The Senator's office appeared to Monica the same as it had 12 years ago. In the mirror built into the cabinet to her left she caught her reflection. She felt the off white mask covering her mouth gave her the appearance of a laborer. She could still smell the sawdust in the hallways of her grandmother's apartment building while the super's sons pulled asbestos from the ceiling. The door behind her clicked.

She hadn't expected to wait for the Senator alone in her Capitol office, but the intern with the braids and black glasses had ushered her in, closing the door behind her. After 15 minutes Monica had assumed the Senator's roll call had run long. After 45 minutes she understood the Senator had decided to repay Monica for arriving two hours past their meeting time. Monica knew it wouldn't matter to the Senator that the Acela train she'd ordered Monica to board had stopped service a week prior. The Senator spoke with imperative impunity. It was her way or go away. Like the office's decor, some things never changed.

"What the fuck, Treyna?"

Monica smiled behind her mask. Senator Loughlin was as petite and fire-brand as she'd remembered. Dumping the collection of folders, binders, and clipped dockets into the waiting arms of her body-boy, Loughlin walked toward Monica with open arms. Monica stepped back, and Loughlin's mouth tightened.

"Six feet, senator," Monica said.

The skin around Loughlin's cheeks softened, and the corners of her dark blue eyes curled toward her temples. Slowly she closed the distance with Monica. Raising her hands she held Monica's face. The gesture felt intimate to Monica. Until the senator snatched the ask from Monica's mouth.

"Ow!" Monica cried as the elastic bands securing the mask around her ears snapped and flicked against her lobes.

"Don't bring that ANTIFA shit into my office," the Senator said.

"The security at the entrance required it," Monica said, cupping her fingers over her lips to soothe the sting.

"The security at the entrance can lick my balls with terpentine," said Loughlin, crumpling the mask in her palm before dropping it in the waste basket beside her desk.

Monica met eyes with Loughlin's body-boy and mouthed the word "balls"? The body-boy heaved the load he carried into his left arm, against his chest, and circled his right hand around the area of his genitals. It was not the commiseration Monica sought.

Loughlin continued, "They're all dropouts from the local high schools, anyway, the security guards, here. They wouldn't know the efficacy of provalactives if it bit them on the dick."

Faced with the Senator's candor, Monica shrunk at how much she'd internalized of her former boss's demeanor. "Chocolate City Yahoo's, sure," Monica said, "but ANTIFA?" Monica smiled, raised her hands in a shrug. "They say it's for your protection as much as mine."

"You know who wears masks? Jihadis. Are you a Jihadi, Monica?"

"No, ma'am."

"I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that. Because your behavior over the past few days has really made me wonder."

Monica looked over her shoulder toward Loughlin's body-boy, but he had gone. He'd closed the door behind him. Monica felt a small amount of relief that no one had seen her chastised.

"Relax. You're not in trouble." Loughlin walked from behind her desk and reached up to touch Monica's shoulder. Monica followed her to the white, floral upholstered sofa. The senator sat in the firm, upright armchair at her left. Crossing her ankles and thumbs, she stared down her nose at Monica. Decades old the couch had little to offer in terms of support. Monica sunk deep into its cushions. Senator Loughlin, all five-foot, two of her, towered.

"I told them to give you the mask so you wouldn't be recognized," Loughlin said.

Monica didn't follow.

Not one to take easy to repeating herself, Loughlin offered a rare clarification. "Sayeed, the guard out front. I showed him your Instagram this morning and told him to make sure you covered up."

Monica nodded. "It did seem out of character for this administration."

"Fuck the administration. They got their fingers so far up Mitch and Lindsay's pussies they can't smell their fingers. You know who sets the tone around here." Loughlin pulled a ceramic bowl of pistachios from the center of the glass coffee table toward her, shaking a few into the palm of her hand.

Of course Monica knew who called the shots in the Capitol. It was the same people who called the shots before she'd left to join the Feds. It was the Trips, a nickname short for the Triple C's, the Conservative Coalition for Change. A right of center branch of the Republican party that had been born from the drive to sabotage the Tea Party. Led by Senator Montrose from Alabama and Congresswoman Hepalita from Alaska, the Trips had spent the past decade and a half using populism catch-phrases to mask a business-friendly agenda. Loughlin, herself from Georgia, had described it starkly for Monica while the then college student was in her employ. She'd said, "Sky patrol flies; ground control dies."

It'd be another five years before Monica learned that the Senator had been quoting the movie Starship Troopers, but at the time she'd heard the Senator say the words, in 2008, Loughlin's intent was clear: poor people don't know what's good for them; that's why they're poor. It was the representative's job to protect the weak from the meek. Biblically, poverty had grace. In America it had dum-dum brains. The Trip C was sky patrol. The Tea Party protestors baring arms with the aim of making the country great again were the infantry; the fodder for the canons mounted higher than Obama on his noble, white horse.

"With secrecy paramount I'm surprised you offered the Capitol to meet."

Loughlin cracked a shell between her clear-coat, french nails. She took her time to suck the salt from the nut after catching it in her mouth. Then she said, "I didn't have much of a choice, did I? Can't have a ranking member of the commerce committee stepping out to a Pret a Manger for brunch during roll call."

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"I didn't know who else to call," Monica said.

Loughlin waved her hand at Monica and swept the pistachio dust from her lap. "It's fine," she said, then added haltingly, "It was good to hear from you."

Monica blushed at the senator's show of emotion. She reached for the bowl of pistachios.

"So? Lay it on me, grasshopper. What can momma bear do for you today?"

Monica spun a pistachio between her fingers. Asking for help wasn't a skill-set she'd exercised. "My step-dad's sick in New York," she said, finally.

Loughlin nodded. She knew about Monica's real dad; it was part of the reason the Latina from a state school born in the Bronx had made the final cut for the Capitol's summer interns.

"We think it's Covid, but he won't go to the hospital. He's quarantined with my mom and sister. I'm worried if it's bad, and he waits, there won't be space for him in the hospital."

Monica had her shoulders hunched, her elbows on her knees. She looked from the peanut to the senator, whose blue eyes were empty. Monica knew the wheels were turning. She just had to wait for the play.

"Have you called your representative?" Loughlin asked.

"I came to you first. Instinct, I guess."

"Habits die hard," Loughlin offered, nodding, understanding, Monica hoped. The senator reached for another handful of nuts. "Tell me how it's going with the Osterhoff situation," she said.

Monica leaned back, sunk into the couch. "Not much to tell. Target's in the wind, but we have eyes on his accomplices and a major haul of his hardware."

Loughlin popped a nut in her mouth. "I got an email for a charge authorization at 10 PM last night. Dinner for two at the Ramada Inn?"

"We're putting the team up at a hotel."

Loughlin lifted a tissue from the decorative dispenser on a dressing table beside her. She wiped thoroughly between her fingers, paying close attention to the pistachio residue near her cuticals.

"I'm assuming I don't have to impress upon you the mountains I moved to get you this task-force," Loughlin said.

"No ma --"

Loughlin held up her finger. "Because while a joint operation between FBI, Agency, ATF, DEA, and DHS sounds all kumbaya chummy coming out of Rachel Maddows' twat, it hangs a hell of a lot of fannies out in the open."

Monica nodded. She knew she'd given Loughlin leverage when she accepted the post on condition; the condition to implement her long gestating dream for interoperational transparency at the federal level. 9/11 could have been prevented if the spooks and the cops had just communicated. Her dad and thousands of others were in boxes, or scattered to the wind, because a couple of desk jockeys wanted to play chicken. Proving her premise that less law enforcement was more effective than more law enforcement, though principally inline with her free-market politics, had turned into the larger tug of war of her adult life. When Loughlin asked her to lead on the Osterhauf inquiry, Monica took her chance to ask for what she wanted. She hadn't at the time fully appreciated the rash she'd get from putting skin in the game. Loughlin had given; Monica readied herself for Loughlin to taketh away.

"Where are you on the hard drives?" Loughlin asked.

"Osterhauf doused them on escape. We think we got a brain that can reverse engineer what he was making, though," Monica said.

"This is the Indian boy?"

"Yes, the one I messaged you about. Chodha's son."

Loughlin examined a dubious blemish on her wrist, beneath a sterling and diamond charm. "Reiser speaks highly of his text books," she said.

"Yes, they're standard reading for recruits at the higher levels of psy-ops."

"And the boy. He's promising?"

Monica tapped her two front teeth. "I'm not sure yet. I'm still playing with some of the group dynamics."

"Not sure; playing; these are not words that inspire confidence, Monica." The senator's voice had gone back to the register of genteel afternoon tea and lemonade on the veranda, the tone she used like an instrument on the Sunday morning shows when she talked about budget cuts to social security. She'd had a gift for making Chris Matthews drool more than usual.

"The potential is there. He just has to be molded," Monica said.

"Surely I don't have to unduly impress upon you that time is of the motherfucking essence."

"Of course, ma'am, but it's good to know we are the fail safe."

Loughlin cocked her head. "Meaning what?"

Monica hesitated, unsure of whether or not to express her thought more fully. The senator had made a career of luring conversants into quicksand with her rhetorical double-speak.

"I assume the hopes of the country for a cure to this coronavirus do not lie entirely on the shoulders of me and my cobbled together misfits," Monica said.

Loughlin smiled, the pink of her lipstick only slightly lighter than her gums. "You do know how to inflame my unease," she said, pushing herself up off the arm rests of her chair. As the senator turned from Monica toward the freestanding shelf mounted on the wall opposite, Monica noted the fitness of her former boss' physique. Her cream skirt fit more snuggly in the rump, her bare shoulders showed definition of a caliber Monica could only describe as Michelle Obamanian. The senator pulled a long, slender cigarette from a decorative urn and slid it through her fingers like a whip.

"I'd have hoped by now you'd understand that the inquiry into the Osterhauf empire and the quest for a vaccine are but two heads of the same coin," Loughlin said.

"Of course," Monica said. "Tyler's research had already proved promising on SARS samples from Taiwan. But the mandate from the Justice Department is only for the Oxycontin hearing. Isn't it?"

Senator Loughlin drew the cigarette under her nose. Monica remembered she'd told her that the smell of toasted tobacco took her back to her days as a law student at Duke. The happiest days of her life, she'd told Monica. Before she'd gotten married. When the name she'd uttered most wasn't Jesus but the one of the Farsi boy who looked like Al Pacino in the Godfather II.

"You have your orders, Agent Treyna. Either find Tyler Osterhauf, or find out what he knew."

Monica stood, conditioned for obedience at the utterance of her last name by a superior. She winced, however, at the torque her abdomen took pulling from the sofa so quickly. "And my father, ma'am?" she asked.

Loughlin placed the cigarette back into its hiding place, beneath the lid of the ornamental, copper urn. "There may be a delivery of ventilators arriving in New York shortly. I could place a call to weigh the possibility of securing at least one for your father and a second for either your mother or sister, should they get sick, too. Of course, that kind of choice is too stark for a young person like you to have to consider. Rest your pretty head easy knowing momma bear is gonna do her best."

The senator approached Monica and held her face in her hands again. "As the junior congresswoman from your neck of the woods would say, you do you, boo. And I'll do me, too." She pinched Monica's cheek and salved it with a smooth, tender touch. Monica got the feeling Senator Loughlin wanted to say more; she feared it may be I love you. Loughlin parted her lips and said, "Ask the intern for one of her homemade masks on the way out. They're so hideous I got to get them out of here."

The senator's boy-toy had entered the senator's inner office almost immediately after Monica had opened the door. The speed with which Loughlin jumped from backroom don to government bureaucrat had always impressed Monica. She was a creature in her element; a fly on honey; a pig in shit.