March  22, 2025

From confidential Washington sources, the following excerpt is drawn from an account of the aftermath of the March 17 seizure and closing of the U. S. Institute of Peace, by armed agents of the DOGE administration. The account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Brief Encounter at 2301

Mid-March, 2025, on the edge of the National Mall, not far from the Vietnam War Memorials.

It was almost break time, the leftover dinner pizza was hours cold, and Hennigan thought he heard something.

Standing up from the desk chair, he closed the Security Inc. employee handbook, which was making him drowsy anyway, and peered across the open atrium: first left, then right, following the protocol.

Everything seemed in order: several tiers of closed offices rose or each side. Lights were dim. Nothing moving.

Next a glance at his phone: 23:01, in large numbers. A minute after eleven PM.

23:01 at 2301 Constitution Avenue. D-effing-C. Six hours to go.

He spoke to the phone screen. “I’m stepping out, Chief,” he said.

“Right,” Garfield answered, from somewhere upstairs, back where computers were.

Hennigan walked across the broad floor toward the stairwell.

Maybe the noise, if he really heard one, came from the ground floor. If not, the back door was close, opening on the executive parking lot, also empty, but safe for having a smoke.

Waving his ID at the reader, he was turning the door handle when the red of a large tail light half-lit up the high-ceilinged atrium behind him.

Who the hell was that at this hour? Under this locked-down status?

He turned and strode toward the big main entrance. Through the atrium’s reinforced glass he saw a car merging onto Constitution Ave., heading east toward the Washington Monument.

Dark, navy blue or black. Big. It slid behind the spotlighted yard sign that still said, “U. S. Institute of Peace, Parking,” with an arrow pointing right.

Was that an old bicycle he noticed leaning against it?

Not sure. The Foggy Bottom night was thick with mist drifting off the Potomac. A bike? An official car? A limo? Couldn’t tell.

Had the car even really stopped here?

Hennigan still wanted a smoke.

He shook it off. But halfway back to the stairwell, the number 3 blinked bright amber above the big elevator door.

Christ, someone was inside.

The DOGEniks had warned them: these peaceniks were tricky and dangerous. Half were communists, the rest DEI.

The day team had supposedly completely searched and cleared the building Monday.

Maybe they  missed a lock when changing them after wrestling the USIP staff out the front. Maybe somebody spent a long day hiding in a toilet stall. What for?

At the stairwell Hennigan went up instead of down. His shoes were silent on the steps, but his breathing was getting heavier by the first landing.

Exercise, yada yada.

He reached around and fondled the compact Glock 9, but didn’t pop the holster strap.

The third floor had a central lounge with a view of the river. As the elevator door slid noiselessly open, Hennigan thought he heard a low murmur of voices, and glimpsed a faint flicker from toward the lounge.

He flattened against the hallway wall, easing the Glock into his right hand, pointed down. There were voices.

He did own a heavy kevlar vest; it was safe at home.

There were big couches in the lounge, and a few low tables. Beyond these, against a far wall, he saw stacks of parcels, all with diagonal red and white stripes faintly visible: burn bags, stuffed with documents from nearby offices.

There were similar stacks rising on each floor. Come morning they would be piled on dollies and loaded into trucks, bound for a high-temp incinerator that left nothing but dusty ash behind. Computer hard drives had their own doom machine, a super-pulverizer.

Closer, one couch was within a few feet of the hallway entrance. Hennigan inched inside, and did a slow, painful deep knee-bend until he was on the floor behind the couch. Crawling to the far end, deep in its shadow, he slowly pushed his torso up until he could just see over the arm.

Two people, a man and a woman, old but seemingly ageless, sat at one of the tables. Their chairs and faces were half-slanted away from Hennigan.
Their eyes were on the candle, its flickers moving across their faces, and each other.

“You’re Denton?” The woman murmured.

The man stiffened. “Senator Denton. Jeremiah.” The tone was hostile.

“Yes,” she said. “Also a Navy Pilot. An admiral. Vietnam prisoner of war.”

“And you’re Boulding,” he said.

“Elise,” she said.g

Denton snorted. “A communist.”

“Not really,” she demurred. “More a social democrat.”

“Same thing,” he said

“Oh, not so. I was born in Norway. It’s capitalist, but with a bigger safety net. We lived close to Russia, and knew communism well from up-close.”

“I bet y’all liked it,” he grunted.

“No chance. My family left for America when I was three.” She raised a hand, as if brushing something aside.

“A smart move.”

“Yes. We were well-settled in New Jersey when the Nazis invaded and occupied Norway. I was twenty, and the war made me a pacifist and a Quaker.”

She gave him a serious look. “I respect those who served. But my conscience took me a different way.”

He snorted again, shaking his head. “A Quaker? If it was left up to your kind, we’d all be speaking German now.”

“I don’t think so.” Her white hair was pulled back into a low bun. She smoothed a stray lock with her right hand. “We’re all lucky not to have been turned into mute radioactive dust years ago.”

“Could still happen,” he said.

Her brows furrowed. She changed tack. “Why did you come here tonight?The gloating was better, louder in the daytime. And they had pizza.”

He looked past her, toward the big, mist-obscured windows. “I miss pizza,” he admitted. Then, “why did YOU come? Still trying to find out,
‘where have all the flowers gone?’”

She was rueful. “I did come to grieve a bit,” she said. “And I do know where all the flowers went. To help them come back, I worked to make this place possible for — I can’t recall exactly now — 25 years. Thirty?”

She folded her hands in her lap. “At least that long. And you were

there at the hearings, trying to strangle it in the crib. That was 40-plus years ago. But we made it.”

She cocked her head a bit. “Once it got going, I thought you let it go, and took up your other crusade for a big teenage chastity bill.”

He sniffed. “Excuse me, that was the Adolescent Family Life Act. And it got passed too, thank you very much. President Reagan gave me the signing pen.”

She raised a skeptical brow. “Well, it seems to be working, Senator.” Was that a half-mocking smile? “Teen pregnancies are down. So does that mean chastity must be up?”

He caught the sardonic undertone. “Not with as much porn and abortion as we have, ma’am.”

He took a slow, airless breath. “But yeah, I asked to take a ride down here to see that this place was really being taken down and — what’s that woke word y’all always use? ‘Dismantled.’”

He pointed with a thin, knobby-knuckled hand, toward the stacked burn bags. “Some extra large pyro cages will be kept burning right hot for days getting rid of all this.”

She followed his finger. It was shaking slightly.

“Its’s awful, for sure,” she said. “But it won’t be that easy to get rid of. The Institute published many books and scads of papers, even a few of mine. Recorded and copied lots of conversations and panels. They’ll find copies in many libraries, colleges and offices that are well out of your reach.”

She gazed at the big windows, then at the stacked striped bags. She sighed. “They’ll have a heckuva job, tho,” she said.

“Who?”

“The ones putting the surviving pieces of all this back together. And they will,” she waved a finger like a maestro’s baton. “But they won’t be starting from scratch.”

Denton listened, a pensive expression shadowing his brow. He focused on the candle, and its small quivering flame. Boulding, the old Quaker, settled into the silence more comfortably.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said at length, “I did come to gloat. And it is mostly quite satisfactory to see this place going away . . . .”

Then he trailed off.

Boulding regarded him for a long moment. Then she said only, as a question, “But — ?”

Denton glanced back, as if caught in an unforced admission.
“Yeah, but . . . .”

She waited another long silent moment. Then,”’But — let me guess,” she ventured: “you get down here, and coming out of the fog you find out that Russia, which Reagan had brought to its knees for you, is back. And . . . .”

More silence. Finally, Denton spoke tensely as if he needed to be pushed, repeating “And . . .?” Leaving the phrase a blank to be filled in.

She filled it. “Let me guess,” she said, “and you arrive only to find that the Big Guy behind all this demolition has changed sides.”

She nodded firmly. “Yes. You find that Russia is back and bad as ever, but the Big Toupeé is with them — not with us, not you and your Vietnam brothers, he’s with the ones you were attacking when your plane went down in Vietnam. Your new Cyrus, your savior, all at once looks more and more like a Judas—“

“— I didn’t say that,” he protested. But the Quaker was relentless:

“—Okay, I said it. But he’s sold you out (and all your surviving fans, and me too, plus all our great grandchildren), only this time for thirty pieces of — what? Bitcoin, I reckon.”

Denton was looking at the floor, both hands in the air, as if to ward off blows. His hands shook a little.

“How did this,” he started, “how did this happen?”

“How?” She snapped. “Don’t you know? I’m the soft-headed Liberal Quaker here. You’re the hardcore Catholic. The pope’s got all the answers you need: sin. The original. And the Seven deadly ones. I don’t think he’s missed any of them.”

She stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “kind of blew my cool there. In Quaker talk, we say I outran my Guide. You’re not the enemy here. Or me. We’re both just watching from the cheap seats now.”

It seemed as if Denton was sighing heavily. “But, what, what can — ?” he began—

There was a clang from behind. Hennigan turned and saw the amber elevator light was on; the car was coming.

Behind him now, the candle abruptly went out. The room was nearly black, except for a couple of distant refracted street lights struggling against the fog.

The elevator door rolled open. Garfield was a black silhouette against the brightness inside it.

“Hennigan,” he said.

“Yessir,” Hennigan replied, in his sharpest veteran sergeant voice.

“What the hell is going on?” Garfield said. “All that racket?”

“Sir, uh, I thought I heard something sir. But there’s nobody here.” He gestured behind him, at the now empty lounge table. “So I — I took my break here, and checked a couple voicemails.”

(Why did I lie? He wondered. Because otherwise he’ll think I’m nuts or drunk, he silently answered.)

Garfield was unruffled. “Okay, I’m going back up to the 5th floor. You take the stairs and check the other floors on the way.”

“Yessir!” Hennigan headed toward the stairwell.

At the main floor, he crossed the big atrium, to the desk which was his home base here. Breaktime was over, no chance to smoke now. But a slice or two of cold pizza might help.

As he opened the grease-stained flat box, he glanced past it out the big window.

The Institute parking sign was still there. But the old bicycle was gone.

NOTE: Elise Boulding (1920-2010)

A longtime active Quaker, Elise was also a cofounder of peace research, and a key activist in the grassroots campaign pressing Congress to create a U. S. Peace Academy. Jimmy Carter appointed her to the federal Commission which prepared a report recommending it, and she also served on its initial Board, renamed an institute, and supported it as long as her health permitted.

Jeremiah Denton (1924-2014),

A native Alabamian, served as a Navy pilot in Vietnam. After his plane crashed, he was a POW subjected to torture and other mistreatment, for eight years. After his release, he was elected to the U. S. Senate from Alabama in 1980. There he strongly opposed the Peace Academy bill, calling it a signal of weakness in the mortal struggle against Russian communism. Then he  focused on passage of the Adolescent Family Life Act, enacted in 1981, which made big grants for abstinence education programs, especially through Catholic organizations. Defeated for re-election in 1986, Denton continued his personal campaigns against teen promiscuity and a militant U.S. military posture.

USIP signs  in and around the building have now been removed, and the website is blocked.

One more note: this story is fiction. At least part of it is. USIP’s fate is real. The surrounding chaos is real. The two visitors were real people, with views and commitments like those evoked here.

And the unanswered questions here remain — unanswered. And even if you don’t believe in ghosts, my sense is that we’re going to be haunted by all this for a long time.