Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  They paused somewhere between N and P streets. Mary Catherine and William had gotten all the way down to gym shorts and running shoes, and James was able to catch up as soon as they stopped running.

  William crashed down the bank. A cube of solid masonry projected from the bank and into the stream, carrying a storm sewer outfall a couple of feet in diameter. William A. Cozzano, thigh-deep in icy water, leaned into it for a moment with his left arm and shoulder, and emerged carrying a couple of plastic garbage bags weighted with stones. He threw them up on to the bank and then climbed up after them.

  Mary Catherine was stark naked by this point. She ripped open one of the bags to expose folds of dark green cloth, and a few pairs of running shoes. The shoes were labelled in magic markers: WILLY, M.C., and JAMES. She tossed the appropriate pairs to James and William, then hauled the clothing out: three identical sweatsuits.

  The change of clothes ate up about thirty seconds and then they were running down the footpath again. Mary Catherine was carrying a small black plastic box in her hand; the blazing red light on one end danced up and down as she pumped her arms. She had dropped to a slower, sustainable pace. They passed under several more towering stone bridges, at one point fording the creek again in order to keep it between them and the Parkway.

  The path dead-ended at the fence of Oak Hill Cemetery, which ran downhill from Georgetown and all the way to the creek’s edge. They made a left and ran parallel to the fence, following a footpath in the red, rocky soil, terraced by innumerable exposed tree roots. A few stray gravestones poked askew from the carpet of ivy.

  Cemetery gates loomed on their right and they had emerged into the city again. They were in Montrose Park. It was two blocks long and a couple of hundred feet wide, bordered on one side by the woods and on the other by an alley that ran behind a row of old four-story red brick apartments. This was a bad stretch of blacktop, patches on top of older patches, covered with mud, leaf litter, and parked cars with the usual odd D.C. mixture of license plates. A delivery van, painted with the logo of a ubiquitous local diaper service, was sitting there with its motor running.

  Mary Catherine ran up to it, hauled open the back doors, and motioned James and William in. They climbed in the back and she followed, pulling the doors shut behind them. They all collapsed, unable to do much more than suck in oxygen. But Mary Catherine was laughing, James was sputtering and starting to ask questions, and William’s mind was elsewhere.

  Mary Catherine was thinking that, no matter what else happened today, they had all gone out for a vigorous run together, just like the old days, and they had gotten wet and messy and enjoyed themselves. Now she was ready for all hell to break loose. She caught her father’s eye for a moment and realized he was thinking the same thing.

  They drive for fifteen or twenty minutes, not really knowing where they were, and then the truck stopped, and they could hear a garage door grinding shut behind them.

  They staggered upstairs and found themselves in an old town house with plywood windowpanes. Mattresses and a few pieces of junk furniture were scattered around. But it had a few touches that made them feel at home: a coffeemaker on the floor, its red light shining cheerfully, and a sack of bagels next to a stack of paper plates, and, sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, chewing on a bagel and going over some papers, one Mel Meyer.

  “Willy, if you can hear me, get your left hand over here and grab this pen. You have a hell of a lot of papers to sign before we get you dressed,” Mel said.

  “James,” Mary Catherine said, “grab some coffee. I have a few things to tell you.”

  59

  In downtown Rosslyn, Virginia, a man in a nice suit and a trench coat, wearing a neatly trimmed beard, and hair so short that his scalp almost showed through, emerged from a Metro station and walked up the street to a mailbox. He removed a standard legal-sized envelope from his breast pocket, held it between his hands, and contemplated it for a few moments. Then he dropped it into the mailbox. He continued down the street, turned a corner, and walked downhill toward Key Bridge. Ahead of him, on the far side of the Potomac, he could see Dixie Liquors, which was on M Street, which would take him through the center of Georgetown and on to Pennsylvania. You could fire a bullet straight down the centerline of Pennsylvania and it would pass through the middle of the White House and continue down to the presidential lectern on the reviewing stand on the Capitol steps.

  Unfortunately Floyd Wayne Vishniak’s Fleischacker was not quite powerful or accurate enough for that. He would have to follow much the same route on foot. But that was okay. He had planned this thing pretty well, had left himself plenty of time to get there. As he walked across Key Bridge, pounded by a cold crosswind that found every leak in his trench coat, he mentally reviewed the contents of the letter, which he had written at one o’clock this morning in the front seat of his pickup truck, parked in the holler in West Virginia.

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

  Parts Unknown

  United States of America

  Letters to the Editor

  Washington Post

  Washington D.C.

  Dear Mr. (or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor:

  As of yesterday A.M. I have spent, or maybe the right word is wasted, a total of $89.50 on your worthless rag, and this is not counting money spent on the other papers and magazines I had to buy just to cross-check all of the so-called facts you printed and find out which were true and which were false.

  So I know full well that you will screw everything up. So here is some information. The name is spelled V-I-S-H-N-I-A-K (see top of page). I am not a psycho. Just a concerned American citizen.

  And please don’t screw this up: I - me - Floyd - did this ALL BY MYSELF. I did not get help from anyone - no co-conspirators, foreign governments, terrorist groups, or anyone else.

  Yes, hard as it might be for you smug East Coast bastards to comprehend, a hick from the sticks is actually capable of doing something ALL BY HIMSELF.

  See you in Hell - where we can look forward to many interesting conversations.

  You will be hearing from me again soon, I am sure.

  Sincerely,

  Floyd Wayne Vishniak

  By the time he had made it across Key Bridge he had decided that it was a good letter. He turned right underneath the red neon sign of Dixie Liquors and headed for the center of Washington.

  On the southeastern fringe of Capitol Hill, just beyond the boundary between the yuppified zone and the ghetto, a tour bus made a difficult turn into a narrow alley running through the center of a block. Facing on the alley was a long, low, one-story cinder-block building, a former box-printing plant. Air burst from its brakes and the bus settled to a stop in the alley. The door opened up and men began to climb off. They walked in single file around the front of the bus and entered the building through a wide steel door, which was flanked on the inside and the outside by middle-aged men with nervous eyes and guns in their armpits.

  Most, but not all, of the men were enormous. They ranged in age from their early thirties to their mid-fifties. Some of them were wearing dark suits already and some were carrying them in garment bags. They filed into the building, which was a single huge room. It was mostly empty; its concrete floor was scarred where huge pieces of machinery had been uprooted and dragged away. Most of the illumination was provided by skylights. But when all of the men had come inside, the door had been closed, more lights were turned on.

  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 quantities of doughnuts. A lot of these men knew each other and so in some ways the atmosphere was like that of an old class 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 oppo
site 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 shit,” 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 Constitution 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 fucking documents 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 documents 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 Willy 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 Willy 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 ballpoint pen (SKILCRAFT U.S. GOVERNMENT) out of her purse, and started signing her name to documents. All of the documents in the white envelope said:

  Eleanor Richmond

  Vice President, United States of America

  All of the documents 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 Tshirts. 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 spaces - 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 Constitutional scholars and locking them all in a room until they made up their minds. The people who had the parking spaces won the argument. The decision was sealed when those parking spaces were occupied by flatbed semitrailer rigs with big GODS 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 Constitution 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 GODS 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 GODS 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 asshole 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 GODS trucks stayed where they were, accumulating 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 hell of a lot like a kidnapping. But the outgoing President, and several news outlets, had received brief, untraceable telephone calls from Mary Catherine Cozzano, assuring 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.