Van had been outfitted to allow me to live in it for at least a couple of days, more if I conserved resources. I wanted to be free to travel, and with the spotty availability of accessible hotel and motel rooms, I needed a bedroom (and bathroom) I could take with me. Y had designed and built it. It had all the comforts of home, if home was a space slightly smaller than a cargo container but with less charm. The decor was American rudimentary: On one side panel I had hung a print of Munch’s The Scream, and directly across from that, a poster of a kitten dressed as a ballerina. The facilities could run on batteries for a full day, which could be at least partially recharged through two solar panels on the roof, but also could be hooked up to water and waste lines at campsites.

I used one of my burners to call Hack. I couldn’t put it off any longer. “What’s happening?” I said with exaggerated bonhomie, not identifying myself. “Missed you this morning. Just checking that with everything going on, you still want to work out tomorrow morning?”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, why not? Be there or be square.”

“Great.” Then, as if an afterthought, “Oh hey, do me a favor. Don’t forget to bring those insurance papers you wanted to show me.”

After ending the call, I took the Sim card out of the phone to prevent the law from pinpointing my location. This is really weird, I thought. I’m on the run. Me, on the run. How absurd is that? Other than the techniques I’d been taught in Special Ops training, none of which had been conducted from a permanent sitting position, everything I knew about escape and evasion had come from novels and movies. An entire entertainment industry had been built around that concept. I had taken out the battery because that’s what Jason Bourne would have done to “stay off the grid.”

Stay off the grid? That’s how my go-to experts, Robert Ludlum and Lee Child, might have referred to it. I was about to find out how much they actually knew about it. As long as it didn’t include jumping out of helicopters or beating up six tattooed guys, I probably could handle it. Mostly I had to operate on common sense. “Adapt and adjust” to changing conditions, my instructors at Bragg had drilled into us, “adapt and adjust” being military speak for “make it up as you go along.” “Think out of the box,” they had told us, although more accurately in my case, it was think out of Mighty Chair. I moved to the back of Van for several hours, watching the battery-powered TV. Most of the coverage included footage of ordinary people doing ordinary things. See, these new laws aren’t a big deal. Just go ahead with your life. Your newly safer normal life.

When I was finally ready to move, I put the card back in the phone and called Jen. She was still operating at NASCAR speed. An emergency session of Congress had been scheduled for later that evening, she told me. All kinds of rumors were floating around. She was going to spend the night on a cot in the office; the Hill was sort of locked down. She did not say whether or not she had a choice. “Listen,” I told her, adopting my new default position, the assumption that the phone had ears, “there’s a problem with the air-conditioning in the apartment.” Meaning don’t go there. “I’m getting ready to park Chair for the night.” Meaning I was going to stay in Van.