“To your new home for a while, sir,” Bugsy replied. Every line these guys spoke felt rehearsed and was delivered with a humorless smile. “Just follow me.” As he stepped across the raised threshold, he ducked his head to clear the top of the opening, and at the same time pressed a finger against the curly-corded piece in his ear. He waved Penn and Strasky in behind him, and then pressed a button on his ballistic vest. “Decon copies,” he said.

“Something wrong?” Penn asked.

Bugsy smiled. “Oh, no, sir. It’s just that this is really happening. A bunch of your comrades are on their way in. It’s about to get real crazy, real soon.”

“Are we the first to arrive?” Strasky asked.

“No, sir, but you’re in the first ten. You won’t be lonely for long.” Bugsy settled his shoulders and sort of winced as he said, “This is the awkward part.” He opened a heavy steel bin with a door not unlike that on a blue public mailbox, but many times thicker. “I need you to put everything in here.”

Penn took a step back. “What is that?”

“It’s an incinerator, sir. Or it will be when we fire it up. Nothing from the outside is allowed in, now that the Annex has been sealed. We have to prevent contamination.”

“Contamination from what?”

Bugsy’s demeanor changed ever so slightly, and he stood even taller. Penn thought of it as puffing up for a fight. “Sir, in the next hour or so, I have to process five hundred thirty-five members of Congress and a like number of staffers through decon. Since you’re among the first, I can tell you that you’re about to enter a sterile environment, but as we get busy, I’m going to need people to simply do what they’re told. I’ll leave it to you to explain the rationale to them on the other side. If it helps, me and my people will have to do the same thing before we button everything up.”

“I’m sorry, Bugsy, but I just don’t—”

“It’s not complicated, Mr. Speaker. Everything goes into the bin. Everything. Jewelry, clothes, eyeglasses, everything. We have duplicates of all prescriptions on the other side of decon.”

“You mean naked?” Strasky seemed more horrified by that than he did by the prospect of going to war.

“As the day you were born, sir. That happens here in this room and the female facility next door, with everything getting incinerated. You were told to leave valuables at home, were you not?”

“I was told very little of anything,” Strasky said.