Interface.

"Whatcha got there?" he said, brusquely.

"My stuff," she said, unable to come up with anything more eloquent at this time of the morning.

"What"s this?" he said, bending over and reaching for it.

The tote bag was just a cheap freebie given to by her travel agent in Alexandria. Eleanor had brought it along precisely because it was so flimsy that it could be wadded up and stuffed into other luggage. Tonight it had come in handy for carrying a change of clothes. Right now she was wearing jeans and an old sweatshirt with TOWSON STATE printed across the front. Her party dress, jewelry, and purse were all in the tote bag. The purse was ontop. As the man in the suit bent down, she followed his gaze, and saw that the strap of the purse - a heavy gold- plated chain, a la Chanel - was dangling out. His hand reached out, quick as a snake, grabbed the chain, and yanked, taking the purse out with it.

"Hey!" she said, and grabbed at the chain. But he yanked the purse away as her hand was closing around it, ripping it out of her hand and bending a couple of nails back.

She"d heard of these guys: well-dressed thieves who wandered around in posh hotels late at night, s.n.a.t.c.hing purses and picking pockets. They"d be in the lobby any second and then this guy would be in trouble.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," she said, and kicked him in the knee.

"You b.i.t.c.h," he said. He bent down, got one shoulder into her solar plexus, and used the thrust of both legs to body-slam her into the wall of the elevator. Her head snapped backward against the wall, which didn"t cause any serious damage but did leave her disoriented; she slid down the wall and collapsed to the floor with her legs sprawling, and realized that she could not draw a breath.

The man loomed in front of the elevator"s control panel. He had pulled out a huge keychain, the kind that"s attached to a spring-loaded reel on the belt, and shoved a tubular key into the switch at the base of the panel.

He rotated the switch one notch and then pressed the b.u.t.ton beneath the one for the lobby.

The door opened a moment later. This was not the lobby of the hotel: she saw barren concrete walls, harshly illuminated with cheap industrial lights, and steel doors with numbers painted on them. The man turned the key switch one more time and the elevator froze in position with the doors open. She still couldn"t hardly breathe. This was the first time she"d had the wind knocked out of her since the second grade.

"Get out," the man said, reaching down to grab her wrist. He yanked hard and trudged out into the corridor. He wasn"t so much helping her to her feet as he was dragging her over the floor. Eleanor hardly cared; the lack of oxygen was a more immediate concern than this guy"s bad manners. She ended up tumbled in a heap on the floor next to a steel door in the corridor, close to the elevator. The keychain jingled once again, the door swung open on a big room with a few people in it.

Finally she drew in a breath. Her lungs had constricted, her airway was clenched shut, and the air pa.s.sing through it made an ugly sobbing noise. But it felt good. She forced that breath out and drew in another one. Color vision returned. Her panic subsided.

In the meantime, a couple of other men in suits had stepped to the door, grabbed her arms, hauled her up off the floor, and dragged her into the room. They sat her down on a chair. The room contained four cheap steel desks, chairs to go with them, a couch, and a table with a coffee machine. In the corner was some kind of communications setup: a phone switchboard and a two-way radio.

Eleanor closed her eyes and just concentrated on breathing for a while. But when she closed her eyes, her head began to swim around; she was still dizzy from having been slammed into the wall. She kept her eyes open just enough to get a strong visual fix on one object: a cheesy pinup of a woman with huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, dressed half in a cop uniform and half in s.e.xy lingerie, a pistol stuck into the band of her fishnet stockings, dangling a set of handcuffs from her finger.

Finally she recovered enough to get p.i.s.sed. "What the h.e.l.l is going on here?" she said, and rose from her chair. But someone gripped the collar of her sweatshirt from behind, twisted it tight around her neck, and jerked her back down into the chair. "Shut up, sister," a voice said. "You should know better than to make trouble."

Then they grabbed her arms and pulled them around behind her back, behind the back of the chair. She heard a high zipping noise and felt something go tight around her wrists: plastic handcuffs. She couldn"t move her arms.

"Would you guys mind telling me who the h.e.l.l you are?" she said.

They ignored her. The man in the suit who had confronted her in the elevator went over to the telephone, punched a couple of b.u.t.tons, and spoke: "Yeah, this is Moore in Security. We have apprehended a black female carrying a bag with someone"s purse and some jewelry. She is intoxicated, violent and disorderly. Have you had any complaints of missing property from any of your guests tonight?"He listened for a moment. "Okay. Well, it"s possible she hit one of the other hotels on the block and just got here. You want to phone some of the others and see if they"ve had any problems?"

By now, the entire contents of Eleanor"s tote bag had been spread out across the table, and the hotel d.i.c.ks were pawing through them, making lewd comments about her underwear and appraising her jewelry.

Eleanor knew she should have been chewing them out. She should have been calling down the retribution of heaven above. But she was so stunned that it was almost more interesting to stand back and observe.

A television set was going on the coffee table, showing a late-night news program. Her face flashed up on the screen right next to Cozzano"s. What happened next was the most gratifying moment she had experienced since the birth of her last child. "Look at the TV," she said.

Mr. Salvador reached Cy Ogle by sky phone the next day. Ogle was on one of the Cozzano campaign planes. Cozzano 1 carried the candidate, his Secret Service detail, staff, and immediate hangers-on; Cozzano 2, was a press plane, and Cozzano 3, which hardly anyone knew about, was a G.o.dS cargo plane. It carried a G.o.dS shipping container, the Eye of Cy. Ogle was on Cozzano 1 when he got the call from Mr. Salvador, who was upset. "Did you see the morning papers?"

"Of course I did," Ogle said.

"It"s exactly as I predicted. Eleanor Richmond is a loose cannon."

"Now, why would you say that?"

"Are you kidding? The first thing she does is go out and get herself arrested."

"Detained. Not arrested."

"And then, immediately, without consulting you, she begins to run her mouth. Yap yap yap, racists here, racists there, lynch mob mentality, all the usual radical Afro-American buzzwords."

"You can"t blame her for being p.i.s.sed."

"I can blame her for being strident. Did you see her on TV this morning? In front of the hotel?"

"Yes."

"Who authorized her to throw a street rally?"

"I don"t think she threw it, per se," Ogle said. "It just sort of happened. A bunch of people came up from the South Side and wanted to burn the hotel down. She came out and cooled them off."

"Well, it looked like a rally."

"I know it did."

"And the last thing we need is some kind of outspoken radical black woman running through the streets with a megaphone."

"Mr. Salvador," Ogle said, quietly and forbearingly, "Eleanor Richmond, as we speak, is on a plane to Cashmere, Washington, to pick apples with migrant farm workers. Then she"s going to go white-water rafting and read a scripted speech about the importance of wild rivers. Then she"s going to fly to San Diego to mend fences with those Mexican people who run up the centerline of highways. Then-"

"Okay, I get the picture," Mr. Salvador said.

"So does she, I think," Ogle said.

48.

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS HAD THEIR OWN CALENDAR: A SERIES OF special days, sprinkled throughout the year,determined by certain arcane astrological formulae. Chief among these was Election Day itself, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Another such occasion was Labor Day, which, to most people, marked the end of summer, but which to politicians marked the formal beginning of the presidential campaign - a complete surprise to almost everyone in America.

So television viewers across the land, who for the last year had not been able to settle into their recliners without being exposed to a scene of red-white-and-blue balloons and flawlessly coiffed candidates standing in front of blue curtains in hotel ballrooms, were generally befuddled when they checked the evening news on Labor Day and were informed, by solemn anchorpersons, that Tip McLane, the President, and William A. Cozzano had all kicked off their campaigns today.

The shortest point between a camera and a backdrop is a straight line pa.s.sing through the candidate"s head.

Who these three candidates were, and how they would run their campaigns, could be inferred from the things they stood in front of.

The President stood in front of an empty Buick plant in Flint, Michigan. This informed the viewing public that he was a serious, taking-care-of-business type who cared about the downtrodden (unlike, for example, Tip McLane) and that he intended to renew America.

Nimrod T. ("Tip") McLane stood in a lettuce field in California where he and his parents had once stooped at menial labor; behind him rose a mountain vista. This backdrop told the viewing public that Tip McLane had not forgotten his humble roots, that he was a gra.s.s-roots, back-to-basics conservative who was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty.

William A. Cozzano and his running mate Eleanor Richmond kicked off their independent campaign on the runway of a munic.i.p.al airport south of Seattle. This was a fairly complicated bit of multileveled background engineering. The immediate background consisted of a runway, outlined in colored lights and streaked with tire marks, conveying a strong sense of motion (Cozzano is taking off!). The next thing down the line was a vast Boeing airplane factory; brand-new 767s were lined up on the ap.r.o.n, each tail fin freshly and brightly painted in the color scheme of a different airline somewhere around the world. Finally, in the deep background, Mount Rainier heaved itself up out of a low, dark line of foothills. It was so vast that it looked like a telephoto lens shot, even through a normal lens, and when the cameramen enhanced it with their telephotos (as none of them could resist doing) it looked like a giant ice-covered asteroid looming over the shoulders of William A. Cozzano and Eleanor Richmond.

Boeing had nothing to do with the Cozzano campaign, of course, or so they said. This whole event was being held on munic.i.p.al property. The presence of a Boeing facility next door was a convenient accident.

Cozzano looked snappy in his homburg, the sort of old-fashioned men"s hat that had gone out of fashion when JFK had refused to wear one, and that Cozzano was now single-handedly bringing back into fashion. In the middle of his campaign-kickoff address, a new 767, painted with the logo of j.a.pan Airlines, taxied on to the runway. Its tail fin momentarily came between Cozzano and the glaciated slopes of Rainier, then narrowed into a vertical blade as the plane turned onto the runway, revealing the mountain, illuminated by a peach-colored sunrise.

The icy clarity of Rainier was muddled by the heat waves rising from the jet"s engines. Then those engines glowed bluish-white, the plane accelerated down the runway, directly toward Rainier, shot into the air, banked into a climbing turn, and headed west, bound for j.a.pan. It happened just as Cozzano was making a point about the trade deficit; and as the roar of the jet engines died away, it was almost possible to hear a dim cacophony of whacking noises from the directions of California and of Flint, Michigan, as Cozzano"s compet.i.tors and their campaign managers smacked their foreheads in anguish.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak watched this lovely spectacle in a cool, dark hollow set in the folds of the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. He was not much more than a hundred miles outside of Washington D.C., and yet the location could scarcely have been more remote.

He had been camping out here for a couple of days, just lying low for a time, watching Cozzano on his wrist.w.a.tch TV-c.u.m-brain-control device, tossing the occasional lure into the stream that ran past his little campsite, draining cans of beer and then shooting them full of big starburst holes with his nimble Fleischacker.

His truck was stopped on a gravelly floodplain, the floor of a ravine with nearly vertical sides that made a perfectbackstop for shooting. He had brought two cases of inexpensive beer with him, going out of his way to obtain cans rather than bottles. You could only shoot a bottle once, but you could shoot a can over and over again until not much was left of it; this was how a man had to pinch his pennies nowadays.

Out here in the Eastern time zone, the sun had already been up for a few hours and so the peach-coloured light on the slopes of Rainier looked strange and faky. Vishniak was sure that the lumbering jetliner and the ice- covered volcano looked great on the kind of thirty-nine-inch Trinitron that rich people would own, but on his postage-stamp wrist.w.a.tch it didn"t really look so hot.

That was okay. Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbled together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had their secret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysterious place called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So when Cozzano stepped up to the microphones to make the formal campaign kickoff speech, Vishniak emptied his Fleischacker into a hapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holster under his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and sat down on the tailgate of his pickup to listen to the murmuring of the stream and the speech that William A. Cozzano was delivering to him and the rest of the American people. As the introductions were being made, Vishniak pulled a small reporter"s notebook out of his pocket. The last page read: COZZANO"S HATS (CONTD.).

SUN AUG 25 CHICAGO CUBS BASEBALL CAP.

MON AUG 26 HARD HAT (STEEL MILL VISIT).

TUE AUG 27 NO HAT - BUT HE STAYED IN-DOORS!!!.

WED AUG 28 THE HOMBURG.

THU AUG 29 U.S. FLAG BASEBALL CAP.

FRI AUG 30 BIKE HELMET (ORLANDO BIKE-A-THON).

SAT AUG 31 THE HOMBURG.

SUN SEP 1 NO HAT - WENT TO CHURCH.

and now he added a new line: SUN SEP 2 THE HOMBURG AGAIN.

Some kind of spooky s.h.i.t was definitely going on with those hats. They were all saying now that the homburg was some kind of a Fashion Statement, but William A. Cozzano had never felt any need to make such statements until he had gotten that chip stuck into his brain. It obviously had something to do with brain waves.

In his speech, Cozzano covered the usual bases: the corruption of big-party politics, the need for change.

Change not only in the political system but in the values system of the entire country. Change that would renew our commitment to education and to long-term investment in the future. This topic led, inevitably, to the subject of the economy, at which point Vishniak finally started to pay attention. The economy was the only thing that mattered to him.

"There are those who say that we are doomed to be a secondrate power, subjugated to the j.a.panese,"

Cozzano said, just as the big Boeing jet was beginning its takeoff run. Vishniak clenched his teeth and became enraged, as he always did when people said this kind of thing.

"To those people," Cozzano continued, "I have only one thing to say: BEHOLD!" He turned aside and swept out one arm toward the jet, then watched it take off. To shout above the scream of its turbofans would have been futile, would have made him look tiny by comparison. As Vishniak watched the miniature figure of the jet take off on his little screen, saw it bank into its turn, exposing the Rising Sun logo painted on its tail fin, his anger was replaced by a surge of defiant pride. Sure the economic situation looked bleak, but a country that could make airplanes like that could accomplish anything if it just set its mind to it.

Cozzano turned to the microphones and said, "No matter how bleak the economists and the pundits say our situation is, I think that any country that can make airplanes like that one can, with hard work and determination, accomplish anything."Vishniak felt relieved that a great man like Cozzano felt the same as he did, that his feelings weren"t just stupid, blind patriotism. But he was a jittery and suspicious fellow by nature and could not be satisfied with this kind of happy talk for long.

"Now, I would be lying if I stopped there, and left you with the impression that happy talk is going to close the trade deficit," Cozzano said. "Uplifting speeches and slick media images do not an economy make. What we need is to educate our children. But not just to cram their heads with facts and figures - to teach them values as well, values of hard, steady work."

That was a little better. Cozzano was talking some sense there. Although Vishniak was beginning to get a little skeptical about politicians who always spouted this easy talk about education. Education was great but it wouldn"t really help the economy for another twenty years. And it wouldn"t help the likes of Floyd Wayne Vishniak at all.

"People think that when I speak of education I mean kindergarten, elementary school and high school,"

Cozzano said, "but education is more than that. Education is a lifelong process. An unemployed, down-and-out factory worker in the Midwest can benefit from education just as much as a five-year-old child."

"Wait just a G.o.dd.a.m.n minute," Floyd Wayne Vishniak said, out loud.

It was just a little too much - that bit about the down-and-out midwestern factory worker. He rewound his mental tape of the last few minutes and played it back inside his head, ignoring the rest of Cozzano"s speech (Cozzano had now gone on to talk about the need for corporate America to shape up and restructure itself).

Vishniak held the d.i.c.k Tracy watch up to his eye and scrutinized the scene carefully. Cozzano didn"t have any notes up there on the lectern. And it didn"t seem like he was using a TelePrompTer. He was looking around naturally, seemingly speaking off-the-cuff, making everything up as he went along. This was a habit that had been noticed and remarked upon by all the papers that Vishniak had been reading over the summer: Cozzano, who in years past had written his own speeches and read them back, hewing closely to a fixed script, had, in the last few months, taken to speaking extemporaneously.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was beginning to understand why. William A. Cozzano was reading his mind. He was reading Vishniak"s brain waves and telling him exactly what he wanted to hear! How was he doing it?

Through the wrist.w.a.tch, no doubt. That was the key to the whole thing.

Vishniak rotated his forearm, the palm of his hand facing upward, to expose the little b.u.t.ton that would release the ratchet and pop the watch off his wrist. All he had to do was take it off and then he would be a free man again, and William A. Cozzano would no longer be able to read his brain waves. He had been wearing it continuously for a couple of weeks, and underneath it his skin was itching fiercely. But he couldn"t take it off, no matter what. He had to trust his instincts. He knew that they were watching him and that to remove the wrist.w.a.tch meant certain death, a nice dose of sh.e.l.lfish poison straight into his arm. He"d never get that thing off.

He was on a suicide mission.

He jumped off the tailgate, climbing into the cab of his truck, dug his road atlas out from under the seat, and began to contemplate possible approach vectors to the seat of all evil in the world.

49.

SHORTLY AFTER FLOYD WAYNE VISHNIAK ENTERED THE GREATER Washington metropolitan area, something completely shocking and unprecedented happened to him: he got a job.

It happened in Pentagon Plaza, of all places. He had gone there expecting to stage a bloodbath and ended up filling out job applications. The unpredictability of life in America was a constant source ofamus.e.m.e.nt to him.

He had spent half a day doing recon. Pentagon Plaza, he concluded after driving around it at high speed several dozen times, was a single building that just happened to look like a whole bunch of different buildings very close together. There was a parking ramp (the rich and powerful had to have their parking s.p.a.ces!) and a low, squat, enormous structure mostly concealed behind that, and rising up from it were a couple of skysc.r.a.pers - Pentagon Towers. But they were all part of the same complex. The fortress of darkness owned and opened by Ogle Data Research.

How best to make his approach? His maps told him that there was a Metro stop beneath Pentagon Plaza. That would be a good way to get in close. But in the end he decided against it. He had no idea what was going to happen. If he didn"t get killed, he would want to get out of there fast, and taking the subway wasn"t the way to do it. Better to have his truck handy.

He could park outside and walk in or - daring idea - he could actually drive on to the parking ramp. This latter idea, while it might seem impossibly audacious, held major advantages. It was worth checking out. He drove past the entrances to the parking ramp several times, going very slowly, his window rolled down, and observed people driving into the place. Everyone got in without ha.s.sle. They pulled up to a little machine, slammed a b.u.t.ton, and pulled out a ticket. The gate rose up and they drove on in. No one inspected them. You didn"t have to show any kind of ID.

It was worth a try. The worst thing that could happen was that he"d have to crash through the gate. He pulled into the chute. So much adrenaline was pumping through his system now that his teeth hurt and his gums felt hot and swollen.

He stopped by the little machine, and, trying to look nonchalant, like he did this every day, he reached out and punched the b.u.t.ton. A cardboard ticket spat out of the machine. He jerked it out. The gate rose up.

Calmly, like he belonged here, Floyd Wayne Vishniak piloted his pickup truck into the bowels of Pentagon Plaza.

The parking ramp held no secrets. He found a s.p.a.ce and backed into it. This unorthodox maneuver caused consternation and horn-honking among several other would-be parkers, but (a) they could all f.u.c.k themselves, (b) he had a gun, and (c) he needed to park this way so he could pull out rapidly when the time came.