The Zero Game

In an eye blink, the other two officers grip my armpits and haul me out of the hole. Tossing me facefirst on the ground, they try to cuff my hands behind my back. “My arm…!” I scream as they bend it back.

“You’re hurting him!” Viv shouts as the tall officer pins her down and puts her own set of cuffs on. “His arm’s broken!”

Both our faces are dripping with blood. They’re not listening to a word.

“Vents are going down,” a man’s voice squawks through the radio. “Anything else?”

“We got a body in the hallway and an unconscious guy up here!” the officer with the radio adds.

“Barry tried to kill me!” Viv yells.

Barry?

“We were attacked!” she says. “Check our IDs – we work here!”

“She’s telling the truth,” I stutter, barely able to pick my head up. My arm feels like it’s snapped in half.

“So where’s the attacker?” the shortest officer asks.

“Down there!” Viv shouts, flat on her chest and pointing with her chin. “Check the hole!”

“H-His body…” I add. “You’ll… You’ll find his body…”

The short officer motions to the tall one, who lifts the walkie-talkie to his lips.

“Reggie, you there yet?”

“Almost…” says a deeper voice that comes simultaneously from the radio and the opening of the hole. He’s down at the bottom. “Oh, man…” he finally adds.

“What you got?” the officer with the radio asks.

“There’s some bloodstains down here…”

“I told you!” Viv shouts.

“… all the explosive sniffers are crushed… the trail keeps going… and from the looks of it, he ripped the grating clear off the safety gate…”

Oh, no.

“That’s a forty-foot drop,” the officer with the radio says.

“Oh, he definitely did himself some damage,” Reggie says through the radio. “But I’ll tell you right now… I don’t see a body.”

I lift my chin off the ground. My arm’s the least of my worries.

“Jeff, make sure maintenance locks down those vents, and get Reggie some backup,” the shorter officer says to the one with the radio. “And Reggie…!” he adds, leaning over the edge of the hole and shouting as loud as he can, “… get outta there right now and start following that blood! He’s hurt, with at least a few broken paws. He couldn’t have gotten far.”

82

“THEY STILL HAVEN’T FOUND him. They never will.

I’m not surprised. Janos was hired for a reason. Like any great magician, he not only knew how to keep a secret – he also knew the value of a good disappearing act.

It’s been seven hours since we left the depths of the Capitol basement and air tunnels. To double-check that the air system wasn’t compromised, they evacuated the entire building, which hadn’t been done since the anthrax scares a few years back. They moved us, too.

Most people know that if the Capitol is under a full-on terrorist assault, the bigwigs and hotshots get relocated to a top-secret off-site location. If the attack’s on a smaller scale, they go to Fort McNair, in Southwest D.C. But if the attack is minor and containable – like a gas canister thrown in the hallways – they come here, right across the street, to the Library of Congress.

Standing outside the closed doors of the European Reading Room on the second floor, I sink down to sit on the marble floor. My shoulder eventually rests on the leg of one of the enormous glass display cases that line the hallway and are filled with historical artifacts.

“Sir – please don’t sit there,” a nearby FBI agent with silver hair and a pointed nose says.

“What’s it make a difference, huh?” my lawyer, Dan Cohen, threatens as he rubs a hand over his own shaved head. “Don’t be an ass – let the poor guy take a seat.” An old friend from my Georgetown Law days, Dan’s a half-Jewish, half-Italian matzoh-ball-meatball of a guy stuffed into a cheap, poorly tailored suit. After graduation, while most of us went to firms or to the Hill, Dan went back to his old neighborhood in Baltimore, hung out an honest-to-God shingle, and took the cases most lawyers laugh at. Proudly tracing his family tree back to his great, great-uncle, gangster Meyer Lansky, Dan always liked a good fight. But by his own admission, he no longer has any connections in Washington. That’s exactly why I called him. I’ve had enough of this town.

“Harris, we should go,” Dan says. “You’re falling apart, bro.”

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m fine,” I insist.

“C’mon… don’t be a jackass. You’ve been through five and a half hours of interrogation – even the agents said you should take a break. Look at you – you can’t even stand.”

“You know what they’re doing in there,” I say, pointing to the closed doors.

“It doesn’t matter…”

“It does matter! To me it does. Now just give me a few more minutes.”

“Harris, we’ve been waiting here two hours already – it’s almost midnight; you need to get your nose set, and a cast for your arm.”

“My arm’s fine,” I say, readjusting the sling the paramedics gave me.

“But if you-”

“Dan, I know you mean well – and I love you for it – but just be humble for once and acknowledge that this is one part of the problem you can’t fix.”