And now, heart slamming with excitement, Orrin found parking on 2nd Street, five blocks from the Longworth Building. At one time, years ago, you could park closer, but between the security precaution tire shredders, bomb barriers, and no parking signs, you needed to range farther to find a legal two-hour parking space on Capitol Hill.
He left the car in front of a townhouse. His size eleven footprints filled with falling snow as he walked. A few Diamond cabs cruised Independence, exhaust trailing like breath. Orrin had shaved. His dress shirt was blue and his tie was maroon, the suit gray. His hair was combed and he wore Washington’s ubiquitous belted raincoat. He was a lawyer. A lobbyist. The effect was enhanced by clear-lensed, thick-framed rectangular glasses.
The line to get in stretched outside — people stamping in the cold, waiting to go through metal detectors. Longworth filled a city block. Its gray edifice represented the Capitol’s 1930s love affair with neoclassical revival architecture, a combo of boxy Soviet utilitarianism with glommed-on Ionic colonnades.
At the security station he watched the Tumi bag float through the x-ray machine. This was the moment when he could be caught, and for an instant he was scared. The bag contained news clips about today’s hearing on a religious revival at U.S. Air Force bases. There was also the day’s Washington Post, Tylenol, and a pill vial labeled Cipro, an antibiotic. But it was not.
It did not cure illness. It created it.
The security guards didn’t even open the case. Sykes kept his head down so cameras would not show his face. He walked with a small limp, turned his feet slightly inward. A smart observer watching a tape later and then seeing the real Orrin walking, would not connect the gaits.
The hearing room was packed, standing room only. He stood there for thirty minutes, pretending to listen, because Harlan said that security people would later go over the tapes. He opened the notebook. A Congressman from Buffalo grilled an Air Force major about evangelical meetings at air bases in Colorado Springs and at Creech in Nevada. Daily readings from the New Testament. Lunchtime prayers in a dining area. Hazing of non-Christian personnel.
“Major, wouldn’t you say that there is no place for religious proselytizing in an air base?” the Congressman said curtly. “That our Constitution specifies the separation of Church and State?”
The man at the witness table looked up at seven Congressmen and women on a raised dais, and frowned.
“I would say, sir, that at no time were any personnel coerced into participating. Prayer was purely voluntary.”
The blood roared in Orrin’s ears so loudly that it all was gibberish to him.
The clock ticked toward noon, when the chairman adjourned for lunch and Sykes joined a stream of people heading downstairs to the underground level of the Capitol. It was a maze down there! A mini city. Corridors filled with staffers, tourists, witnesses from the hearings, lobbyists trying to get bills passed or shut down. Orrin saw a post office and a Quick Mart and a dry cleaners. There was a Verizon shop. One tunnel led to the Rayburn Building and another to a little open train taking riders back and forth to the Senate side of the Capitol.
The cafeteria was packed, smaller than he would have imagined. At one table: Iñupiat Eskimos from Alaska, here to lobby against blocking off their entire coastline, polar bear habitat, to development; at another, pro-football players fighting against salary caps. Nuns on the left. Ten guys in AFL–CIO jackets sat in a corner. A Toyota Motor Corp. legal team sat beneath a flat-screen TV showing a Midwest snowstorm. The cafeteria was like a high school lunchroom for the whole country, each table a clique, each group wearing their group uniforms, clerical collars, pinstriped men at the deli counter, logo sweatshirts by the steam table reading, A FETUS IS A PERSON.
“You will want the salad bar,” Harlan Maas had said.
Sykes put his right hand in his pocket and palmed the little vial. The blood rushed in his head and his voice, when he ordered a burger, sounded astoundingly calm. The fries looked soggy. The burger looked like paper. He had no appetite to eat. He carried the food to the salad bar; shiny bins offering up red tomatoes and black olives, here a bin of yellow pineapple squares, there a container featuring freshly cut rings of red onions.
He’d rehearsed the hand movements last night before a mirror. He was, after all, in public, moving down a line. This was his most vulnerable moment. He felt sweat inside his socks. If someone saw him, there would be no question that he was contaminating the food.
All heads swiveled for a moment to the TV on the wall, rebroadcasting an argumentative part of today’s hearing. As Sykes’s tray passed over the mushroom bits, he pinched the capsule, felt plastic give. He envisioned the mushroom-colored powder falling on the veggies. Then his legs — as if by themselves — carried him to a four-person table. He sat down. From his pocket he removed a small clear plastic vial labeled HAND SANITIZER. He felt the liquid squishing between his fingers. Stomach churning, he picked up the burger and forced himself to take a bite.
“Remember, surveillance tapes will be scrutinized,” Harlan had warned him. “Make yourself eat.”
Sykes finished the burger. Heart slamming in his chest, he felt a fry ooze down his throat, as if it were a living creature, wriggling and trying to get back out.
He watched the room. No one went to the salad bar.
Then suddenly his throat constricted as a cafeteria worker approached the bar with a rolling cart filled with replacement vegetables. He was going to take away the infected food before anyone ate it!
The worker wore thick blue rubber gloves as he replaced some of the vegetable bins in the salad bar with fresh ones. Sykes wanted to scream at him to stop. Not even one person had eaten from the mushroom bin yet. Sykes had to contain himself from launching himself across the floor at the cafeteria worker. But then the worker broke off his activity before replacing the mushroom bin. The attendant rolled the cart away, looking bored.
Harlan’s voice, in Sykes’s head, said, “Relax, friend.”
Orrin Sykes watched a trio of men in expensive suits — including a Congressman he recognized from the TV — step up to the salad bar. Sykes uncapped his bottled water. The Congressman added mushrooms to his salad, then the men carried their trays to the STAFF ONLY area.
Orrin rose and placed his tray with the empties. Leaving the room, he turned back to see a half dozen Amish women, in bonnets, at the salad bar, loading up.
Orrin Sykes walked out of the Longworth Building and down the marble stairs and hit the cold air outside. The weather had turned vicious. The temperature had plunged. A barrage of snowy hail slanted from the sky, smashing taxis, slashing the rooftops of government. In wonder, Sykes recalled that sometimes Harlan Maas sermonized about the ten plagues that God visited upon Egypt when Pharaoh denied the Hebrew slaves permission to leave. The prophet Moses warned Pharaoh that if he did not relent, great suffering would afflict his people. Pharaoh laughed, never imagining that any force existed that was more powerful than him.