Interface. Part 55

Already in the room was a busload of more men matching the same general description, drinking coffee from a couple of big industrial percolators set up on a folding table, eating vast quant.i.ties of doughnuts. A lot of these men knew each other and so in some ways the atmosphere was like that of an old cla.s.s reunion. But they were generally subdued and serious. This was especially true of those men who weren't huge.

The huge ones were former professional football players. The others were Vietnamese veterans. They instinctively formed up into two separate groups, on opposite ends of the room. The Vietnam veterans had served with Cozzano in the mid- to late-sixties and were, for the most part, older than the football players, and from a wider economic range: this group included corporate presidents, highly paid lawyers, janitors, auto mechanics, and homeless people. But today they were all dressed more or less the same, and they greeted each other wordlessly, with hugs and long, intense, two-handed handshakes.

A few minutes after the second bus had arrived, one of the veterans, a big, round-headed, round- shouldered black man, walked to the center of the room, whistled through his fingers, and shouted, "Listen up!"

The conversation rapidly dropped to zero. All of the men moved to the edges of the room, facing inward.

"My name is Rufus Bell. For today, you can call me Sarge," said the man. "I have three people to introduce. First of all, the woman who will be our new Vice President in an hour and a half: Eleanor Richmond."

She had been standing by the coffee table. Now she walked to the center of the room. Scattered applause started up and rapidly exploded into an ovation. Rufus Bell whistled again.

"Shut up!" he yelled. "We don't want to bother the neighbors."

"Thank you all," Eleanor said.

Bell continued. "I would also like to introduce Mel Meyer, who will be the acting Attorney General of the United States."

Mel acknowledged by removing the cigar from his mouth momentarily.

"Finally," Bell said, "the Chief of the District of Columbia Police, who's going to swear you all in."

The Chief was snappy in full dress uniform. He walked to the middle of the room and got no applause at all; his appearance, and his bearing, radiated no-nonsense authority. He turned to face the men around the edges of the room and examined them closely for several moments, making individual eye contact with every man in the room.

"This is some serious s.h.i.t," the Chief said, "not some kind of a fun little field trip. If you're not willing to lay down your life in the defense of the Const.i.tution of the United States, right now, then stay in this building for the next three hours and you'll be fine."

He stopped for a while to let that sink in, and surveyed the men's faces again. They all stared back at him, like statues. A couple of them couldn't hold the eye contact, and glanced away.

If you are willing to take that risk," the Chief said, "then repeat after me." He held up his right hand, palm facing forward.

All of the men in the room did the same. Then the Chief swore them all in as deputies of the District of Columbia Police Department.

In the meantime, Mel had taken Eleanor aside and was talking to her in a corner of the room. "You ever bought a house?" he asked.

"Once or twice," she said, surprised and mildly amused.

"Remember all those f.u.c.king doc.u.ments they pulled out for you to sign?"

"I remember them well."

"That's nothing compared to what we're doing today," he said. He opened up a time-worn leather satchel that was resting on the floor. "I have two sets of doc.u.ments for you," he said, "depending on what happens. I have spent the last several months holed up in the middle of nowhere with a word processor, a laser printer, and a whole lot of law books, drawing these things up. Some of them you need to sign. Some of them w.i.l.l.y has already signed. It's all organized."

Mel pulled a white nine-by-fifteen envelope out of the satchel. "This is in case we're lucky," he said."In that case, there's not much for you to do - most of your duties will pertain to your role as President of the Senate."

Mel reached back into the satchel and pulled out a black envelope. This one was the expanding type, with bellows on the sides. It was two inches thick. "And this," he said, "is in case we're not so lucky."

"I see," Eleanor said. "White is good and black is bad."

"No," Mel said. "White is w.i.l.l.y and black is Eleanor."

The Chief had finished deputizing the men by now, and Rufus Bell was beginning to stride up and down the room, perusing a list of names, ordering men this way and that, forming them up into several groups of various sizes.

Eleanor opened up the envelopes, took a black ball-point pen (SKILCRAFT U.S. GOVERNMENT) out of her purse, and started signing her name to doc.u.ments. All of the doc.u.ments in the white envelope said: Eleanor Richmond Vice President, United States of America All of the doc.u.ments in the black envelope said: Eleanor Richmond President Rufus Bell and Mel Meyer were dragging cardboard boxes across the floor and shoving them across the concrete in the direction of the various platoons that Bell had organized. The men began to rip the boxes open and pull out T-shirts. They were all black, 100 percent cotton, extra large. On the front was a white star and the words DEPUTY - D.C. POLICE. And on the back of each shirt were the words DEPT. OF JUSTICE.

60.

Lines of authority were never especially clear in Washington, D.C., where the jurisdiction of a dozen different law-enforcement agencies all overlapped. The presence of so many people with guns and badges made it impossible to figure out who was in charge of what. So when men with guns and badges had gone to several locations in the District of Columbia during the last few days and laid claim to numerous parking s.p.a.ces - some on the street, some in parking lots of federal buildings - there had been disputes, arguments, even threats. But the issues raised could not have been untangled short of calling a convention of Const.i.tutional scholars and locking them all in a room until they made up their minds. The people who had the parking s.p.a.ces won the argument. The decision was sealed when those parking s.p.a.ces were occupied by flatbed semitrailer rigs with big G.o.dS shipping containers on their backs. One of them took up a position in front of the headquarters of the Teamsters Union on Louisiana Avenue, only a block north of the Capitol Building. From there, it had a direct line of sight across Taft Park and Const.i.tution Avenue on to the Capitol grounds; a person could climb on to the roof of the truck and get a clear, side-on view of President Cozzano delivering his inaugural address, not much more than a thousand feet away.Another G.o.dS truck seized a position along Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House.

Others parked on Fourteenth Street, in the shadow of the Commerce Department; on C Street, in front of the State Department; in front of the Treasury Department on Fifteenth Street; and in the parking lot of the Pentagon.

Once the trucks were in place, they weren't likely to move. The owners - and the mysterious people who went in and out of the containers on their backs - seemed to have an infinite fund of bewildering paperwork, from various D.C. and federal agencies, justifying their presence. Any authority figure, at any level, who tried to move those G.o.dS trucks, would soon find that each one had a lawyer living in the back, on call twenty-four hours a day, complete with cellular phone and portable fax machine. These were not just plain old lawyers either; they were a.s.shole lawyers, ready and willing to issue threats and talk about their friends in high places at the slightest provocation.

And if things escalated beyond that level, each truck also had a couple of imposing plainclothes security guards who would emerge, crack their knuckles, flex their muscles, and glare threateningly when anyone tried to get them to move. The only people in the world who had the guts to confront these people were D.C. meter maids, and so the G.o.dS trucks stayed where they were, acc.u.mulating stacks of D.C. parking tickets under their windshield wipers but incurring no further retribution.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of Inauguration Day, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle could be found in the truck that was parked in front of the Teamsters Building, a thousand feet from the inaugural podium. He was seated in the Eye of Cy, keeping tabs on the PIPER 100, and trying to reestablish radio contact with the chips in Governor Cozzano's head.

The radio transmissions were short-range, line-of-sight affairs and so they were used to breaking contact whenever Cozzano strayed more than a couple of thousand feet from the truck. But Cozzano had gone out of his way to be elusive this morning. The listening devises secreted in his clothing and in that of this children were not transmitting any sounds other than the soothing burble of running water. The Secret Service had converged on Rock Creek Park, hindered by a nightmare traffic jam, and found no sign of the Cozzanos other than the abandoned clothes.

It looked a h.e.l.l of a lot like a kidnapping. But the outgoing President, and several news outlets, had received brief, untraceable telephone calls from Mary Catherine Cozzano, a.s.suring them that everything was okay. She promised that her father would show up for the Inauguration.

Ogle had been planning to reinstate contact with Cozzano's biochip from the truck in Lafayette Square when he paid a call at the White House, which was traditionally what an incoming president did on Inauguration morning. Then, as the outgoing and incoming presidents made their way down Pennsylvania for the inaugural parade, control would be relayed to the truck at Treasury and then at Commerce. Then there would be a blackout of several minutes as the motorcade proceeded down Pennsylvania.

But those moments of freedom were useless to Cozzano. He would have to come to the Capitol eventually. As the motorcade emerged from the shadow of the U.S. Courthouse, the truck at Teamsters - Cy Ogle's truck - would be able to establish contact with the biochip. From that point onward, Cy Ogle would have full control through the inauguration.

William A., James, and Mary Catherine Cozzano emerged from the Farragut West Metro station at eleven o'clock. They had reached Pennsylvania Avenue before anyone recognized them.

The person who did was a well-dressed man in a trench coat, with a neatly trimmed beard and very short hair, proceeding west on Pennsylvania. He was standing at a street-corner waiting for the light to change when he saw the Cozzanos coming toward him. "Good morning President Cozzano," he said.

The light changed and all of them crossed Seventeenth Street together. The Old Executive Office Building was on their right, the White House a stone's throw away.

"Good morning. How are you today?" Cozzano said.

"Just fine, sir, and you?"

"I'm great, thank you," Cozzano said.

"How's your head?" the man asked, as they reached the east side of Seventeenth Street. They stopped at the corner and waited for the light to change. Across Pennsylvania, in front of the White House gates, wasa mob of cops and Secret Service. One of them noticed the Cozzanos. Binoculars swiveled in their direction. A Secret Service detail broke from the gates and ran toward them, plunging directly into traffic.

Cozzano looked at the man quizzically. "My head's fine," he said, "why do you ask?"

"I need to know if they're controlling your brain with radio waves," the man said, as the WALK light came on. "It's very important for me to know this."

Mary Catherine's and James's faces fell into expressionless masks. Crossing the street, they got between Cozzano and the man in the trench coat, and stared at the man coldly. But Cozzano laughed indulgently.

"You know, there was a movie that I saw, at the Tuscola Main Street Theater, when I was a kid, about mind control. Some mad scientist had taken over people's brains and turned them into zombies ..."

"Don't tell me another anecdote!" the man said. "I don't want to hear any of your stupid anecdotes!"

"I'm just trying to answer your question," Cozzano said cheerfully.

"Ever since they started controlling your brain, you can't think any more - all you do is tell those heart- warming stories!" the man in the trench coat said.

They were approaching the south side of Pennsylvania. James pulled up close to the man and stared at him coldly. "You're out of line," he said.

The man in the trench coat stared back at James, not intimidated in the slightest. "I'm out of line, huh?" he said. His total lack of fear unnerved James a little bit. James almost tripped over the curb.

Suddenly, the Cozzanos were surrounded by men in suits and trench coats. Mary Catherine was startled for a moment before she realized that they were Secret Service men.

Then she looked back at the strange man. But he was gone. "That was weird," she said. "That man didn't show any of the external symptoms of an active psychotic. But he sure talked like one."

The presidential motorcade pulled out of the White House gates on to Pennsylvania Avenue at 11:30 A.M., hung a right and headed for the Capitol. Inside, distributed among several cars, were the outgoing President, his wife, the outgoing Vice President and his wife, Cozzano, Mary Catherine, James, Eleanor Richmond, and her two children Clarice and Harmon, Jr. Eleanor's mother was already in her place at the Capitol, attended by a couple of nurses.

The outgoing and incoming presidents sat across from each other in the back of the presidential limousine and made small talk. The motorcade wound around a couple of corners, getting past the Treasury and Western Plaza, and finally pulled on to the long uninterrupted stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that ran straight to the Capitol. William A. Cozzano bent down and peered through the window, across the front seat, through the windshield, and down to the Capitol, where the temporary podium was clearly visible.

Federal Triangle was on the right; half a bloc ahead rose the towering spire of the Old Post Office.

Cozzano reached across his body with his left hand, grabbed the limousine's door handle and popped the door open.

"What are you doing?" the outgoing President said.

"Quite frankly, I have no idea," Cozzano said. He jumped out of the limousine, which was traveling at a slow jogger's pace. The driver, seeing what was happening, braked the limousine to a stop.

"But-"

Cozzano leaned into the open door. "Don't worry," he said, "I think everything's going to be okay."

Then he slammed the door and strode southward across the intersection.

By now the entire motorcade had come to a halt. Mary Catherine and James had jumped out of their limousine and run forward to join Cozzano, who plunged directly into the crowd lining the parade route.

He was followed by a number of Secret Service agents; but although the crowd opened wide to accept the Cozzanos, it closed ranks behind them, forming a dense wall of bodies.

Large bodies. It seemed that this entire section of the parade route was lined with men no shorter than six foot six, and no lighter than two hundred and seventy-five pounds. The Secret Service men tried to elbow their way through, but elbows had no effect on these guys.

Eventually they got through by drawing guns. By that time, the Cozzanos had disappeared. Again.

The Federal Triangle Metro station was half a block away on Twelfth Street. Like all of the stations in theD.C. Metro system, it included an elevator for wheelchair users. Rufus Bell was standing in that elevator, leaning against the door to keep it from closing, and he had an empty wheelchair with him.

The Cozzanos arrived at a dead sprint, pursued only by a few autograph seekers. James and Mary Catherine got on first, then Cozzano followed, spinning around as he came through the door and slamming down a.s.s-first into the wheelchair. Bell let the door slide closed and then the elevator began to drop.

Mary Catherine was standing to the left of the wheelchair, a heavy purse slung over her shoulder. She unclasped it and opened it up.

"Here goes nothing," Cozzano said.

His left hand reached into Mary Catherine's purse, rummaged around, and pulled out a black box with four metal p.r.o.ngs on the end. He squeezed the trigger once, testing it, and a purple lightning bolt snapped between the p.r.o.ngs.

"I already tested it, Dad," Mary Catherine said affectionately, her voice already getting thick with emotion.

"I know you did, peanut," Cozzano said.

Then he shoved the p.r.o.ngs into the side of his head and pulled the trigger.

His body convulsed so violently that it threw him half out of the wheelchair. James and Mary Catherine stood well away until the high-voltage current had stopped blasting through Cozzano's body. His arm snapped out into a stiff-arm position, as though fending off a linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul, and the stun gun flew across the elevator car, bounced off the wall, and clattered to the floor. Rufus Bell picked it up and shoved it back into Mary Catherine's purse.

Mary Catherine had gone into an unemotional, doctorly mode. She grabbed one of her father's arms and got James to take the other one, and they righted his limp body in the wheelchair, then buckled the lap belt.

The elevator doors opened; they were on the platform of the Metro station. A Blue Line train bound for Addison Road was sitting on the tracks, waiting for them; the doors had been physically blocked open by more members of the Cozzano crew, and the D.C. Chief of Police himself, still resplendent in his full dress uniform, was standing at the head of the train, talking to the conductor.

Bell wheeled Cozzano out of the elevator, across the platform, and on to the train. The doors closed behind them and the train began to move. They had a whole car to themselves; sheets of newsprint had already been taped up along the insides of the windows so that none of the shocked tourists on the platform could capture an image of the unconscious President-elect in film or video.

Mary Catherine pulled a stethoscope out of her purse, stuck it in her ears, and held it up to her father's chest.

"He's got a normal rhythm," she said. "It sounds good."

Cozzano was not unconscious, just dazed. Mary Catherine pulled a small white tube out of her pocket, snapped it in half, and held it up under Cozzano's nose. Cozzano's brow furrowed, his eyes rolled around in their sockets, and he snapped his head away from the smell.

Lights flashed by, illuminating the papered-over windows. They had rolled through the Smithsonian station without stopping and were now swinging through the broad curve that would take them eastward into L'Enfant Plaza.

Two Yellow Line trains, pointed in opposite directions, were being held for them at L'Enfant Plaza. One of them was a northbound train that could take them straight back up to the Archives station, right along the parade route. They could re-emerge at that point and continue on to the Capitol as if nothing had happened.

The other train was southbound. It could take them to National Airport, where a private jet was waiting for them. It would take them far away, if that was necessary. Hopefully, it would take them somewhere with good hospitals.

The train doors opened to reveal L'Enfant Plaza. Their way out on to the platform was lined with large and serious-looking men. Standing right in the middle was Mel Meyer.

Bell wheeled Cozzano out on to the platform and right up to Mel, who kneeled down and looked Cozzano in the face. He grabbed one of Cozzano's limp hands and squeezed it, then reached up and patted his friend gently on the cheek. His face was tight, a study in controlled intensity. "w.i.l.l.y," he said. "w.i.l.l.y, do you feel like being President today? Or do you feel like going to a nice rehab center in Switzerland? You have to give me someindication either way."

Cozzano's head had been rolling around loosely. Finally, with some effort, he raised it up and looked Mel in the eye.

"Let's take this thing downtown," he said Mel stood up. His eyes were glistening. He turned toward one of the crew. "You heard the President," he said, "tell the guys at the airport we won't be needing them."

The escalator at Archives brought the Cozzanos up into the sunlight only a few minutes after the presidential motorcade had gone by. A phalanx of some thirty-six ex-NFL players, hand-picked by Rufus Bell for their height and bulk, materialized around them. Cozzano was on his feet now, still a little unsteady, supported on either side by ex-Bears. The phalanx got itself organised and then accelerated to a slow jog, moving en ma.s.se into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and heading straight for the Capitol, two-thirds of a mile away. The crowd along Pennsylvania had begun to disperse, believing that all the important people had already gone past them, and none of them knew what to make of the solid bloc of beefy men - some of them quite famous in their own right - who ran down the center of the avenue in right formation, headed straight for the Inauguration, surrounded by M- 16-toting outriders on foot, car, and motorcycles.

But it was a strange enough sight that it was picked up by the television cameras. The media were on their toes.

They were aware that Cozzano had done something highly unusual during his morning jog, that he had arrived at the White House on foot - contrary to the planned itinerary - and that he had abandoned the motorcade at Twelfth Street. When their cameras on the parade route picked up the phalanx, it went out over the networks. Nothing interesting was going on anyway; the outgoing President had already reached the Capitol, and was now in the Rotunda, awaiting the change of power.

Cy Ogle, seated in his truck in front of the Teamsters Building, saw Cozzano's Praetorian Guard jogging down Pennsylvania and had a pretty good idea of what it meant. He had watched on television as the motorcade had pa.s.sed in front of the U.S. Courthouse - the point at which radio signals from his truck should have been able to reach Cozzano's biochip. It hadn't worked. Nothing was there. He'd known then that Cozzano wasn't into the motorcade.

He was still telling himself that it didn't matter. By one route or another, Cozzano had to show up at the Capitol. Sooner or later they would reacquire the chip. The only question was when.

The appearance of the phalanx moving down Pennsylvania answered that question. The cameras were kind enough to track it all the way through its slow, thundering, five-minute march on the Capitol. When it pa.s.sed in front of the U.S. Courthouse, Ogle tried once more to reestablish the radio link.

Nothing. Cozzano wasn't in the phalanx; it was just a diversion. Either that, or the biochip wasn't responding anymore. Which was impossible. Cozzano had only been missing for about ten minutes, from his disappearance at the Old Post Office to the reemergence of the phalanx at Seventh Street. You couldn't do major brain surgery in ten minutes.