88 - Washington, D.C.
Ben Shapiro, Sarah Goldberg and Judy Katz struggled to walk rather than run as they negotiated the ten blocks back to the Renaissance Hotel to retrieve Shapiro’s car. The only tense moment was when they started to cross K Street but darted back to the sidewalk as a parade of Army trucks, led and trailed by a phalanx of Humvees, shot down the street, sirens blaring. Ben and Sarah ducked into a doorway. Judy stood on the sidewalk, frozen, staring at the Army trucks, unable to move.
Shapiro dashed out from the doorway, grabbed her elbow and dragged her, still unspeaking, to shelter.
“What happened, Judy?” he asked, clutching her hand as her eyes focused on him and Sarah. She answered slowly, searching for words.
“I flashed on a memory,” she said in a hushed voice. “But it wasn’t my memory. My grandfather and my grandmother, they were young, she held a baby, my father was the baby, she held him so tightly he cried out. Trucks went by, army trucks. They were running, running from the soldiers. They hid. They were so frightened. It felt like I was there. Or it was happening now.”
She looked at her two friends. Smiled in embarrassment. “It seemed so real,” she said softly.
“It is real, Judy,” Sarah said.
They were afraid to go to the hotel room for their bags, concerned that since the room had been used as an office for March organizers, the police might be waiting to nab anybody who showed up there. Shapiro’s heart pounded as he handed the hotel doorman the receipt for his car and asked for it to be brought to the front of the hotel. He hoped the five twenty dollar bills he handed the doorman would smooth the process.
The two women were at a coffee shop a block from the hotel. Shapiro told them there was no sense risking all three of them getting arrested when he retrieved his car. The car arrived with no problems, however, earning the valet a further twenty-dollar tip. Shapiro stopped quickly in front of the coffee shop and picked up the two women. Judy Katz sat in the front, next to Shapiro. Sarah Goldberg sat in the back seat.
In a matter of minutes they were on Rt. 95 heading north toward Baltimore, riding in silence, hoping they were ahead of any roadblocks they expected would sprout on roads leaving the capital. Shapiro set the cruise control at nine miles an hour over the speed limit.
Sarah finally broke the silence.
“I don’t know how I can thank the two of you for getting me away from there,” she said. “Judy, if you hadn’t been so quick, and so persuasive, who knows where we would be now. Thank you so much.”
“No big deal,” Katz replied. “I was lucky that my asshole of a boss couldn’t find time to meet last week to take my ID away from me. If he had, we’d be heading for military detention right now, all three of us.”
Although she’d said it was “no big deal,” Judy Katz’ mind was swirling with more images she was helpless to stop. Rather than her grandparents, now she saw herself behind barbed wire in a concentration camp, her face on a photograph out of a history book of the Holocaust. This is how it happened, she thought. This is how it happened to ordinary people, people like my grandparents, people like me, ordinary people, ordinary Jews.
The more she tried to drive the images from her mind, the more vividly they played, a mental black and white newsreel. Judy Katz in a striped prison suit. Judy Katz with her hair shaved off. Judy Katz, stick thin. Judy Katz, entering the shower building, knowing what it really was.
Another thought entered her mind. She startled Shapiro with a scream. “Nana. Nana was supposed to be in Washington. They’ve taken my Nana to a camp.” Shapiro moved to place his hand on her shoulder. Sarah leaned forward and brushed his hand away. “Let her cry,” she said.
An hour later, Sarah was the one to break the silence.
“I hate to ask you this, but do either of you have a cell phone I can use,” she said. “Abram is going to be worried sick about me. I have to let him know I’m all right.”
Katz, who had not spoken for an hour, sat up and reached into the backpack she’d brought to the March that morning. “Here,” she said. “Use my phone.”
“Wait,” Shapiro interrupted. “Let’s think about this for a moment. What sort of monitoring can they do of cell calls?”
“Uh, actually, I know something about that,” Katz said. “In my former life, I did my fair share of listening in on people’s phone calls, bad guys’ calls of course.
“Cell calls are easy to monitor. We used to do that all the time. The only hard part was getting a warrant. I have a feeling, though, that with all the national security talk from the President, they’re gonna be using FISA warrants, if they use any warrants at all to monitor phone calls.”
“FISA? What’s that?” Sarah asked, still anxious to call her husband.
“The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Shapiro said. “I had a FISA case once. It lets the feds do pretty much anything if they say its in the name of national security. But if they don’t know our names or our cell numbers, I don’t think they can get into our calls, can they Judy?”
“Actually, that’s pretty easy,” she said. “I won’t say we did it often, but I can’t deny that once in a while we got help from what we used to call the U-G-A,” She spoke the letters.
“Who?” Sarah asked.
“UGA, the Unnamed Government Agency. That’s what we called the NSA,” Judy answered. “National Security Agency. They bragged to us that they know, well, everything there is to know, and what they don’t know, they know how to find out. Their computers regularly listen to millions of foreign radio, telephone, cell phone conversations. Its simple for them to screen local cell calls, too.”
She turned in her seat to face Sarah.
“You give them some key words or a phrase, like, for instance, bomb or Israel or whatever you expect the bad guys to say. When the computer hears a key word in a conversation it tags it for the analysts to listen in on.
“Its pretty miraculous how well it works. Scary but miraculous. I broke a big case that way once, back in my old life”
“And you think they may be monitoring cell calls now?” Sarah asked.
“They’d be crazy not to check calls made in the Washington area at a minimum.”
“OK,” Sarah said reluctantly. “Abram is going to assume I’m in federal custody someplace, though. I’ve got to get word to him.”
“And I have to try to reach my Nana,” Katz said. “Maybe she stayed home, maybe she was too sick to go.” Her face brightened. “Maybe she went home after the President’s speech.”
The sky darkened as they crossed New Jersey and on into Connecticut. Shapiro broke the silence.
“I wonder whether the President was blowing smoke up our asses with that atom bomb talk,” he said. “It sure reminded me of another President who told fairy tales about weapons of mass destruction. I can’t believe Quaid had the balls to try the same thing.”
“You have to admit though,” Katz added, “it’s a great story. It will scare the pants off most of America, mad Jews running around with atom bombs threatening to blow up Minneapolis unless we send troops to liberate Israel. It’s a hell of a story.”
“Not for long, though,” Shapiro said. “Quaid’s going to have the same problem Bush had when the truth comes out that there are no Jewish atom bombs rattling around the country. That story is going to come back to bite him, you’ll see.”
Sarah Goldberg remained silent throughout this interchange. Finally, she realized that these two people had saved her from being dragged to a concentration camp. They could be trusted.
“Actually, there may be some truth to what the President said,” she whispered, hardly believing that she was about to reveal the secret she’d learned only days earlier and sworn to protect.
Both Shapiro and Katz swiveled their heads to look at the woman in the back seat. The car swerved until Shapiro turned back to look at the road.
Judy Katz continued to stare at Sarah in surprise.
“What do you mean by that, Sarah? What in the world is ‘some truth’ about an atom bomb?” she asked.
The tension, fear and anxiety that had built in Sarah Goldberg throughout the day, anxiety first over what she would say when she walked up to the microphone to address half a million people, fear and tension from the events that prevented her from speaking, all let loose in a torrent of words as she spewed forth the entire story of her friend Debra Reuben, of Lt. Chaim Levi and his death, of the sailboat and, finally, of the atom bomb at the bottom of the swimming pool in her suburban Portland home.
The car was silent when the woman stopped speaking.
“Holy fucking shit,” was Shapiro’s first comment.
“Mega-dittos, Rush,” was all Katz could say as they drove on through the night, heading back to Massachusetts.
Maybe, Katz thought, there was an alternative to the shower building.