Condor, p.1
Condor, page 1
Condor
A Mysterious Profile
James Grady
Condor
The old man sitting in New York’s Penn Station passengers’ waiting area remembered the station’s escalator that once between killings carried him down from the street to find his redheaded lover waiting for him with a crimson rose in her hand and a slow smile of Gotchya! curling her ruby lips.
Who gets killed today? thought the old man.
That tick-tock of 2022 depended on him.
But he couldn’t help flashing on the memory of Brandi surprising him at the bottom of that escalator. Standing there as grooved steel stairs carried liar-him down, down, ever closer, her red lips smiling certainty as the rose she held clung to its petals.
He shook his head that autumn Tuesday afternoon.
Of course my mind is going to wander! I’m an old man!
Silver hair thinning and cut short for convenience or combat.
Scruffy black leather jacket unzipped for easy reach-in.
Frayed shirt a softer blue than his steel sky eyes.
‘Relaxed fit’ black jeans and scruffy black sneaker-like shoes.
Slumped in a yellow plastic chair.
In a world where hardly anyone sees anybody, nobody sees the old.
Old man. Old woman. Doesn’t matter to striding-past Brave New Worlders, their eyes locked on horizon-blocking cellphone screens crucifying their hands.
Perfect cover for a spy.
Me, the draftee who way back when someone he then called “the old man” pushed around bloody Cold War chess squares as The Unexpected Pawn.
Now I’m ‘the’ old man.
Sitting in a New York train station amidst ghosts.
Hearing their whispers calling me Condor.
He scanned the basketball court-sized passengers’ waiting area where hundreds of other haunted human beings hustled their tos & fros.
Two blue-uniformed police officers arrived to post on the edge of the crowd hustling over the station’s underground floor. Cop caps from Elvis Presley’s era. Body armor from 9/11. Holstered yellow Tasers. Handcuffs. Radios with earpieces. Black 9 mic-mic automatics with full stack magazines.
The White cop chewed gum.
The Black cop let the scene fill his eyes.
So far, so good, thought Condor.
Like all of us do, he flashed on: ‘How the hell did I get here?’
But nah.
Forget how.
Go for why.
Nowhere, U.S.A, a small Oh So White picket fence town back when Republican President Eisenhower insisted on educating every American kid as much as possible so we could beat Russia. The movie theater had a name. You shopped at local stores. Church bells on Sundays. Neon signs in bar windows. The pro-woman ex-mayor M.D. sold illegal abortions and everybody knew as his biz rolled gas, cafe and motel nickels & dimes from desperate outlaws into the town’s bank, just like badges and county health officials protocolled the ca-ching! illegal red stucco whorehouse with its lost eyes workers trapped behind closed curtains.
Now wind blew dust against his hometown’s whitewashed windows as Condor sat in New York’s Penn Station waiting for the killing train.
He grew up in a white house with a blue shingles roof. The only child of Spanish Flu/Depression/Dust Bowl/World War II/Hiroshima/Korean War/Berlin Wall survivors. Mom hid in the house: Bad times were outside just waiting to happen again. Dad went to work in a sports jacket like a businessman should in a world where what could be better than to be a businessman.
I was their son, thought the old man.
They loved me. Never got me.
I was a dreamer lost in stories.
I was Ronald Malcolm.
Un-coolest name anybody could think of.
A geek with thick glasses.
The total opposite of Bond, James Bond.
Who beat the bad guys. Saved the world. Swooned dream women.
Old man Condor who’d been born Ronald Malcom scanned the train station.
The cops.
The passing crowd of witnesses with cellphones that could film & post.
An Owl working her Charlie Sugar (counter-surveillance).
I can see clearly now, he thought as that reggae song echoed in his soul. Laser surgery. Contact lenses were my worst liability in my early missions.
If I’d had see-clearly-surgery when I was younger, riding escalators down—
—even made me a good shot, blinked Condor as he sat in the train station’s plastic yellow chair that would be hard to creaky old man launch from if.
And getting to that plastic yellow chair….
Surviving high school while being educated by the county library’s mystery books section. By the white screen of the movie theater back in the days when TVs had only four channels. By rock ‘n’ roll coming out of his parents’ car radio that let him escape to where those wheels wouldn’t take him.
“How does it feel?” asked the deserved Nobel Prize for Literature winner from the generation above his. “With no direction known.”
But whatever, the kid from Nowhere knew he wasn’t a let it be kind of soul.
State university when it was possible to pay for it with a road crew summer job, fee waivers for high grades, student loans that weren’t slavery. Condor’s eyes flunked the physical for being drafted to fight the Vietnam War that Killed In Action Mike Jodrey, same high school class. Remember his laugh?
Me, thought the old man. ‘Had enoughs to put off figuring out what to do with the rest of my fucking life by enrolling in grad school, 1972, when five CIA-connected burglars got caught in the Watergate burglary by a CIA-connected cop and his two dragooned badge partners one June night. The same D.C. cop had CIA-encouraged bugged & burgled the offices of a left wing, anti-war think tank.
America’s first Super Spook J. Edgar Hoover lurked everywhere.
The military’s Joint Chiefs were in the mix too with one, with two, with three independent deep cover agents in a White House spy ring targeting President Tricky Dick and Dr. Strangelove Henry Kissinger who some spy bosses feared was a Soviet mole like Britain’s Kim Philby while others feared the homicidal treason he’d helped Nixon and D.C.’s Dragon Lady pull off when they secretly sabotaged elevated-by-assassination LBJ’s Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam war.
Condor shook his head at what he knew now.
What he knew then is what got him to this train station.
Because he was a stories soul, grad school meant capital L Literature with a test where he was supposed to explain Don Quixote. He scarred the test booklet with his pen-scribbled confession that he’d never read D.Q.—
—then fuck it rocked on about the fictional private eye named Nero Wolfe.
While flunking him, the professor revealed he was a recruiter for the CIA: “They’ve got a unit where you and your quirky sensibilities might prove useful.”
Maybe oh maybe I can save the world like James Bond and swoon my generation’s Marilyn Monroe!
Old man Condor sighed for his youthful dreams and daring.
‘Never saved the world.
And my M.M. took a bullet in her head.
She wasn’t the first woman who Condor’s life shot in her skull.
“Your attention please!” boomed a loudspeaker. “Now arriving Penn Station….”
He arrived at a CIA’s shopping mall training academy that was not the Farm for training actual shoes after selling his parents a cover story about getting a fellowship to a grad school he knew they’d never visit. He left behind buddies he couldn’t tell. The brown-haired Shirley who’d been waiting for him to Pop the Question realized that she was better off without him as he drove away.
His National Intelligence Training Sessions—NITS—made sure he could type 40 words per minute on high-tech IBM Selectric typewriters. Clackety-clack keyboards instead of Bang! Bang! guns. He got trained to On How To Fill Out Forms instead of hand-to-hand combat—
—though in cold Virginia darkness before dawns, he’d climb the stairs of the run-down, two-story motel housing trainees to the black-tar roof and practice the few choreographed routines called katas he remembered from his one year of college club karate.
Instead of learning all the flips of a surveillance coin, the Firm taught him Process. Procedures. Protocols. Policy. Stay In Your Lane. Don’t Make Trouble.
They knew all along where they were going to send him.
The old man sat in that yellow plastic chair in Penn Station as his 2022 clock tick-tocked assassination time.
Felt himself shimmer back to 1974’s crumbling reign of Tricky Dick.
Four blocks behind the Library of Congress at the corner of Southeast “A” and Fourth streets, a white stucco, three-story townhouse building nestles in the capital city’s residential neighborhood. A black iron fence separates the townhouse from the sidewalk to everywhere else. There’s a brass plaque mounted by the white townhouse’s black door:
American Literary Historical Society
Bor-ing—right?
The true identity of the ALHS is Section 9, Department 17 of the CIA’s Intelligence Division.
And its secret national security mission is …
“We read everything that’s published in the world,” Condor explained to a woman who wanted desperately to believe him in the days before Google.
“Who would make up a job like that?”
Who indeed?
His specialty back then was called mysteries, but the emergence in his era of a new literature of lethality created a companion genre called thrillers.
Every day he’d sit in his office and read the kind of novels he loved. Clackety-clack reports. Check boxes on Forms. Have coffee and listen to his colleagues chatter veiled confessions of love & loneliness he’d carry back to his loft nook with its window he’d stare out of, hoping to see her walk past.
She’d be savvy not just smart. Self-defined. Sensual in ways he’d never known. She listened to the right radio station—poets riding guitars, not mindless pop or monotone talkers. She’d go to movies alone and read, oh she’d read, all the books of his life’s work. She’d turn her face up from the sidewalk of where she was going and see him watching from the window of where he had to be. Smile and open the all of her to take in the all of him.
She never walked by.
Left him in the daze of ordinary life.
Until a co-worker told him about oddly missing crates of books.
Ronald Malcolm aka Condor came to work that next day, as you do.
Went out to get lunch for himself and his coworkers, as one does.
Used an unlisted & un-scouted basement back alley door, as he liked to do.
The mailman got door-buzzed into the ALHS.
Silencer-tipped machine gun in his leather mail pouch.
Busting in behind him came the rest of the killer crew led by Maronick.
Condor came back to ALHS with white carryout sacks for his co-workers.
Found them dead. All dead. Murdered. Assassinated.
Blood-smeared, bullet-blasted corpses of people who’d filled five days of his week. The widowed receptionist Mrs. Russell who chain-smoked, kept a 1911 Colt .45 automatic in her desk, disapproved of his hair length and brought homemade chicken soup to his apartment when he had strep throat. Ex-Marine security guard Jennings who grudgingly liked him. Dr. Lappe, the boss who just wanted everything to run smoothly. Ray and Harold who argued about the great cultural question of the Baby Boomer generation—Beatles or Rolling Stones?—and scoffed at Condor’s answer: Same coin, different sides, feel the edge. Tamatha of the shy smile, soft calligraphy, gentle touch.
And Rich Heidegger. Who’d fought his way back from alcoholism to a lesser security clearance desk in a research section of bookworms that no honest person in the CIA cared about. Who told Condor about missing crates of books. Then ‘not-gonna-fuck-up-again’ reported the anomaly Up the Chain of Command.
They killed Heidegger first, in his crummy apartment.
Left Ronald Malcom staggering through their shared work space.
Watching the blood ooze out of his friends’ bullet-ripped bodies.
That could have been me, he told himself in 1974.
That could be you, he told the Penn Station crowd in 2022.
Come back to work from lunch and find everybody shot dead.
That’s the world we all live in now.
Condor’s world.
Back then he ran to a pay phone like the last one ripped from the streets of New York city in the spring of 2022. Called the Panic Line that no civilian knew existed for real until some novelist & muckraker Condor’s age broke the news a couple years later in the syndicated newspaper investigative reporting column by Jack Anderson, the only journalist Tricky Dick’s covert ops team of CIA & FBI connected White House Plumbers tried to murder.
Murder! Condor phoned the Panic Line on that ‘74 day. Everybody’s dead.
He followed orders to an ambush. Escaped. Stole a woman named Wendy from her life to give him shelter because it was all just a shot away.
The old man in Penn Station heard a whisper in his Ear Bud:
“Striker has left the nest. I say again: Striker is out. Sidewalk shoes.”
That Beatles’ “very clean old man” sitting in a 2022 train station yellow chair sighed: Now it’s just a matter of time.
Thought: What isn’t?
Then, oh back then, then that first bloody time in ’74, it was six days.
Hunted by the bad guys. The clueless & compromised Intelligence Community. Rebel CIA would-be rescuers Kevin & the first old man.
The killers shot Wendy in the head.
She was the first woman Condor got skull shot.
He caught up to Maronick in National Airport.
Followed him to the MENS ROOM.
Knew that Kevin and the old man and CIA might arrive too late to stop that contract killer’s escape. Knew in his schooled bones that even if the cavalry did get there in time, the assassin would cut a deal for secrets he knew that Uncle Sam didn’t. Knew Maronick would likely end up in some protection program. New identity—Hell, probably a pension and a consulting contract. Knew Maronick would more than get away with killing Condor’s friends at the ALHS. Wendy. Get away with trying to kill him, an ordinary guy named Ronald Malcolm.
That would be National Security’s most expedient and profitable justice.
‘How does it feel?’ strobed through Condor.
He stepped into the ammonia & urine mirrored MENS ROOM—
—with a pistol in his hand.
Maronick was in the closed door, gray metal stall.
Pants around his ankles while he sat on the toilet.
Condor shot shot shot shot bullet holes through the gray stall’s steel.
Left one more body for Agency janitors.
Let them take his own self away.
The good news was Wendy didn’t die.
Only had to walk with a limp for the rest of her life SO not with Condor.
Not the worst first date in history, but she held a grudge.
Never said nothing.
Not even when the Condor scandal(s) broke.
Watergate’s wake washed away Tricky Dick and washed in the U.S. Senate Church Committee investigating the Intelligence Community with a fervor and scope beyond anything in the nation’s history. Uncovering I.C. renegade operations. Revealing “Operation Condor” that was an American-backed secret alliance of right-wing dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru that targeted for assassinations any political rebels or reformers they labeled leftists.
“Condor” even popped up when Watergate burglar and would-be American journalist’s assassin Frank Sturgis claimed that had once been his CIA codename.
The Intelligence Community wise men knew they had to give Idaho’s Senator Church something about the just-murdered Agency employees.
So they created a legend.
Moved the murders to New York—further from Langley and Watergate.
Changed what the murders were about to oil, a cause that many Americans suffering from 1974’s petroleum blockades felt their intelligence agencies were justified in pursuing, not missing cases of books that contained heroin smuggled from the Vietnam war, an issue that only a Wisconsin professor published about from a university chair not wrapped in Ivy, so, obviously.
And obviously, everyone ignored gay beat poet Allen Ginsberg who saw the best minds of his generation and a lover destroyed by the angry fix of white powder from the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Ginsberg gypsy’d to Vietnam to investigate heroin.
The poet’s crusade got press coverage from only one muckraker.
Ronald Malcom was only days into his debrief & de-tox after killing Maronick before the old man sent him to leak the re-mastered Condor story to The New York Times.
They printed a review of it.
Including the revision that it all happened in three days.
Damn that would have made a great and classic movie! thought the old man sitting in Penn Station on a 2022 Tuesday. Whoever might have been lucky enough to have dreamed such a story and get to see it made even better by Hollywood legends would wake up every morning with a smile of gratitude and mind-blown awe at his astonishing good luck.
Then the real Russians found out about Condor’s unit.
Maybe they found out from one of their moles like Aldrich Ames, Edward Lee Howard, Robert Hanssen or The Fourth Man in the CIA never caught with enough evidence to be nailed and who was shuffling through his Civil Service retirement on that 2022 morning as Condor sat in Penn Station.
