After slightly less than five minutes an illustration of a nuclear weapon detonating into a mushroom cloud appeared and the video ended. As promised, all traces of it disappeared. I was now officially a member of the active resistance. I wondered if they had a health plan.

As I continued watching the gym entrance from a safe distance, about half the Light Brigade showed up. Hack was one of the last to arrive; he paused at the entrance and looked around, then, satisfied, went inside. Handicapped people have our own way of thinking: before taking an action, we run through the entire chain of steps in case there is a step we can’t manage or bypass. Adapting that to life on the run was relatively simple. Getting into the gym was easy. The problem was getting out. If it became necessary, was there an escape route?

There had to be a rear exit. D.C. fire regulations would have mandated it. I circled around to the rear of the building. Back entrances and overlooked doors had taken on a new importance for me. The rear door to the gym was a faded blue steel, the color of well-used tools. Someone had scratched a heart into the door, apparently DJF loved LMF. And a good time might be had by calling Violet, at the given number. An overlapping metal flap prevented anyone from jiggering the lock. (Not that I knew how to do that anyway; in the military, when a lock got in our way we blew the shit out of it. While not neat or secret, it definitely was effective.) I knocked on the door several times until I heard someone pressing down the interior bar. The door was pushed open by a chubby man wearing basketball shorts and a white T-shirt. A towel was wrapped around his neck. “Hey, Rol,” he said, holding open the door and stepping back against it to let me in.

Chair did a little wheelie over a two-inch-high sill. “They’re doing some work out front. They told me to come around.”

“Need some help?”

“Nah, thanks.”

The door opened into the corridor between the men’s and ladies’ locker rooms. I found Hack sitting on the narrow bench in front of his locker, changing into his workout clothes. When he saw me, his shoulders sagged and there was genuine relief in his smile. “You okay?”

“So far. But there’s going to be a lot fewer people at my birthday party this year. Whatta you got?”

He reached into his locker and took the manila envelope off the top shelf. “If you told me what this is all about, you’d have to kill me, right?”

I shook my head. “Not me. I’m sorry to be a jerk about this, Hack, but believe me, if you knew any more about this, you’d wish you didn’t.”

“Okay.” He heard the gravity in my voice. He held up the envelope. “Whoever did this is pretty clever. You know, lots of times when I’m watching a basketball game, I’ll turn off the sound and put on some classical music. It’s pretty amazing; more often than you’d think, it looks like the players are choreographed. They’re completely in concert with the music. It shouldn’t work, but it does.