Interface (98 page)

The Cozzanos arrived at a dead sprint, pursued only by a few autograph seekers. James and Mary Catherine got on first, then
Cozzano followed, spinning around as he came through the door
and slamming down ass-first into the wheelchair. Bell let the door
slide closed and then the elevator began to drop.

Mary Catherine was standing to the left of the wheelchair, a
heavy purse slung over her shoulder. She unclasped it and opened
it up.

"Here goes nothing," Cozzano said.

His left hand reached into Mary Catherine's purse, rummaged around, and pulled out a black box with four metal prongs on the
end. He squeezed the trigger once, testing it, and a purple lightning
bolt snapped between the prongs.

"I already tested it, Dad," Mary Catherine said affectionately, her
voice already getting thick with emotion.

"I know you did, peanut," Cozzano said.

Then he shoved the prongs into the side of his head and pulled
the trigger.

His body convulsed so violently that it threw him half out of the wheelchair. James and Mary Catherine stood well away until the high-voltage current had stopped blasting through Cozzano's body. His arm snapped out into a stiff-arm position, as though fending off
a linebacker from Arcola or Rantoul, and the stun gun flew across the
elevator car, bounced off the wall, and clattered to the floor. Rufus Bell picked it up and shoved it back into Mary Catherine's purse.

Mary Catherine had gone into an unemotional, doctorly mode.
She grabbed one of her father's arms and got James to take the other
one, and they righted his limp body in the wheelchair, then
buckled the lap belt.

The elevator doors opened; they were on the platform of the
Metro station. A Blue Line train bound for Addison Road was
sitting on the tracks, waiting for them; the doors had been
physically blocked open by more members of the Cozzano crew,
and the D.C. Chief of Police himself, still resplendent in his full
dress uniform, was standing at the head of the train, talking to the
conductor.

Bell wheeled Cozzano out of the elevator, across the platform,
and on to the train. The doors closed behind them and the train
began to move. They had a whole car to themselves; sheets of
newsprint had already been taped up along the insides of the
windows so that none of the shocked tourists on the platform could
capture an image of the unconscious President-elect in film or
video.

Mary Catherine pulled a stethoscope out of her purse, stuck it in
her ears, and held it up to her father's chest. "He's got a normal
rhythm," she said. "It sounds good."

Cozzano was not unconscious, just dazed. Mary Catherine
pulled a small white tube out of her pocket, snapped it in half, and
held it up under Cozzano's nose. Cozzano's brow furrowed, his
eyes rolled around in their sockets, and he snapped his head away
from the smell.

Lights flashed by, illuminating the papered-over windows. They
had rolled through the Smithsonian station without stopping and
were now swinging through the broad curve that would take them
eastward into L'Enfant Plaza.

Two Yellow Line trains, pointed in opposite directions, were
being held for them at L'Enfant Plaza. One of them was a
northbound train that could take them straight back up to the Archives station, right along the parade route. They could re-
emerge at that point and continue on to the Capitol as if nothing
had happened.

The other train was southbound. It could take them to National
Airport, where a private jet was waiting for them. It would take
them far away, if that was necessary. Hopefully, it would take them
somewhere with good hospitals.

The train doors opened to reveal L'Enfant Plaza. Their way out on to the platform was lined with large and serious-looking men.
Standing right in the middle was Mel Meyer.

Bell wheeled Cozzano out on to the platform and right up to
Mel, who kneeled down and looked Cozzano in the face. He
grabbed one of Cozzano's limp hands and squeezed it, then reached
up and patted his friend gently on the cheek. His face was tight, a
study in controlled intensity. "Willy," he said. "Willy, do you feel
like being President today? Or do you feel like going to a nice
rehab center in Switzerland? You have to give me some indication
either way."

Cozzano's head had been rolling around loosely. Finally, with
some effort, he raised it up and looked Mel in the eye.

"Let's take this thing downtown," he said

Mel stood up. His eyes were glistening. He turned toward one of the crew. "You heard the President," he said, "tell the guys at
the airport we won't be needing them."

The escalator at Archives brought the Cozzanos up into the
sunlight only a few minutes after the presidential motorcade had
gone by. A phalanx of some thirty-six ex-NFL players, hand-
picked by Rufus Bell for their height and bulk, materialized around
them. Cozzano was on his feet now, still a little unsteady, supported
on either side by ex-Bears. The phalanx got itself organised and
then accelerated to a slow jog, moving en masse into the middle of
Pennsylvania Avenue and heading straight for the Capitol, two-
thirds of a mile away. The crowd along Pennsylvania had begun to
disperse, believing that all the important people had already gone
past them, and none of them knew what to make of the solid bloc
of beefy men - some of them quite famous in their own right -
who ran down the center of the avenue in right formation, headed
straight for the Inauguration, surrounded by M-16-toting outriders on foot, car, and motorcycles.

But it was a strange enough sight that it was picked up by the
television cameras. The media were on their toes. They were aware
that Cozzano had done something highly unusual during his
morning jog, that he had arrived at the White House on foot -
contrary to the planned itinerary - and that he had abandoned the
motorcade at Twelfth Street. When their cameras on the parade
route picked up the phalanx, it went out over the networks.
Nothing interesting was going on anyway; the outgoing President
had already reached the Capitol, and was now in the Rotunda, awaiting the change of power.

Cy Ogle, seated in his truck in front of the Teamsters Building, saw
Cozzano's Praetorian Guard jogging down Pennsylvania and had a pretty good idea of what it meant. He had watched on television as
the motorcade had passed in front of the U.S. Courthouse - the
point at which radio signals from his truck should have been able to reach Cozzano's biochip. It hadn't worked. Nothing was there.
He'd known then that Cozzano wasn't into the motorcade.

He was still telling himself that it didn't matter. By one route or
another, Cozzano had to show up at the Capitol. Sooner or later they would reacquire the chip. The only question was when.

The appearance of the phalanx moving down Pennsylvania
answered that question. The cameras were kind enough to track it all the way through its slow, thundering, five-minute march on the
Capitol. When it passed in front of the U.S. Courthouse, Ogle tried
once more to reestablish the radio link.

Nothing. Cozzano wasn't in the phalanx; it was just a diversion.
Either that, or the biochip wasn't responding anymore. Which was
impossible. Cozzano had only been missing for about ten minutes,
from his disappearance at the Old Post Office to the reemergence
of the phalanx at Seventh Street. You couldn't do major brain
surgery in ten minutes.

Ogle kept watching the TV. There was nothing else to do. Eventually the phalanx reached the Capitol and converged on a
small entrance on the northern end. No one had been expecting
this particular entrance to be used; no camera crew was anywhere
near it. But one intrepid minicam operator from CNN managed to get close enough to zoom in on the doorway, just as William A.
Cozzano himself entered the building. There was no mistaking
him.

Ogle tried the radio link again. Nothing.

The phones in the truck were ringing like mad. He had turned
off the ringers a long time ago, but he could tell they were ringing
by all the flashing lights. The people at the Network were paranoid:
they were into micromanagement, they wanted Cozzano moni
tored twenty-four hours a day. Which was totally unnecessary.
Cozzano was a good politician. He knew how to handle this.

There was nothing more Ogle could do today. In the breast
pocket of his suit was a personal invitation, and a pass that would
get him a seat on the inaugural platform - the hottest ticket in
town. He had been dreading the idea of spending all day sitting in the Eye of Cy. Now he had an excuse to go out there and sit a few
chairs away from the Cozzanos and bask in their glory. He grabbed
his coat, said goodbye to the guards and to the twenty-four-hour
on-site lawyer, and headed into Taft Park, aimed at the West Front
of the White House.

It did not take a genius to figure out that the entire Inauguration
had been set up for the benefit of a tiny minority of rich people. Floyd Wayne Vishniak had arrived well ahead of time and made
one complete circuit of the Capitol grounds, strolling down the
west bank of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, east on Independence,
north on First Street between the Capitol and the Library of
Congress, and now westward again on Constitution.

Up to certain point, an ordinary citizen could walk anywhere he
felt like walking, especially if he got all gussied up in nice fancy-
looking clothes as Vishniak had. If you wanted to watch the
Inauguration from two miles away at the far end of the Mall, that was no problem at all. But if you wanted to actually stand close enough to make out the figure of the new President with the naked eye, you had to enter special zones that were cordoned off and
patrolled by cops.

Vishniak had traveled to many parts of the United States, seen
many different types of police officers, and even been arrested by a
few of them. But he had never seen anything like the variety of
cops that were running around this place. It was like a cop zoo or
something. Some of the cops had uniforms and some didn't. Some
of them looked like souped-up Park Rangers. Some of them
looked like glorified mall cops. They had all staked out different
parts of different border zones whose sole function was to separate
the common people from the rich and powerful scum.

It did not look like there was any way to get within a quarter
mile of the inaugural platform without shooting a whole lot of
those different cops. This was bound to attract attention, bring in
even more cops, and scare away his intended victims. So Vishniak
had himself something of a conundrum here. The closest he could get to the platform was on the north side, in a little park north of
Constitution. He spent a while reconnoitering this area, looking for
gaps in the security, and found none.

Instead he found something even better: a GODS truck. Just like
the one he'd glimpsed under the stage at McCormick Place -
except this one was practically right across the street from the
Capitol. Vishniak began to walk across the park, and even as he did,
the door in the back opened and a man climbed out of it.

Something about the man with the close-cropped hair and the
neatly trimmed beard seemed vaguely familiar to Cy Ogle. He fit
the profile for a Secret Service agent. But this man did not behave
like Secret Service. He was not scanning the crowd. He was
looking straight at Cy Ogle.

Ogle had already reached into his breast pocket and pulled out his engraved invitation. The man in the trench coat was reaching
into his breast pocket too. But he hadn't pulled anything out
yet.

"Hey," the man said.

"Morning," Ogle said, "excuse me, but I got a party to attend."

"Hold on a sec," the man said, "I recognize you from that article
they did about you in
The New York Times Magazine
in 1991. And
also from the little article in
Time
magazine last year. They both ran
photos of you."