Three Days of the Condor (4 page)

"Excellent. I watch while you phone. Tell them to wait ten minutes, then hit it."

"Yes, sir." The driver began to climb out of the car, but a sharp voice stopped him.

"Weatherby," the man said, pausing for effect, "there will be no mistakes."

Weatherby swallowed. "Yes, sir."

Weatherby walked to the open phone next to the grocery store on the corner of Southeast A and Sixth. In Mr. Henry's, a bar five blocks away on Pennsylvania Avenue, a tall, frightfully thin man answered the bartender's page for "Mr. Wazburn." The man called Wazburn listened to the curt instructions, nodding his assent into the phone. He hung up and returned to his table, where two friends waited. They paid the bill (three brandy coffees), and walked up First Street to an alley just behind Southeast A. At the street light they passed a young, long-haired man in a rain-soaked suède jacket hurrying in the opposite direction. An empty yellow van stood between the two buildings on the edge of the alley. The men climbed in the back and prepared for their morning's work.

Malcolm had just ordered his meatball sandwich when a mailman with his pouch slung in front of him turned the corner at First Street to walk down Southeast A. A stocky man in a bulging raincoat walked stiffly a few paces behind the mailman. Five blocks farther up the street a tall, thin man walked toward the other two. He also wore a bulging raincoat, though on him the coat only reached his knees.

As soon as Weatherby saw the mailman turn on to Southeast A, he pulled out of his parking place and drove away. Neither the men in the car nor the men on the street acknowledged the others' presence. Weatherby sighed relief in between wheezes. He was overjoyed to be through with his part of the assignment. Tough as he was, when he looked at the silent man next to him he was thankful he had made no mistakes.

But Weatherby was wrong. He had made one small, commonplace mistake, a mistake he could have easily avoided. A mistake he should have avoided.

If anyone had been watching, he would have seen three men, two businessmen and a mailman, coincidentally arrive at the Society's gate at the same time. The two businessmen politely let the mailman lead the way to the door and push the button. As usual, Walter was away from his desk (though it probably wouldn't have made any difference if he had been there). Just as Malcolm finished his sandwich at Hap's, Mrs. Russell heard the buzzer and rasped, "Come in."

And with the mailman leading the way, they did.

* * *

Malcolm dawdled over his lunch, polishing off his meatball sandwich with the specialty of the house, chocolate rum cake. After his second cup of coffee, his conscience forced him back into the rain. The torrent had subsided into a drizzle. Lunch had improved Malcolm's spirits and his health. He took his time, both because he enjoyed the walk and because he didn't want to drop the three bags of sandwiches. In order to break the routine, he walked down Southeast A on the side opposite the Society. His decision gave him a better view of the building as he approached, and consequently he knew something was wrong much earlier than he normally would have.

It was a little thing that made Malcolm wonder. A small detail quite out of place yet so insignificant it appeared meaningless. But Malcolm noticed little things, like the open window on the third floor. The Society's windows are rolled out rather than pushed up, so the open window jutted out from the building. When Malcolm first saw the window the significance didn't register, but when he was a block and a half away it struck him and he stopped.

It is not unusual for windows in the capital to be open, even on a rainy day. Washington is usually warm, even during spring rains. But since the Society building is air-conditioned, the only reason to open a window is for fresh air. Malcolm knew the fresh-air explanation was absurd— absurd because of the particular window that stood open. Tamatha's window.

Tamatha— as everyone in the section knew— lived in terror of open windows. When she was nine, her two teen-age brothers had fought over a picture the three of them had found while exploring the attic. The older brother had slipped on a rug and had plunged out the attic window to the street below, breaking his neck and becoming paralyzed for life. Tamatha had once confided in Malcolm that only a fire, rape, or murder would make her go near any open window. Yet her office window stood wide open.

Malcolm tried to quell his uneasiness. Your damn overactive imagination, he thought. It's probably open for a perfectly good reason. Maybe somebody is playing a joke on her. But no staff member played practical jokes, and he knew no one would tease Tamatha in that manner. He walked slowly down the street, past the building, and to the corner. Everything else seemed in order. He heard no noise in the building, but then they were all probably reading.

This is silly, he thought. He crossed the street and quickly walked to the gate, up the steps, and, after a moment's hesitation, rang the bell. Nothing. He heard the bell ring inside the building, but Mrs. Russell didn't answer. He rang again. Still nothing. Malcolm's spine began to tingle and his neck felt cold.

Walter is shifting books, he thought, and Perfume Polly is taking a shit. They must be. Slowly he reached in his pocket for the key. When anything is inserted in the keyhole during the day, buzzers ring and lights flash all over the building. At night they also ring in Washington police headquarters, the Langley complex, and a special security house in downtown Washington. Malcolm heard the soft buzz of the bells as he turned the lock. He swung the door open and quickly stepped inside.

From the bottom of the stairwell Malcolm could only see that the room appeared to be empty. Mrs. Russell wasn't at her desk. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Dr. Lappe's door was partially open. There was a peculiar odor in the room. Malcolm tossed the sandwich bags on top of Walter's desk and slowly mounted the stairs.

He found the sources of the odor. As usual, Mrs. Russell had been standing behind her desk when they entered. The blast from the machine gun in the mailman's pouch had knocked her almost as far back as the coffeepot. Her cigarette had dropped on her neck, singeing her flesh until the last millimeter of tobacco and paper had oxidized. A strange dullness came over Malcolm as he stared at the huddled flesh in the pool of blood. An automation, he slowly turned and walked into Dr. Lappe's office.

Walter and Dr. Lappe had been going over invoices when they heard strange coughing noises and the thump of Mrs. Russell's body hitting the floor. Walter opened the door to help her pick up the dropped delivery (he heard the buzzer and Mrs. Russell say, "What have you got for us today?"). The last thing he saw was a tall, thin man holding an L-shaped device. The postmortem revealed that Walter took a short burst, five rounds in the stomach. Dr. Lappe saw the whole thing, but there was nowhere to run. His body slumped against the far wall beneath a row of bloody diagonal holes.

Two of the men moved quietly upstairs, leaving the mailman to guard the door. None of the other staff had heard a thing. Otto Skorzeny, Hitler's chief commando, once demonstrated the effectiveness of a silenced British sten gun by firing a clip behind a batch of touring generals. The German officers never heard a thing, but they refused to copy the British weapon, as the Third Reich naturally made better devices. These men were satisfied with the sten. The tall man flung open Malcolm's door and found an empty office. Ray Thomas was behind his desk on his knees picking up a dropped pencil when the stocky man found him. Ray had time to scream, "Oh, my God, no…" before his brain exploded.

Tamatha and Harold Martin heard Ray scream, but they had no idea why. Almost simultaneously they opened their doors and ran to the head of the stairs. All was quiet for a moment; then they heard the soft shuffle of feet slowly climbing the stairs. The steps stopped, then a very faint metallic
click, snap, twang
jarred them from their lethargy. They couldn't have known the exact source of the sound (a new ammunition clip being inserted and the weapon being armed), but they instinctively knew what it meant. They both ran into their rooms, slamming the doors behind them.

Harold showed the most presence of mind. He locked his door and dialed three digits before the stocky man kicked the door open and cut him down.

Tamatha reacted on a different instinct. For years she thought only a major emergency could get her to open a window. Now she knew such an emergency was on her. She frantically rolled the window open, looking for escape, looking for help, looking for anything. Dizzied by the height, she took her glasses off and laid them on her desk. She heard Harold's door splinter, a rattling cough, the thump, and fled again to the window. Her door slowly opened.

For a long time nothing happened, then slowly Tamatha turned to face the thin man. He hadn't fired for fear a slug would fly out the window, hit something, and draw attention to the building. He would risk that only if she screamed. She didn't. She saw only a blur, but she knew the blur was motioning her away from the window. She moved slowly toward her desk. If I'm going to die, she thought, I want to see. Her hand reached out for her glasses, and she raised them to her eyes. The tall man waited until they were in place and comprehension registered on her face. Then he squeezed the trigger, holding it tight until the last shell from the full clip exploded, ejecting the spent casing out of the side of the gun. The bullets kept Tamatha dancing, bouncing between the wall and the filing cabinet, knocking her glasses off, disheveling her hair. The thin man watched her riddled body slowly slide to the floor, then he turned to join his stocky companion, who had just finished checking the rest of the floor. They took their time going downstairs.

While the mailman maintained his vigil on the door, the stocky man searched the basement. He found the coalbin door but thought nothing of it. He should have, but then his error was partially due to Weatherby's mistake. The stocky man did find and destroy the telephone switchbox. An inoperative phone causes less alarm than a phone unanswered. The tall man searched Heidegger's desk. The material he sought should have been in the third drawer, left-hand side, and it was. He also took a manila envelope. He dumped a handful of shell casings in the envelope with a small piece of paper he took from his jacket pocket. He sealed the envelope and wrote on the outside. His gloves made writing difficult, but he wanted to disguise his handwriting anyway. The scrawl designated the envelope as a personal package for "Lockenvar, Langley headquarters." The stocky man opened the camera and exposed the film. The tall man contemptuously tossed the envelope on Mrs. Russell's desk. He and his companions hung their guns from the straps inside their coats, opened the door, and left as inconspicuously as they had come, just as Malcolm finished his piece of cake.

* * *

Malcolm moved slowly from office to office, floor to floor. Although his eyes saw, his mind didn't register. When he found the mangled body that had once been Tamatha, the knowledge hit him. He stared for minutes, trembling. Fear grabbed him, and he thought, I've got to get out of here. He started running. He went all the way to the first floor before his mind took over and brought him to a halt.

Obviously they've gone, he thought, or I'd be dead now. Who "they" were never entered his mind. He suddenly realized his vulnerability. My God, he thought, I have no gun, I couldn't even fight them if they came back. Malcolm looked at Walter's body and the heavy automatic strapped to the dead man's belt. Blood covered the gun. Malcolm couldn't bring himself to touch it. He ran to Walter's desk. Walter kept a very special weapon clipped in the leg space of his desk, a sawed-off 20-gauge shotgun. The weapon held only one shell, but Walter often bragged how it saved his life at Chosen Reservoir. Malcolm grabbed it by its pistol-like butt. He kept it pointed at the closed door as he slowly side-stepped toward Mrs. Russell's desk. Walter kept a revolver in her drawer, "just in case." Mrs. Russell, a widow, had called it her "rape gun." "Not to fight them off," she would say, "but to encourage them." Malcolm stuck the gun in his belt, then picked up the phone.

Dead. He punched all the lines. Nothing.

I have to leave, he thought, I have to get help. He tried to shove the shotgun under his jacket. Even sawed off, the gun was too long: the barrel stuck out through the collar and bumped his throat. Reluctantly, he put the shotgun back under Walter's desk, thinking he should try to leave everything as he found it. After a hard swallow, he went to the door and looked out the wide-angled peephole. The street was empty. The rain had stopped. Slowly, standing well behind the wall, he opened the door. Nothing happened. He stepped out on the stoop. Silence. With a bang he closed the door, quickly walked through the gate and down the street, his eyes darting, hunting for anything unusual. Nothing.

Malcolm headed straight for the corner phone. Each of the four divisions of the CIA has an unlisted "panic number," a phone number to be used only in the event of a major catastrophe, only if all other channels of communication are unavailable. Penalty for misuse of the number can be as stiff as expulsion from the service with loss of pay. Their panic number is the one top secret every CIA employee from the highest cleared director to the lowest cleared janitor knows and remembers.

The Panic Line is always manned by highly experienced agents. They have to be sharp even though they seldom do anything. When a panic call comes through, decisions must be made, quickly and correctly.

Stephen Mitchell was officer of the day manning ID's Panic phone when Malcolm's call came through. Mitchell had been one of the best traveling (as opposed to resident) agents in the CIA. For thirteen years he moved from trouble spot to trouble spot, mainly in South America. Then in 1967 a double agent in Buenos Aires planted a plastic bomb under the driver's seat in Mitchell's Simca. The double agent made an error: the explosion only blew off Mitchell's legs.

The error caught the double agent in the form of a wire loop tightened in Rio. The Agency, not wanting to waste a good man, shifted Mitchell to the Panic Section.