The Death Trust

FORTY-FOUR

The aircraft touched down without incident, which surprised me as it always does, and taxied up to and then inside a hangar. No immigration, no homeland security checks. That meant whoever was in control could pull powerful strings, but I already knew that.

The Rolex guy lifted the latch on my seat belt and motioned at me to stand. I did as I was told without causing trouble. I’d antagonized them enough and baiting them would only get me beaten up some more. Who said I can’t learn?

The pilots shut down the engines and an ape cracked the hatch. I was shuffled down the stairs, across the hangar floor, and into the back of a black Suburban, accompanied by my simian buddies. The air was warm and humid. With all the rain, I expected it to be cold, like Germany. I was sandwiched in the backseat of the vehicle between a couple of thousand dollars of Italian suit. The windows fogged up almost instantly, but I could still see through the windshield. There wasn’t much traffic on the streets. We came to a fork in the freeway: right to Andrews AFB, left to the city. We turned left.

The pickings were still slim in the conversation department. We drove in silence toward the halo projected by the city’s lights onto the low cloud above it. The place was pretty much deserted at this after-midnight hour and seemed lit up for a party where the invitations hadn’t been sent. I passed some time again trying to work out who these people were who had, at various times over the past few weeks, done their best to kill Anna and me. In their suits and earpieces, they looked like Secret Service types, but the suits made them look uncomfortable, like kids dressed by their grandmothers for church. I pegged them as mercenaries or, in the lexicon of current PC military job speak, “security.”

The Suburban took it slow, just another government car. No need to hurry. The Potomac was a river of black glass throwing up rippling colors of reflected light. We paralleled it for a couple of miles before crossing the bridge to the city’s heart. Here the monuments were easy to pick out: the Jefferson Monument and then, as we crossed the river, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument beyond it.

This case had given my feelings about national pride, embodied by these grand architectural displays, a bad shake. I was sorry to say I now viewed these symbols as props in a show. They represented an ideal, but not a lot more.

The driver followed the signs to Pennsylvania Avenue and then to Massachusetts Avenue. A couple of ancient Chevys full of rust and young partygoers rolled past, the rap music so loud it made the droplets on the Suburban’s windows fizz. Two black guys, naked to the waist, hung out the windows and shouted at us. One of the apes gave them the bird. The White House appeared for an instant as we turned in an intersection. It stood white and clean, bathed by innumerable spotlights. How anyone inside got any sleep was beyond me.

We turned onto Massachusetts and stayed on it for a while, heading for higher ground. The buildings we passed were imposing and impersonal: lots of columns, celebrations of power, a conveyor belt of concrete wedding cakes. I knew where we were headed: The U.S. Naval Observatory. It occupied the hill filling the windshield, its illuminated telescope dome looking like a giant’s lost golf ball among the trees. The driver pulled in to the driveway of Number One Observatory Circle, home of the Vice President of the United States, Harmony Scott’s daddy, Jefferson Cutter.