Read Online Last Days of the Condor by James Grady - Free Book Online

reflecting a tumble of mature honey hair, a black garter belt above her moon of curved hips, black stockings on dancer-long legs in ridiculously decorative black stiletto heels, breasts heavy & low & full maroon there, her smile wide as her eyes look to see who’s looking at her.
    Condor taped that garter-belted photo to his brick wall a respectable distance from his newspaper art portrait of a lone woman with black hair tumbling to her simple blue sleeveless blouse and a pink surreal featureless swirl for her face.
    One image reveals so much, one image reveals so little. The space between is enough to drive you mad.
    Still, he stole and poked them both with the secret three holes: Pay attention!
    But that wasn’t his job.
    What they ’d told Condor to do was glance at each book, each discard of vision, and in as few possible heartbeats, decide which cart claimed the work.
    Cart A went to Permanent Storage.
    Cart B carried its captives to the pulp machine.
    Condor once convinced a transport team to take him along to Cart B’s disposal site, a thirty-seven-minute drive in the cramped truck’s front seat with two men who argued about professional football and how fucked up the Navy had been and wasn’t that the best time and when could they smoke with this what the hell stranger sitting between them. Seagulls circled the packed earth landfill, a wasteland where putting a pulping plant probably made environmental sense. Condor watched books he’d tossed onto Cart B get dumped into a green steel maw, heard them sprayed with chemicals and the whining gear clanging crunch as they became a gooey mass poured into vats on other trucks and taken away to be turned into … What?
    Rules prohibited Condor from saving more than one Cart A of books a week.
    He agonized over filling Cart B with doomed books. As ordered, flipped their pages. Looked for indications this volume had been the key to a book code. Scanned for spy notes cribbed in the pages or classified documents slid in there and forgotten. He pondered security risk quotient amidst coming-of-age novels, con artist swaggers, flesh peddles, noir sagas, soul-revealing classics, cop stories, alternative times fantasies or science fictions, heaving bosomed romances about the President’s lost love. A book could earn Cart A salvation with its reputation for getting it right, for tradecraft revealed or created, secrets shared.
    Every workday made Condor unpack crates.
    â€œYou’re a reader,” said the Settlement Specialist. “This is like your first spy job.”
    â€œYou mean it’s not something the CIA made up so they know where I am?”
    She smiled.
    Helped him keyboard cover lies to his Library of Congress employee file.
    Now it’s now!
    No shit, he told the new ghosts that Wednesday morning as he sat at his desk framed by the open doorway of the Grave Cave. At 9:51 he tossed a novel about a gunfighter come home to a small town on Cart B, then stared out his open door.
    Waiting.
    Clicking heels came up the hallway on the other side of his wall, to his left, his heart side. Footsteps coming louder, drawing closer to his view through the open door.
    Here she comes.
    You’ve been here before.
    Here and now spy-you spend hours tracking her data. The more you know, the more you need to know. She’s fifty-three. Born in the year of the dragon. Never married, no dependents. That makes no sense . Employed by the Library of Congress for eighteen years, plus a three-year loan-out to the Smithsonian. First employment line on her résumé: U.S. Senate staff for five years when she was young & smart & schooled and snapped her way over the sidewalks while taxi passengers gawked at her. She rents an apartment in a building not yet transitioned from run-down to hip. Two promotions during her years here at the Library.
    She heel-clicks into view beyond your open door.
    Curly blond hair with gray roots falls off a