Interface (88 page)

The door of the limousine had been flung open before the limo
had come to a full stop. Jeremiah Freel, the Prince of Darkness,
climbed out and jerked the driver's side door open before the driver
even had time to set the parking brake.

"Out out out out!" he screeched in his terrible, grinding voice.

People who had run afoul of the Prince of Darkness vied for ways
to describe the sound of his voice: "like a cattle prod in the armpit,"
one had said. Like snorting pure Mace from the can. Like putting
a single crystal of Drano in the corner of each eye. Having a killer
bee stuck in each ear.

"Get out, you nigger!" Jeremiah Freel screamed at the driver,
which was an interesting choice of words since the driver was a
white boy.

He was a white boy with a southern accent. A rural, uneducated
southern accent. And as Freel had obviously figured out, simply by
listening to this man say, "Good afternoon, sir," the single most
insulting thing you could call him was nigger. So he got out of that
driver's seat in a big hurry and drew himself up face-to-face with Freel, or chest-to-face, actually, since Freel was short enough to sleep comfortably on an ironing board.

"You-" the driver began, but before he could get anything else
out, one of the burly suits from the trailing vehicle had come up
behind him, grabbed both his elbows, and swung him away,
shoving and dragging him into the median strip.

Which was fine with Jeremiah Freel. With the driver removed from his path, he made a direct line for the steering wheel of the
limousine.

He was blocked by three other men who had jumped out of the
dark sedan and who were now standing on tiptoe, as close to him
as they could get, spreading their jackets wide open like wings to
form a pinstriped curtain that blocked all view of his face from the
cars screaming down the roadway. It was imperative that no one
recognize the face of Jeremiah Freel, which stared out from so
many wanted posters in so many post offices that it had actually
been made into a poster, popular in the dorm rooms of cynical
college students.

"Mr. Freel-" one of these men said, moving into position to block the door. The sentence ended there because Freel, taking
advantage of the man's spreadeagled posture, reached up with both hands, gripped the tips of the man's nipples through his white linen
shirt, twisted, and pulled. The man screamed, collapsed in on
himself, and fell back against the side of the limousine. Instantly.
Freel was sitting in the driver's seat, the doors all closed and
electrically locked. The rear tires of the limousine began to spin
wildly in the gravel. One of the other guys in suits lunged forward, grabbed his stunned comrade by the neckline, and jerked him away
from the side of the car as it peeled out, fishtailing, on to the road,
nearly causing a chain reaction smashup in the three leftmost lanes.
"Shit!" everyone was saying. Two of them ran back, jumped into
the sedan, and took off, stranding the limo driver, the man who was
trying to calm him down, and the man who had made the mistake
of getting in Jeremiah Freel's way, who now had a pair of symmetric
ally placed two-inch bloodstains soaking through his white shirt.

"So that's what tertiary syphilis does to a man," said the driver of
the sedan, screaming down the Dulles Access Road at ninety miles
per hour in hot pursuit of the limousine. "They said he was an
asshole but I had no
idea."

"Shut up and drive," said the one in the passenger seat. "You
have any idea how badly we screwed this up? Anybody catches
sight of his face and we're finished."

They drove very fast, but they had a hard time catching up with
Jeremiah Freel in his limousine. In theory the big limo was
supposed to be the slower vehicle. The difference between them,
though, was this: the Prince of Darkness was not afraid to ram. Not only was he not afraid to ram, he was practiced. Any vehicle in his
lane not going as fast as he was got rear-ended and that was that.
Lane changes were accomplished
by force majeure.
They passed at
least three vehicles that had veered into the ditch or the median
strip. In the end, the only way to catch up with Jeremiah Freel was
to pull on to the shoulder and floor it. Which is pretty much what they did, though by the time they actually caught up with him, he
was screaming across the Potomac River on the Theodore
Roosevelt Bridge, vectored into the heart of the Capital like a
poisoned dum-dum from a sniper's rifle.

"You know what he's doing?" the driver said. "He's going to the goddamn Watergate!"

"Head him off," the passenger said.

Once they realized where Freel was going, they were able to do
a bit of deft curb-hopping, lawn-driving, and zooming down
oncoming lanes, and pull their sedan directly across Freel's path just
a few yards short of the entrance to the Watergate. Freel rammed
them anyway, caving in the side of the sedan, but both of the
occupants saw it coming and dove and rolled out of the other side
of the car just before impact.

The suit who had been sitting in the passenger seat pulled a gun
out of his armpit and used the butt of the weapon to smash the driver's-side window of the limousine. The black glass dissolved
into tempered fragments held together by the plastic sheet that had been used to blacken the window. When this debris was pulled out
of the way, Jeremiah Freel was exposed, slumped against the
steering wheel with a big laceration across his forehead, blood
streaming out and dripping off the horn button into his lap. He was barely conscious, mumbling deliriously.

"Drive much?" he said. "Where'd you get your fucking
license? K mart? Get the fuck out of my way, asshole, I got an
equalizer in the glove compartment and more lawyers than
you've got friends."

They shoved Freel across the seat on to the passenger side and then climbed in after him. The driver backed the limousine away
from the wrecked sedan. A steady wisp of steam was piping from
its radiator but it was still drivable. The passenger wriggled his
hands into a pair of latex gloves and then set about tying Jeremiah
Freel up with plastic handcuffs. Only when he was finished with that did he begin applying direct pressure to Freel's forehead.

Waiting at a stoplight, the two men in suits exchanged looks and
rolled their eyes at each other. "Campaign consultants," the driver said, "gotta love "em."

"Oh, this is a good one," said the chairman of the Republican
National Committee, inspecting a sheet of paper he had just pulled
from a file folder marked FREEL. "During a campaign visit to
Minot, North Dakota, you ran a school bus off a road, causing
thirty-six injuries, ten of them serious. The parents sued you for a
hundred million dollars and won."

"Fuck you," Jeremiah Freel said. "Fuck your mother too." Freel had a nice dark line of stitches across his forehead, tracing a long welt that perfectly matched the curved of the limousine's steering
wheel.

"When we add that to the libel and slander judgments from the
last three presidential campaigns - let me see, those alone add up to
almost another hundred million dollars, which you owe to a dozen
and a half different people, including, by the way, myself. You owe
me four million."

"Eat my shit," Jeremiah Freel said.

Several other distinguished-looking and well-dressed men were
sitting around the conference table. They were in a suite in a very
private hotel a few blocks north of the White House. They had
rented a whole floor, covered the windows with black stuff,
disabled the elevators, and posted guards with submachine guns by
all the stairwells. Jeremiah Freel was sitting in a luxurious padded
leather chair in the middle of the table. Standing behind him were
two men with a combined weight of six hundred pounds, wearing
latex gloves and clear plastic face shields.

The other men sitting around the table were all glaring coldly at
Freel. One by one, they began to raise their hands and speak up.

"You owe me three million plus legal fees," said the chairman of
the Democratic National Committee.

"One point five," said another man, holding up his hand.

"Eight hundred thousand," barked another man.

"One point one."

"Half a mil and a printed apology in
The Miami Herald."

"What the hell is this, a fucking star chamber?" Jeremiah Freel
said. "Why don't you just tell me what the hell you're after?"

"We're after Cozzano," the GOP chairman said.

"Fine. You got him. He's a dead man," Freel said. "By the time I'm finished with that wop son of a bitch, he'll curse his mother for every having given birth to him. He won't be able to cash a check
north of the Equator. Children will spit on his knees. His dog will
climb on to his bed in the middle of the night and try to tear his
face off and he'll beg for it to happen."

There was an awed silence in the room.

"Don't you want to hear what we are prepared to offer you in exchange for your services?" the Democratic chairman said
uncertainly.

"Fuck that," Freel said. "You guys have no imagination. You
think I do this shit to make money. But that's not true. I been
sitting down there in Rio waiting for something like this. I do it for
the pure joy of a job well done. Now, did you assemble my A-
Team, or not?"

"We got 'em."

"All of 'em?"

"All the ones who aren't dead, in prison, or running other
campaigns," said the Republican chairman.

54

A
 
bit later than a month before election day, a flatbed
truck carrying a GODS shipping container could be seen fighting
its way through the bewildering vortex of Boston's Kenmore
Square, on the eastern fringes of Boston University. The truck
eventually broke through by asserting the divine right of semitrailer
rigs to go anywhere they wanted, and entered the campus.

This area swarmed with Boston cops, campus police, men in dark
suits, and nicely dressed young persons wearing COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT
buttons. An impressive minority carried walkie-
talkies. These people had been seizing parking spaces for the better
part of the day. They did it by the power vested in them by various
high authorities; by sheer chutzpah; and in some cases by the brutally
simple expedient of placing their bodies in those places and refusing
to move when motorists tried to bluff them out. When the big
GODS truck arrived, it found nine consecutive parking spaces
waiting for it, which in Boston happened about as often as a Grand Alignment of the planets, or, for that matter, a World Series victory.

Not long afterward, a motorcade sliced through the Gordian
knot of Kenmore Square and pulled up near Morse Auditorium, a
squat, domed synagogue-turned-lecture-hall that was already about half full of media personnel and politically conscious students.

William A. Cozzano emerged from one of the cars, waved
cheerily to a number of supporters who had gathered in back for a brief sight of the Great Man, and followed an advance person into
the back of the hall. A dressing room had already been staked out behind the stage. He changed to a fresh shirt and had his hair and makeup fixed by trained professionals.

Then he walked on to the stage. From here he could see a wall of television lights and, dimly, a dark auditorium beyond it. The
auditorium was full of students who applauded him when he
emerged from the wings. Two chairs had been set up in the middle
of the stage, angled toward each other, a table between them set with a glass water pitcher and two tumblers.

William A. Cozzano was going to talk politics with the chairman
of the Political Science Department, a long-time Washington
figure who had taken an academic appointment that gave him the
freedom to do pretty much whatever he wanted with his time; in return, he lent prestige to the university. The whole idea was that
the discussion would be loose and unscripted, and Cozzano would
be open to questions, both from the audience (mostly students) and
the local media. This was a daring maneuver, exactly the kind of
thing that Tip McLane probably couldn't pull off without offending half of the ethnic groups in the United States.