“Is everyone out?” he shouted, once he had his wife to safety and made sure she was breathing. “Is everyone safe? Buddy up. Make sure you can account for everyone you came with. Look for the people at your table who were—”
The next sound he heard, barely discernible over the buzz of the crowd and the power of his own voice, shook him even more than the explosion, even more than the sight of flames slowly consuming the room.
A baby was crying.
“No,” he whispered, under his breath.
He raced back toward the doors, but one of his fellow federal judges stopped him. “Don’t be a fool, Rupert. You can’t survive in there. The firefighters should be here any moment. Let them—”
Haskins didn’t wait for the end of the sentence. He returned to the center of the inferno.
He had one advantage the firefighters would not have—he knew where the baby was, or at least where it had been. The problem was, visibility was now almost zero. He felt his way forward, using the walls and the tables to thread his way back to his former seat, even though everything he touched was red hot.
Haskins heard the baby cry again. That helped. Even with flames crackling all around him, he could zero in on that heart-wrenching sound.
The baby was still in her carrier, but her face was completely covered in black. The plastic molding of the carrier had begun to melt.
Haskins lifted the baby into his arms, wiped the smoke and soot from her face, and held her close. “Breathe, child. Breathe.”
Now he had a bigger problem—how to get back. A trail of flames cut across the center of the room, separating him from the main entrance. He knew he didn’t have the strength to get another door open. Already he was feeling faint. Must be the thinness of the air, he thought. Most of the oxygen had been burned out of the room. His knees wobbled. This couldn’t be the end. Surely he hadn’t gone through all this just to have the poor child die in his arms.
Like a ray of light piercing the darkness, Haskins saw a white arc stream through the flames. It hit him in the face—and it was wet.
Water. Someone was putting out the fire. Praise God—someone was putting out the fire!
A moment later he saw uniformed firefighters crossing the room. One of them took the baby and immediately put an oxygen mask over its tiny nose and mouth. Someone threw a blanket over Haskins and escorted him to the outside corridor. Just in time. His brain was as smoky as the room; it was getting very hard to think clearly.
“If you ever get tired of judging,” he heard one of the men say, “we’d be honored to have you join the Firefighters Brigade. You’re a hero, Judge. A real-life hero.”
He didn’t want to appear rude, but he felt sick and tired and had no stomach for compliments. “Angel,” he whispered.
“Your wife is over here,” another voice said. “She’s fine.”
Haskins allowed himself to be led to her side. Her eyes were open, though streaked with soot and tears. Even though his clothes were hot and filthy, he threw his arms around her and hugged her tightly.
“Looks like we’ll be around for our twenty-eighth, Angel,” he said. He heard nothing back from his wife. But he could feel tears of joy cascading down his cheek, renewing him, making him feel young all over again.
1
Ben Kincaid rushed into the magnetic train in a blind panic. He knew he shouldn’t have taken a meeting with that woman from the foreign-policy think tank, but she’d told him that it was urgent, that American civil rights might crumble into dust if he didn’t meet her at Jimmy T.’s, a favorite hangout for senators and lobbyists not far from his office in the Russell Building.
“You can see why this is so urgent,” the thin, earnest woman said, brushing a shock of brunette hair from her face. She was even younger than Ben, which undoubtedly accounted for a good deal of the earnestness. “This country has endured the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. We’ve endured Gitmo Bay and the Salt Pit and all the other places where the Constitution has been violated.”
“Technically,” Ben said, “the Constitution only applies to U.S. citizens. Not foreign nationals.”
“So you’re saying you’re okay with torturing prisoners?”
“Nooo,” Ben countered. “I’m down on torture. But I’m down on terrorists, too.”
“If we allow this to continue, then we become the terrorists.”
Ben could see he would get nowhere with this woman using only logic. “You do understand that I’m not Todd Glancy, right? Senator Glancy resigned. I was appointed by the governor to fill out the remainder of his term.”
She flipped her hair back again. “Like I don’t know that already.”
And in that instant, Ben realized that she not only knew that already—that was the reason she had singled him out. She would get nowhere with any experienced member of the Senate, so she was going after the new kid on the block. “Look, if you have a report or something, I’ll be happy to forward it to the Foreign Relations Committee. Of which I am not a member.”
“You seriously think we haven’t done that already? I don’t think you understand how dire this situation is…”
And it probably was dire, too, as was the predicament of every lobbyist, politician, and private citizen who had contacted Ben in the few short months since he became a senator. If he’d had the time, he would have been happy to listen to what she had to say. Maybe. But in this particular instance, the time did not exist. He still had the memo Christina had given him in his suit pocket: the Democrats were planning a filibuster and he was late.
As soon as he’d managed to extract himself from the earnest young woman, which was none too soon, he’d raced down the sidewalk, run into the Russell Building, and taken the elevator down to the small private subway train that shuttled back and forth between the Senate office buildings and the Capitol. Ben liked the train—it was quiet and clean, unblemished by graffiti and advertisements. A series of state flags, arranged in order of admission to the Union, ornamented the track. Ben knew that by the time he reached the baby blue flag of Oklahoma, the forty-sixth state in the Union, he had almost arrived at the Capitol building. But he couldn’t enjoy the ride today. He was late. For his first filibuster! His party was hosting a party and he wasn’t there!
He ran into the building only to be stopped for an interminable period of time at the security checkpoint. How long before they would just wave him past? Probably forever. Finally he smiled at the Capitol Police and raced down the corridor. He sped past the pillared Capitol crypt, past the vice-presidential marble busts in the spectator gallery, past the historic Ohio clock in the hall outside the chamber. He had heard some of his new colleagues talking about the politics of motion—the need to appease the public by creating the appearance of movement, even when none is actually taking place. At the moment, Ben’s feet were giving the phrase a whole new meaning.
Moving as quickly as decorum would allow, Ben made his way inside the Senate chamber. He emerged on the carpeted center aisle but veered left toward the curving rows of nineteenth-century mahogany desks (exactly one hundred of them) arranged in concentric semicircles. Ben found his assigned desk on the Democrat side: Desk 101 on the far rear left of the chamber, the desk reserved for the most junior freshman senator in the assemblage. He slid behind it, sat up straight, and tried to act as if he had been there all along and knew exactly what was going on.
Ben had been in such a rush it took him a moment before he noticed that no one else was there. The other desks were all empty.