staircase to the second floor, which was mostly restricted space, and
continued to the third floor, where people could freely wander.
Buchanan knew he was being followed by more people now. While there
were lots of dark suits around, he had trekked these halls long enough
to sense who should be here as opposed to those who looked out of
place. He assumed they were the FBI and Thornhill’s men. After the
encounter in the car, the Frog would have deployed more resources.
Good. Buchanan smiled. He would, from now on, refer to the CIA man as
the Frog. Spies liked code names. And he couldn’t think of a more
appropriate one for Thornhill. Buchanan just hoped that his stinger
was potent enough, and that the Frog’s shiny, inviting back wouldn’t
prove too slippery.
The door was the first one a person would come to upon reaching the
third floor and turning left. A middle-aged man in a suit stood next
to it. There was no brass plate to identify whose office this was.
Right next door was the office of Franklin Graham, the Senate
sergeant-at-arms. The sergeant-at-arms was the Senate’s principal law
enforcement, administrative support and protocol officer. Graham was a
good friend of Buchanan’s.
“Good to see you, Danny,” the man in the suit said.
“Hello, Phil, how’s that back of yours?”
“Doc says I should have the surgery.”
“Listen to me, don’t let them cut you. When you’re feeling the pain,
have a nice, pleasing shot of Scotch, sing a song at the top of your
lungs and then make love to your wife.”
“Drinking, dancing and loving-sounds like good advice to me,” Phil
said.
“What’d you expect from an Irishman?”
Phil laughed. “You’re a good man, Danny Buchanan.”
“You know why I’m here?”
Phil nodded. “Mr. Graham told me. You can go right in.
He unlocked the door and Buchanan passed through, and then Phil closed
the door and stood guard. He didn’t notice the two pairs of people who
had idly watched this exchange.
The agents reasonably figured they could wait for Buchanan to come out
and then take up their surveillance once more. They were on the third
floor, after all. It wasn’t like the man could fly away.
Inside the room, Buchanan grabbed a raincoat off the hook on the wall.
Lucky for him it was drizzly outside. There was also a yellow hard hat
on another wall hook. He slipped this on as well. Then he pulled
Coke-bottle glasses and work gloves from his briefcase. At least from
a distance, with his briefcase under the raincoat, he would change from
lobbyist to laborer.
Going to another door at the end of the room, Buchanan removed the
chain locking this door and opened it. He went up the stairs and then
opened a hatch like door, which revealed a ladder leading up. Buchanan
put his feet on the rungs and started climbing. At the top, he popped
another hatch and found himself on the roof of the Capitol.
The attic room was how the pages accessed the roof to change the flags
that flew over the Capitol. The inside joke was that the flags were
constantly changed, some flying only for seconds, so that members could
send generous constituents back home a continuous supply of Stars and
Stripes that had “flown” over the Capitol. Buchanan rubbed his brow.
God, what a town.
Buchanan looked down at the front grounds of the Capitol. People were
scurrying here and there, running for meetings with people they
desperately needed help from. And with all the egos, factions,
agendas, crisis upon crisis and stakes greater than anything that had
come before in the world’s history, everything somehow seemed to work
out. A large anthill came to mind as Buchanan looked down upon the
scene. This well-oiled machine of democracy. At least the ants did it
for survival. But maybe in a way, we do too, he thought.
He looked up at Lady Liberty on her century-and-a-half perch atop the
Capitol’s dome. She had recently been removed via helicopter and stout
cable, and the grime of a hundred fifty years had been thoroughly
cleaned away. Too bad the sins of people weren’t as easy to scrape