Neal Stephenson - Interface

Otho was shaken. No one had ever come to Cacher before. The very fact that Otis had been placed in this position - standing in the door of the old general store with a machine gun, locked and loaded - was disastrous. If the Network knew that they had been reduced to such methods, they would probably be cut off, and Otho's responsibilities transferred to someone else. Otho knew that there were others - like Mr. Salvador - waiting to take his place as soon as he slipped up.

"Should we kill him?" Otis said. It was a painfully stupid question, but it was good that Otis had come out and asked it. Otis had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching spy movies and thrillers on HBO. Since he had become aware of the nature of the current undertaking, he had let his imagination run away with him, thinking that they were in the middle of some asinine James Bond movie.

"That's not what this is about," Otho said. "This is not violence, son. It's not war. It's not espionage. The whole point here is to get this country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping your promises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer's an honorable man and if we killed him we'd cut the ground out from under our feet." Otho paused for a moment and stared through a dusty window-pane. "If we were killers, I'd kill Mr. Salvador."

"How come?" Otis said, astonished. "I thought he was doing a real good job."

"If he was doing a real good job," Otho said, "Mel Meyer never would have come here. He wouldn't even have known that anything was going on."

William A. Cozzano's National Town Meeting, which took place in Chicago in August, was the equivalent of a political con­vention. But because it was a pure media event, with no procedural nonsense to gum up the works, it was a lot more entertaining.

The opening event was held in Grant Park, a green swath that ran between the towering center of downtown Chicago and the lake. At the cost of permanently alienating the animal-rights and anticombustion constituencies, Cozzano's campaign managers had set up a huge Sunday evening barbecue. The ten thousand participants in the town meeting had been streaming into Chicago all weekend, checking into the big downtown hotels and getting themselves settled in the rooms where they would spend the next week. The Grant Park barbecue was an informal way for everyone to get together and goof around before the scheduled events got underway at the convention center on Monday morning.

From the balcony of her hotel suite along Congress Plaza overlooking the heart of Grant Park, Mary Catherine could see the barbecue developing through most of the day. Around five p.m., when the afternoon heat was starting to subside, the smoke rising up from all of those barbecue pits began to look appetizing, and so she put on a sundress. It was rather prim by the standards of an urban beach on a hot summer day, but racy by the standards of candidates' wives and daughters. Furthermore, it was light and loose enough that she could play Softball in it, though sliding into base would be out of the question. Since her display of place-hitting acumen in Tuscola on the Fourth of July, being spunky and athletic had become part of her job description.

She took the elevator down to the street and strolled through the park. Mary Catherine could now stroll anywhere in Chicago, wearing any clothing she wanted, at any time of the day or night, because she was always followed by Secret Service agents. She had decided that armed guards were a great thing and that every girl should have a few.

The barbecue couldn't just be a plain old barbecue. It had to be built around some kind of a central media concept. In this case, the concept was that all of the various regions of the United States were competing to see where the best barbecuing was done. Mary Catherine strolled among the smoking beef pits, from Texas, North Carolina, Kansas City, and decided that, beyond providing her with a quick take-out dinner, comparative barbecue was not very interesting to her.

Flocks of black birds, just like the ones Mel had raved about, swirled around the grassy areas scavenging the ends of french fries. One of Dad's favorite sixties rock bands was playing in the bandshell to the north, but she found their songs just one step above Muzak. To the south, on Hutchinson Field, a number of impromptu games were underway: touch football, frisbee, softball, volleyball. She didn't feel like getting sweaty just yet, and stayed close to the footpaths, which were lined with double rows of shade trees.

Across Lakeshore Drive, along the border of the yacht basin, things were much quieter and several degrees cooler. The basin was dotted with numbered white-and-blue buoys where recreational boats could tie up. There was no beach here, just a stone seawall with one or two depressed platforms where boats could take on or discharge passengers. A couple of big tour boats were circulating between these sites and the open lake, taking people on free rides so that they could appreciate the splendour of the Loop as seen from Lake Michigan. That looked cool and relaxing, so Mary Catherine climbed on board one of the boats, sat down in a deck chair, and took her freshly barbecued hamburger out of its wrapper. She and her Secret Service agents were the last persons to cross the gangplank; within a few moments the boat was motoring out through a broad avenue between the white buoys, headed for a gap in the breakwater.

As she was polishing off the last of her hamburger, a woman separated herself from the crowd of people standing along the railing of the boat and approached her. She was black, nicely dressed, probably in her forties but capable of looking younger. She " moved with unusual confidence through the loose picket fence of Secret Service agents, giving each of the guards a knowing smile and a nod. She had a nice face and a nice smile. "Hello," she said, gesturing to an empty deck chair next to Mary Catherine. "Is this taken?"

"Go ahead," Mary Catherine said. "You're not from around here, are you?"

The woman laughed. "Eleanor Richmond. It's nice to meet you, Ms. Cozzano," she said, extending her hand.

"Nice to meet you," Mary Catherine said, shaking it. "I'm sorry I didn't recognize you right away - I've seen you several times on TV."

"Several times. Well, you are one attentive TV watcher. I haven't been on that many times."

"I watch Dr. Lawrence's program pretty regularly," Mary Catherine said, "and he seemed to like you."

"He hates me," Eleanor said, "but I do wonders for his ratings. And, I suspect, for his fantasy life."

"I was so sorry to hear about Senator Marshall," Mary Catherine said.

"Thank you," Eleanor said graciously.

Caleb Roosevelt Marshall had gone back to his ranch in south­eastern Colorado "to clear some brush" in the third week of July. The doctors, aides, and bodyguards who traveled with him all the time had arisen early one morning to find his bed empty. Eventually they had found him on the top of a mesa. He had ridden up there before dawn, watched the sun rise over the prairie, and then blown his heart out with a double-barrelled shotgun.

He left letters addressed to several people: his staff, various senate colleagues, old friends, old enemies, and the President. Most of the contents of these letters were never revealed, partly because they were private and partly because many of them were unprintable. The President read his letter - two lines scrawled over a piece of senate stationery - threw it into the fire, and ordered a double Scotch from the White House bar.

Eleanor's note said, "You know what to do - Caleb. P.S. Watch your back."

They flew his body back to the Rotunda, where it lay in state for twenty-four hours, and then they flew him back to Colorado, where he was cremated and his ashes spread over his ranch. As per Marshall's written instructions, Eleanor ran the office for the next two weeks, while the Governor of Colorado debated whom to appoint to replace Marshall.