Interface. Part 54

"He's doing great," Mary Catherine said, "this is all boy adventure stuff. Just the kind of thing he likes."

Mel, Rufus, and Craig ("the Crag") all looked slightly embarra.s.sed."Okay," Mel said, "now listen carefully, because I'm freezing my a.s.s off, and because this is important.

These two guys Rufus and Crag can provide the bodies we need. With a little help from some of Eleanor's friends and supporters in D.C., we can even make it legal. And I can provide the paperwork. Mary Catherine?"

"I've got the black box ready. And I've got some information for you. The secretaries-designate of Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and State, and the Speaker of the House, have all spent time at the Radhakrishnan Inst.i.tute in the last few months."

Mel shook his head. "Tragic," he said. "A tragic epidemic of strokes. Anyone else?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, that will be useful knowledge," Mel said. "Now, Mary Catherine, there's only one thing we need from you."

"My father," Mary Catherine said.

"Right. Can you give me w.i.l.l.y?"

"I have a plan, Mel," she said. "I have a scam."

That night after supper, Cozzano called Mary Catherine in for another game of Scrabble. She'd had two or three gla.s.ses of Chianti, she was in a good mood, and she spoke without restraint. "Dad, it's the most boring game ever invented."

"If only you would play it right," he groused, "and not cheat."

They went into the study and sat down at the desk in front of the works of Mark Twain.

Mary Catherine always started the same way: she reached into the heap of tiles and spelled out ARE YOU STILL THERE. They had a fancy Scrabble board mounted on a turntable and so when she was done, she spun it around so he could read it.

Cozzano frowned. "Stop playing around," he said. "You know the rules." Both of his hands were active. It was a bizarre sight: with his left hand he was breaking up the sequence that she had spelled out, rearranging the letters, plucking more of them out of the overturned box top. With his right hand, he was picking seven tiles at random and placing them neatly on his little rack. He continued to speak at the same time. He seemed genuinely annoyed and appeared not to notice what his own left hand was doing. "You have to pick seven tiles. And you can only spell one word at once.

Why do I have to explain this to you every time? Are you teasing me, girl?"

Mary Catherine was accustomed to strange neurological tics because of her work, and she had grown accustomed to her father's peculiarities over the months that she had been putting him through daily therapy. She had to remind herself just how bizarre this would look to anyone else.

Cozzano's left hand spun the board so that Mary Catherine could read the words DID YOU SEE MEL.

She looked into his eyes. He was frowning, staring down at the Scrabble board, befuddled. "How did those letters get there?" he asked.

Mary Catherine messed them up with her hand before his eyes could read them. Then she combed some more tiles out of the heap and spelled out the word YES.

He got the same look on his face as when she had come home from school with Bs on her report card.

"Is that the best you could do? A three-letter word?"

"Sorry," she said. "I got bad letters."

"Thanks for giving me that big fat Y," he said. "That's four easy points for me. You need to think harder about strategy." As he was talking, both hands were again active on the Scrabble board. His right hand was turning her Y into the world YTTRIUM. His left hand was spelling out HOW IS HE on the bottom left corner of the board.

Mary Catherine spun the board around. Again, Cozzano's eyes picked out the letters that had been laid down by his left hand. "How did those letters get on there?" he said. "For G.o.d's sake, peanut, we need to make sure the board is clear before we start. Get rid of those."

She had already read them, so she swept them away. Then she used the I in YTTRIUM to spell out the world PLANNING. In order to do it, she had to rummage through the box top for some more letters.Cozzano frowned and grumbled about this cheating.

The conversation went back and forth like that for several more rounds, the Scrabble board spinning round and around.

Cozzano: FOR WHAT.

Mary Catherine: INAUGDAY "I defy you to find that word in any dictionary," Cozzano said.

DuLafayette Webster, Heisman trophy winner for the Elton State Comanches, scored three touchdowns singlehandedly in the first half of the Fujitsu Guacamole Bowl on Christmas Night. As soon as the first half clock ticked down to zero, the broadcast cut away to the cheerful theme music of the Cozzano Family Christmas Special.

A live shot from a hovering chopper zoomed down on the twinkling Christmas lights of Tuscola, which had begun billing itself as "America's hometown." The Christmas decorations had been heavily enhanced by the largesse of Ogle, and coordinated by his designers. The camera panned across church steeples, small businesses, and the city park, all decked with boughs of electric holly, and then settled on the now-familiar Cozzano residence. A street level camera peered through the large front window to view the roaring fire and the happy, smiling group gathered around the eggnog. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From Tuscola, Illinois, America's hometown, we bring you an address by the President-elect, William Anthony Cozzano. Governor Cozzano."

Cut to a shot of Cozzano, James, and Mary Catherine sitting together on the sofa. Zoom into a talking- head shot of Cozzano alone.

The President-elect made a heartfelt statement of thanks to the American people, expressed his happiness with his daughter's career plans and his son's excellent book, and incidentally, announced his cabinet nominees.

Then he stood up and introduced them personally. The cabinet-to-be were all gathered around the huge dining room table, dressed in cozy sweaters, drinking cider. They interrupted the convivial routine for a moment as Cozzano introduced them, one by one, to the American people. They were good-looking, confident, bipartisan, and multicultural.

Finally Cozzano returned to his seat by the fire to address a few last words of greeting and holiday cheer to the American people. Cozzano had developed a sense of timing that was positively eerie. He brought his little speech to a close just in time to cut back to the Scoreboard clock at the bowl game.

On the eighteenth of January, the Cozzanos climbed on to a chartered plane and flew to Washington, D.C. Journalists from around the world were converging there at the same time. So were members of the incoming administration and transition team, all of Cy Ogle's top people, several big G.o.dS trucks full of electronics, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and an irregular caravan of buses, cars, and airplanes carrying old teammates and Marine comrades-in-arms of William A. Cozzano.

58.

AT EIGHT O'CLOCK ON THE MORNING OF INAUGURATION DAY, A cl.u.s.ter of Secret Service agents burst from the elevators and into the lobby of the Georgetown Four Seasons Hotel, striding calmly but implacably across hardwood floors, green oriental carpets, and weathered brick. At the same time, a motorcade of three dark cars was spiraling out of a parking garage down the street. The motorcade pulled into the brickdriveway at the front entrance just as the cl.u.s.ter of agents, and the dignitaries hidden among them, was bursting through the bra.s.s front doors. Within a few seconds, the cars and the people were gone, trailed by a few journalists who had been quick enough to notice that the President-elect was on the move.

At the same time, William A. Cozzano himself was emerging quietly from an elevator tucked into a dimly lit corridor near the restaurant on the next floor down. He was accompanied by his son and daughter and two Secret Service agents. The Cozzanos were dressed in running clothes. They padded down a gray- carpeted stairway and exited on to a brick patio behind the hotel, two stories below street level, which led directly on to a herringbone-brick jogging path. Beyond the path was the C&O Ca.n.a.l, a narrow trench of stagnant water lined with ma.s.sive, moss-covered masonry blocks.

The President-elect wanted to go for a d.a.m.n jog with his family. Was it too much to ask? It would be his last opportunity to do so as a private citizen. He wanted to do it in Rock Creek Park, which was where he normally jogged when he was in D.C., but the Secret Service didn't like that idea. They had gotten positively jumpy about Floyd Wayne Vishniak, who was still at large. During his escapade at Ogle Data Research, Vishniak had displayed cunning and well-developed marksmanship skills. He was still firing off demented manifestoes to various newspapers and magazines. Everyone knew that Cozzano liked to jog in Rock Creek Park, and with its dense vegetation and myriad ways in and out, it would be like the happy hunting grounds for Vishniak.

Cozzano was a demanding sort. He didn't merely want to go jogging in an incredibly dangerous place: he was insisting on privacy too. He wanted to stage a diversion and send the journalists on a wild goose chase so that he could just run with his son and daughter.

The Secret Service agreed to a compromise. If Cozzano would go running in Arlington - in an area that was not quite so Floyd-friendly - then the Secret Service would stage the diversion for him. So far it was working perfectly.

Fifty feet away, the ca.n.a.l pa.s.sed underneath the Rock Creek Parkway and joined up with Rock Creek itself.

Three more Secret Service cars were idling on the side of the Parkway, wheels up on the curb, waiting for them with doors open. This little motorcade would spirit them away to Arlington, where they could go jogging on the flawlessly groomed parade grounds of Fort Myer, next to the National Cemetery, under the protection of military police and Secret Service.

Cozzano had been talking football with the Secret Service men all the way down the stairs. As they crossed the brick patio, Mary Catherine drew close to her brother and said, "James, this is important. Remember when we were kids? Remember Follow the Leader?"

"Sure," James said sunnily, mistaking this for idle nostalgia.

"We're about to play the world's most important game of Follow the Leader. Don't screw it up," Mary Catherine said.

"Huh?"

They were stepping on to the jogging path. Mary Catherine reached into the open top of her belt pack and flipped the toggle switch on the end of her black plastic Radio Shack contraption.

William A. Cozzano stopped dead for a moment and shouted, "Hey!"

He was staring off into the distance, focusing on something that wasn't there.

"Dad?" James said. "Are you okay?"

Cozzano shook his head and snapped out if it. He looked at James and Mary Catherine for a moment, thinking about something. Then he glanced at the Secret Service men as if noticing them for the first time.

"Nothing," he said. "I just remembered something. Deja vu, I guess."

The family, trailed by the two agents, began to jog down the path, which angled up and away from the ca.n.a.l toward the edge of the parkway. A few yards short of the waiting cars, Mary Catherine broke sharply to the right, thrashed through some brush, and skittered down the jumbled pile of boulders that made up the creek's bank.

She was followed by her father and, somewhat uncertainly, by James.

"Sir" one of the Secret Service men said. They had fallen well behind the Cozzanos and were watching them pick their way toward the confluence of the ca.n.a.l and Rock Creek.

"Just stay there," Cozzano said. "We're going to pick up some of this litter. It's a national disgrace."The whole family disappeared beneath the parkway. The Secret Service men stood dumfounded for a few moments, then ran down the bank, awkward in their suits and trench coats and leather shoes, trying to regain sight of the Cozzanos. But all they saw was the creek.

Three of them charged under the bridge, but ran into an obstacle: several homeless men. They had apparently been awakened by the Cozzanos. Now they were up on their feet and feeling frisky. These men occupied a bottleneck: a rocky stretch of bank between the b.u.t.tress of the bridge and the bank of the creek. One of them was even standing in the water, thigh-deep.

There were harsh words and some shoving. The Secret Service men did not fare well in the shoving match, because, as they had started to notice, all of the homeless men were astoundingly large, and, considering their lifestyle, inhumanly strong. By the time the Secret Service got around to pulling guns, and the homeless men held up their hands apologetically and let them pa.s.s, they had completely lost track of the Cozzanos.

Above them, tires were squealing out on the Rock Creek Parkway. The noise was made by half a dozen large rental cars skidding sideways, across both sets of lanes, blocking all traffic.

The drivers of these vehicles, an unexceptional lot of reasonably well dressed, middle-aged men, seemed to be the least excited people in all of Washington. They ignored the honking horns and shouted obscenities from the instant traffic jam that had materialized behind their roadblock. With the calm self- possession of a combat veteran, each driver strolled around his vehicle and jabbed a knife into each of the four tires before turning his back on his crippled vehicle and sauntering into the park.

If any of the furious drivers in the traffic jam had bothered to look up at the Four Seasons, which stood at the intersection of M and Pennsylvania like the cornerstone of the whole neighborhood, they would have seen Cy Ogle looking back at them from the window of his suite.

He had just received a telephone call from the man on duty in the closest G.o.dS truck, informing him that a sudden burst of microwave noise had broken their link with Cozzano, and that they were unable to reestablish the connection. "Argus is not receiving any inputs," the man said. "Repeat: Argus is on his own."

The stream channel was shallow and lined with large blocks of brown rock. As soon as they got past the "homeless" men, the Cozzanos plunged into it, picking up their knees as they ran, Walter Payton style, to keep them up out of the icy water, and forded Rock Creek. Far above their heads was another bridge, much larger and higher: Pennsylvania Avenue. As soon as they got past the b.u.t.tresses of the bridge they scrambled up on to the eastern bank, which even in winter was covered with a mixture of bamboo, ivy, and reeds. This was difficult territory, but William and Mary Catherine had been training hard for this and they didn't object to getting wet. Mary Catherine had been using all the slings and arrows of sibling rivalry to get James to whip himself into shape; he couldn't really keep up with them, but he had the minor advantage of being in a state of shock.

Rock Creek now ran between them and the parkway. This side of the park was more heavily wooded and had no road or bicycle path, just a little footpath paralleling the bank. All of them were still running as hard as they could, Mary Catherine leading the way, James bringing up the rear, still trying to gasp out questions when he wasn't sucking wind. His confusion was only deepened when he noticed that his father and sister had begun to rip off their clothes as they ran, dropping a trail of sweatshirts and tank tops in his path. Mary Catherine looked over her shoulder, into his eyes, and he knew that he was supposed to do the same. The world had gone crazy anyhow, why not run around Washington D.C., stark naked?

They paused somewhere between N and P streets. Mary Catherine and William had gotten all the way down to gym shorts and running shoes, and James was able to catch up as soon as they stopped running.

William crashed down the bank. A cube of solid masonry projected from the bank and into the stream, carrying a storm sewer outfall a couple of feet in diameter. William A. Cozzano, thigh-deep in icy water, leaned into it for a moment with his left arm and shoulder, and emerged carrying a couple of plastic garbage bags weighted with stones. He threw them up on to the bank and then climbed up after them.

Mary Catherine was stark naked by this point. She ripped open one of the bags to expose folds of dark green cloth, and a few pairs of running shoes. The shoes were labelled in magic markers: w.i.l.l.y, M.C., and JAMES. She tossed the appropriate pairs to James and William, then hauled the clothing out: threeidentical sweatsuits.

The change of clothes ate up about thirty seconds and then they were running down the footpath again.

Mary Catherine was carrying a small black plastic box in her hand; the blazing red light on one end danced up and down as she pumped her arms. She had dropped to a slower, sustainable pace. They pa.s.sed under several more towering stone bridges, at one point fording the creek again in order to keep it between them and the Parkway.

The path dead-ended at the fence of Oak Hill Cemetery, which ran downhill from Georgetown and all the way to the creek's edge. They made a left and ran parallel to the fence, following a footpath in the red, rocky soil, terraced by innumerable exposed tree roots. A few stray gravestones poked askew from the carpet of ivy.

Cemetery gates loomed on their right and they had emerged into the city again. They were in Montrose Park. It was two blocks long and a couple of hundred feet wide, bordered on one side by the woods and on the other by an alley that ran behind a row of old four-story red brick apartments. This was a bad stretch of blacktop, patches on top of older patches, covered with mud, leaf litter, and parked cars with the usual odd D.C. mixture of license plates. A delivery van, painted with the logo of a ubiquitous local diaper service, was sitting there with its motor running.

Mary Catherine ran up to it, hauled open the back doors, and motioned James and William in. They climbed in the back and she followed, pulling the doors shut behind them. They all collapsed, unable to do much more than suck in oxygen. But Mary Catherine was laughing, James was sputtering and starting to ask questions, and William's mind was elsewhere.

Mary Catherine was thinking that, no matter what else happened today, they had all gone out for a vigorous run together, just like the old days, and they had gotten wet and messy and enjoyed themselves. Now she was ready for all h.e.l.l to break loose. She caught her father's eye for a moment and realized he was thinking the same thing.

They drive for fifteen or twenty minutes, not really knowing where they were, and then the truck stopped, and they could hear a garage door grinding shut behind them.

They staggered upstairs and found themselves in an old town house with plywood windowpanes. Mattresses and a few pieces of junk furniture were scattered around. But it had a few touches that made them feel at home: a coffeemaker on the floor, its red light shining cheerfully, and a sack of bagels next to a stack of paper plates, and, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, chewing on a bagel and going over some papers, one Mel Meyer.

"w.i.l.l.y, if you can hear me, get your left hand over here and grab this pen. You have a h.e.l.l of a lot of papers to sign before we get you dressed," Mel said.

"James," Mary Catherine said, "grab some coffee. I have a few things to tell you."

59.

In downtown Rosslyn, Virginia, a man in a nice suit and a trench coat, wearing a neatly trimmed beard, and hair so short that his scalp almost showed through, emerged from a Metro station and walked up the street to a mailbox. He removed a standard legal-sized envelope from his breast pocket, held it between his hands, and contemplated it for a few moments. Then he dropped it into the mailbox. He continued down the street, turned a corner, and walked downhill toward Key Bridge. Ahead of him, on the far side of the Potomac, he could see Dixie Liquors, which was on M Street, which would take him through the center of Georgetownand on to Pennsylvania. You could fire a bullet straight down the centerline of Pennsylvania and it would pa.s.s through the middle of the White House and continue down to the presidential lectern on the reviewing stand on the Capitol steps.

Unfortunately Floyd Wayne Vishniak's Fleischacker was not quite powerful or accurate enough for that.

He would have to follow much the same route on foot. But that was okay. He had planned this thing pretty well, had left himself plenty of time to get there. As he walked across Key Bridge, pounded by a cold crosswind that found every leak in his trench coat, he mentally reviewed the contents of the letter, which he had written at one o'clock this morning in the front seat of his pickup truck, parked in the holler in West Virginia.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

Parts Unknown United States of America Letters to the Editor Washington Post Washington D.C.

Dear Mr. (or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor: As of yesterday A.M. I have spent, or maybe the right word is wasted, a total of $89.50 on your worthless rag, and this is not counting money spent on the other papers and magazines I had to buy just to cross-check all of the so-called facts you printed and find out which were true and which were false.

So I know full well that you will screw everything up. So here is some information. The name is spelled V-I- S-H-N-I-A-K (see top of page). I am not a psycho. Just a concerned American citizen.

And please don't screw this up: I - me - Floyd - did this ALL BY MYSELF. I did not get help from anyone - no co-conspirators, foreign governments, terrorist groups, or anyone else.

Yes, hard as it might be for you smug East Coast b.a.s.t.a.r.ds to comprehend, a hick from the sticks is actually capable of doing something ALL BY HIMSELF.

See you in h.e.l.l - where we can look forward to many interesting conversations.

You will be hearing from me again soon, I am sure.

Sincerely, Floyd Wayne Vishniak By the time he had made it across Key Bridge he had decided that it was a good letter. He turned right underneath the red neon sign of Dixie Liquors and headed for the center of Washington.

On the southeastern fringe of Capitol Hill, just beyond the boundary between the yuppified zone and the ghetto, a tour bus made a difficult turn into a narrow alley running through the center of a block. Facing on the alley was a long, low, one-story cinder-block building, a former box-printing plant. Air burst from its brakes and the bus settled to a stop in the alley. The door opened up and men began to climb off. They walked in single file around the front of the bus and entered the building through a wide steel door, which was flanked on the inside and the outside by middle-aged men with nervous eyes and guns in their armpits.

Most, but not all, of the men were enormous. They ranged in age from their early thirties to their mid- fifties. Some of them were wearing dark suits already and some were carrying them in garment bags. They filed into the building, which was a single huge room. It was mostly empty; its concrete floor was scarred where huge pieces of machinery had been uprooted and dragged away. Most of the illumination was provided byskylights. But when all of the men had come inside, the door had been closed, more lights were turned on.