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By Root 1455 0

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 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 HOLBROOK had 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 into coming. Just the sight made all the travel hassles worth it. This time he managed the first collective thought: Ernie, Holbrook said in awe, it's inspirational.

Yeah.

ONE PROBLEM WITH the disease was that the warning signs were equivocal, and her main concern was one of her patients. He was such a nice boy, but-but he was gravely ill, Sister Jean Baptiste saw now that his fever had spiked to 40.4 degrees Celsius, and that was deadly enough, but the other signs were worse. The disorientation had gotten worse. The vomiting had increased, and now there was blood in it. There were indications of internal bleeding. All that, she knew, could mean one of several things-but the one she worried about was called Ebola Zaire. There were many diseases in the jungle of this country-she still thought of it occasionally as the Belgian Congo-and while the competition for the absolute worst was stiffer than one might imagine, Ebola was at the bottom of that particular pit. She had to draw blood for another test, and