were approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and was screamed at by a stewardess as if I was charging at the cockpit door with an axe. ‘Sit down NOW!’ she hollered, only seconds after asking me sweetly if I wanted another cup of coffee. Why, I wondered, had she offered me the drink if she didn’t now allow me to make room for it in my bladder? In theory the passengers were probably on my side. In practice none of them was showing it. Everyone looked down at their newspapers or folded hands. I sat down, chastened, like a naughty schoolboy, and crossed my legs, hoping to feel the plane descend soon.
At Washington National Airport a huge American flag is draped across the departure hall. In Europe such an exuberant display of patriotism would make the headlines. Here it is standard. Soldiers in desert fatigues and crew cuts shuffle through the airport on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan or heading home after another deployment. America is unmistakably at war. Uncle Sam feels fearful, vulnerable and pissed off. When strong countries feel weak strange things happen.
Washington’s other airport, Dulles, which receives international flights, has become a fortress. For non-US citizens the immigration line can last up to two hours. The use of mobile phones is strictly forbidden as if the tired and bedraggled passengers were about to call in air strikes. Here that famous American spirit of welcome and friendliness has taken leave of absence. Once I turned up at Dulles after a tediously delayed flight from London. The queue was of biblical proportions. My surreptitious use of the BlackBerry had caused the ‘customs arrival overseer on duty’ to have a seizure. Then I committed the ultimate faux pas. In filling out my visa form I described myself as a ‘resident’. It seemed logical to me. I was living in the US at a fixed abode. The customs officer, whose neck was wider than his face and whose face was as red as the alarm buzzer on his desk, looked at me as if I had just burned the Stars and Stripes on his desk.
‘You are not a resident!’ he decreed.
‘I beg to differ,’ I hissed back, perhaps too eagerly. ‘I reside here. I pay taxes here. I own property here and my fourth child was even born here, which makes her a full-blooded American.’
The neck reddened. Somewhere inside the folds of flesh an Adam’s apple stirred. His grey eyes, as minute as a tick in a questionnaire’s box, signalled a combination of triumph and rebuke.
‘You are a non-resident alien.’
He left it at that. In his book he had delivered the ultimate insult. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought, yearning – briefly – to return to my own planet. Since Alice, our youngest child, has an American passport on family holidays we now place her in front like a human shield, holding up her precious blue document. It breaks the ice. Sometimes. I can fully understand America’s careful attention to security. But the one thing not to point out at the airport customs desk – unless you want to get deported – is that the biggest threat in terms of the number of people actually killed is thoroughly home-grown: road rage, school shootings – there is one on average every six months – shopping-mall massacres, disgruntled employees who avenge an overlooked promotion by blasting their boss with an M16 … America makes it very easy for someone with a grudge to buy a gun.
The fortress of Dulles Airport is located in the state of Virginia where it is much easier to buy a gun at the age of eighteen than a beer. A short drive from the airport there is a gun store that proudly announces: Open 364 Days a Year. Closed ONLY on Christmas Day. It was a Bushmaster rifle legally acquired by a man with an undetected history of mental instability that caused a terror spree soon after we moved to the United States.
October should be the kindest month. The blazing heat and the humidity of summer have yielded to cooler breezes. It is the perfect time of year to arrive in Washington. The children can play outside without having to be doused in industrial quantities of mosquito repellent. The evening air is filled with barbeque smells. We were counting our blessings. No more trips to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Despite fresh and searing memories of the attack on the Pentagon, Washington, DC, seemed safe. And then something changed.
Only a few weeks after our arrival we found that playgrounds were becoming emptier, until they were completely deserted. Schools forbade their pupils to play soccer on open fields or venture out into the sunshine during breaks. It was as if everyone apart from us had been issued with silent orders to evacuate. A hidden plague was stalking the open public spaces of the capital, spiriting away children. Many schools took the added precaution of masking windows with black cloth. Classrooms were turned into dark caverns, as if their inhabitants were underage vampires who could not be exposed to natural sunlight. But this bizarre behaviour wasn’t just confined to children and schools. I remember filling up at our local petrol station on Connecticut Avenue. There were five other cars. I noticed the inordinately tall taxi driver next to me – many of them are Eritrean or Somali – crouching down while he was filling his tank and looking over his shoulder as if he was whispering furtive words of encouragement as the petrol gushed into the tank of his Lincoln. I started bending over, too. And then so did everyone else in the petrol station, bowing in deference to their vehicle. But this wasn’t reverence for the automobile taken to new heights. It was a matter of personal security. We were taking cover.
No one wanted to stand out or be exposed, especially when the enemy might be hiding in a nearby forest or among roadside bushes. Wheeling the rubbish bins onto the street in front of our house became an even more onerous ritual. Now it was conducted with brisk efficiency and a nervous glance over the shoulder. One year after 9/11 the citizens of Washington were terrified once again. But it wasn’t Osama bin Laden or rumours of an imminent Al-Qaeda attack that triggered this wave of paranoia. It was the murderous rampage of a seventeen-year-old Jamaican called Lee Boyd Malvo and his forty-two-year-old mentor/godfather, John Allen Mohammed. For three weeks the pair cruised the heavily fortified area of the Nation’s Capital picking off on average one civilian every two days. They killed ten and injured six, including a fourteen-year-old schoolboy waiting for a yellow bus. He was shot in the stomach.
They shot an elderly man mowing his lawn, two people at a petrol station, a bus driver in his seat as he opened the door to passengers and an FBI analyst who had just emerged from the Home Depot megastore with rolls of wallpaper and floor matting. They felled their victims at random, while they were engaged in the most mundane acts of daily life. This grotesque game of Russian roulette gripped the city and captured the imagination of the rest of America. What was novel about this killing spree was that it took place in the predominantly white neighbourhoods in and around the capital. Violent death in African American areas like Anacostia or Southeast Washington was so commonplace – and continued unabated during the sniper period – that it was banished to the inside pages of the Washington Post Metro section. Unless the crime was particularly horrific, no TV crew would be sent to cover the event. But the Washington snipers terrorized the usually placid suburbs of the capital at a time when the city had been turned into a veritable fortress. They made a mockery of the whole notion of homeland security.
The only things that can enter Washington airspace without strict permission from the Department of Transport or the Pentagon are pigeons and bald eagles. A day before Ronald Reagan’s funeral in June 2004 the executive jet belonging to the Republican governor of Kentucky caused widespread panic on the ceremonial Mall and triggered the evacuation of the Capitol because the pilot had failed to log his plane’s arrival. Antiaircraft Patriot missile batteries stand alert on a hill behind the domed Capitol and a phalanx of CCTV cameras supposedly records every suspicious movement. Police cars sit on just about every street corner ready to pounce on unruly drivers, as I have discovered repeatedly to my own cost. And yet for three weeks this overwhelming uniformed presence did nothing to make us feel safe. The Washington snipers had opted for something so simple and crude that the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t thought of it.
They had converted an ordinary blue Chevrolet into a killing machine. The back seat had been ripped out to allow the shooter to shuffle into the boot on his stomach. Here an orange-size hole had been made just above the number plate to allow the muzzle of a Bushmaster rifle to be poked through. From this position the young Malvo – he pulled the trigger in most of the killings – was able to kill Linda Franklin with a single shot to the head as she wheeled her shopping trolley into the covered car park at the Home Depot in Fairfax on a busy Monday night.