Interface (100 page)

"My fellow Americans, I come to you at a moment of great peril," Cozzano said, trying to use the authority of his voice to
quiet the rising anxiety - the ugly fights going on behind him, the
murmuring that had grown into a low roar. "We have narrowly
averted a disaster. I am speaking to you, now, as a free man, for the
first time in a year. Exactly one year ago, as you may know, I was struck down by a stroke. I have been away for a while. Today, I am
here to tell you that I am back!"

It was the first thing Cozzano had said, all day long, that sounded
like what a triumphant new president should say. The crowd was
enormously relieved. The shrill chattering and nervous buzzing was
overwhelmed by a cheer that started in the throats of the Justice
Posse and grew explosively until it rang up and down the length of the Mall.

And it did not die down; it grew into an ovation. Those listening
to Cozzano had experienced more anxiety during the last couple of
minutes than they had since the Cuban Missile Crisis or the
Kennedy assassination. Now, Cozzano was telling them that
everything was going to be fine. He told them this, not just with his words, but with the deep resonant tone of his voice and with
his posture, his facial expression.

No one really knew what was going on. But hearing his words
and watching his face, they came to know one thing beyond
question: President Cozzano was doing what he had been elected
to do. Finally, a leader was in the White House, and he was leading.

The people on the inaugural platform were the last ones to rise
to their feet and join in the ovation.

Cozzano was about to resume his speech, but he realized that there was no way to talk over the voices of half a million people.
He paused, smiled at the crowd, waited for a couple of moments.
The cheering continued. He stepped back away from the lectern,
now just a couple of paces in front of his daughter and Eleanor Richmond and her family, and raised both of his arms in the air as
if he had just scored a touchdown.

The first bullet did just what it was supposed to do. Its teflon
coating took it smoothly through the seven layers of bullet-proof-fabric making up President Cozzano's bulletproof vest. After that,
momentum and plain old-fashioned lead did the rest. It passed into
his thorax a couple of inches below the right nipple and exploded
against a rib, spraying fragments of lead, bone, and teflon through
Cozzano's chest cavity. Most of his right lung was turned into hash.
Numerous holes were blown through the heart and a major vessel
pierced in his left lung. Nothing emerged from the other side of
Cozzano's body; the bullet, which was specifically designed to kill
human beings wearing bulletproof vests, had been totally efficient in transferring all of its energy into Cozzano's flesh.

Vishniak saw a jet of steam and blood spurt from the entrance wound and knew that Cozzano was dead. He angled the weapon a couple of degrees to the right and took aim at Eleanor Richmond.
But just as he was pulling the trigger, a bulky man in a black T-shirt
jumped in front of her.

Darryl Garfield, an offensive linesman for the Skins, took the
second bullet in his massive upper arm, which was nearly as big as
Eleanor's waist. The bullet ricocheted off his humerus and ended
up shattering a window in the Rayburn Building, a thousand feet due south, whence it was later recovered. As the bullet exited
Garfield's arm it drove before it a shock wave of blood and
pulverized muscle tissue that burst out of his body in a crudely
hemispherical pattern, spraying Eleanor Richmond with blood.

Vishniak lowered his weapon a bit, surprised by Garfield's
sudden intervention, and did not see the precipitous approach of
Rufus Bell. Bell threw all of this momentum behind the heel of his
right hand, which impacted on the bridge of Vishniak's nose and
collapsed the bone structure of his entire face, driving a number of
small bone fragments all the way into Vishniak's brain. Vishniak
was a vegetable before he hit the ground. Ten minutes later he was
dead.

Most of the people on the platform knew only that Darryl
Garfield had been shot, because his wound had been so spectacular.
In the ensuing confusion, Mary Catherine was the first person to
notice that President Cozzano was sitting down behind the lectern,
looking stunned and pale.

At first they thought he was just stunned by the near miss. But a look at his face proved otherwise. Pink foam had collected at the corners of his mouth. Mary Catherine, James Cozzano, and Mel all
converged on Cozzano at the same moment and helped him to lie
on his back. Within a few moments they were surrounded by the
Posse.

A few moments after the shooting, Eleanor Richmond had
vanished, completely surrounded by huge Posse members who
practically encased her in bulletproof vests. The guests on the
inaugural platform drained back into the Capitol as though a plug
had been pulled and they were being sucked back into the building.
Eleanor and her escort were swept along.

Mary Catherine ripped Cozzano's shirt open down the middle
and discovered the entrance wound on his thorax. Her eyes met
his.

"I'll be okay," Cozzano said.

"One of the guys has called for a chopper," Mel said. "Hang in
there, buddy."

Cozzano didn't pay any attention to Mel. He was looking at
James and Mary Catherine, kneeling next to him side by side.

"Listen, peanut," the President said. "James will stay with you.
You stay with Eleanor."

"No!" Mary Catherine said.

"They have no choice but to kill Eleanor," Cozzano said.
"They'll try to do it now. Natural causes. Go! By order of the President."

Tears burst over the rims of Mary Catherine's eyes and cascaded
down her face. "I love you more than anything, peanut," Cozzano
said.

"I love you too, Dad," Mary Catherine said.

"Now go and do your job," Cozzano said.

Mary Catherine bent down and kissed her father's cheek. Then
she stood up, turned, and ran into the Capitol.

The Rotunda had gone nuts. Several dozen Capitol Police had
been herded into one corner and were being guarded by a couple
of Posse members carrying M-16s with fixed bayonets. More
justice men, and several men wearing FBI windbreakers, were
stationing themselves around the entrances, trying to establish some
control over who came in and who left. A couple of media crews were here, unable to make up their minds what they should be
pointing their cameras at; several radio and television reporters
were running around seemingly at random, shouting a stream-of-
consciousness narration into their microphones. It didn't matter
what they said as long as they said it with authority.

But most of the people in the Rotunda were invited guests who had been seated in the rows of chairs on the inaugural platform. It was easy to tell them apart. The men were all wearing intensely
formal garb and the women were dressed, coiffed, and bejeweled
to the nines. These people had gathered into knots scattered around
the floor of the Rotunda. Each knot consisted of a few people
turned inward, slack-faced with shock, jabbering at one another,
and a few people, mostly men, constantly craning their necks in all
directions, eyes wide and staring, trying to get some sense of what
was going on. One or two men were jabbing at cellular phones
with stiff index fingers, screaming into them, getting nothing but
static. A man in black tie and morning coat slammed his cellular
phone on to the floor in frustration and it slid across the polished
stone like a hockey puck.

Mary Catherine couldn't see Eleanor anywhere. A Posse
member walked in front of her in his black Justice shirt. Mary
Catherine jumped forward and put her hand on his shoulder.
"Where's Eleanor?" she said.

As soon as he recognized her, he told her: "She went to the
ladies' room to clean up. She's got blood on her." "Who's with her?"

"I dunno," the man said, "we don't have any female deputies in
this outfit."

"Where's that bathroom?" Mary Catherine said kicking off her
shoes.

The man pointed. Mary Catherine headed across the floor of the
Rotunda, building up to a full sprint.

It wasn't hard to find the bathroom where Eleanor was holed up: the entrance was almost obscured by a knot of black-shirted Posse
members. Mary Catherine just aimed at the door and relied on them to recognize her, and to get out of the way.

They did, but she had to slow down to a brisk walk. She entered
the women's lounge. The first thing she saw was Eleanor's dress spread out across a couch near the entrance, spattered with blood. She rounded a corner and saw a row of sinks. Eleanor was bent over one of the sinks, hot water blasting. She had stripped down to
a camisole and panties. Her arms were wet up to the shoulders and
she was bent over the sink splashing water on her face; flecks of blood were still visible in her hair.

One other woman was in the bathroom: from her appearance, obviously one of the invited guests. Mary Catherine had spent
enough time with people of the advanced upper crust to know one
when she saw one.

She even recognized this woman. It was Althea Coover.
DeWayne Coover's granddaughter. She and Mary Catherine had
gone to Stanford together and attended a lot of the same parties.
Because of Coover's support of the Radhakrishnan Institute, his
family had gotten several invitations to the Inauguration.

Althea Coover was standing at the sink next to Eleanor's. She
had put a few small cosmetics containers out on the shelf beneath
the mirror, as though she were here to fix her face. But just as Mary
Catherine was rounding the corner, althea was pulling something else out of her bag: a capped hypodermic needle.

Mary Catherine headed straight for her.

Althea saw Mary Catherine and startled. Her eyes jumped to the
hypodermic needle, then Eleanor, then up to Mary Catherine's
face. She pulled the cap off, exposing the hair-thin needle, and
raised it like a dart, aiming it at Eleanor's exposed shoulder.

Then Mary Catherine shoved her stun gun into the side of
Althea Coover's neck and pulled the trigger.

Althea dropped the needle, collapsed, and smacked her head into
the marble floor with a shocking thud. Eleanor straightened up, blinked water out of her eyes, and jumped to see Mary Catherine suddenly standing there with lightning in her hand, and Althea
Coover gone.

When Mary Catherine and Eleanor returned to the Rotunda, now surrounded by very nervous and trigger-happy men in black T-
shirts, they discovered that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had not been as lucky. He was collapsed on the marble floor,
unconscious and unresponsive. Immediately before his collapse he
had been seen talking to another invited guest who had made a
hasty exit; later, an empty hypodermic syringe was found in an ashtray by the door. The Chief Justice was being attended to by a
couple of old and distinguished doctors who had made it on to the
guest list. A few Posse members picked him up and carried him into
the Capitol infirmary.

Anyone wearing white tie or a formal gown was now being
viewed with intense suspicion by the Posse. Mary Catherine and
Eleanor found themselves dead center in the Rotunda, surrounded
by Posse members facing outward, as the remaining guests were
herded toward the outside of the room.

Between the knot in the center and the people crowded to the
edges, there was a broad, doughnut-shaped, empty space, now
occupied by a grand total of three people: a minicam operator from
CNN, his sound man, and a bald, middle-aged man in a long black
robe. The robe was a flimsy thing made of synthetic fibers and
looked as though it had been wadded up into a ball and then sat on
for a few days. It was unzipped to reveal a bulletproof vest
underneath; beneath the vest, a black T-shirt could be seen. This
guy was a member of the Posse.