Interface (79 page)

Grant Park, he realized, must be named after General Grant. As
in Grant and Sherman. Vishniak had learned all about those two guys on TV. One was drunk and one was crazy, he could never
remember which, but the thing was that both of them kicked ass
for their country. When the war started Grant was living in Galena, which was just a few miles up the river from where Vishniak lived.
And he was working in a livery stable, which was equivalent to working in a car wash nowadays, or detasseling.

He walked south past Soldier Field, where William A. Cozzano
had attained glory in an earlier life, and then took a pedestrian
overpass across Lakeshore Drive into the extreme northern end of
the McCormick Place parking lots. The first thing he encountered was a line of portable toilets. On the theory that you should never
pass up a chance to make water or take water, he went into one of these, wiped the seat with a wad of toilet paper, and sat down. All
he really had to do was take a leak - the series of thirty-two-ounce
coffees he had picked up at various Chicagoland 7-Elevens was
having an effect - but as long as he was here he flicked his Bic and
had one last good look at the Fleischacker. He popped the
magazine loose from the grips, checked it, shoved it in.

Someone pounded on the fiberglass door of the portable toilet. "Is anyone in there?"

"Fuck you," said Floyd Wayne Vishniak reflexively. His heart
was pounding; he was afraid it was a cop. But it wasn't. Just another
Cozzano supporter. Vishniak reholstered his gun under his wind-
breaker and started getting himself together, wondering whether
this rude person had any friends, whether he was big, whether he
would be worth picking a fight with. But when he came out he saw
it was just a little man in a suit, accompanied by a little kid who was
holding his crotch and jumping up and down.

Fuck it anyway, Vishniak realized. He had abandoned his trailer and hit the road with a pocket of cash, a pickup truck, and a plastic
gun. He had to get used to the idea that he was a different kind of
man now, a man who had risen above the common crowd, who
could not trouble himself with meaningless hassles over toilet
access.

McCormick Place was a huge rectangular black thing with a
much larger black slab of a roof that overhung the building quite a
bit on all sides. As Vishniak walked toward it through the parking
lot, Lakeshore Drive was on his right and a little backwater of Lake

Michigan on his left; beyond that was a peninsula with a private airport on it, small planes taking off and landing and taxiing. The
yachts of the rich and powerful were tied up in the water only yards
away from the private jets of the even more rich and powerful, and
Vishniak could plainly see that if you were the right kind of person,
you didn't have to waste your time with parking lots, or even cars.

All the way from Grant Park southward, the pedestrian traffic
had been getting heavier. At the southern end of the parking lot, all
the people were funneled down a wide staircase and into
McCormick Place's subterranean entrance. The floor was backed
up a little bit, the crowd milled rather than streamed down the
stairs. Working his way slowly down the steps, Vishniak was able
to get a clear view of the metal detectors bracketing the doors.

He immediately got scared shitless. His heart was going so fast it
was more of a vibration, like an idling truck engine, than a beat, and
he was sweating like a pig. But it was a warm humid night and he was wearing a windbreaker, so he had every excuse to sweat.

Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place's huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported and
stiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin red
lines - a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinkler
system. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept along
by the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyone
else ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of these
things, these hidden connections and networks that were laced
imperceptibly through the structure of everything.

Then he was there, confronted with the metal detector, people
pushing him from behind, and all he could do was give himself up
to the force of the crowd, the pressure of history, and walk on through.

Nothing happened. As he kept on walking with the crowd now filling the main floor of William A. Cozzano's National Town
Meeting, becoming invisible and anonymous, he was overcome with relief, which showed up as a vivid green on the monitors in
the Eye of Cy and ODR headquarters in Pentagon City.

The National Town Meeting was a political convention in all but
name, and it followed some of the same protocols. One of these
was the hierarchy of introductions. It wouldn't do just to have the nominee stroll out on stage and start talking. He had to be intro
duced by someone. Preferably by someone very, very important.
And anyone who was important enough to make that introduction was, likewise, too important to step out in front of an ice-cold
audience and just start talking. He would have to be introduced
by someone else. That person had to be important enough that his
role as introducer did not seem to belittle the stature of the
introduced . . .

Suffice it to say that the first person who stepped out in front of
the microphones that evening was as completely anonymous as any
person could be. His job was to get the attention of the crowd. To
sever all of the conversations that had sprung up among the people
standing shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor. Then he
introduced an alderman, who introduced a former mayor of
Chicago, who introduced a former Governor of New York, who introduced a movie star, who introduced a former Secretary of State, who introduced Governor William A. Cozzano. At each
stage of the hierarchy, the dull roar of bored conversation
diminished and the excitement of the crowd built.

Twenty thousand people were in the hall. The original roster of
the National Town Meeting had been ten thousand but these
people were just statistical abstracts who had been snatched off the
streets and transported into town to spout their opinions and
represent their demographic groups. Many of them supported Cozzano, many didn't, and the ones that did, did so in the same moderate, reasonable way that most average people supported
political candidates. Which was to say that, while they might vote
for Cozzano, they would not be willing to paint his name across
their foreheads and jump up and down screaming at every mention of his name.

Consequently, Cy Ogle had brought in an additional ten
thousand people who would do exactly that. They tended to stand
closer to the dais, crowding the National Town Meeting partici
pants into the back of the hall. The fact that these riotous supporters were not the same as the ten thousand average Americans who had been appearing on TV all week was not, of course, explained to the
nationwide television audience, which was watching on no fewer
than eight networks.

This was a good thing for Floyd Wayne Vishniak, because, until
tonight, you couldn't have gotten into the convention center with
out a special National Town Meeting photo ID. Vishniak didn't
have one. But neither did any of the other ten thousand fanatical Cozzano supporters who had packed the hall tonight.

Tables had been set up at the back of the hall and piled high with
Cozzano paraphernalia: signs, bumper stickers, skimmers, buttons. Vishniak scored an armful of stuff and festooned himself like the
hard-core Cozzano supporter that he, in fact, was. He even filled
out a little COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT stick-on name tag:
HELLO, MY NAME IS Sherman Grant. He was amid relatively
glum, drab National Town Meeting participants who had now
been relegated to the outer darkness. As the hierarchy of
introductions rose toward its peak, he shouldered his way through
them, working toward center stage.

Like a lot of other secretaries of state, the one who introduced
Cozzano had not been allowed to die a natural political death. He
had resigned or been forced out, or something like that, in the
middle of a term. Everyone concerned had agreed that it was over
a question of principle on which reasonable people could honestly
disagree, which gave this man the image of a person who was
willing to stake his job on a matter of principle. As such, he was
exactly the right guy to introduce Cozzano.

He delivered a lengthy and somewhat less than thrilling address
about his career in big-time Washington politics and how disgusted
he had been by the decadence and corruption of it all. He talked
about the need for change. Finally, his voice began to rise in pitch,
he started to pump the crowd back up out of the comatose state
into which he himself had placed them, to pull them back in from
the lines at the rest rooms, and by the time he bent forward to shout
the name of William A. Cozzano into his microphone, he was
completely inaudible, even to himself: thousands of people were screaming the name.

Cozzano appeared on the stage, holding hands with Eleanor
Richmond. Behind them were four younger people: Mary
Catherine and James Cozzano, and Clarice and Harmon
Richmond, Jr., all holding hands.

The screaming, and the sound of the air horns, seemed loud
enough to split the molecules in the hot sweaty air from the
convention hall. The candidates and their families stood in a pool
of blue carbon-arc light that set them apart from everything else, which now looked dim and yellowish by comparison, like a TV
screen blaring in the middle of an antique living room.

It was just like when the Quad Cities Whiplash scored a winning
goal with one second remaining in a playoff game, thought Floyd
Wayne Vishniak, standing just below the dais, a stone's throw from
William A. Cozzano.

He had a clear shot from here. But shooting him was not really
part of the plan. The idea was not to hurt Cozzano, but to protect
him.

Cozzano was a great man. A hero. The only honest politician in the United States. But even a great man could be led astray by the forces of evil, and Vishniak had been forced to the conclusion that
it was happening to Cozzano right now.

Why couldn't anyone else figure it out? It was so obvious. They were all stupid. The world was full of morons. In all of the United
States, only a tiny number were capable of seeing the truth.

They knew, of course. The people who were manipulating
Cozzano had access to all kinds of secret FBI and CIA files. They could use their computers and satellites to pry into people's school
records, police records, and bank accounts. They had figured out that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and a few other people around the
country, would see through the charade and would represent a
threat to their conspiracy.

The couldn't just send out hit men to kill Vishniak and the
others. No, that was just a little too obvious. Instead they were
taking the subtle approach. All the way across Illinois, Vishniak had
been laughing at himself. To think he had actually believed the
ridiculous story that the little Jew had told him! "We're doing
research on public opinion and we want you to wear this Dick
Tracy watch."

Research on Floyd Wayne Vishniak's brain waves was more like
it. They were watching him. Waiting for him to figure out the
conspiracy and make his move. And he had played into their hands.
He had worn the watch. He had even sent them letters, explaining
his opinions in detail, and in these letters, he had made the
incredibly stupid mistake of tipping them off to the fact that he was
suspicious.

He could have just taken the watch off his wrist and been free of
it, but he was a little smarter than that. To take the watch off his
wrist at this point would probably mean certain death. They would
send out a hit man to get him.

To hell with a hit man. The watch probably was booby-trapped.
It probably had a little needle coated with shellfish toxin, and if he
tried to take it off now, that needle, activated by a satellite
transmission from ODR headquarters, would jab into the
underside of his wrist and shoot the poison straight into his vein. But as long as he kept wearing the watch, they'd think he had still been duped. He could continue his careful reconnaissance of the
Cozzano
campaign.