by Jim Geraghty
Afterward, Bader ran into another one of his budget hawk allies, a newly elected member and budget wonk from his home state.
“How did it go?” asked Pat Toomey. “Does the Senate leadership understand what we’re trying to say, or not?”
“Do you remember in Indiana Jones, where they’re on a plane, and they think everything’s fine, and then the plane starts shaking, and they sense things aren’t fine, so they go up to the cockpit?” Bader rambled, a little shell-shocked with disappointment. “And then they open the door and gasp, seeing two empty seats and no pilots and a mountain right in front of them?”
Bader sighed, shook his head, and refocused with a wide-eyed, befuddled stare.
“Pat, nobody’s flying our plane!”
* * *
26 Sen. Tom Coburn, Breach of Trust, p. xix.
9
MARCH 2001
U.S. National Debt: $5.7 trillion
Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $175.93 million
Humphrey and Wilkins departed the Department of Agriculture building, walking along the National Mall to look at a site that the administrative director declared would be the next location of the Agency of Invasive Species Headquarters Building. Wilkins thought his boss was wildly over-optimistic.
Wilkins shook his head with a skeptical laugh. “There’s no way the Mall bosses are going to sign off on this.”
They stood before an unused triangle of land, where the grass grew thin, bordered by Independence Avenue from the north, Maine Avenue to the west, 15th Street to the east. Maine and 15th intersect at the southernmost point. Directly to the northeast was the Washington Monument.
“I’ve been suggesting sites to the National Capital Planning Commission for the past eight years now,” Humphrey said. “They’re more receptive to this than to any of my previous proposals.”
“Yeah, because your other ones were even more ridiculous,” Wilkins chuckled. “How long did it take them to laugh you out of their office when you proposed a site that would have views of both the Washington Monument and the White House? They’d never put something there.”
“Actually, word is that they’re going to put the National Museum of African American History there.”
“Really? There?” Wilkins winced. “I mean, it’s good to have one—although I guess I’m wondering why you would want it separate from the National Museum of American History.”
“Probably because they’ll soon finish the National Native American History Museum, and eventually they’ll have to address the proposal for the national Latino Museum,” Humphrey shrugged. “It’s a land rush, Jack. The Dwight Eisenhower Memorial—”
“Wait, you mean separate from the World War II Memorial?”
“The victims of Ukrainian famine, the United States Air Force Memorial, the Victims of Communism Memorial, the Thomas Masaryk Memorial—”
“I have no idea who that is.”
“First president of Czechoslovakia.”
“Ooh, I have a good spot for that one! How about Prague, does that work for them?” Wilkins rolled his eyes.
“The American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial. They’re jamming the Japanese-American Internment Camps memorial on a narrow little traffic triangle by Union Station.27 In the future, everyone will have a memorial or monument for fifteen minutes.”
“To be carved in stone at the Andy Warhol Memorial,” Wilkins griped. “Good luck getting the funding for all these, particularly with a Republican in the White House.”
“That’s the thing, Jack,” Humphrey said with a smile. “You notice we haven’t needed our traditional battle-stations meetings, no dire sense of a budgetary threat from a new Republican coming to Washington, no sudden embrace of the latest Bader plan to cut us to the bone.” He nodded in the direction of the White House. “This one doesn’t have any of that budgetary ferocity. His enthusiasm for faith-based government services, his repeated emphasis that he’s a …” Humphrey momentarily squinted his eyes and held his hands to his heart, “compassionate conservative, the belief that government should help people … George W. Bush did not come to Washington to cut spending.”
“You realize you’re saying this with Republicans controlling the House, and the Senate, depending on what side of the bed Jim Jeffords woke up on this morning.” Wilkins laughed a bit at the irony. “So after all these years, these ninnies have finally made peace with government spending?”
Ava expected the layoff notice from EasyFed to trigger another round of heartbreak, but she found it liberating.
The EasyFed site had more and more portions that said, “This page is currently undergoing maintenance.” Updates grew more infrequent, and traffic dwindled. Some pages failed to load entirely and dead links multiplied. Like a dying relative, Ava wanted to see someone pull the plug and end the suffering. She joked that some sites should come with prearranged
DNRs—“Do Not Reload.”
She expected the decline of the site to generate humiliating criticism and mockery, but she realized that everyone who would write about it in the dot-com world was undergoing the same ritual sacrifice of mass layoffs. It was brutal out there.
It was brutal inside, too. Ava outlasted Drew—he said farewell by setting fire to a pile of long-awaited business cards on the sidewalk outside GlobeScape headquarters—and she found that she knew only a small fraction of her remaining coworkers. Those that remained seemed to keep their heads down and rarely said hello in the hallways. The GlobeScape offices grew emptier, and the EasyFed team kept getting moved to smaller and more cramped spaces—the cubicle farms went from free range to a setup that the ASPCA would find intolerably cruel for livestock. She introduced herself to new office-mates, “Hi, I’m Ava Summers, and I’m the Angel of Dot-Com Death. Within a few months we’ll be moving offices again, and half of our coworkers won’t be here.”
When GlobeScape announced that the EasyFed project was going “on hiatus,” she knew it was dead.
The good news was that with her failure to use any vacation days or sick days, and the fact that GlobeScape as a whole continued to operate, Ava departed the building with about three months’ worth of severance and unused paid vacation.
Freed from the monotony of staring at a computer monitor for a thoroughly unhealthy majority of her waking hours, Ava finally started enjoying living out on the West Coast.
It was on a park bench in San Diego, looking out at the U.S.S. Midway, that she sensed she just had to chalk up her tumultuous roller coaster ride of EasyFed as an adventure she had to take, just to determine finally that she in fact didn’t belong out here. She didn’t quite miss her old life at the Agency of Invasive Species, but she found she missed Washington.
Californians were relaxed, easygoing, and fun, but … too relaxed, she found. Sure, half the time you would walk through Palo Alto and bump into people obsessing with their cellular phones, but she realized that most of the tech-heads out here were missing part of the equation. They obsessed over what their gadgets could do—and often how lucrative they could be—but rarely if ever talked about how they affected the world that used them. Something about the language of her industry—seeing people as consumers and market share—left Ava cold. They were people, and she remembered coming out of NYU with a fire in her eyes to use technology to change the world—and not just in unveiling a faster Web browser that would be overtaken by the competition within six months.
She stood up from the bench and resolved: She would return to Washington … as soon as she could find a decent-sounding job back there.
AUGUST 2001
“Condit’s been somebody we could count on,” sighed Wilkins as the morning news replayed the previous night’s catastrophically awful interview between the congressman and Connie Chung. Wilkins rubbed his head, turned off the small television in Humphrey’s office, and wandered toward the couch, wondering why Humphrey seemed so unperturbed about the nationally televised PR self-immolation of one of their better allies on
Capitol Hill. “Why’s he doing this?” Wilkins asked Humphrey, seated at the desk and focused upon a stack of paperwork. “Can’t he see he’s making himself radioactive?”
“Why’s he doing what, precisely?” Humphrey asked, looking up with one cocked eyebrow, attempting to stifle a mischievous and largely inappropriate grin.
“Well, for starters, being dumb enough to bang an intern!” exclaimed Wilkins, falling to the couch.
Humphrey’s smirk now reached the status of an elite running back; he couldn’t stop it but could only hope to contain it. “Two years ago, didn’t we have almost precisely the same conversation?”
Wilkins rolled his eyes. “This is different!”
“Indeed,” Humphrey clucked. “As far as we know, Congressman Condit has never testified under oath about that poor girl. It is also different in that President Clinton knew that his position within his party made his resignation unacceptable to hundreds of powerful people. If he had stepped down, and Al Gore had become president, little or nothing would have changed in terms of policies—in fact, he probably would have won last year as a quasi-incumbent presiding over peace and prosperity. But enough powerful people had worked and struggled and sweated to put Bill Clinton in that office, and they weren’t about to see him depart over something they deemed as … insufficiently consequential as … ‘banging an intern,’ as you so eloquently put it.”
Wilkins shook his head. “Monica Lewinsky never went missing!”
“True,” shrugged Humphrey. “But what Congressman Condit is attempting is the same wait-it-out maneuver as Clinton. I use that strategy regularly—hunker down, delay in every way possible, and wait for your opponents and critics to become distracted. I like to think of it as one of the useful potions in my studies of bureaucratic alchemy, and I wish I could have trade-marked it. Clinton at least used it well. But with Condit, today it’s … well, it’s maddening to watch a perfectly respectable and well-regarded tactic used so amateurishly.”
Ava’s return preceded the discovery of that decent-sounding job; the tech bust that had left a deep chill of hiring freezes over Silicon Valley had struck most nongovernmental entities in the nation’s capital as well.
Ava found a nice one-bedroom a bit south of Dupont Circle—a seemingly near-ideal neighborhood suddenly in the national spotlight for the most macabre of reasons: some congressional intern who lived across the street had disappeared and become a bizarre, tawdry media obsession.
But she relished having Jamie and Lisa over for cheap red wine and a reconnection.
“I’m on New Hampshire Avenue now,” Ava said. “When you hit the TV trucks, you’ve gone too far.”
SEPTEMBER 2001
The federal offices opened up again. The National Guard Humvees started packing up.
There was an effort to get back to “normal,” but a lot of folks watched televisions that had been put in for keeping up on events or emergency information. No one really objected or claimed they were a distraction. The new, ominous news tickers ran across the bottom of the screen, little constantly flowing rivers of anxiety in all-caps Helvetica Narrow font.
Wilkins found himself sitting on the couch in Humphrey’s office.
“I’m thinking of scrapping it all and enlisting,” Wilkins said. “I know they don’t need any more forty-five-year-old career civil service employees, but maybe they need somebody to … I don’t know, fill out forms somewhere, to free up somebody else who can go and do something useful and find these—”
“Jack,” Humphrey interrupted. “As we speak, our very finest are arming themselves and preparing to bring justice, in its most lethal forms, to our enemies,” Humphrey said. “By the time any branch of the armed services figures out what to do with you, the fight will be over. We should, however, think of how we can assist in the protection of our nation, in our own humble way.”
The momentary heart-to-heart over, Humphrey rose to his feet and purposely strode back toward the desk. “I ask you: What is the one form of aviation that this agency deals with all the time and enjoys virtually unparalleled expertise?”
“Caro says you fly to conferences more often than—”
“Er, no, not commercial flight. Crop dusters, Jack!” the formality returned. “Look at this!”
On September 23, 2001, at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the government grounded all the crop dusters in America—over five thousand planes that ordinarily spray pesticides on crops.
James Lester, an airplane maintenance worker in Belle Glade, Florida, identified Atta from photographs shown him by the FBI after the September 11th attack. He said he was one of a group of 12–15 “arab-looking” men who had visited the airport and asked about crop dusters, including the weekend of September 9–10, 2001.28
“And this!” Humphrey handed over a transcript of a presidential news conference:
Reporter: You talk about the general threat toward Americans. You know, the Internet is crowded with all sorts of rumor and gossip and, kind of, urban myths. And people ask, what is it they’re supposed to be on the lookout for? Other than the twenty-two most wanted terrorists, what are Americans supposed to look for and report to the police or to the FBI?
President Bush: Well, Ann, you know, if you find a person that you’ve never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn’t belong to you—report it.
“What are you thinking?” Wilkins asked when he was finished reading.
“Jack,” Humphrey said proudly, “our country needs us. It’s time to show how we can help our country. Hargis can make this happen.”
A few days later, Humphrey and Wilkins were wanded repeatedly by the U.S. Capitol Police as they headed into Rayburn House Office Building.
Hargis was aging but no less beloved by the voters in Kentucky’s Seventh Congressional District.
“I cannot believe that old coot!” Vernon Hargis fumed with a phlegmy gurgle. “Two days after the attacks—we could have lost this building!—Byrd is getting two million dollars for a new computer network at the ‘Robert C. Byrd Regional Training Institute’ at the Army National Guard’s Camp Dawson in West Virginia. Now he’s talking about turning the whole place into a National Counterterrorism Training Center!”
“Yikes,” exclaimed Wilkins. “Pretty crass to start sniffing around for pork at a time like this.”
“Crass?” grumbled Hargis. “I’m mostly pissed I didn’t think of it first!”
Humphrey cleared his throat.
“Congressman, I’d like to turn your attention to another facet of the terrorist threat that our agency may be able to contribute to …” he began as he reached into his briefcase. “You’re familiar with the discussion of terrorists spreading chemical or biological weapons through the use of crop dusters.”
“Damn if I’m not having nightmares about it!” bellowed the congressman. “You look up, see some small plane, and then POOF—some toxic crap is making your hair fall out and you break into boils. Makes a man nostalgic for the simplicity of the old-fashioned mushroom cloud.”
“Indeed, Congressman, a threat like no other. What you may not know is that perhaps no other federal agency deals with crop dusters more than ours …”
“What about the Federal Aviation—eh, yeah. I see,” the congressman said.
“They’ve got a lot on their minds right now,” Wilkins said.
“Which pesticides and chemicals could be most harmful to human health, dispersal patterns, which types of crop dusters can do what—Congressman, this is our bread and butter. Let us help our nation during this darkest of hours by converting one of our facilities in your district into … the Agency of Invasive Species’ National Center for Crop Duster Security.”
Hargis didn’t say anything for a few moments, which was not like him.
“Maybe …” he said quietly. “Byrd’s already getting grief for what he’s doing with Camp Dawson. I’m going to need paperwork—some compelling stuff to show that this is worthwhile … How serious is
this threat?”
“Florida crop dusters discussing their meetings with Mohammed Atta is insufficiently serious?” Humphrey exclaimed with a bit of indignation. “Congressman, you tell whoever needs to hear it that our familiarity with the mechanics of this activity and … the information available to us points to a serious and persistent al-Qaeda threat to American agriculture.”
Hargis’s eyes bulged. Wilkins wondered if Humphrey knew what he was implying.
“You’ve heard about something?” gasped the congressman. “Your pilots or pesticide dealers on the ground met with other terrorists or something?”
Humphrey played his hand carefully. “Congressman, at this point, I would be remiss if I ruled anything in or out. As you know, many Americans are reevaluating past interactions with slightly suspiciously behaving young Arab men.”
“Apparently the moment Mohammed Atta’s mug shot hit the airwaves, the FBI got thousands of calls from people claiming to have talked to him,” Wilkins added.
“Mundane interactions and unusual questions now take on a much more sinister light. Like everyone else, we’re trying to sort out fact from rumor. Our particular specialty, species that come in and wreak ecological havoc with crops and water supplies and such, well … it makes a chill go down one’s spine, the thought of the evil men of al-Qaeda focusing their energies in that direction. But … in light of the consequences, I don’t think we can dismiss any possibility, now can we?”
Hargis nodded. “Humph … I’ll use my utmost discretion.”
WASHINGTON—FBI and Federal Aviation Administration officials banned crop-dusting flights Sunday amid new reports that terrorists sought the use of the planes in launching a biological or chemical attack.
Lawmakers are said to be particularly concerned about intelligence reports from the Department of Agriculture’s Agency of Invasive Species, indicating that al-Qaeda may be looking beyond ordinary bioweapons and poisons to attempts to import invasive species to wreak havoc upon U.S. cropland and water supplies.