Neal Stephenson - Interface

"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.

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.

Cozzano ascended the stage a few minutes before air time, unbuttoned his jacket, and sat down in his chair. A technician assisted him in clipping a microphone to his lapel, and asked him to say a few words so that they could adjust their sound levels. Cozzano quoted the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, which raised a smattering of applause from the students and even from a few of the TV people.

The host, looking professional, sat in his chair and went through a sound check of his own. At five seconds before eight p.m., a man in a headset gave them a digital countdown (he used his fingers) and then the host delivered some prepared remarks, reading them from a TelePrompTer. Then he turned toward Cozzano and asked him a question about Middle East policy.

This was a hard pitch. The politics of the Israeli/Palestinian question had been dissected and analyzed to an impossibly minute degree, over decades, by persons whose sole function in life was to know everything about these issues. Every squiggle and jog in the contour of Israel's border had its experts, who knew about everything that had happened in that place since the time of the pharaoh. West Bank settlement and the status of the PLO had become more arcane than the concept of the Trinity in the early church: every conceivable idea had already been come up with, and its ramifications worked out and analyzed. Of all the millions of possible opinions one could have on these subjects, there were only a few that a presidential candidate could get away with having, and in order merely to explain these opinions the candidate had to master a new vocabulary and even a new form of logic that did not really apply anywhere else. The best way to trip up a governor who was running for president was to ask him a seemingly simple, innocuous question about the Middle East and then wait for him to hang himself.