ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 6
It was still dark when I exchanged the warmth of the Holiday Inn for the
damp chill of the predawn, heaved my bags into the back of the cab and
hunkered down for the 30-minute ride across the river. I had around
eight hours to sieve Lusty for evidence of a technology Cross maintained
couldn't be substantiated.
The commuter traffic was jamming the bridges, the top of the
Washington Monument scraping the overcast sky, as the taxi headed
across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge and into a part of the
nation's capital that only makes the news when the body counts from the
drive-by shootings top three or four.
By the time I reported to the guard at the main gate, the wind had got
up, lifting sheets of spray from a choppy confluence of gray wave caps
where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers meet off Greenleaf Point. The
spray snaked in rivulets this way and that in front of us as the cabdriver
navigated the maze of open streets looking for the address I'd been given.
It took him 15 precious minutes to find it.
The archive was tucked away in a forgotten corner of Boiling Air Force
Base, home of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the USAF's Office of
Special Investigations. It wasn't the sort of place you'd want to stroll or
take the view.
Boiling was a large cordoned-off military district sandwiched between
the black waters of the Potomac and the badland housing projects of
Congress Heights and Washington Highlands. It also bordered the
grounds of St. Elizabeth's—a hospital for the criminally insane, since
renamed—where John Hinckley served time for his assassination attempt
on President Reagan.
The reading room in the tiny Office of Air Force History was low-lit
and windowless. True to her word, the senior archivist had placed a cup
of coffee next to the warmed-up microfilm reader opposite the farthest
row of metal book stacks. There was a clock on the wall above the door to
her office. It was a little after seven-thirty. The air-conditioning had not
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