“Wait here,” said the guard, and then he stepped out of his kiosk and walked back toward the nearby building.

The gate in front of him was a wall of steel on wheels. Some local kids had managed to tag it, with a red stencil of an armadillo holding a spray can in one hand and a hammer in the other. A guy in fatigues was on his knees trying to rub the graffiti out with some chemical that required him to wear a respirator. He wasn’t having much luck.

Standing in front of that guy was a more serious-looking dude in the blue and orange of the Guard, waiting for Donny to give him an excuse to use the South African assault rifle he had slung to his tactical vest. Donny looked to his right, and saw the K-9 officer walking the perimeter of his car, with a dog that was too short for Donny to see. In the rearview mirror were two more guards, one with the mirror on a stick they used to search the undercarriage for bombs. Behind them was an armored truck that had been pulled up to block Donny from backing out.

Donny had his arm up on the open driver’s-side window. He looked that way, and noticed for the first time the cluster of cameras and microphones there, right about where the box would be at the drive-through of a fast-food joint.

“Hey, do you all have any breakfast tacos?” said Donny, speaking to the box.

The sixth member of the detail attending to his arrival standing there in the kiosk, who had been reading whatever it was the screen said about Donny, looked at him with something more confounded than a cop stare.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“No?” said Donny. “How about a latte.”

The guy shook his head in disgust.

The dog was right there now, sniffing Donny’s quarter-panel at the end of a short leash. It wore a black vest velcroed with morale patches of urban combat service in Nicaragua, New Orleans, and Nebraska. Its handler was a young white guy with an ugly beard made uglier by his service branch’s regulations of its personnel’s facial hair. Donny imagined the actual regulation that existed in a book each of those men had been issued, there with all the other rules ensuring conformity of their grooming and hygiene.

“What kind of dog is that?” asked Donny.

The K-9 handler just looked at him, then looked back at the dog.

“What kind of dog are you, Titus?” Donny asked the dog, whose name was also patched on its vest, in GI Joe letters.

“Don’t talk to the dog,” said the handler.

Donny could see it was one of those Doberman–pit bull mixes the Secret Service had bred back in the day for its combination of nose and attack aptitudes.