Interface

by Neal Stephenson

  William A., James, and Mary Catherine Cozzano emerged from the Farragut West Metro station at eleven o’clock. They had reached Pennsylvania Avenue before anyone recognized them.

  The person who did was a well-dressed man in a trench coat, with a neatly trimmed beard and very short hair, proceeding west on Pennsylvania. He was standing at a street-corner waiting for the light to change when he saw the Cozzanos coming toward him. “Good morning President Cozzano,” he said.

  The light changed and all of them crossed Seventeenth Street together. The Old Executive Office Building was on their right, the White House a stone’s throw away.

  “Good morning. How are you today?” Cozzano said.

  “Just fine, sir, and you?”

  “I’m great, thank you,” Cozzano said.

  “How’s your head?” the man asked, as they reached the east side of Seventeenth Street. They stopped at the corner and waited for the light to change. Across Pennsylvania, in front of the White House gates, was a mob of cops and Secret Service. One of them noticed the Cozzanos. Binoculars swiveled in their direction. A Secret Service detail broke from the gates and ran toward them, plunging directly into traffic.

  Cozzano looked at the man quizzically. “My head’s fine,” he said, “why do you ask?”

  “I need to know if they’re controlling your brain with radio waves,” the man said, as the WALK light came on. “It’s very important for me to know this.”

  Mary Catherine’s and James’s faces fell into expressionless masks. Crossing the street, they got between Cozzano and the man in the trench coat, and stared at the man coldly. But Cozzano laughed indulgently. “You know, there was a movie that I saw, at the Tuscola Main Street Theater, when I was a kid, about mind control. Some mad scientist had taken over people’s brains and turned them into zombies …”

  “Don’t tell me another anecdote!” the man said. “I don’t want to hear any of your stupid anecdotes!”

  “I’m just trying to answer your question,” Cozzano said cheerfully.

  “Ever since they started controlling your brain, you can’t think any more - all you do is tell those heart-warming stories!” the man in the trench coat said.

  They were approaching the south side of Pennsylvania. James pulled up close to the man and stared at him coldly. “You’re out of line,” he said.

  The man in the trench coat stared back at James, not intimidated in the slightest. “I’m out of line, huh?” he said. His total lack of fear unnerved James a little bit. James almost tripped over the curb.

  Suddenly, the Cozzanos were surrounded by men in suits and trench coats. Mary Catherine was startled for a moment before she realized that they were Secret Service men.

  Then she looked back at the strange man. But he was gone. “That was weird,” she said. “That man didn’t show any of the external symptoms of an active psychotic. But he sure talked like one.”

  The presidential motorcade pulled out of the White House gates on to Pennsylvania Avenue at 11:30 a.m., hung a right and headed for the Capitol. Inside, distributed among several cars, were the outgoing President, his wife, the outgoing Vice President and his wife, Cozzano, Mary Catherine, James, Eleanor Richmond, and her two children Clarice and Harmon, Jr. Eleanor’s mother was already in her place at the Capitol, attended by a couple of nurses.

  The outgoing and incoming presidents sat across from each other in the back of the presidential limousine and made small talk. The motorcade wound around a couple of corners, getting past the Treasury and Western Plaza, and finally pulled on to the long uninterrupted stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue that ran straight to the Capitol. William A. Cozzano bent down and peered through the window, across the front seat, through the windshield, and down to the Capitol, where the temporary podium was clearly visible. Federal Triangle was on the right; half a bloc ahead rose the towering spire of the Old Post Office.

  Cozzano reached across his body with his left hand, grabbed the limousine’s door handle and popped the door open.

  “What are you doing?” the outgoing President said.

  “Quite frankly, I have no idea,” Cozzano said. He jumped out of the limousine, which was traveling at a slow jogger’s pace. The driver, seeing what was happening, braked the limousine to a stop.

  “But-”

  Cozzano leaned into the open door. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I think everything’s going to be okay.” Then he slammed the door and strode southward across the intersection.

  By now the entire motorcade had come to a halt. Mary Catherine and James had jumped out of their limousine and run forward to join Cozzano, who plunged directly into the crowd lining the parade route. He was followed by a number of Secret Service agents; but although the crowd opened wide to accept the Cozzanos, it closed ranks behind them, forming a dense wall of bodies.

  Large bodies. It seemed that this entire section of the parade route was lined with men no shorter than six foot six, and no lighter than two hundred and seventy-five pounds. The Secret Service men tried to elbow their way through, but elbows had no effect on these guys.

  Eventually they got through by drawing guns. By that time, the Cozzanos had disappeared. Again.

  The Federal Triangle Metro station was half a block away on Twelfth Street. Like all of the stations in the D.C. Metro system, it included an elevator for wheelchair users. Rufus Bell was standing in that elevator, leaning against the door to keep it from closing, and he had an empty wheelchair with him.

  The Cozzanos arrived at a dead sprint, pursued only by a few autograph seekers. James and Mary Catherine got on first, then Cozzano followed, spinning around as he came through the door and slamming down ass-first into the wheelchair. Bell let the door slide closed and then the elevator began to drop.

  Mary Catherine was standing to the left of the wheelchair, a heavy purse slung over her shoulder. She unclasped it and opened it up.

  “Here goes nothing,” Cozzano said.

  His left hand reached into Mary Catherine’s purse, rummaged around, and pulled out a black box with four metal prongs on the end. He squeezed the trigger once, testing it, and a purple lightning bolt snapped between the prongs.

  “I already tested it, Dad,” Mary Catherine said affectionately, her voice already getting thick with emotion.

  “I know you did, peanut,” Cozzano said.

  Then he shoved the prongs into the side of his head and pulled the trigger.

  His body convulsed so violently that it threw him half out of the wheelchair. James and Mary Catherine stood well away until the high-voltage current had stopped blasting through Cozzano’s body. His arm snapped out into a stiff-arm position, as though fending off a linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul, and the stun gun flew across the elevator car, bounced off the wall, and clattered to the floor. Rufus Bell picked it up and shoved it back into Mary Catherine’s purse.

  Mary Catherine had gone into an unemotional, doctorly mode. She grabbed one of her father’s arms and got James to take the other one, and they righted his limp body in the wheelchair, then buckled the lap belt.

  The elevator doors opened; they were on the platform of the Metro station. A Blue Line train bound for Addison Road was sitting on the tracks, waiting for them; the doors had been physically blocked open by more members of the Cozzano crew, and the D.C. Chief of Police himself, still resplendent in his full dress uniform, was standing at the head of the train, talking to the conductor.

  Bell wheeled Cozzano out of the elevator, across the platform, and on to the train. The doors closed behind them and the train began to move. They had a whole car to themselves; sheets of newsprint had already been taped up along the insides of the windows so that none of the shocked tourists on the platform could capture an image of the unconscious President-elect in film or video.

  Mary Catherine pulled a stethoscope out of her purse, stuck it in her ears, and held it up to her father’s chest. “He’s got a normal rhythm,” she said. “It sounds good.”

  Coz
zano was not unconscious, just dazed. Mary Catherine pulled a small white tube out of her pocket, snapped it in half, and held it up under Cozzano’s nose. Cozzano’s brow furrowed, his eyes rolled around in their sockets, and he snapped his head away from the smell.

  Lights flashed by, illuminating the papered-over windows. They had rolled through the Smithsonian station without stopping and were now swinging through the broad curve that would take them eastward into L’Enfant Plaza.

  Two Yellow Line trains, pointed in opposite directions, were being held for them at L’Enfant Plaza. One of them was a northbound train that could take them straight back up to the Archives station, right along the parade route. They could reemerge at that point and continue on to the Capitol as if nothing had happened.

  The other train was southbound. It could take them to National Airport, where a private jet was waiting for them. It would take them far away, if that was necessary. Hopefully, it would take them somewhere with good hospitals.

  The train doors opened to reveal L’Enfant Plaza. Their way out on to the platform was lined with large and serious-looking men. Standing right in the middle was Mel Meyer.

  Bell wheeled Cozzano out on to the platform and right up to Mel, who kneeled down and looked Cozzano in the face. He grabbed one of Cozzano’s limp hands and squeezed it, then reached up and patted his friend gently on the cheek. His face was tight, a study in controlled intensity. “Willy,” he said. “Willy, do you feel like being President today? Or do you feel like going to a nice rehab center in Switzerland? You have to give me some indication either way.”

  Cozzano’s head had been rolling around loosely. Finally, with some effort, he raised it up and looked Mel in the eye.

  “Let’s take this thing downtown,” he said

  Mel stood up. His eyes were glistening. He turned toward one of the crew. “You heard the President,” he said, “tell the guys at the airport we won’t be needing them.”

  The escalator at Archives brought the Cozzanos up into the sunlight only a few minutes after the presidential motorcade had gone by. A phalanx of some thirty-six ex-NFL players, hand-picked by Rufus Bell for their height and bulk, materialized around them. Cozzano was on his feet now, still a little unsteady, supported on either side by ex-Bears. The phalanx got itself organised and then accelerated to a slow jog, moving en masse into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue and heading straight for the Capitol, two-thirds of a mile away. The crowd along Pennsylvania had begun to disperse, believing that all the important people had already gone past them, and none of them knew what to make of the solid bloc of beefy men - some of them quite famous in their own right -who ran down the center of the avenue in right formation, headed straight for the Inauguration, surrounded by M-16-toting outriders on foot, car, and motorcycles.

  But it was a strange enough sight that it was picked up by the television cameras. The media were on their toes. They were aware that Cozzano had done something highly unusual during his morning jog, that he had arrived at the White House on foot - contrary to the planned itinerary - and that he had abandoned the motorcade at Twelfth Street. When their cameras on the parade route picked up the phalanx, it went out over the networks. Nothing interesting was going on anyway; the outgoing President had already reached the Capitol, and was now in the Rotunda, awaiting the change of power.

  Cy Ogle, seated in his truck in front of the Teamsters Building, saw Cozzano’s Praetorian Guard jogging down Pennsylvania and had a pretty good idea of what it meant. He had watched on television as the motorcade had passed in front of the U.S. Courthouse - the point at which radio signals from his truck should have been able to reach Cozzano’s biochip. It hadn’t worked. Nothing was there. He’d known then that Cozzano wasn’t into the motorcade.

  He was still telling himself that it didn’t matter. By one route or another, Cozzano had to show up at the Capitol. Sooner or later they would reacquire the chip. The only question was when.

  The appearance of the phalanx moving down Pennsylvania answered that question. The cameras were kind enough to track it all the way through its slow, thundering, five-minute march on the Capitol. When it passed in front of the U.S. Courthouse, Ogle tried once more to reestablish the radio link.

  Nothing. Cozzano wasn’t in the phalanx; it was just a diversion. Either that, or the biochip wasn’t responding anymore. Which was impossible. Cozzano had only been missing for about ten minutes, from his disappearance at the Old Post Office to the reemergence of the phalanx at Seventh Street. You couldn’t do major brain surgery in ten minutes.

  Ogle kept watching the TV. There was nothing else to do. Eventually the phalanx reached the Capitol and converged on a small entrance on the northern end. No one had been expecting this particular entrance to be used; no camera crew was anywhere near it. But one intrepid minicam operator from CNN managed to get close enough to zoom in on the doorway, just as William A. Cozzano himself entered the building. There was no mistaking him.

  Ogle tried the radio link again. Nothing.

  The phones in the truck were ringing like mad. He had turned off the ringers a long time ago, but he could tell they were ringing by all the flashing lights. The people at the Network were paranoid: they were into micromanagement, they wanted Cozzano moni­tored twenty-four hours a day. Which was totally unnecessary. Cozzano was a good politician. He knew how to handle this.

  There was nothing more Ogle could do today. In the breast pocket of his suit was a personal invitation, and a pass that would get him a seat on the inaugural platform - the hottest ticket in town. He had been dreading the idea of spending all day sitting in the Eye of Cy. Now he had an excuse to go out there and sit a few chairs away from the Cozzanos and bask in their glory. He grabbed his coat, said goodbye to the guards and to the twenty-four-hour on-site lawyer, and headed into Taft Park, aimed at the West Front of the White House.

  It did not take a genius to figure out that the entire Inauguration had been set up for the benefit of a tiny minority of rich people. Floyd Wayne Vishniak had arrived well ahead of time and made one complete circuit of the Capitol grounds, strolling down the west bank of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, east on Independence, north on First Street between the Capitol and the Library of Congress, and now westward again on Constitution.

  Up to certain point, an ordinary citizen could walk anywhere he felt like walking, especially if he got all gussied up in nice fancy-looking clothes as Vishniak had. If you wanted to watch the Inauguration from two miles away at the far end of the Mall, that was no problem at all. But if you wanted to actually stand close enough to make out the figure of the new President with the naked eye, you had to enter special zones that were cordoned off and patrolled by cops.

  Vishniak had traveled to many parts of the United States, seen many different types of police officers, and even been arrested by a few of them. But he had never seen anything like the variety of cops that were running around this place. It was like a cop zoo or something. Some of the cops had uniforms and some didn’t. Some of them looked like souped-up Park Rangers. Some of them looked like glorified mall cops. They had all staked out different parts of different border zones whose sole function was to separate the common people from the rich and powerful scum.

  It did not look like there was any way to get within a quarter mile of the inaugural platform without shooting a whole lot of those different cops. This was bound to attract attention, bring in even more cops, and scare away his intended victims. So Vishniak had himself something of a conundrum here. The closest he could get to the platform was on the north side, in a little park north of Constitution. He spent a while reconnoitering this area, looking for gaps in the security, and found none.

  Instead he found something even better: a GODS truck. Just like the one he’d glimpsed under the stage at McCormick Place - except this one was practically right across the street from the Capitol. Vishniak began to walk across the park, and even as he did, the door in the back opened and a man climbed out of it.

>   Something about the man with the close-cropped hair and the neatly trimmed beard seemed vaguely familiar to Cy Ogle. He fit the profile for a Secret Service agent. But this man did not behave like Secret Service. He was not scanning the crowd. He was looking straight at Cy Ogle.

  Ogle had already reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his engraved invitation. The man in the trench coat was reaching into his breast pocket too. But he hadn’t pulled anything out yet.

  “Hey,” the man said.

  “Morning,” Ogle said, “excuse me, but I got a party to attend.”

  “Hold on a sec,” the man said, “I recognize you from that article they did about you in The New York Times Magazine in 1991. And also from the little article in Time magazine last year. They both ran photos of you.”

  “That’s nice,” Ogle said. By now he had realized that the man could not possibly be Secret Service.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” the man asked. “You should. I’m a very important person in your life.”

  Ogle took a good look at the man’s face.

  At the face of Floyd Wayne Vishniak.

  His lips parted and he felt stunned and weak in the legs, as if he had been struck on the head.

  Vishniak grinned and turned sideways to Ogle. He moved his hand inside his trench coat and Ogle could see the barrel of the gun pressing on the fabric from the inside. “I’m covering you with the same gun I used before,” he said, “and if you say anything, I’ll pull the trigger.”

  “What do you want?” Ogle said.

  “I want your truck,” Vishniak said, nodding towards the park. “You know us farmboys. We’re just crazy about big ol’ trucks.”

  Ogle turned his back on the Capitol and started walking back across Taft Park. Every few paces he would look back behind himself hoping that Vishniak would have disappeared. But he was always right there. Almost as bad, he never shut up. “I figured you had to have some kind of secret transmitter to control Cozzano’s brain. Because when I busted up your control room at the shopping mall over there, it didn’t make any difference at all. Let’s go on over there and take a look around.”