Interface (42 page)

"I just got the weirdest phone call," she said.

"Tell me about it," Aaron said.

"This guy called up. A guy with a southern accent. I think it's
that guy you've been dealing with out in California."

"Cy Ogle."

"Yeah."

"Well, what did Mr. Ogle have to say?"

"That I was fired."

"He said what?"

"That I was fired. That the corporation was undergoing a
restructuring and that I could apply for reemployment later."

Aaron was more nonplussed than he was angry. It had to be
Ogle's weird sense of humor at work. "Well, who the hell is Ogle
to be saying stuff like that?"

"Exactly what I asked him. He said he was the chairman of the board of directors."

"I'm the chairman," Aaron said.

"I know that."

Another person appeared in the hallway, standing behind
Marina. It was Greg. College buddy of Aaron's. Cofounder of the
corporation. Chief biologist. "I have just been informed that I'm fired too," he said. "But maybe it's not so bad since our stock is selling for twice its normal value today. So I'm worth twice as
much."

"Good," Marina said, "so am I." Marina had lots to stock too.

"Selling?" Aaron said. "None of our stock has changed hands in
months."

"Get with it," Greg said. "Fifty-five percent of it changed hands
at 9:05 this morning."

"What you're saying is that our venture capitalists sold us to someone else."

"That's what it amounts to."

"And Cy Ogle claims to be that someone," Marina said.

The telephone on Aaron's desk began to purr. Aaron picked it
up, indicating with a hand gesture that it was, okay for Greg and
Marina to stay in the room.

"You're probably pissed because I just fired half of our
company," Ogle said. "Which is understandable. It's hard to run a
tight ship based on emotion and personal loyalty. Damn hard."

"Who's next? Me?"

"Nope. You're staying on, along with your two electronics guys.
We can use them. Everyone else has served their purpose."

"How am I supposed to run an office without Marina?"

"You don't have to worry about running an office anymore. We
have plenty of room down here in Falls Church."

"But I don't live in Falls Church, Virginia. I live in Arlington,
Massachusetts."

"Then you better get used to a hell of a long commute," Ogle
said, "because a moving truck is showing up at your office door in
five minutes to pick up all your equipment and drive it down
here."

"Now, wait just a second," Aaron finally said. He had been fighting the impulse to get pissed off ever since this weirdness
started. "This is just totally unacceptable. You can't just uproot our
lives like this. Hell, I don't even know for sure that you're the real
chairman!"

"I am," Ogle said, "but there's no point in your getting pissed
off at me."

"There certainly is," Aaron said, "if you're the chairman."

"I'm the chairman of Green Biophysical Systems as of 9:05
a.m.,"
Ogle said, "but as of 9:03
a.m.
I was no longer the chairman
of Ogle Data Research."

"Huh?"

"I got bought out too."

"By whom?"

"A whole bunch of folks. MacIntyre Engineering. The Coover Fund. Gale Aerospace. Pacific Netware. They own me now. And
the first thing they did was tell me to buy you. So I did. And then
they told me to initiate a radical downsizing program. So I did. And part of that is closing the Lexington office and moving it down here
to Falls Church."

"And all of these events took place during the first five minutes
of the business day."

"Yup."

"Gee," Aaron said, "a guy could almost get the impression that
the groundwork for this whole thing had been laid well in
advance."

"Draw your own conclusions. Throw a tantrum. Call me names.
Just don't be late for the meeting."

Aaron rolled his eyes. "What meeting would that be?"

"Emergency board meeting for Ogle Data Research, which
you're invited to sit in on, to be followed immediately by an
emergency board meeting for Green Biophysics."

"When and where?"

"Right here at Seven Corners, at two o'clock this afternoon. That
should give you time to grab a pair of shuttle flights. Oh, and Aaron?"

"Yes?"

"We bought you out at twice your book value."

"So I heard."

"We'll double that figure again if any of your existing
stockholders want to sell out. But they have to do it today."

"I'll pass that along."

"See you at two o'clock."

Aaron hung up his phone. Cy Ogle's phone. MacIncyre's,
Gale's, Coover's, and Tice's phone.

"The bad news is, we just got hit by the financial equivalent of Desert Storm," he said, "and we lost. The good news is that we all
just quadrupled our net worth."

Marine laughed, verging on hysteria.

"Not bad for an hour's work," Greg said, looking at his watch.
It was ten o'clock.

A big, handsome head shot of Governor William A. Cozzano flashed up on the television screen. Roaring white noise came out
of the speaker, the sound of a wildly cheering multitude.

Aaron sold his stock. There was no point in hanging on to the stuff
when he knew that it would drop to one-quarter of its current
value by the end of the day. He took a taxi to Logan, hopped the shuttle to LaGuardia, walked across the concourse and hopped
another shuttle to National Airport in Washington.

As the shuttle twisted and veered down the lower Potomac,
Aaron looked out the window and saw the Washington
Monument, the Mall, which seemed prematurely green to a person
used to New England winters, and the dome of the Capitol. He
realized, somewhat to his own astonishment, that this was the first
time he had been to Washington, D.C., since his high-school band
trip fifteen years before.

It was thirty degrees warmer here, humid, green, with flowers coming out all over the place. Spring, which hadn't even started in
Boston, was a memory here. It gave him a feeling of being out of
it, of being way behind the times. He got on a little bus that inched its way through the airport's pathetically constricted traffic pattern
and finally let him off at Avis. There, he climbed into a brand-new
navy-blue Taurus. It was about a hundred and twenty degrees
inside the car, and the controls for the air conditioner were already
set to MAX.

D.C. was going to take getting used to. His car in Boston didn't
even have air-conditioning. He was going to have to buy a new
goddamn car.

He went right out and got badly lost. That was okay, he had
plenty of time, and he felt like driving around lost for a while. Eventually he pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a big oversized street map atlas for northern Virginia and figured out where Falls Church was: just a few miles due west of D.C. Right in the middle
of that was a place called Seven Corners, where a whole lot of roads came together. It was difficult to miss. From its folksy name, Aaron
was expecting it to be sort of a quaint, woodsy crossroads.

It wasn't. It was a place where seven different franchise ghettos
intersected and piled their congestion on top of each other, a
universe of asphalt parking lots stewing in the Virginia sun. And
most of it was a couple of decades old, and showing its age. It had been superseded by newer and nicer competitors farther away from
the center of the metropolis.

And because Aaron Green had come to know and appreciate the style of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, he knew where to look. He
eventually found his way into the vast, mostly empty parking lot of a big old shopping center at the heart of Seven Corners. It was
a ghost mall. The anchor store, the behemoth at the dead center
of the mall, was a windowless monolith, sheathed in a sort of
white-gravel substance that had probably been sparkling and clean
back in the fifties but which had now gone dully gray and become stained with long vertical streaks of rust. A constellation of rusty,
decapitated bolts projected from the wall way up high, and

Aaron could see that it had once been a major department store.
But now the sign was torn down and the row of plate-glass
display windows and double doors that stretched along the entire
front of the building at sidewalk level had been replaced by particle
board, painted black. Aaron walked into the place without
hesitation.

It was just like the Cadillac dealership, except bigger. And, at the
moment, it was somewhat noisier and more crowded than Ogle's operations tended to be when he was between campaigns. More
colorful, too. A lot of people were working here right now, mostly
young people, most female, mostly black. Most of them were
wearing bright new T-shirts. And all of the T-shirts had the word
Cozzano printed on them. They were operating T-shirt
printing machines. Printing up more of them.

But they weren't fancy. The insignia going on to those shirts
(and hats and sweatshirts and windbreakers) was not a nifty logo, like a national campaign would use. Everything was being done in
simple block letters, with no graphics. It was exactly what you
would get if you went into a seedy discount T-shirt printing place
at a carnival midway and asked them to print the word
Cozzano on to a T-shirt.

The same could be said of the crude 8
½
-by-ll campaign posters
floating out of the xerox machines, and of the campaign signs,
being stapled together from fence pickets and refrigerator boxes and
hand-lettered by more women in cheap Cozzano T-shirts.

One corner was given over to folding tables with many
telephones on them. Young people sat behind the tables talking on
the phones. There were also a dozen desks with older people, suit-wearing people, sitting behind them, and these people were talking
on the phones too. On the wall behind all of this was a large map
of the fifty states, nearly obscured with little colored pins, streamers,
flags, and yellow notes.

"That right there," said the familiar voice of Cy Ogle, "is the
spontaneous ground-swell department."

Aaron ignored him. Ogle walked around until he was standing
in Aaron's peripheral vision. He had pulled a bright yellow
Cozzano T-shirt over his dress shirt and donned a
Cozzano skimmer.

"See, the problem with spontaneous ground swells is they are so
damn disorganized," Ogle said. "And that don't cut it, because the
ballot rules in the various states are just unbelievably complicated.
For example, in New York-"

"Spare me," Aaron said. "Spare me."

"Anyway, welcome to the metacampaign," Ogle said.

"Okay, I'll bite. What is the metacampaign?"

"Y'know how, after the New Hampshire primaries, the com
mentators always concentrate on the runner-up? They never seem
to give a shit about who actually won the damn thing. All they
want to talk about is who came in second. Who's got momentum.
Big Mo. That's the metacampaign. The struggle for the hearts and
minds of the media, and of big contributors."

When Aaron first came into the Pentagon Towers offices of Ogle Data Research, carrying half a dozen PIPER prototypes in a box,
he knew that Ogle must be serious about something, because he
had never known his new boss to own, rent, or come anywhere
near real estate that was so civilized.

This particular nice new office building was rooted in a big
shopping mall called Pentagon Plaza. It was one of the nicest malls
in the D.C. metro area, which was saying something. It was a self-contained metropolis; in addition to the mall it had a parking ramp,
movie theaters, a Westin, a Metro station, and office space. From
the suite that Ogle had rented, on the eleventh floor, you could
look out over the vast geometry of the Pentagon itself, across the
Potomac, and into Washington. Or, if you looked in the other
direction, you could stare straight down through the spectacular
glass roof of the mall, down through its atrium, and into the food
court, half-full of tired shoppers, half-full of lunching brass from the
Pentagon.