Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  Mary Catherine mocked him for being so inept. That was all Cozzano needed. He started playing to win. He was tenacious, and over the months, became good. He played once a day with Mary Catherine. He played it so often that even the Secret Service folks and the people at control stopped noticing it.

  Cozzano’s cabinet members were announced. They were mostly youthful and in good physical shape, their names indicated a pleasing and politically correct distribution of ethnic groups and genders, they had gone to the best schools, they had outstanding records. They were all perfect.

  A day later, Mary Catherine got a Christmas card from Zeldo. It included several photos: a couple of Zeldo riding his mountain bike on the bluffs above the Pacific and a few of Zeldo at work.

  One of the photos showed Zeldo sitting in the courtyard of the Radhakrishnan Institute, enjoying caffé latte and typing away on his laptop. In the background, seated at another table, was one of the institute’s patients. Mary Catherine recognized the man: he was the secretary-designate of Defense.

  She went through the other photos very carefully, and saw three more patients “accidentally” caught in the background: the secretaries-designated of State, Treasury, and Commerce, and the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

  Early on the afternoon of December eighteenth, Mary Catherine went cross-country skiing. Three inches of new snow had fallen the night before. By the standards of post-greenhouse effect Illinois, it was a winter wonderland. She tossed her skis and poles into the back of the family’s four-wheel-drive pickup truck, checked her arsenal of waxes, and took off. A few minutes’ drive took her to the old Cozzano farm. She got out, locked the front hubs, shifted into four-wheel-drive, pulled on to a dirt lane between fields, and drove for half a mile or so. Then she put her skis on and took off.

  After a mile or so she was able to coast down into the gentle cleft of a river valley, lightly forested with skinny ironwood trees. She followed the river for another half mile until she came upon a beat-up, ramshackle old cabin, really more of a glorified duck blind than a dwelling. Parked beside it was a big Chevy pickup truck, and as she approached from downwind she could smell cigar smoke and hear subdued conversation.

  Mel Meyer, ludicrously clad in a heavy insulated farmer’s coverall, emerged from the building, walked up to Mary Catherine, and ran a bug detector over her body. This time he got a faint radio signal from one of the buttons on her shirt. Mary Catherine skiied a couple of hundred feet away from the shack and left the button under a log. Then she came back and gave Mel a long hug.

  Inside the shack were a bulky, round-shouldered black man in his fifties, and a huge white guy with bushy eyebrows and a salt-and-pepper hair and beard. Mary Catherine knew them both already. Respectively, they were Rufus Bell, USMC Retired, and Craig (“the Crag”) Addison, Chicago Bears, Retired. “How’s he doing?” Bell asked.

  “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 embarrassed.

  “Okay,” Mel said, “now listen carefully, because I’m freezing my ass 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 Institute 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 Willy?”

  “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 glasses 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 god’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 settle
d 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 GODS 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 cluster 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 brick driveway at the front entrance just as the cluster of agents, and the dignitaries hidden among them, was bursting through the brass 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 Canal, a narrow trench of stagnant water lined with massive, moss-covered masonry blocks.

  The President-elect wanted to go for a damn 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 canal passed 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. Déjà vu, I guess.”

  The family, trailed by the two agents, began to jog down the path, which angled up and away from the canal 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 canal 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 buttress 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 pass, 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 GODS 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 buttresses 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?