Interface. Part 50

"You're done with the campaign, then?"

"For now," he said. "I've been called back. Your dad's been perfect for the last couple of weeks, there's no point in my tagging along anymore . . . we have other patients to work on in California." Zeldo reached into his satchel and pulled out an unmarked manila envelope, half an inch thick. "I've put together some data that is relevant to your efforts," he said, "and I thought you might like a hard copy."

"Thanks," she said, taking the envelope.

She sensed that something was going on. Something in Zeldo's tone of voice, his careful and vague phrasing, reminded her of the conversation in James's bedroom on the Fourth of July.

"Well, stay in touch," she said.

He seemed inordinately pleased by this offer. "Thank you," he said. "I will. I respect your activities very much and I respect you too. I can hardly say how much," he added, looking significantly over his shoulder.

"Tell your dad I'm going to take a few liberal arts courses, as per his suggestion. Good-bye." Then he turned around, slowly and decisively, as if forcing himself to do it, and walked toward the elevators.

The envelope was full of laser printer output. Almost all of it was graphs and charts tracking various new developments in William A Cozzano's brain. There was a cover letter, as follows: Dear Mary Catherine, Burn this letter and stir up the ashes when you are finished with it. Your suite has a working fireplace that will be suitable. Let me make a few general statements first.

Politics is s.h.i.t. Power is s.h.i.t. Money is s.h.i.t. I became a scientist because I wanted to study things that weren't s.h.i.t. I got involved with the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute because I was excited to take part in a project that was at the leading edge of everything, where neurology and electronics and information theory and philosophy all came together.

Then I learned that you can't escape politics and power and money even at the leading edge. I was about to resign when you came back to Tuscola and insisted on being made the campaign physician. This did not make Salvador happy but they had no choice but to let you in.

I knew what you were up to before you even started: you were putting your father through therapies designed to create new pathways in his brain that by-pa.s.sed the biochips. I volunteered to stay on and follow you and your father on the campaign because I knew that otherwise Salvador would put someone else in my place, and he would eventually figure out your plan, and tip off the bad guys.

For the last three months I have been tracking your work, following developments in your father's brain through the biochip. I have not said anything because I didn't want to tip them off, so I will say it now: you are on the right track. Keep it up. In another four months (Inauguration Day) he should be able to function without the biochip, not perfectly, but good enough.

I have enclosed a schematic for a small device you can solder together using parts from Radio Shack. Itwill emit noise in the microwave band over small ranges (<100 ft.).="" this="" noise="" will="" cause="" your="" dad's="" biochips="" to="" put="" themselves="" in="" helen="" keller="" mode.="" you="" might="" find="" it="">

Let me know if I can be of further use. I am fond of you and I hope, perhaps fatuously, that one day if we cross paths again you will allow me to take you out to dinner or something.

Pete (Zeldo) Zeldovich Mary Catherine wandered out on to the suite's balcony. The harbor view was magnificent.

Immediately to the north she could see the skysc.r.a.pers of downtown Boston's financial district standing out against the brilliant blue sky of the New England autumn. Logan Airport was just a couple of miles away, directly across the harbor, and beyond that she could see the Atlantic stretching away so far that the curvature of the earth was almost visible.

The airport water taxi was just pulling away from the hotel wharf. Zeldo was standing in the back, his Hawaiian shirt blazing among dark business suits. He had his legs planted wide against the rolling of the small boat, and he was looking directly up at her.

She waved to him. He raised his fist over his head in a gesture of solidarity, drawing stares from the men in suits. Then he turned away.

Mary Catherine went back to the suite, burned the letter from Zeldo in the fireplace, and erased the files on her dad's computer.

The schematic for Zeldo's microwave transmitter was buried in the middle of a stack of graphs. He had hand-drawn it in ballpoint pen on a sheet of hotel stationery. It was a network of inscrutable electronic hieroglyphs: zigzags, helices, stacks of parallel lines, each one neatly labeled with Radio Shack part numbers. Mary Catherine folded it up and put it in her wallet.

52.

ELEANOR'S MOTORCADE STEAMED ACROSS THE WOODROW WILSON Bridge, and then immediately on the Maryland side, took the exit to the Inner Loop. To the left was the sewage plant, Boiling Air Force Base, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Navy Yards. To the right, wooded hills, and then the projects, and then the decay of Southeast - one of the great free fire zones in urban America. Eleanor had been for three funerals of friends and relatives who had been shot to death there, and on her way to the third one she had almost been run off the road by a careening SWAT van.

D.C. was a great, historically black city that had been colonized, in a few places, by rich whites. Lacking a traditional organized crime network, it had become the battleground of a drug war among competing groups: Jamaicans, Haitians, New York elements, and home-grown Washingtonians competing for the lucrative trade to service the insatiable demand of the Beltway professionals. The police could only wait until the "market worked itself out," as one police official put it. Once turfs and boundary lines had been established, the murder, it was thought, would stop.

Instead the violence had infected a whole new generation with the notion of the cheapness of human life, and the flow of weapons into the region that made semiautomatics available to even preteens. The doctors who worked emergency rooms in the District had become some of the world's leading experts on the treatment of gunshot wounds. During the Gulf War they had been sent straight to the front lines, where they felt right at home.

Awaiting Eleanor was the Lady Wilburdon Gunshot Wound Inst.i.tute, an ugly, brand-new, fortresslike structure built on the bulldozed foundations of the first of the War Against Poverty projects. Its architecturereflected its function, which was to treat people involved in deadly combat. The place had been made secure and bulletproof to discourage shooters from coming by to finish off their victims while they were being worked on by the doctors.

The only shooters here now were carrying cameras. Eleanor got out of her limo and followed her advance person through a wall of photographers and cameramen. She made her way, along with her Secret Service escort, to a small auditorium in the inst.i.tute. Already present on the stage were the Mayor of D.C.; the medical director of the inst.i.tute, who was a young black Gulf War veteran named Dr. Cornelius Gary; and the founder and namesake, an imposing Englishwoman named Lady Guenevere Wilburdon. An empty seat awaited Eleanor.

"Ms. Richmond," Lady Wilburdon said, extending her hand, "it's a pleasure to meet you. I look forward to your inauguration."

"Thank you so much, Lady Wilburdon, but we do have to go through the election."

"Pfft," Lady Wilburdon said, and waved her hand as if shooing flies away.

Eleanor repressed an urge to laugh. This was exactly the kind of att.i.tude that she had sported, back before she was a candidate.

They were not able to converse anymore before the ceremony began. It opened with a presentation of songs by the ma.s.sed choirs of several local churches, a lengthy, involved oratory-c.u.m-prayer by the Mayor, and the presentation of Dr. Cornelius Gary, the executive director of the inst.i.tute. Who in turn presented Lady Wilburdon, who said nothing except to introduce Eleanor, who dedicated the inst.i.tute.

"It was nice to have met you, Lady Wilburdon," Eleanor said after it was over.

"Not so fast, Ms. Richmond," Lady Wilburdon said. "We are going to have a chat."

"I would like nothing better, but my schedule- "Arrangements have been made," Lady Wilburdon said firmly.

On their way out the front doors they had to jump out of the way of an incoming gurney: the inst.i.tute's first patient, a thirteen-year-old boy who had been gunshot with a .357 Magnum.

Eleanor's advance person explained it to her in the motorcade. Eleanor's next two engagements had both been cancelled at the last minute. She had a couple of free hours. Nature abhors a vacuum and Lady Wilburdon had rushed in to plug the gap. They would be having lunch at the Willard.

It was a small lunch too - just Eleanor, Lady Wilburdon, and her secretary, Miss Chapman. Lady Wilburdon used both force of personality and sheer physical bulk to eject all of Eleanor's hangers-on from the room. Then they sat at the table together and lunched on tiny sandwiches.

"I should explain that I knew Bucky," Lady Wilburdon said.

"Bucky?"

"Salvador. The fellow who was shot by the madman across the river and exploded in front of the sushi bar. It is tasteless, I know, but I have become inured."

"I didn't know him myself," Eleanor said. "All I know is that he ran the company that does media consulting for our campaign. And that Cy Ogle has taken over from him."

"Bucky was the very embodiment of low cunning," Lady Wilburdon said. "Impressive in a superficial way.

But flashy." She said this word with the same intonation she might have used if she were calling him a child molester. "In a way it is surprising that the Network hired him. Normally we have higher standards. But we are in an age when high standards are no longer fashionable."

"Network? He worked for one of the television networks?"

Lady Wilburdon rolled her eyes. "Certainly not. Not even Bucky would do that. You need to know about this, as you will be spending the next eight years - possibly the next sixteen - in a position of great responsibility."

"We have to win the election."

"You will," Lady Wilburdon said. "We have solved the problem of elections."

It was somewhat later in the afternoon. Lady Wilburdon had dipped into a bottle of sherry and held forth at some length on the subjects of Bucky, Ogle, Cozzano, and the functioning of the PIPER 100. Eleanor listened politely, soaked it all up, and made up her mind that she would not try to figure out until later whether this woman was completely out of her mind or telling the truth.It would be easy enough to pa.s.s her off as a dingbat. But her words explained a lot. From time to time Eleanor would feel an uncomfortable shock of recognition as Lady Wilburdon's explanations matched up perfectly with what she herself had noticed. Consciously she kept an open mind. Subconsciously she had long ago decided that everything Lady Wilburdon said was true.

"If what you're saying is true," Eleanor said, "an unbelievable amount of money has been spent."

"It's all relative," Lady Wilburdon said. "It's all part of a long-range strategy."

"How long-range?"

"Centuries."

"Centuries?"

"There are only five ent.i.ties in the world with sufficient wisdom to pursue consistent strategies over periods of several centuries," Lady Wilburdon said. "These ent.i.ties are not national or governmental in nature - even the best governments are dangerously unstable and short-lived. Such an ent.i.ty is self-preserving and self- perpetuating. A world war, or the rise and fall of an empire or an alliance such as the USSR or NATO, is no more serious, to it, than a gust of wind buffeting the sails of a clipper ship."

"What are these ent.i.ties?" Eleanor said.

"In no particular order, one is the Catholic Church. One is j.a.pan - which is nothing more than a group of zaibatsus, or major industrial combines. The third is a loose network of shtetls. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, they forcibly realized the importance of long-range planning, and in the intervening years have acc.u.mulated formidable a.s.sets. The fourth one we don't know much about; it seems to connect many of the recalcitrantly traditional cultures of the Third and Fourth Worlds and to be headquartered somewhere in Central Asia. And the fifth is the Network. It is an alliance of large investors, both individual and inst.i.tutional, predominantly European and American. You might think of it as the legacy, the residue, of the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the American railway companies, Standard Oil, and the technological empires of our time. It is the most decentralized of the five ent.i.ties - really just an effort to pursue investments, and certain other activities, in a coordinated fashion. Before the war its funds were managed by a lovely Scottish gentleman who lived in an old castle near Chichester. Afterward it was moved to the interior of the States and placed in the hands of an American fellow, a mathematical prodigy who attended the Lady Wilburdon School for Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum."

"The Network owns Ogle Data Research?"

"Yes."

"And by implication, Cozzano?"

"Yes."

"So you're saying that the Network is going to take over the United States?"

"The Network wouldn't want it," Lady Wilburdon said. "Governments, as I mentioned, are dodgy. All the Network wants is to stabilize the return on its investment in the national debt."

"Wait a minute. You're saying that the Network would put together this incredible conspiracy just to get a couple of extra points on a loan?"

The idea did not seem troubling to Lady Wilburdon. She seemed a bit surprised that Eleanor didn't accept it.

"My dear lady," she said, "do you have any idea how much money your government has borrowed?"

"A lot," Eleanor said. "Ten trillion dollars." It was a figure she had to cite regularly during campaign debates.

"Well, you certainly can't expect to borrow that much money from someone without incurring certain obligations, can you?" Lady Wilburdon said, as if it were all perfectly obvious. And it was, in fact, perfectly obvious.

"Of course, not," Eleanor said, "you're right."

"When a business borrows money from a bank, and does so irresponsibly, and is profligate and incompetent, what happens?"

"It goes bankrupt. And the bank takes it over."

"Yes. The bank simply wants what is best for the business. It gets rid of the dead wood, fires the miscreants who drove the business to ruin, cleans it out, and sets everything right, so that the business is once again able to meet its obligations.""And I'm one of the people who is supposed to set everything right."

"You and Mr. Cozzano, yes. And I'm sure you'll do a splendid job of it."

"You are? Are you kidding?"

"Of course not. I've been following your career, Ms. Richmond. Everything you've been saying in the last year about the failure of American politics is correct," Lady Wilburdon said. "Without going round and talking to them personally, I daresay that most of the people in the Network consider you something of a folk hero."

Eleanor's mind was whirling, and not just because she had taken two gla.s.ses of sherry. She had to see Mary Catherine. And providentially, one of her a.s.sistants broke through and signaled it was time to go.

Eleanor had been listening with such rapt attention that she had not moved for an hour. One of her legs had gone to sleep, and the sherry also had reduced her coordination. When she stood up, it showed.

"You need to do some stretching exercises," Lady Wilburdon said. "Take it from me - I travel even more than a presidential candidate."

"I'll keep that in mind, Lady Wilburdon. Thank you for an illuminating chat."

"It was my pleasure, I a.s.sure you," Lady Wilburdon said, seeing her to the elevators. Eleanor had now been enveloped by her campaign staff.

"Good-bye," Lady Wilburdon said, as the elevator arrived, "I should enjoy paying a call on you at the Naval Observatory, if you would have me. I love telescopes."

53.

THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS ARRIVED AT DULLES AIRPORT AT ONE P.M. on the ninth of October, in a chartered Learjet with the windows painted black. He was met on the end of the runway by a black limousine that gave the terminal building a wide berth as it swung on to the Dulles Access Road. The limousine made its way into the stream of traffic, headed directly in toward the District of Columbia, trailed by a dark sedan full of men in sungla.s.ses and suits.

Within half a mile the limousine had changed lanes all the way over to the left edge of the roadway and was traveling in excess of ninety miles per hour. In the back of that limousine, an astonishingly loud, grating voice was egging on the driver, like a hot poker shoving him in the a.s.s. There were only two men in the vehicle, the driver and the pa.s.senger, they had been together for less than sixty seconds, and the driver was already fighting a nearly uncontrollable urge to pull on to the shoulder, vault the seat, and wrap his fingers around the Prince of Darkness's neck.

They were less than a mile from the airport when the limousine's brake lights flared and it suddenly veered on to the shoulder. The black sedan grumbled to an emergency stop directly behind it, spraying gravel. The high-speed traffic in the left lane of the roadway veered, screeched, and honked, nearly rear-ending this strange little caravan.

The door of the limousine had been flung open before the limo had come to a full stop. Jeremiah Freel, the Prince of Darkness, climbed out and jerked the driver's side door open before the driver even had time to set the parking brake.

"Out out out out!" he screeched in his terrible, grinding voice.

People who had run afoul of the Prince of Darkness vied for ways to describe the sound of his voice: "like a cattle prod in the armpit," one had said. Like snorting pure Mace from the can. Like putting a single crystal of Drano in the corner of each eye. Having a killer bee stuck in each ear.

"Get out, you n.i.g.g.e.r!" Jeremiah Freel screamed at the driver, which was an interesting choice of words sincethe driver was a white boy.

He was a white boy with a southern accent. A rural, uneducated southern accent. And as Freel had obviously figured out, simply by listening to this man say, "Good afternoon, sir," the single most insulting thing you could call him was n.i.g.g.e.r. So he got out of that driver's seat in a big hurry and drew himself up face-to-face with Freel, or chest-to-face, actually, since Freel was short enough to sleep comfortably on an ironing board.

"You-" the driver began, but before he could get anything else out, one of the burly suits from the trailing vehicle had come up behind him, grabbed both his elbows, and swung him away, shoving and dragging him into the median strip.

Which was fine with Jeremiah Freel. With the driver removed from his path, he made a direct line for the steering wheel of the limousine.

He was blocked by three other men who had jumped out of the dark sedan and who were now standing on tiptoe, as close to him as they could get, spreading their jackets wide open like wings to form a pinstriped curtain that blocked all view of his face from the cars screaming down the roadway. It was imperative that no one recognize the face of Jeremiah Freel, which stared out from so many wanted posters in so many post offices that it had actually been made into a poster, popular in the dorm rooms of cynical college students.

"Mr. Freel-" one of these men said, moving into position to block the door. The sentence ended there because Freel, taking advantage of the man's spreadeagled posture, reached up with both hands, gripped the tips of the man's nipples through his white linen shirt, twisted, and pulled. The man screamed, collapsed in on himself, and fell back against the side of the limousine. Instantly. Freel was sitting in the driver's seat, the doors all closed and electrically locked. The rear tires of the limousine began to spin wildly in the gravel. One of the other guys in suits lunged forward, grabbed his stunned comrade by the neckline, and jerked him away from the side of the car as it peeled out, fishtailing, on to the road, nearly causing a chain reaction smashup in the three leftmost lanes.

"s.h.i.t!" everyone was saying. Two of them ran back, jumped into the sedan, and took off, stranding the limo driver, the man who was trying to calm him down, and the man who had made the mistake of getting in Jeremiah Freel's way, who now had a pair of symmetrically placed two-inch bloodstains soaking through his white shirt.