Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Eleanor’s mind was whirling, and not just because she had taken two glasses of sherry. She had to see Mary Catherine. And providentially, one of her assistants 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 assure you,” Lady Wilburdon said, seeing her to the elevators. Eleanor had now been enveloped by her campaign staff.

  “Goodbye,” 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 sunglasses 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 ass. There were only two men in the vehicle, the driver and the passenger, 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 nigger!” Jeremiah Freel screamed at the driver, which was an interesting choice of words since the 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 nigger. 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. “Shit!” 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.

  “So that’s what tertiary syphilis does to a man,” said the driver of the sedan, screaming down the Dulles Access Road at ninety miles per hour in hot pursuit of the limousine. “They said he was an asshole but I had no idea.”

  “Shut up and drive,” said the one in the passenger seat. “You have any idea how badly we screwed this up? Anybody catches sight of his face and we’re finished.”

  They drove very fast, but they had a hard time catching up with Jeremiah Freel in his limousine. In theory the big limo was supposed to be the slower vehicle. The difference between them, though, was this: the Prince of Darkness was not afraid to ram. Not only was he not afraid to ram, he was practiced. Any vehicle in his lane not going as fast as he was got rear-ended and that was that. Lane changes were accomplished by force majeure. They passed at least three vehicles that had veered into the ditch or the median strip. In the end, the only way to catch up with Jeremiah Freel was to pull on to the shoulder and floor it. Which is pretty much what they did, though by the time they actually caught up with him, he was screaming across the Potomac River on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, vectored into the heart of the Capital like a poisoned dum-dum from a sniper’s rifle.

  “You know what he’s doing?” the driver said. “He’s going to the goddamn Watergate!”

  “Head him off,” the passenger said.

  Once they realized where Freel was going, they were able to do a bit of deft curb-hopping, lawn-driving, and zooming down oncoming lanes, and pull their sedan directly across Freel’s path just a few yards short of the entrance to the Watergate. Freel rammed them anyway, caving in the side of the sedan, but both of the occupants saw it coming and dove and rolled out of the other side of the car just before impact.

  The suit who had been sitting in the passenger seat pulled a gun out of his armpit and used the butt of the weapon to smash the driver’s-side window of the limousine. The black glass dissolved into tempered fragments held together by the plastic sheet that had been used to blacken the window. When this debris was pulled out of the way, Jeremiah Freel was exposed, slumped against the steering wheel with a big laceration across his forehead, blood streaming out and dripping off the horn button into his lap. He was barely conscious, mumbling deliriously.

  “Drive much?” he said. “Where’d you get your fucking license? K mart? Get the fuck out of my way, asshole, I got an equalizer in the glove compartment and more lawyers than you’ve got friends.”

  They shoved Freel across the seat on to the passenger side and then climbed in after him. The driver backed the limousine away from the wrecked sedan. A steady wisp of steam was piping from its radiator but it was still drivable. The passenger wriggled his hands into a pair of latex gloves and then
set about tying Jeremiah Freel up with plastic handcuffs. Only when he was finished with that did he begin applying direct pressure to Freel’s forehead.

  Waiting at a stoplight, the two men in suits exchanged looks and rolled their eyes at each other. “Campaign consultants,” the driver said, “gotta love “em.”

  “Oh, this is a good one,” said the chairman of the Republican National Committee, inspecting a sheet of paper he had just pulled from a file folder marked FREEL. “During a campaign visit to Minot, North Dakota, you ran a school bus off a road, causing thirty-six injuries, ten of them serious. The parents sued you for a hundred million dollars and won.”

  “Fuck you,” Jeremiah Freel said. “Fuck your mother too.” Freel had a nice dark line of stitches across his forehead, tracing a long welt that perfectly matched the curved of the limousine’s steering wheel.

  “When we add that to the libel and slander judgments from the last three presidential campaigns - let me see, those alone add up to almost another hundred million dollars, which you owe to a dozen and a half different people, including, by the way, myself. You owe me four million.”

  “Eat my shit,” Jeremiah Freel said.

  Several other distinguished-looking and well-dressed men were sitting around the conference table. They were in a suite in a very private hotel a few blocks north of the White House. They had rented a whole floor, covered the windows with black stuff, disabled the elevators, and posted guards with submachine guns by all the stairwells. Jeremiah Freel was sitting in a luxurious padded leather chair in the middle of the table. Standing behind him were two men with a combined weight of six hundred pounds, wearing latex gloves and clear plastic face shields.

  The other men sitting around the table were all glaring coldly at Freel. One by one, they began to raise their hands and speak up.

  “You owe me three million plus legal fees,” said the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

  “One point five,” said another man, holding up his hand.

  “Eight hundred thousand,” barked another man.

  “One point one.”

  “Half a mil and a printed apology in The Miami Herald.”

  “What the hell is this, a fucking star chamber?” Jeremiah Freel said. “Why don’t you just tell me what the hell you’re after?”

  “We’re after Cozzano,” the GOP chairman said.

  “Fine. You got him. He’s a dead man,” Freel said. “By the time I’m finished with that wop son of a bitch, he’ll curse his mother for every having given birth to him. He won’t be able to cash a check north of the Equator. Children will spit on his knees. His dog will climb on to his bed in the middle of the night and try to tear his face off and he’ll beg for it to happen.”

  There was an awed silence in the room.

  “Don’t you want to hear what we are prepared to offer you in exchange for your services?” the Democratic chairman said uncertainly.

  “Fuck that,” Freel said. “You guys have no imagination. You think I do this shit to make money. But that’s not true. I been sitting down there in Rio waiting for something like this. I do it for the pure joy of a job well done. Now, did you assemble my A-Team, or not?”

  “We got ‘em.”

  “All of ‘em?”

  “All the ones who aren’t dead, in prison, or running other campaigns,” said the Republican chairman.

  54

  A bit later than a month before election day, a flatbed truck carrying a GODS shipping container could be seen fighting its way through the bewildering vortex of Boston’s Kenmore Square, on the eastern fringes of Boston University. The truck eventually broke through by asserting the divine right of semitrailer rigs to go anywhere they wanted, and entered the campus.

  This area swarmed with Boston cops, campus police, men in dark suits, and nicely dressed young persons wearing COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT buttons. An impressive minority carried walkie-talkies. These people had been seizing parking spaces for the better part of the day. They did it by the power vested in them by various high authorities; by sheer chutzpah; and in some cases by the brutally simple expedient of placing their bodies in those places and refusing to move when motorists tried to bluff them out. When the big GODS truck arrived, it found nine consecutive parking spaces waiting for it, which in Boston happened about as often as a Grand Alignment of the planets, or, for that matter, a World Series victory.

  Not long afterward, a motorcade sliced through the Gordian knot of Kenmore Square and pulled up near Morse Auditorium, a squat, domed synagogue-turned-lecture-hall that was already about half full of media personnel and politically conscious students.

  William A. Cozzano emerged from one of the cars, waved cheerily to a number of supporters who had gathered in back for a brief sight of the Great Man, and followed an advance person into the back of the hall. A dressing room had already been staked out behind the stage. He changed to a fresh shirt and had his hair and makeup fixed by trained professionals.

  Then he walked on to the stage. From here he could see a wall of television lights and, dimly, a dark auditorium beyond it. The auditorium was full of students who applauded him when he emerged from the wings. Two chairs had been set up in the middle of the stage, angled toward each other, a table between them set with a glass water pitcher and two tumblers.

  William A. Cozzano was going to talk politics with the chairman of the Political Science Department, a long-time Washington figure who had taken an academic appointment that gave him the freedom to do pretty much whatever he wanted with his time; in return, he lent prestige to the university. The whole idea was that the discussion would be loose and unscripted, and Cozzano would be open to questions, both from the audience (mostly students) and the local media. This was a daring maneuver, exactly the kind of thing that Tip McLane probably couldn’t pull off without offend­ing half of the ethnic groups in the United States.

  Cozzano ascended the stage a few minutes before air time, unbuttoned his jacket, and sat down in his chair. A technician assisted him in clipping a microphone to his lapel, and asked him to say a few words so that they could adjust their sound levels. Cozzano quoted the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, which raised a smattering of applause from the students and even from a few of the TV people.

  The host, looking professional, sat in his chair and went through a sound check of his own. At five seconds before eight p.m., a man in a headset gave them a digital countdown (he used his fingers) and then the host delivered some prepared remarks, reading them from a TelePrompTer. Then he turned toward Cozzano and asked him a question about Middle East policy.

  This was a hard pitch. The politics of the Israeli/Palestinian question had been dissected and analyzed to an impossibly minute degree, over decades, by persons whose sole function in life was to know everything about these issues. Every squiggle and jog in the contour of Israel’s border had its experts, who knew about everything that had happened in that place since the time of the pharaoh. West Bank settlement and the status of the PLO had become more arcane than the concept of the Trinity in the early church: every conceivable idea had already been come up with, and its ramifications worked out and analyzed. Of all the millions of possible opinions one could have on these subjects, there were only a few that a presidential candidate could get away with having, and in order merely to explain these opinions the candidate had to master a new vocabulary and even a new form of logic that did not really apply anywhere else. The best way to trip up a governor who was running for president was to ask him a seemingly simple, innocuous question about the Middle East and then wait for him to hang himself.

  Cozzano maneuvered through it perfectly, delivering an answer that was seemingly erudite; that hit all the key buzzwords that would prevent him from being vilified by Jewish organizations; and yet was so vague and imprecise that it said practically nothing at all. Like compulsory figure in an ice-skating competition, it was devoid of content and not much fun to look at, but to the initiate, i
t was an extremely impressive display of technical skill.

  By the time he was finished, it was time to break for a com­mercial. The host made a witty, self-deprecating remark about how dull the show had been up to this point and then promised that the rest would be more lively. The students applauded. The director, staring at a monitor, turned to the performers and said, “You’re clear.”

  Cozzano turned toward the table and poured himself half a glass of water. He was just about to jump into some small talk with the host when a voice came out of the darkness behind the television lights.

  “Governor Cozzano, Frank Boyle from The Boston Globe. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I just got a call on my portable phone here from our correspondent who’s following your daughter in Minnesota. He called from the lobby of the hotel where she is staying in Minneapolis. Apparently, Mary Catherine was late for an appearance at Macalester College. All the press went back to her hotel, and the floor where her room was is swarming with cops and detectives. Our correspondent talked to one of these detectives on background, and he said that apparently she was assaulted in the hallway by Floyd Wayne Vishniak. He managed to get past her Secret Service men and put a bullet into her head and Mary Catherine bled to death right there in the hallway.”

  A hundred feet away, Cy Ogle, perched in the Eye of Cy, sat and watched William A. Cozzano’s bio readouts go ballistic.

  The television monitor in the Eye of Cy was patched into the pool feed from the cameras in the auditorium, and Ogle couldn’t help watching it. Cozzano’s face had turned deathly pale as Frank Boyle of the Globe told his story, and had now gone red. His eyes had become red and glistening too. And Ogle could see from the bio monitors that Cozzano’s heart rate had gone up to 172, almost three times the norm. His blood pressure was explosively high.