Marc Zicree - Magic Time

“Fuckin’ mess,” said Gabriel Cox, the shift supervisor who’d been on duty since eight that morning, when the chief didn’t show.

Shango had to admit that was a pretty succinct summation of the situation.

Emergency shelters had been set up in the lobbies and hallways, the conference rooms of every office building along the Mall and in the classrooms and lecture halls of George Washington University for commuters stranded downtown. Some hardy souls had set out on foot around noon on the long trek to Georgetown, Manassas, Arlington, Woodbridge, but the majority of clerks and bureaucrats had stayed put, confident that transportation would be restored. From what he’d heard from the other agents since coming off duty at four, Shango gathered that frustrated and furious crowds had intermittently gathered around the offices of Eastern Bell, shouting for service to resume.

They’d remained there until it dawned on them slowly that not being able to phone their families was, in fact, the least of their worries.

Shango himself felt little actual concern for his own family. Home, to him, was a peeling blue double shotgun on Ascension Street near the Mississippi where his sister lived, his Georgetown apartment was just a place to shower and sleep. He knew perfectly well that seven or eight of his mother’s church-lady buddies would look in on her and that in case of a real emergency his sisters and brother would take care of her. They’d band together like they always had and get each other through.

He smiled a little in the dim glow of the candles that had been set around the duty room in the elaborate candelabra sent across to them by Jan McKay: centerpieces from any number of White House dinners. The golden light reminded him of nights in his childhood, when there’d been a little hiccup between NOPSI’s electricity cut-off date and Dad’s paycheck, or when Georges or Betsy or Andrew had roared through town and water had stood in the street up to the porch. Dad would bed everyone down in the living room on blankets and tell stories in front of a dead TV, taking all the voices and the special effects himself, a thousand times better than anything on Star Trek or MASH .

Funny, he thought, what the glow of a candle could do.

“So what do you think?” Cox looked up as Witjas, one of the younger men, came in with the hand-printed list of agents: who had checked in, who lived where, who might be expected to show up tomorrow.

“I think anybody who hasn’t shown up by this time isn’t gonna.” The young man tossed the papers on the gray metal table. “I was just out. Looks like more fires in Anacostia.”

“Oh, great,” muttered Cox, trying to sound pissed instead of scared. “What the hell is it about your people, Larry? Things fuck up, and they start wreckin’ their own neighborhoods.” He turned back to Witjas without waiting for a reply-which was fortunate, since Shango made it a point never to reply to Cox’s attitude on blacks. “How many have we got?”

The half dozen agents in the duty room put out their cigarettes and put down their half-eaten sandwiches and gathered around, divvying up shifts for the night: so many for the embassies, so many to work the White House perimeter, so many for inside. Many of those, like Witjas, who’d walked in from Falls Church and Bethesda had brought sleeping bags and changes of clothing under the assumption that they’d be staying for as long as they had to. When things hadn’t straightened out by about noon, Cox had passed out pens and paper and told them to start writing reports about everything they’d observed on their way in, and these had been forwarded to the emergency command post in the State Department building.

“You mind going back till midnight?” asked Cox, glancing up at Shango. “I’d feel safer if there was a fourth guy over there, and we’re gonna be spread thin.”

“Fine with me,” said Shango. “Beats listenin’ to Witjas snore in the conference room.” And you talk in here .

Witjas gave him the finger as he left the duty room and descended the stairs.

No lights showed from the windows of the West Wing, but when Shango reached there-it must have been ten by then, though his watch had stopped at 9:17 that morning, like everyone else’s-he found the corridors and conference room still glowing with candlelight, stuffy after a day of no air-conditioning and the nightlong burning of dozens of small flames. When Shango came in, Agent Breckenridge was just showing Nina Diaz and Ron Guthrie out of McKay’s office-McKay’s press secretary and the White House chief of staff, part of the inner circle of advisers and friends. McKay had walked to the office door with them and looked like ten miles of bad road: shirt soaked with sweat, jacket and tie long gone, lines that most men didn’t develop until their sixties printed deep on his face. Past his shoulder Shango could see into the candlelit Oval Office, where chairs had been pulled up close to the desk and every surface was littered with papers and reports. Shango wondered whether any word had yet come in from the agents who were guarding McKay’s son up in Maine.

There were still a dozen people sitting in the hall waiting to be seen, a couple of the big-name lobbyists from the oil companies and arms manufacturers, but mostly military: grim-looking young corporals with folders on their knees. Messengers.

Not, by the look of them, bearers of any kind of good tidings.

McKay turned his head and met Shango’s eye. And smiled-relieved?

“Mr. Shango,” he said. He was always scrupulous about knowing the names of the men on the White House detail, and about calling people Mr., an odd little formality left over, Shango assumed, from his army days. The next instant a frown creased McKay’s forehead, “But you’re supposed to be off shift.”

“Mr. Cox thought an extra man here might be helpful.” And he saw understanding change the President’s blue eyes.

“As it happens,” said McKay, “I was thinking of sending a message asking you to come back for a few minutes. Steve,” he turned to where Steve Czernas, his deputy chief of staff, sat in the chair closest to the office door. “Mr. Breckenridge, if you’ll excuse us, please.”

Breckenridge-one of the older men on White House detail, thin and tough and very silent-glanced at Shango and stepped out into the corridor to let Shango and Czernas pass him and go on into the office. McKay shut the door.

“Mr. Shango,” he said, “I understand you scored at the top of your class in the training center.”

“Not in all areas, sir,” said Shango, hands folded before him. He was a little rumpled and tired, but with his tie tied and jacket on he still looked more businesslike than the Commander in Chief. “But I was in the top five percent, yes, sir.”

McKay smiled. “What you scored tops in was survival and escape and evasion.”

“I grew up black in the Deep South, sir.”

McKay grinned.

“I’m going to ask Mr. Richter-or Mr. Cox, if Mr. Richter hasn’t come in yet-if he would second you to special duty. Would you be willing to undertake that?”

“Of course, sir.” Shango felt a slight prickling of his scalp and thought, Here it is. What he’s known all along today that no one else has known .

He glanced at Czernas. Like Shango, he was still neat, Yale tie knotted, navy blazer unrumpled, chin smooth as Pamela Anderson’s tit, and yet, beneath his almost dandyish sleekness, he had the elastic, broad-shouldered fitness of a young man who works out diligently. He’d often been on those long road rides, zooming out ahead while McKay stayed obediently back with the Secret Service boys.

“This isn’t anything I’d ask of anyone if it weren’t an emergency,” McKay went on, and for an instant Shango could see him, thirty years younger, huddled in cammies by firelight in some Southeast Asian base camp, sizing up who to send out on patrol. “Jerri Bilmer was supposed to come into Dulles this morning, with some papers and possibly film, that could hold the key to what happened today.”