Interface (86 page)

The Cozzanos traveled with a lot of luggage, which was an easy
thing to do when you never had to carry it yourself, and you had
your own airplane. Not all of it was clothing. Some of it was
equipment that Mary Catherine had bought for use in her father's
therapy. Early in the campaign this had been simple stuff, like wads
of stiff putty that Cozzano would squeeze in his left hand to
develop strength and dexterity. By this point in the campaign, late
in September, he was way beyond the putty-squeezing stage. He
was now almost completely ambidextrous. In fact, he could sign his
name with both hands at the same time. The left-hand signature looked similar to his pre-stroke version, albeit bigger and lazier.
The right-hand signature was completely unfamiliar, though she
had to admit it looked more presidential.

They had flown into Boston's Logan Airport from a string of
campaign appearances in Arizona. Mary Catherine had insisted that
since it was going to be a long flight, Dad should write her a letter,
and he should do it with his left hand. He had grumbled at this
suggestion and tried to find ways to avoid it, but she had insisted, and finally he had buckled down to the job, ejecting all journalists
and aides from his private cabin and sitting down with the big fountain pen gripped securely in his left hand and a pad of lined
paper on his lap, writing the letters carefully, in block capitals, one
at a time like a schoolboy.

She had left him alone to the task. But when she came back an
hour later, he was typing on a laptop computer.

"Dad!"

"Peanut," he said, "it was driving me crazy. I thought my head
was going to split open."

"But you need to work on your right-hemisphere-"

"Spare me the neurobabble," he said. "Please observe that I am
typing. I am typing a letter to you. And I am using both hands."

Now, alone in the hotel, she turned on Dad's laptop and opened
up the file named "Letter to MC."

Ddeeaarrest 3Maarryee Ccaattheerine,

3As eyqowuals claentter sle3e my therapy is progressing well.
I have you to thank

wfaovres rtahveage gdraedast sbterlifdreese I have made since
you signed onto the

tcearmapfaeiegn. wlrtcs whealsl been a constant joy having
you with me. As you

hdaavde pfreoabrasbly naovteirceeed Ibad carmew having
some involuntary twitches in the

fdiandgers aodfres emwye left hand, but under your super
vision I have no doubt

tgheatt stchriasbble small problem will clear up sooner or later
and then I can

tgeoll b3aeclk to my old southpaw ways. I hope that this
letter is long

eenroausgeh Ifeotrter me to receive at least a gentleman's C.

Yxoxuxrs affectionately,

ydoaudr Father

She spent a while looking it over. The letter consisted of eleven
lines. The first few words of each line were garbled, but she could
usually puzzle them out from the context. For example, the word
campaign
at the beginning of line 4 was spelled
tcearmapfaeiegn.
It had
been contaminated by several extra letters. Mary Catherine opened
up a new window on the computer's screen and teased out the
extra letters: they spelled terafee.

Terafee didn't mean anything. If you said it fast, it almost
sounded like therapy. While Mary Catherine was typing it into the
new window, she noticed that all the letters were on the left hand
side of the keyboard.

The letter complained of involuntary twitches in the fingers of
the left hand. As he was typing, Dad much have noticed his left
fingers pounding out a few unwanted letters and been unable to control it.

It was interesting that the twitches only occurred toward the
beginning of each line. Mary Catherine went through the letter
line by line, teasing out the left-hand letters and leaving behind only the ones that made sense. The letter her father had intended
to write went like this:

Dear[est] Mary Catherine

As you can see my therapy is progressing well. I have you to
thank for the great strides I have made since you signed on to the campaign. It has been a constant joy having you with me.
As you have probably noticed I am having some involuntary
twitches in the fingers of my left hand, but under your
supervision I have no doubt that this small problem will clear
up sooner or later and then I can go back to my old southpaw
ways. I hope that this letter is long enough for me to receive
at least a gentleman's C.

Yours affectionately,

your Father

The letters that had been typed by the "involuntary twitches" of
William A. Cozzano's left hand read as follows:

DEAREST 3AREE CATE

3 EQWAlS 1
ETTER
13

WAVES RAVAGE DADS BE1FREE

TERAFEE WRCS WEll

DAD FEARS A VEREE BAD CREW

DAD ADRES EWE

GET SCRABBlE

TEll 3El

ERASE 1ETTER

XXX

DAD

Someone knocked on the door of the suite. Mary Catherine
jumped.

It had to be someone in the campaign, or else they would have
been stopped by the Secret Service. Unless it was Floyd Wayne Vishniak, of course. But the famous spree killer of Pentagon Plaza
would have made a lot more noise.

She went to the door and peered through the peephole. Then
she opened it up.

"Hello, Zeldo," she said. "I thought you'd be with Dad."

He rolled his eyes. "Touring high-tech firms," he said, "is not
my idea of an interesting time."

"Would you like to come in?"

He seemed uncertain. Maybe a little wistful. "I have to catch a
plane," he said. He nodded toward the window of the suite.
"Going to take the water taxi over to Logan and fly back to the Left
Coast."

"You're done with the campaign, then?"

"For now," he said. "I've been called back. Your dad's been
perfect for the last couple of weeks, there's no point in my tagging
along anymore . . . we have other patients to work on in
California." Zeldo reached into his satchel and pulled out an
unmarked manila envelope, half an inch thick. "I've put together
some data that is relevant to your efforts," he said, "and I thought
you might like a hard copy."

"Thanks," she said, taking the envelope.

She sensed that something was going on. Something in Zeldo's tone of voice, his careful and vague phrasing, reminded her of the
conversation in James's bedroom on the Fourth of July.

"Well, stay in touch," she said.

He seemed inordinately pleased by this offer. "Thank you," he said. "I will. I respect your activities very much and I respect you too. I can hardly say how much," he added, looking significantly
over his shoulder. "Tell your dad I'm going to take a few liberal arts
courses, as per his suggestion. Good-bye." Then he turned around, slowly and decisively, as if forcing himself to do it, and walked toward the elevators.

The envelope was full of laser printer output. Almost all of it was
graphs and charts tracking various new developments in William A
Cozzano's brain. There was a cover letter, as follows:

Dear Mary Catherine,

Burn this letter and stir up the ashes when you are finished
with it. Your suite has a working fireplace that will be suitable.
Let me make a few general statements first.

Politics is shit. Power is shit. Money is shit. I became a scientist
because I wanted to study things that weren't shit. I got
involved with the Radhakrishnan Institute because
 
I was
excited to take part in a project that was at the leading edge of
everything, where neurology and electronics and information theory and philosophy all came together.

Then I learned that you can't escape politics and power and
money even at the leading edge. I was about to resign when
you came back to Tuscola and insisted on being made the
campaign physician. This did not make Salvador happy but
they had no choice but to let you in.

I knew what you were up to before you even started: you
were putting your father through therapies designed to create
new pathways in his brain that by-passed the biochips. I
volunteered to stay on and follow you and your father on the campaign because I knew that otherwise Salvador would put
someone else in my place, and he would eventually figure out your plan, and tip off the bad guys.

For the last three months I have been tracking your work,
following developments in your father's brain through the
biochip. I have not said anything because I didn't want to tip
them off, so I will say it now: you are on the right track. Keep it up. In another four months (Inauguration Day) he should be
able to function without the biochip, not perfectly, but good
enough.

I have enclosed a schematic for a small device you can solder
together using parts from Radio Shack. It will emit noise in
the microwave band over small ranges (<100 ft.). This noise
will cause your dad's biochips to put themselves in Helen
Keller mode. You might find it useful.

Let me know if I can be of further use. I am fond of you and
I hope, perhaps fatuously, that one day if we cross paths
again you will allow me to take you out to dinner or
something.

Pete (Zeldo) Zeldovich

Mary Catherine wandered out on to the suite's balcony. The
harbor view was magnificent. Immediately to the north she could
see the skyscrapers of downtown Boston's financial district standing
out against the brilliant blue sky of the New England autumn.
Logan Airport was just a couple of miles away, directly across the
harbor, and beyond that she could see the Atlantic stretching away so far that the curvature of the earth was almost visible.

The airport water taxi was just pulling away from the hotel
wharf. Zeldo was standing in the back, his Hawaiian shirt blazing
among dark business suits. He had his legs planted wide against the
rolling of the small boat, and he was looking directly up at her.

She waved to him. He raised his fist over his head in a gesture of
solidarity, drawing stares from the men in suits. Then he turned
away.

Mary Catherine went back to the suite, burned the letter from
Zeldo in the fireplace, and erased the files on her dad's computer.

The schematic for Zeldo's microwave transmitter was buried in the middle of a stack of graphs. He had hand-drawn it in ballpoint
pen on a sheet of hotel stationery. It was a network of inscrutable
electronic hieroglyphs: zigzags, helices, stacks of parallel lines, each
one neatly labeled with Radio Shack part numbers. Mary
Catherine folded it up and put it in her wallet.

52

Eleanor's motorcade steamed across the Woodrow Wilson
Bridge, and then immediately on the Maryland side, took the exit to the Inner Loop. To the left was the sewage plant, Boiling Air
Force Base, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Navy Yards. To
the right, wooded hills, and then the projects, and then the decay
of Southeast - one of the great free fire zones in urban America.
Eleanor had been for three funerals of friends and relatives who had
been shot to death there, and on her way to the third one she had
almost been run off the road by a careening SWAT van.

D.C. was a great, historically black city that had been colonized,
in a few places, by rich whites. Lacking a traditional organized
crime network, it had become the battleground of a drug war
among competing groups: Jamaicans, Haitians, New York
elements, and home-grown Washingtonians competing for the
lucrative trade to service the insatiable demand of the Beltway
professionals. The police could only wait until the "market worked
itself out," as one police official put it. Once turfs and boundary
lines had been established, the murder, it was thought, would stop.