The attackers stopped and looked up, looked at each other, deciding what to do. One man raised his middle finger at us, but they all turned away, started running, and as we approached the guy on the ground, I reached for the door handle again, to get out.
Galli snapped, “I’ll leave you here!”
Chris was screaming at me, “Goddamnit! You don’t listen! What’s the matter with you?”
My palms went up to soothe her. “Look, I know you’re upset. But at this point the actual odds of infection are smaller than—”
“The odds? The odds? This is my daughter!”
Looking back, I saw the figure on the ground stirring, lifting a bloody head up. I saw him take something from the snow and put it on his head, before pulling his hood over it. A woven skullcap. So he was Muslim. My last glimpse of the man showed him trying to stand.
Chris had me by the jacket and was shaking me. “What is your problem?”
“Mom, Joe was just trying to help,” said Aya.
“You stay out of this!”
The admiral sighed. “Watch committees, Joe, although that’s the first one I’ve actually seen. People looking for sick ones to beat up, chase out of their neighborhoods, or vent rage. Most people they attack aren’t even sick. A swollen face from a bad tooth. A guy with a limp. Bible Fever—that’s what I call it — initially resembles twenty things that are completely normal. A shaving cut. A pimple. Vigilantes have put more people in the hospital than disease.”
“This bad after only eight days?” I said. My chest throbbed where Chris had grabbed me. She’d been right, I saw, aghast. If I’d gotten out, I could have infected them…
“The first two days were tolerable. Then food in stores started running out. The numbers doubled in places. Then, thanks to the President’s warning, people stayed home and the spread slowed a little. Wikileaks made it clear to the world that we don’t know what the disease is, that the CDC is running around, lost. The numbers got worse. So by day three some truckers refused to drive in shipments. Plus the images on TV. Every new case reported. More cities!”
The admiral’s eyes met mine in the mirror. I said, “I’m okay. I won’t do it again.”
Upper Reno Road — normally busy — was as still as at 5 A.M. on a Sunday morning. Galli zigzagged back to Massachusetts and pulled to the curb outside the Homeland Security complex by American University. It’s an old Navy base, lots of redbrick buildings inside a double fence. Unlike other sites we’d visited, this one was bustling. Parking lot filled. Staffers moving up and down outside stairs that separated different campus levels. Guards in balaclavas at the drive-in booth gazed out at us, hands on their sidearms. The impression was effectiveness. But impression, half the time, is mirage.
Homeland Security is like a company on the stock market whose value goes up during disasters. That doesn’t mean it is a good company. It’s the only one there at the time.
“I never liked this place anyway,” Eddie said. “It’s a goddamn maze. Building H next to Building B. Rooms with three numbers. You need a roadmap to get around, and half the signs are intentionally wrong. Nobody trusts anyone else in there.”
The guards didn’t like seeing a car idling outside the grounds, even beneath a two-hour parking sign. Three of the guards started toward us.
The admiral pressed down on the accelerator and we headed off and I could see one of the guys with binoculars pressed to his eyes, recording our license plate, but fence cameras would have already done that.
Galli said, “Look, everyone’s tired. We’ll have a good meal when we get back. There’s food on campus but a shortage elsewhere. Supplies distributed by social security number. Even numbers can purchase twelve items today. Tomorrow, odd. The Mayor’s trying different systems. New one every day.”
“Twelve isn’t a lot,” Aya said.
“Hopefully, as more food arrives, portions will get bigger.”
“I bet there’s plenty for the high and mighty,” Eddie grouched, nodding toward Capitol Hill.
The admiral looked surprised. “I thought you knew. The President’s gone. Congress. Supreme Court. The city woke up and our national leaders had left.”
Eddie gaped at him.
Galli said, “Protocol 80 is in effect.”
Protocol 80 had been theoretical, like a hundred other exercises that we’d worked on at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Rhode Island Avenue. And late some nights, on Grant Street, at the admiral’s home. My own kitchen cabinet, he called us as we pored over plans detailing food delivery in an outbreak, medical deployment, ways to distribute vaccines; ways, with transportation crippled, to move investigators around. Protocols for interviewing people who feared even the doctors sent to help.
Protocol 80 had been originally designed after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when lines of limousines had clogged roads out of Washington, filled with evacuating VIPs; heading for Mount Weather, the underground installation near Berryville, Virginia: 600 acres up top, 650,000 square feet underground, filled with lodging, radio and TV studios, even three 25-story buildings in which evacuees would live, work, and eat while running the government. In a nuclear attack, the limos would have been decimated. So we’d streamlined the process for those deemed crucial to get out.
“Continuity of government.”
Eddie quipped morosely, “Someone should have done this to Congress years ago. Quarantined ’em!”
In my head I saw what must have happened a few nights ago. I saw FBI agents working with lists of those to be evacuated, spreading out, knocking on doors, hustling frightened men, women, and children into idling cars in lightly falling snow. Continuity of government involves saving more than the President, Congress, and nine justices of the Supreme Court. It means saving the computer files of taxpayers, a Treasury Department midlevel clerk who heads up disability check delivery for veterans, the anonymous crucial cogs in the social security system, a scientist working on a secret chemical program, a spy master getting information from a high-level official in Iran, a rotating list of those deemed important at that particular moment, updated annually, a cast of thousands to be saved to guarantee the survival and operation of the Republic.
“Alpha,” I said. “Principal leaders to Mount Weather.”
“Beta,” said Eddie. “Congress to Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania,” which was another underground facility.
I saw more. I saw evacuation beginning in a two-story colonial in Bethesda, a Federalist home on Capitol Hill, a three-bedroom suite with lights blazing at 3 A.M., shared by three Congressmen, a Watergate apartment discreetly paid for by a billionaire Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for his mistress, who was asking, as he pulled on his pants, Why can’t I come, too?
The chosen would be hustled to designated triage hospitals; Georgetown or Walter Reed — for blood tests. Healthy folks, step this way! Babies crying. VIPs, some angry or scared, some meek and helpful, a few demanding special attention, which had happened in drills.
“Third group, Charlie,” said Chris. “Those remaining in the cutoff capital. Us.” She couldn’t resist adding in a voice low with fury, “Ordering Las Vegas sandwiches.”