(Willow in July. Photo Socotra.)
We could not get any further than Clarendon on the Metro. The train had seemed like the right way to get out of town, where we had business in the Chinatown district adjacent to the old Convention Center and the Bus Station, where I worked in the towering structure that had been thrown up on New York Avenue above the classic Art Deco façade of the old terminal.
A cab would have been hung up in the rush hour traffic, and the moisture made the air shimmer as we made our way on the blazing streets toward the Metro Center subway. The parking lot that had been the Old Convention center next to the bus station is now a deep pit, I was interested to see, and the excavations had got down to about four stories below street level.
“Apparently the Qataris are backing the project. It is supposed to have a high-end hotel, a thousand apartments and a bunch of other crap. There is going to be a central plaza with a half-acre of open space, and will create a destination right here on New York Ave, not far from the New Convention Center. I swear, it used to be worth your life to come down here.” I shook my head. “Amazing. Now it is going to be a destination.”
I gestured toward the Hyatt, whose soaring atrium would provide coolness against the heat. We walked in through the revolving doors and past the delegates to the Export Control Conference with their convention badges, and looked at the blue waters in the vast fountains that cover the lower level of the hotel and radiate cool calm at the base of the escalators.
The office complex adjacent can be reached through a grand portal off the hotel atrium, and has another escalator that accesses the tracks at Metro Center far below.
Down there, I thought, the air would be cooler, and at rush hour the trains come with a frequency that mimics a real public transportation system. We got past McPherson and Farragut Squares, and Foggy Bottom and Rossyln and Courthouse, but that is where our luck ran out.
At Clarendon the train glided to a stop, hitched briefly, and then sat with the doors open.
The conductor made periodic announcements, which were garbled the way CIA Director William Casey used do when he would testify to Congress and didn’t want them to understand he was invading Nicaragua or El Salvador, I forget which.
We waited long enough on the train that we could have walked up past Virginia Square and right to Ballston where we intended to have some crisp happy hour white to beat down the effects of the heat. “It is important to stay hydrated,” I said as we marched up the sun-drenched street.
I pointed at a distinctive pyramidal building across the street from a Chinese restaurant that people used to claim belonged to the People’s Liberation Army. The Agency I used to work for rented that building over there,” I said gesturing. “They had to justify the money for new construction since you can see how crappy security is here, with the Metro almost running underneath it. That is when the hemorrhage of money after 9/11 began to scare the government.”
We walked along in silence, sweating, and made it past Virginia Square and the Ballston station in good order.
In the cool darkness of Willow, Old Jim was chatting with the Lovely Bea, Jon-with-no-H and Jake was conducting business up the bar. I asked Big Jim the bartended for a glass of water to go along with the crisp happy hour white, and talk turned, eventually, once we had smeared every other issue, toward the construction that is still booming in town.
“Doesn’t seem to matter if the government is going to shut down. The beast just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”
Jake finished his beer, gestured for the check and wandered down to press the flesh. I asked hi about the building we had both regardless of the Government of the completion…There was this guy named Dubois- he was the successor to D.O.C. Cook, the old Mayor of the Pentagon who had been there forever.”
“Yeah, I knew him before they named the DOC Cook Remote Delivery Facility for him.”
“Appropriate to name a loading dock for him.”
“Anyway,” said Jake, “we had to go to Dubois and explain why we needed to clear out the building in Clarendon. We were going to justify it on Force Protection issues….”
“Yeah, of course, the garage is open to the street and you could drive a VB-IED there and do a number on the structure….”
“Well, Jim Manzelmann was Director of the Naval Reserve Intelligence Program at the time and in private life he was the architect of the DIAC Expansion.”
“I remember we couldn’t call it that for a while- it sounded like the Agency was Expanding, which was considered bad on the Hill…we had to call it “DIAC Completion,” like it was something we planned all along.”
“Well, we knew what it was. But because Jim got tipped off, we went in saying that it was about increased survivability. The pond in front…“
“You mean Lake Manzelmann?”
“Better than Lake Jake! Yeah, we said it was to give us additional cooling capability, and that being on the Air Force Base gave us better cross-connectivity- the Uninterrupted Power Source of the new building would enable us to continue the mission regardless of what happened. It was about survivability.”
“Everyone else was saying that it was a force protection issue and we had to disperse into scattered facilities.”
Jake nodded. “We went the other way and said we were consolidating, and that is what did it. We were one of the few buildings that got approved.”
I shook my head. “It pays to have agents on the Hill, doesn’t it? I sort of wish the taxpayers had some up there, too.”
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com