31 December 2003

I had a lunch meeting at James Mackey's Public House on L Street. I took the metro down, since I was working at the government facility on the Orange Line in Arlington. When I got off at Farragut West the streets were full, but the people were walking more aimlessly than usual. This close to the big K Street Legal firms there is normally a sort of grim purpose in the air, but there were more jeans and fewer suits than I usually see.

The Barnes and Nobel bookstore on the corner of 18th and L was jammed. Looked like people were getting ready to hole up for the last holiday weekend. Just a guess, but I think a lot of us are hedging our bets on the terror alert. We'll go about our business but also stay home and catch up on some reading.

Mackey's has a bold red front calculated to catch the eye like a real Irish public house. I went through the red and into the dark wood interior. Despite the crowds on the street there weren't many people in the bar. Normally it is jammed at lunchtime. I got a stool right by the door and set up shop. I ordered a Boddington's and when the imposing African American barman brought the dark amber glass the foam was a deep vanilla confection. It is too bad people don't drink at lunch anymore. It used to break up the day so nicely before a nap at the desk.

I spread out my paper. The lady next to me was reading The Lady's No. 1 Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. It is the first in a series of short detective stories set in Botswana, featuring lead investigator Precious Ramotswe. I asked her if she liked it. She stopped playing with her chicken caesar salad and glanced up. "It's quite good. Human scale." She glanced back down at the book, dismissing me. "There is way too much terror out there."

It was appropriate. Every time I have lunch with the Doctor I come away a little more depressed than when I went there. It is not that the conversation isn't interesting, nor even entertaining. It is to be expected when you are an expert in how people die, why they die, and how you address that whole post-mortality thing.

He says he wrote a couple episodes of "Quincy: ME" when the Jack Klugman vehicle was on the boob-tube in the late 70s. Klugman's character was based on the extraordinary career of Thomas Noguchi, Coroner to the Stars, who built a reputation in LA as the boutique medical examiner, the guy who did the autopsies on Robert Kennedy, John Belushi, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin and Natalie Wood. Among others. He had a comment for everything and loved the limelight.

My pal the Doctor didn't want it. He was trying to get us ready for the Next Big Thing. My phone went off and it was him, two blocks away, walking up from the Old Executive Office Building. His noon meeting had run over and he had begged off on the afternoon session on mass decontamination. He toldme he would be there in a couple minutes.

I didn't have much going on that day. The Holidays were slow in one of the Government offices where I do contract labor, and in the other there is a crush of bodies so dense due to the orange alert that there is no place to sit down. They are very busy, while the rest of the town lets the air out of their shoes, and holes up at home. This is the first real break for many since 9-11 they weren't going to give it up, Orange alert or not.

The Doctor came down the steps into bar. I asked him how he was doing. He said he had been in non-stop meetings right through Christmas Eve. I rolled my eyes. "Because of Orange?" I said. "Is it still pandemonium when they advance the alert condition?"

The last time we went to Orange was during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was still at the Department and it was a pain. These things always come on the holidays, calculated to screw up your plans.

The domestic component of the ground war in Iraq was called "Liberty Shield," a title suitably uplifting codeword. There were a lot of measures imposed to safeguard the Homeland. Physical security, public health, food chain integrity. Those sorts of things.

We had a lot of false alarms, since some of the things they did were not routinely done and so we had no baseline to compare the results to. Is a positive on this test a bad thing? How often does that happen?

Often we just didn't know. This is a big country, after all, but things like Mad Cow and SARS happen naturally. Suppose the bad guys did something like that intentionally?

There is an awful lot to protect. That is why the bad guys always have an advantage in being able to pick the target.

God Bless the White House staff. While the rest of us were putting up the lights and the mistletoe they came to the realization that if even a small part of the bogus intelligence swirling around was true, we had a heap o' trouble. They were probably sitting in their offices playing games of "what if?" They started with airplanes from France and ran through the dozens of possibilities. Each one generated a question, which in turn was passed to the Departments and Agencies under the authority of The President, who went to Camp David and later to Texas.

The questions kept coming, though, and the Doctor and a few of his interagency buddies were the only ones left around to answer. "Suppose they hit us with a big chlorine barrage. What about plague or anthrax!"

You know how that goes. Convene a meeting. Write a memo. "Does anyone know if there is a plan on the shelf for treating a whole stadium of victims? It was two weeks of what we normally call the Five O'clock Friday Follies, when the grownups frown at the idea there will be two whole days before policy can be made again on Monday. So they fill up the evening.

Those that had escaped the offices before the questions began had a pleasant holiday. Those that didn't were answering weighty questions like: "How do we deal with tens of thousands dead or exposed?"

The problem was not that these are not good things to think of. Nor it is that people have not thought about them. The problem was that many of the people who knew what the answers were, and where they were kept were on vacation.

The Doctor ate his chili and sighed. "We can do anything we need to. Today's question is about decontamination. Suppose we have to do a mass decon." He raised his spoon to his lips. The Doctor eats expeditiously, knowing from his days as an ME that the beeper could go off at any moment.

"We can do all that, but we don't have a common standard for success. This is outside, remember. We can get hundreds of people to disrobe and move in an orderly manner through the tents with the water sprays. That part is not going to be a problem, if we are ready."

"So what is the question?" I asked as I ladled some of my own chili on toasted garlic bread.

"The question was that the last time we practiced this, it was summer in Washington."

"Oh yeah" I said. "I suppose they would need some clothes at the other end of the shower or they would freeze to death."

"Bingo," said the Doctor. "Quincy worked like death was a boutique business. This isn't. It is more like WalMart."

The Doctor's beeper went off. It was the Center for Disease Control. We made out pleasantries and he headed for the next meeting and I headed back to the Orange Line.

As I walked, I wondered if it was true that there was no word in English that rhymes with Orange. It wasn't the first time, and I had a feeling it wouldn't be the last.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra