scanned what he’d hidden amidst oddities taped to his wall—newspaper photos, pages cut from books or magazines. So he’d remember, he poked tiny triangles into the “intelligence indicators.” Other articles taped to his bricks also had holes, but only items patterned with three dots were clues hidden in plain sight on his seemingly mad wall.
    If only he knew what the clues meant:
    A New York Times photo of a black Predator drone flying in a blue sky with a silver full moon and a cutline that read: “Like our other less-lethal high-tech toys, unmanned crafts feed our addiction to instant gratification.”
    Cut from a book, a photo of a black-hooded British SAS commando peeking over the roof wall of the Iranian embassy in London during 1980’s terrorist siege.
    The 9/11 smoke-billowing World Trade Towers.
    A 2013 newspaper photo showing Chinese citizens wearing white medical masks as they practice t’ai chi in a Beijing smog so thick people standing ten feet apart were barely visible to each other or the camera.
    A movie review’s black & white photo showing the black leather trench coat hero in a swirling sci-fi kung fu battle.
    A Washington Post portrait of Bruce Springsteen that claimed “The Tao of Bruce” transcended the bitter battles of America’s two ruling political parties.
    A news service snapshot of a running man ablaze with orange flames from gas he poured over himself in the streets called Arab Spring.
    Newspaper photos of paintings: Edward Hopper’s lonesome American gas station, another artist’s portrait of a woman, black hair tumbling around her shoulders, her face a pink blur.
    The one easy triggering image: a newspaper photo of a soaring condor.
    If only.
    Call him Vin as he microwaved leftover Chinese food, ate a meal that tasted like cardboard and soy mush.
    He carried a glass of water and a razor blade upstairs.
    Strung a web of clear dental floss across the top of the stairs—a flimsy barricade, but it might startle an assassin, create noise of his arrival.
    Vin used the razor blade to shave that night’s prescribed pills, his gamble that a