Her eyes swiveled to me. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry. But sorry is a pathetic word. It means nothing. It means too late, too stupid, too slow, too fatheaded.
“I’m not mad at you,” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t stop you.”
“You couldn’t have stopped me,” I said, trying to make her feel better. But it didn’t come out right. It sounded aggressive. It sounded like I was telling her that I would have ignored her order even if she’d given it. And then I realized that I’d meant exactly that.
She turned red as Eddie’s hand reached out and pointed. “Holy shit, One. It’s a riot!”
“It’s like Baghdad,” I said.
Aya said, eyes huge, “But it isn’t Baghdad. It’s here.”
Baghdad looting had looked different, of course. There we’d seen women wearing black chadors and veils carting baskets of oranges from a busted-up fruit stall, donkey carts loaded down with televisions, parades of men in short-sleeved shirts and sandals pushing hand carts piled with furniture, Lada taxis bulging with thousand-year-old museum artifacts, rogue soldiers rolling ergonomic office chairs out of a smashed-up furniture store.
Here we were stuck in traffic outside a supermarket parking lot where denizens of upper-middle-class Northwest Washington — high-level bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, even a Congressman’s wife I recognized — fanned in a stream from the smashed Safeway windows with their gloved hands clutching bulging plastic bags, knapsacks, or cardboard boxes stuffed with loot. So many cars were trying to exit at the same time that traffic was blocked, the air filled with screams, shouts, horns.
“Must be one hell of a big sale,” Eddie said.
I saw an elderly woman fall and a man reach and pick up her mesh bag and run. I saw a Nissan Altima smash into a backing-up Mini Cooper. I saw kids, roughly twelve-year-old identical twins, dressed in matching ski parkas, running between parked cars and carrying identical bulging canvas bags that read, SAVE THE PLANET. I saw a man in a police uniform breaking up a fight, but then I realized he wasn’t doing that; he was carrying bags. He disappeared on foot as the first faint sharp edge of sirens became audible through the screaming and barking of a lone Labrador retriever in a car nearby.
“Hey, Eddie! That’s Kendall Bates,” I said, recognizing a looter.
Bates was a State Department analyst who sat in on planning sessions at HS. Now he was dressed out of the movie Fargo, calf-high furred boots, ballooning green down parka, furred flap-eared hat, surgical mask slipped down off his panicked face, and his breath frosted as he threaded parked cars, heading our way, hauling bound-up starter fireplace logs in each hand.
I put my mask on and rolled down the window halfway and called, “Kendall!” He stopped, heaving, wild eyed, hearing his name, but needing a moment to place my face. Recognition replaced confusion. Bates was medium sized with a largish head, small eyes, and arms that seemed long, partly due to the too-short sleeves of the parka, partly because the wood weighed him down and made him slump, simian-like.
“Colonel Rush,” he said in his official State Department voice, as if we sat in his office over coffee.
All around us people were running. Bates looked down at his starter logs like a kid caught stealing chocolate bars in a candy store. He stood mortified and frightened, as if I’d arrest him, which I could not. I just asked, ignoring the loot, “What happened here?”
He relaxed slightly, seeing that I wasn’t trying to stop him. I recalled that one time during a conference—bioterror in the new century—when he’d made reference to having three children, and living near here. He probably owned one of the big Victorian homes nearby, expensive when heating bills came. He was probably planning on stuffing those chemical logs into his fireplace, trying to provide heat or light, or maybe he was trying to get ready in case the power went out.
He said, gasping from the running and the cold, “It was orderly. But then one woman started an argument by the vegetable section, it’s mine. And then someone else started yelling about needing more food than other people. The guy had six children. How come childless couples got the same amount as him, he shouted.” Kendall’s voice sped up. “Someone pushed me. Then Frank Carlyle, my neighbor, broke for the door without paying… and…”
He was heaving. A man with an overcoat open to a clerical collar ran by, carrying a stuffed shopping bag.
“The front window shattered. I guess someone threw something.”
The sirens — multiple ones — sounded very loud now.
“Get away, Joe. They’re shooting looters on the news. But I’m not… my neighbors… I’m not a looter.” He looked down at the stuff in his hands. He said, “I’m just me. I’ll come back and pay later. I will!”
“Sure you will,” Eddie said in a flat voice.
Washington as truncated capital, an instant, enormous, upside-down refugee camp for the once elite. I stared at Kendall Bates. Somehow he looked smaller than usual. Part of his job — until now — had involved facilitating food aid delivery to suffering nations. I recalled that one time in a meeting he’d complained that more guards were needed to keep aid from being stolen in southern Sudan.
“There must be order!” he’d said.
He ran now, past the priest, who was trying to unlock his car, Kendall’s boots leaving skid marks in the clumpy snow.
My eyes fixed on the priest. The man’s hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t get the key in the lock of his Mini Cooper. A priest. I stared, fascinated, as the admiral got us moving.
What was it about a priest? No, that wasn’t it. It was something else, triggered by the sight of a priest.
“You said to try other avenues,” I said thoughtfully to everyone in the car.
Chris, hearing my request, grew quiet and then, shocked, erupted in a mother’s rage. “I can’t believe you’re even thinking this! I just can’t believe you!”
I could not fault her. But if we went to Georgetown, we’d be stuck there, so I kept my eyes on the admiral’s in the rearview mirror. “Were you serious about what you said, sir, about other ideas? Little detour? Or not?”
“Oh, let’s go!” enthused Aya.
“Not a chance,” snapped Chris.
“Admiral?”
“No.”
I wasn’t surprised. And I was ready. I said, “You said we had to get to campus, but we don’t have a mandatory arrival time. Once in, we can’t leave. But we’re not there yet. So how about this?”
Orrin Sykes sat in his Honda outside the Georgetown University Medical Center and fretted. Harlan Maas had told him that Joe Rush was supposed to be stationed here, had landed hours ago, and was on his way, but the man had still not shown up.
“I want confirmation that he goes inside,” Harlan had said.
The campus had been sealed by Marines, and anyone entering the sprawling complex had to use the Reservoir Road entrance. The grounds included a collection of redbrick hospital and research buildings, med offices, restaurants, a parking garage, the adjoining college campus, and the Jesuit cemetery. McDonough Arena was set up to handle overflow patients. Student and faculty housing had been given over to med staff.
Sykes observed the grounds from a block lined with small attached townhouses, each featuring an identical patch of snow-dusted lawn. An assembly line of private shared student housing or midlevel bureaucrat homes.
“Once he goes in, he can’t get out without a pass, and he won’t get that pass,” Harlan had assured Sykes.