An instant after the speech ended, Lucille’s exploded in a cacophony of rings—a postmodern symphony, a clinging, clanging cry for immediate attention. Everybody sprang into action. It had occurred to me once that if babies learned to ring rather than cry, they would be a lot more successful at getting attention.

Lucille did not suffer people talking on cell phones in her place (in fact, in a pique she had been known to drown a ringing iPhone in a wineglass), but this time she didn’t say a word. This was our siren call: We were a roomful of newspeople watching news taking place that in some way was going to involve all of us.

I told Cher to call the office. Jenny and I had agreed we would never respond to a call while in a public place unless it clearly was an emergency. This qualified. Around the room people were settling their bills, giving Lucille a quick peck on her cheek as they raced back to work.

“I got this,” I told Jen, handing over my credit card. She believed paying her own bills maintained her independence. Who was I to dissuade her of that notion?

She was as wound up about the speech as I was. “What do you think this means?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Maybe everything? How about Martha? She’s not going to go for something like this, is she?”

Jenny frowned. “I don’t know. Wrightman did a great job scaring people. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on Congress to give him what he wants. I don’t know who’s strong enough to face those winds.”

The waiter, John, returned with the credit slip. As I signed it, I asked her, “What do you think you’d do?”

Jenny had the politician’s gift of physical prevarication; whatever was going on in her mind, her body language didn’t give it away. When fully dressed, I mean. “Depends,” she said finally. “There’s a political calculation, obviously.” The left side of her mouth frowned, while the other side stayed level; it was a neat trick, a perfect way of expressing her indecision. “Lincoln and FDR had that power and they did okay with it. Maybe. I mean, I guess it depends how he uses it.”

“That’s a pretty long leash to give a guy like this, don’t you think? Doesn’t it bother you at all that he’s using the cyjacking to consolidate his power?”

“Of course it does,” she said sharply. No equivocation there. But then came her thought check. “Sometimes it’s necessary.” She stood over me, not ready to leave the question alone. “We’ve never faced an enemy like this. You … you as much as anybody knows that. I had a pre-law professor who loved to quote the Greeks to show us how smart he was; one of them was Hippocrates…”

I backed Mighty Chair away from the table and spun neatly around. “The medical oath guy.”

“The oath guy,” she agreed. “But he also said that for extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure are the most suitable.”