Excerpt from the Manuscript of Pablo’s Scythe: Berneria from 1955–1999

… was relayed via payphone from a street corner not two blocks from the burning American embassy, to the newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Juan Alexander, who took it to Pablo.

Or, rather, who intended to take it to Pablo. But the President could not be found. A former servant would later recall Juan Alexander and Heriberto Bigotes (the Mayor of Tireiez, who’d helicoptered down earlier that day), along with a gaggle of secretaries, undersecretaries, and estate staff running up and down the halls of the Presidential Palace’s government offices and apartments, shouting the premier’s name and “bugging out their eyes and panting and trying to look as desperate as possible so that no one would be able to say, later, that they had not been looking their hardest.” ¹

Finally, a guardsman eating an early dinner in the staff quarters told them where Pablo had gone: he was in the woods back of the mansion, playing frisbee golf.

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1    Aguilar, Melissa. El asiento en el olimpo. 1st ed., Pinzón, 1991. p. 298