Last Days of the Condor Read Online Free PDF Page B

low but correct percentage of those drugs in the Home Sec/NROD urine test could pass as a testing, marijuana masked, or other aberration within Tasers & straitjackets–enforced limits. He swallowed his chop-shopped pills, flushed their shavings down his toilet with a pang of conscience for the fish swimming at the end of the sewer pipe in the Potomac River.
    Condor raised his gaze from the bathroom sink.
    Through his diminishing medication state saw the bathroom mirror reflecting a face that somehow had become his. He saw his eyes: impenetrable whites surrounding scarred blue orbs centered by zooming-ever-wider black pupils.

 
    6
    We deal in lead.
    â€”Steve McQueen, The Magnificent Seven
    Faye hid the flash drive in her closed fist as she navigated through a maze of cubicles in search of her target on the limbo level.
    Or as it is officially known: the Situation Center for Task Force Umbrella of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the SC for TFU of ODNI, a vast spy factory that fills the fourth level of the ODNI Complex Zed building in Washington, D.C., not far from Wisconsin Avenue’s “upper Georgetown” strip of stores and a private high school with an annual tuition that exceeded the cost of two years at the state university where Faye punched her ticket.
    Call it the limbo level.
    She always had, back when she was at the CIA.
    Now I’m in limbo, she thought as she searched for her target in this windowless cavern’s overhead lighting. Blue lightning bolts pulsated atop the walls of green cubicles. The blue lightning bolts zapped upward like Jacob’s Ladders, only instead of being designed to inspire intellectual curiosity in hormone-frazzled teenagers, these blue lightning bolts block hostile rays beamed at the cubicles’ computers. The limbo level hums and crackles like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Electrified ozone wafts through the cavern’s smog of cubicle-caged office workers.
    The limbo level houses units shuffled off the flow charts of America’s sixteen officially admitted intelligence agencies, a catch-all centralization of crews whose duties drift across bureaucratic lines. A dozen desks are designated PITS—Personnel In Transition Stations, sometimes given to an agent, analyst, or exec on the way up some secret ladder, more often assigned as the pre-pension parking place for burnouts or screw-ups or rebels who were right but failed to cover their ass.
    At least I dodged the PITS, thought Faye.
    So far.
    The hidden flash drive burned in her closed fist.
    The National Resources Operations Division she’d been exiled to fills one corner of the limbo level’s factory floor, looks like a Smithsonian museum diorama with plastic walls encasing a replica of a police detective squad consisting of twelve workstation desks shared by Faye and nineteen other field agents plus a plastic-walled “inner office” of command stations for the two executives in charge of monitoring defectors, PINSS (Persons In Need of Security Supervision) like Condor, and miscellaneous but unglamorous national security/intelligence tasks shoved by agencies like the CIA, ODNI, FBI, NSA, Secret Service, DIA, and DEA into the post–9/11 beast called Homeland Security.
    She glanced at the time display on a workstation’s computer: 7:22 P.M. outside in the real world of Washington, D.C.—ninety-eight minutes until 9 P.M .
    You can make it. If you find Alex, you can still—
    She spotted him inside a cubicle where the blue lightning bolts were turned off.
    â€œYou got a sec?” said Faye as she plopped down beside the thin redheaded man wearing a white shirt, striped tie, and khaki slacks.
    â€œBarely,” Alex said as he packed tools he’d used to install a hard drive in the cubicle’s computer. “I got called off the bench!”
    â€œGood for you.”
    â€œHey, the Dumpster I backed into still works. I drove by and