There were no secrets from the Secret Service. The First Lady was referred to in the Secret Service radio code as “Fox,” a corollary to her husband’s code name of “Wolf,” which he claimed derived from the way he could make a roast beef sandwich disappear in fifteen seconds. Agent Jordan knew Fox had not spent a single night in what the detail referred to as the Wolf’s Den in several weeks. The Lincoln bedroom was no longer available for overnight guests because Mrs. Quaid claimed it for herself.
“Okay, Bob, just out of curiosity and not because I seem to have any say in the matter, go ahead and tell me. Where is my wife going tomorrow?”
“She’s informed her detail she’ll be traveling to Massachusetts tomorrow. She will be flying on Air Force One. She said she will be traveling with a delegation.”
“So she’s going to Boston on Air Force One. What’s the big deal?”
“Well, sir, that’s the problem. Mrs. Quaid isn’t flying on Air Force One to Boston. She is flying to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. That’s where that detention camp, Camp Edwards, is. The one where the Jews—I mean, the Israelis are being held. She’s flying with a delegation of Jewish leaders. She told her security detail that there should be trucks standing by at Otis to transfer supplies. Actually, the term she used was ‘relief supplies,’to the detention camp.”
President Quaid glanced at the ceiling, considering his response.
“You did the right thing by sharing this, Bob. This isn’t something I’d want to find out from the six o’clock news. Tell me, Bob, do you have a wife?”
“Yes, sir, I do. Three of them, in fact. All ex-wife types, though. Nobody on board at the moment.”
“Sometimes, Bob, I think an ex-wife could be the best kind to have. But keep that one under your hat, will you please?”
“With everything else, sir. With everything else.”
Lawrence Quaid prided himself on his moral compass. Patted himself on the back for knowing right from wrong. For doing right, opposing wrong. Quaid had become increasingly concerned in recent weeks that this moral compass had not been in his hands all those years but had rather been held by his wife. That she, rather than he, was the good person. That her role was to guide him down the right path. Away from what was expedient but wrong.
This time, though, he was lost and alone.
And it didn’t help when his chief of staff Bob Brown bailed out, either. Quaid corrected himself. Brown didn’t really bail out, he thought. I booted him out. Come to think of it, Catherine told me which way to go on that decision, too. I chose not to follow her.
President Quaid picked up the phone and asked to have Gen. Cruz located. As it turned out, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was in the West Wing and came to the Oval Office at a brisk walk.
“Mr. President,” he said, slightly out of breath.
“General,” Quaid said. “I am extremely upset to hear about the mechanical problems that grounded Air Force One.”
General Cruz looked at the president with a puzzled expression. He said nothing, waiting for Quaid to continue.
“The First Lady planned on flying to Massachusetts tomorrow, to deliver supplies, relief supplies, to Otis Air Base. General, you can imagine how upset I am that she will be unable to make that trip, can’t you?”
The general nodded, understanding.
“Yes, sir, I’ll apologize personally to the First Lady. The Air Force prides itself on maintaining Air Force One scrupulously. Unfortunately, Air Force Two is also undergoing service. This is a major blunder and I take full responsibility for it, sir.”
“No apology necessary, General. Better safe than sorry, to be trite. So how long do you expect the plane—any plane, in fact—to be unavailable for the First Lady’s use?”
“Mr. President, for just as long as you say so, I expect.”
“Thank you, General. I see we understand each other.”
CHAPTER 37
The Camp Edwards detainees were sorted into categories. Families were moved to barracks where they could remain together. Some even included a small kitchen. That portion of the base was called Camp Foxtrot. Those age fifty and above were in Camp Alpha, with unmarried men and women in separate buildings. Residents of both camps could visit one another, and they ate in a communal mess hall.
At the far side of Edwards was Camp Echo, named nostalgically by Base Commander Dancer after the Camp Echo at Guantanamo, where the least cooperative detainees were housed. The residents of Camp Echo were all between eighteen and forty-nine and all potential members of the Israel Defense Forces. Camp Echo was surrounded by a wire fence topped with coiled razor wire. A second identical fence stood a dozen yards outside the inner fence. Wooden guard towers stood at each corner.
The barracks at Camp Echo showed their hasty and recent renovation. Plywood partitions created a series of separate rooms, each ten feet by eight feet. Windows were covered by plywood. Air circulated from ceiling vents. No light entered from the outside. Each room had a single wire-covered fluorescent fixture. There were no light switches in the rooms, no electrical outlets of any kind. The lights were never turned off—never during the day, never at night.
Each room had a loudspeaker mounted high on a wall. There were two plastic pails in each room. One held drinking water. The other was the toilet. A plastic pad served as a mattress. Detainees were issued plastic foam blankets that tore when twisted or stretched, designed to prevent suicides. The pads and blankets were collected every morning and handed back every evening.
When inmates moved from one place to the other, they were shackled at wrists and ankles, blacked-out ski goggles over their eyes, and sound-deadening muffs covered their ears.
Maj. Dancer designed Camp Echo as a replica of Guantanamo Bay. His only regret was that because he was limited to the existing facility and because of time constraints, the rooms were built from plywood rather than steel shipping containers.
Keep them guessing, uncomfortable, with absolutely no control. That was a lesson learned at Guantanamo. Hot, then cold. Light, then dark. Silent, then loud. All out of their control. Completely dependent on their interrogator. “Womb rooms,” the soldiers manning the camp called them. Not cells. Womb rooms cut off from everything. From everybody.
The most important building at Camp Echo was the JIF, the Joint Interrogation Facility. It was constructed from cinderblocks, with sound-deadening vermiculite pellets poured through the holes in the blocks. It, too, had no windows and it, too, was separated into a warren of small rooms accessible only by a single door from the common hallway. Each room had a wall-mounted camera.
Following the pattern created at the interrogation camp established at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and continued at Guantanamo Bay, the detainees at Camp Echo were nameless, identified in camp records only by numbers, bestowed on them sequentially in the order in which they were processed. The Nazis used the same procedure at Auschwitz.
Camp Echo’s detainees were numbered 00001 to 01657. There was considerable discussion when the detainee database was first established as to how many digits the numbers should have. Five digits provided for a maximum of 99,999 persons.
“If we need more numbers than that,” Maj. Dancer joked, “we’ll have bigger problems than reprogramming the database.”
Edwards wasn’t America’s first concentration camp. The Confederacy warehoused 45,000 Union prisoners at Andersonville in Georgia. Some 13,000 died. At the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, called by its inmates “Hellmira,” almost 3,000 of the 12,000 Confederates held there died one winter. Within two months of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were herded into ten internment camps, some for as long as five years.