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Roger Durling had been a very nice man, and how attractive his wife had been, and how cute the children were, and how awful it must be for them.
Well, the two members of the Mountain Men had to agree between themselves, yeah, sure enough it was tough on the kids–and who didn’t like kids?–but scrambling eggs was probably something mama chicken didn’t like to see, right? And how much suffering had their father inflicted on honest citizens who only wanted to have their constitutional right to be left alone by all these useless Washington jerks? But they didn’t say that. They kept their mouths mostly shut as the line wended its way along the street. Both knew the story of the Treasury building, which sheltered them from the wind for a while, how Andy Jackson had decided to move it so that he couldn’t see the Capitol building from the White House (it was still too dark for them to make out very much), causing the famous and annoying jog in Pennsylvania Avenue–not that that mattered anymore, since the street had been closed in front of the White House. And why? To protect the President from the citizens*. Couldn’t trust the citizens to get too close to the Grand Pooh-Bah. They couldn’t say that, of course. It was something the two had discussed on the flight in. There was no telling how many government spy types might be around, especially in the line to the White House, a name for the structure they’d accepted only since it had allegedly been selected by Davy Crockett. Holbrook had recalled that from a movie he’d seen on TV, though he couldn’t remember which movie, and ol’ Davy was without a doubt their kind of American, a man who’d named his favorite rifle. Yeah.
It wasn’t really a bad-looking house, and some good men had lived there. Andy Jackson, who’d told the Supreme Court where to get off. Lincoln, a tough old son of a bitch. What a shame he’d been killed before implementing his plan to ship the niggers back to Africa or Latin America . . . (Both rather liked James Monroe as well for starting that idea by helping to establish Liberia as a place to ship the slaves back to; a pity that nobody had followed up on it.) Teddy Roosevelt, who had a lot
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of good things going for him, a hunter and outdoorsman and soldier who’d gone a little far in “reforming” the government. Not many since, though, both men judged, but it wasn’t the building’s fault that it had more recently been occupied by people they didn’t like. That was the problem with Washington buildings. The Capitol had once been home to Henry Clay and Dan’1 Webster, after all. Patriots, unlike the bunch who’d been roasted by that Jap pilot.
Things got a little bit tense when they turned into the White House grounds, like entering enemy territory. There were guards at the gatehouse of the Secret Service’s uniformed division, and inside were Marines. Wasn’t that a shame? Marines. Real Americans, even the colored ones, probably, ’cause they went through the training same as the white ones, and probably some of them were patriots, too. Too bad they were niggers, but it couldn’t be helped. And all the Marines did what they were told by the ‘crats. That made the looks a little hard to take. They were just kids, though, and maybe they’d learn. After all, the Mountain Men had a few ex-military in it. The Marines were shivering in their long coats and white fairy gloves, and finally one of them, a buck sergeant by the stripes, opened the door.
Some house, Holbook and Brown thought, looking up and around the towering foyer. It was easy to see how somebody who lived here might think himself king-shit. You had to watch out for stuff like that. Lincoln had grown up in a log cabin, and Teddy had known life in a tent, hunting up in the mountains, but nowadays whoever lived here was just another damned ‘crat. Inside were more Marines, and the honor guard around the two boxes, and most disquieting of all, people in civilian clothes with little plastic curly things that led from their suit collars to their ears. Secret Service. Federal cops. The face of the enemy, members of the same government department that held the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That figured. The first instance of citizens’ objecting to the government had been about alcohol, the Whiskey Rebellion– which was why the Mountain Men were equivocal in their admiration for George Washington. The more liberal of them remarked that even a good man can have a bad day,
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and George wasn’t a guy to fuck with. Brown and Hoi-brook didn’t look directly at the Secret Service pukes. You had to be careful fucking with them, too.
SPECIAL AGENT PRICE walked into the foyer then. Her principal was safe in his office, and her responsibilities as Detail commander extended throughout the entire building. The procession wasn’t a security threat to the House. In terms of security it was just a nuisance. Even if a gang of gunmen had secreted itself in the line, behind the closed doors all around this area were twenty armed agents, many of them with Uzi submachine guns in their fast-action-gun bags, unkindly known as FAG bags. A metal detector hidden in the doorway told a crew from the Technical Security Division whom to look at, and other agents concealed in their hands photos stacked together like a deck of cards, which they shuffled through constantly until every face coming through the door could be compared with known or suspected troublemakers. For the rest they depended on instincts and training, and that came down to people who looked “funny,” the usual Americanism for inappropriate demeanor. The problem with that was the cold weather outside. People came in, and a lot of them looked funny. Some stamped their feet a little. Others shoved hands into pockets, or adjusted coats, or shivered, or just looked around oddly–all of which was calculated to attract the attention of somebody on the Detail. On those occasions when the gestures came from one who had pinged the metal detector, an agent would raise his or her hand as though scratching one’s nose and speak into a microphone. “Blue coat, male, six feet,” for example, would cause four or five heads to turn for a closer look at, in that case, a dentist from Richmond who had just switched his pocket hand warmer from one side to the other. His physical dimensions were checked against threat photos of similarly sized subjects and found not to match–but they watched him anyway, and a hidden TV camera zoomed in to record his face. In a few more extreme cases, an agent would join up with the exiting mourners and follow a subject to a car to catch the tag
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number. The long-since-deestablished Strategic Air Command had taken as its official motto PEACE is OUR PROFESSION. For the Secret Service the business was paranoia, the necessity for which was made plain by the two caskets in the White House foyer.
BROWN AND HOLBROOKhad their five seconds of direct viewing. Two expensive boxes, doubtless purchased at government expense, and blasphemously, they thought, draped with the Stars and Stripes. Well, maybe not for the wife. After all, the womenfolk were supposed to be loyal to their men, and that couldn’t be helped. The flow of the crowd took them to the left, and velvet ropes guided them down the steps. They could feel the change in the others. A collective deep breath, and some sniffles of people wiping their eyes of tears–mainly the womenfolk. The two Mountain Men stayed impassive, as most of the men did. The Remington sculptures on the way out caused both to stop and admire briefly, and then it was back into the open, and the fresh air was a welcome cleansing after the few minutes of federal steam heat. They didn’t speak until they were off the grounds and away from others.
“Nice boxes we bought them,” Holbrook managed to say first.
“Shame they weren’t open.” Brown looked around. Nobody was close enough to hear his indiscretion. “They do have kids,” Pete pointed out. He headed south so that they could see down Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they’ll grow up to be ‘crats, too.” They walked a few more yards. “Damn!”
There was nothing else one could say, except maybe, “Fuck!” Holbrook thought, and he didn’t like repeating things Ernie said.
The sun was coming up, and the absence of tall buildings to the east of the Hill meant that the white building was beautifully silhouetted. Though it was the first trip to Washington for both, either man could have done a reasonably accurate sketch of the building from memory, and the wrongness of the horizon could not have been more obvious. Pete was glad that Ernie had talked him