Free Last Days of the Condor by James Grady

can tell them we ran into each other. It’s natural, and you’re cleared.”
    â€œAm I getting off the limbo level? Coming back online?”
    â€œThere’s cleared and there’s cleared, ” he said.
    â€œSo you’re not here about me?”
    â€œWish I was.” He looked around the midmorning-lit plaza. Looked for who was there. Who wasn’t. “Remember RTDs?”
    â€œReal-Time Drills.”
    â€œNecessary risk even before Boston. A random day. Flash alert. Race to some game scenario site designed to see how you can do better. By noon, every crisis-clear East Coast headhunter worth his bullets will be in your building. But one real bomb go BOOM! under the right conference room table, and it’s a great day for the bad guys.”
    Sami sighed. “Oh well, at least I got to run into my most charming colleague. She’s kind of okay on the bricks, too.”
    â€œIf it weren’t for the cameras,” smiled Faye, “I’d drop you.”
    â€œ A B C, ” grinned Sami. “ A lways B e C overed.”
    Risk it, she thought as they walked toward work. Told the man beside her: “You’ve been around a long time.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t have gotten odds on that back when I was a kid in Beirut.”
    â€œRumors, legends, whispers: you’re who knows.”
    Sami stopped an arm’s length away from a security door in the wall of black glass that reflected the images of him and a younger woman with short hair, slacks, Op shoes.
    He said: “Only three types of people are susceptible to flattery: men, women —”
    â€œAnd children, ” finished Faye. “I don’t want to talk to a child.”
    She said: “There are rumors about an agent who got caught in the shit in denied territory and called in a drone strike on himself.”
    â€œWe’re spies, Faye. Starting rumors is one of the what s we do.”
    â€œCome on, Sami. It’s me asking.”
    â€œNo matter what you heard,” said her friend and former boss, “something like that happens, guy like that … Forget about him getting one of the no-name stars on the wall out at Langley. He’d be Congressional Medal of Honor material.
    â€œOr completely nuts,” added Sami. Smiled as he said: “And dead.”
    The breath of spring morning that Sami took seemed completely natural. He let his hand touch her arm. A mentor-to-protégé touch. A soft, sensitive touch. Innocent.
    He looked straight into her green eyes. “Have you got some reason for asking?”
    â€œI don’t know what I got,” said Faye. “If it is something, I’ll play it straight.”
    â€œNever a doubt in my mind,” said Sami as he held the door open for her.
    Like he held the door for her that day eight months before when they didn’t pillory her in the soundproofed, plexiglass “fishbowl” conference room of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That when morning, Sami looked away from the two Senators sitting across the table from him and Deputy Directors from both the CIA and the ODNI, looked at Faye in her chair, told her: “Would you step outside, please?”
    Then he got up and held that door for her.
    As if her wound might require special care and attention.
    Sami loved subtle.
    She left that fishbowl deep in the windowless office complex for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Perhaps a dozen cubicles and other executive offices waited between where she stood outside the fishbowl and the Committee entrance. CIA task forces on paper clips have more personnel than this Congressional oversight force charged with keeping track of America’s war status intelligence community.
    Faye glanced back into the fishbowl. Sami with four strangers wearing business suits, deciding what they’re going to do to me, with me .
    She looked left, saw him standing by the coffee bar holding a white Styrofoam