Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  The couldn’t just send out hit men to kill Vishniak and the others. No, that was just a little too obvious. Instead they were taking the subtle approach. All the way across Illinois, Vishniak had been laughing at himself. To think he had actually believed the ridiculous story that the little Jew had told him! “We’re doing research on public opinion and we want you to wear this Dick Tracy watch.”

  Research on Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s brain waves was more like it. They were watching him. Waiting for him to figure out the conspiracy and make his move. And he had played into their hands. He had worn the watch. He had even sent them letters, explaining his opinions in detail, and in these letters, he had made the incredibly stupid mistake of tipping them off to the fact that he was suspicious.

  He could have just taken the watch off his wrist and been free of it, but he was a little smarter than that. To take the watch off his wrist at this point would probably mean certain death. They would send out a hit man to get him.

  To hell with a hit man. The watch probably was booby-trapped. It probably had a little needle coated with shellfish toxin, and if he tried to take it off now, that needle, activated by a satellite transmission from ODR headquarters, would jab into the underside of his wrist and shoot the poison straight into his vein. But as long as he kept wearing the watch, they’d think he had still been duped. He could continue his careful reconnaissance of the Cozzano campaign.

  This was the first step: to get close to Cozzano, to get a good look at his security apparatus, and so memorize the faces of the people who were close to him. Not the obvious ones like Eleanor Richmond and Mary Catherine - they were just pawns too - but the men in suits who hovered around the edges, just out of reach of the arc light’s rainbow-tinged border.

  The platform was huge, as big as the stage for a major rock concert, and it was hollow, and all of the mysterious men in suits had special access to the cleverly concealed doors and stairways that led beneath. All the doors were guarded by uniformed cops who Would only let certain people through; you had to have a special backstage pass around your neck. But from time to time when some bigshot went in or out, a door would swing open for a few seconds, giving Vishniak a glimpse into the hidden world under Cozzano’s feet. What he saw confirmed everything he’d been thinking: thick black cables snaking everywhere, and banks of television monitors, men wearing radio headsets, talking on phones and typing on computers. And in the center of it all, hard to glimpse through the tangle of technicians and cables and structural supports, sitting right in the middle of the web, was a semitrailer rig, a nice new one. He couldn’t see enough of it to read the words on its side, but he didn’t have to; you could recognize it from its color scheme; it was a GODS truck.

  He took a good look at the people under the platform whenever those doors opened up. These were the ones who were controlling Cozzano’s mind. The ones who, sometime between now and Election Day, were going to be taking nine-millimeter bullets between the eyes, fired from Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s plastic gun.

  Vishniak jumped up and down and screamed along with the crowd. “I’ll save you, Governor Cozzano! I’ll get you out of this conspiracy or die trying!” But his words of encouragement were lost in the tumult.

  47

  Eleanor didn’t get a real chance to talk to William A. Cozzano until several hours after the announcement. She had met him once, briefly, prior to the debate, and spoken with him in formal circumstances, in a conference room full of flacks and advisers, before the announcement. After the announcement they had spent most of their time partying in the ballroom of Cozzano’s hotel. This had not been a real party, of course, any more than a talk show appearance was a real conversation; it had been a staged event, and she had had to stay on her toes the entire time. She knew, without being told, that she was going to have to get in the habit of holding her tongue more than she was used to, and try to avoid making gaffes.

  Finally, shortly before midnight, she and Cozzano and Mary Catherine got together in Cozzano’s hotel suite, on the top floor of the hotel, naturally. The women changed out of their party dresses and into comfortable, casual clothes, and they had a nightcap up on the balcony.

  She had known about William A. Cozzano for many years and she had always been a bit put off by the hypermacho foundations of his image: war and football. He had always seemed like the type who’d be great for smoking cigars and shooting wild game with corporate CEOs, but who wouldn’t be able to handle the subtle nuances of national politics, who wouldn’t really grasp women’s issues.

  After about five minutes on the balcony with him, she decided she was wrong. He wasn’t a macho shithead at all. He was courtly in an almost European way and he had a fine, self-deprecating sense of humour. He had an easy rapport with his daughter that told Eleanor everything about what kind of man he was.

  They ended up conversing for more than an hour. Cozzano had a penchant for anecdotes and he told several of them. Toward the end of the evening, Eleanor could tell that this was beginning to make Mary Catherine slightly uneasy. She would shift in her chair and say, “Oh, Dad!” when he was beginning to launch into a story. And as he was telling these stories, she would watch his face intently and occasionally frown or bite her lip.

  Eleanor wasn’t quite sure why. Cozzano liked to talk, but this was not senile rambling by any means. It didn’t make Eleanor uncomfortable. He told his stories concisely and they always had a point that was germane to the conversation. But all they did was make Mary Catherine agitated.

  It looked to Eleanor as though father and daughter had some talking to do, and so finally, a little after one in the morning, she excused herself, insisting that she could find her own way down to the lobby and back to her own hotel. She wanted to enjoy her last evening of freedom before her fulltime Secret Service contingent kicked in the following morning.

  The elevator came quickly - demand was low at this time of the morning - and she climbed on and punched the button for the lobby. When the doors closed, she found herself alone in a room for the first time since Mary Catherine had come to see her earlier that day. She was exhausted. She dropped her tote bag on the floor, sagged against the wall of the elevator, closed her eyes, and heaved an enormous sigh.

  This was the type of pressure she’d never known before. Since her first meeting with Cozzano earlier today, not a second had gone by without her photograph being taken. It boggled the mind to think about a lifestyle in which you could never pick your nose, never allow your hair or your face to get messy.

  The elevator slowed. Eleanor opened one eye a crack and saw that they were passing the tenth floor. She closed her eyes again, content to spend another few minutes relaxing before she exited back into public life again - no doubt, photographers would be waiting on the sidewalk.

  The doors opened and Eleanor sensed someone climbing on board. Remembering that she was now a role model, she forced herself to open her eyes and stand up straight. It was a thin man in a suit. He had very short hair and burning, hyperactive eyes. He was staring at her. His eyes dropped to her tote bag.

  “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 on top. 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, snatching purses and picking pockets. They’d be in the lobby any second and then this guy would be in trouble. “Goddamn it,” she said, and kicked him in the knee.

  “You bitch,” 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 button 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 passing 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 breasts, dressed half in a cop uniform and half in sexy 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 pissed. “What the hell 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 hell 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 buttons, 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 dicks 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 GODS cargo plane. It carried a GODS 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 pissed.”

  “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 passing 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 grass-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 municipal 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 apron, 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 municipal property. The presence of a Boeing facility next door was a convenient accident.