Penn Glendale couldn’t look away from his reflection. “We look like Castro,” he said. “Some Third World dictatorship. This is unacceptable. This isn’t a military junta. This is the United States Congress!”

Everyone had been issued three sets of 1990s-era BDUs, battle dress uniforms, the chocolate-chip style made famous by soldiers in the first Gulf War. The trousers had Velcro closures at the ankle to compensate for improper inseam length, and the waist closure was further adjustable by buttons along the belt line. All of it was held up by a fabric belt with a brass buckle. The button-down shirt was a tunic of sorts, with a tail that hung lower than the waistline. Even the underwear was military issue. For footwear, everyone wore the same black high-top tennis shoes with black soles.

“I swear to God, Arlen, this could not possibly be a worse image to project to the public.”

“When this is over, I think you should give someone a severe talking-to,” Strasky said.

The locker rooms were divided by sex, and once they emerged into the hallway on the far side, reentry was forbidden, and an armed sentry was posted to make sure that no one cheated.

The hallway itself was painted a bland shade of aqua that reminded Penn of the operating buildings of his Stateside military assignments. The overhead fluorescent lights were dialed up a little too bright, but the glare revealed this place to be perfectly clean—the literal definition of spotless.

“Move this way, people,” said another uniformed Solara worker, this one a woman.

“How many of these guards are there?” Penn mumbled.

The guards ushered them down the narrow hallway toward a closed pair of double doors. Overhead, pipes and electrical conduit made the ceiling seem lower than it actually was. The walls were constructed of reinforced concrete, and everything about this part of the facility was dedicated to efficiency and storage.

At the far end, the heavy steel double doors opened into what might have been—and probably once was—convention space. The wide expanse of the room was interrupted only by thick support columns every fifteen or twenty feet. Penn remembered reading somewhere in his briefing notes that the total square footage of the Annex approached 150,000 square feet. It sounded much bigger in the abstract than it felt now that he was inside. The prospect of another one thousand souls in the space triggered the beginnings of a claustrophobia attack.

“Gentlemen, this way, please,” their lady guide told them. She led the way to a long table that was manned by more uniformed people. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, each behind a sign that indicated letters of the alphabet. Some, notably I, Q and X, shared signs with the letters that preceded them in the alphabet.

“Your credentials are filed by alphabet,” the guide said. She turned and headed back to the hallway, presumably to escort the next group of arrivals.