Neal Stephenson - Interface

He stopped for a while to let that sink in, and surveyed the men's faces again. They all stared back at him, like statues. A couple of them couldn't hold the eye contact, and glanced away.

If you are willing to take that risk," the Chief said, "then repeat after me." He held up his right hand, palm facing forward.

All of the men in the room did the same. Then the Chief swore them all in as deputies of the District of Columbia Police Department.

In the meantime, Mel had taken Eleanor aside and was talking to her in a corner of the room. "You ever bought a house?" he asked.

"Once or twice," she said, surprised and mildly amused.

"Remember all those fucking documents they pulled out for you to sign?"

"I remember them well."

"That's nothing compared to what we're doing today," he said. He opened up a time-worn leather satchel that was resting on the floor. "I have two sets of documents for you," he said, "depending on what happens. I have spent the last several months holed up in the middle of nowhere with a word processor, a laser printer, and a whole lot of law books, drawing these things up. Some of them you need to sign. Some of them Willy has already signed. It's all organized."

Mel pulled a white nine-by-fifteen envelope out of the satchel. "This is in case we're lucky," he said. "In that case, there's not much for you to do - most of your duties will pertain to your role as President of the Senate."

Mel reached back into the satchel and pulled out a black envelope. This one was the expanding type, with bellows on the sides. It was two inches thick. "And this," he said, "is in case we're not so lucky."

"I see," Eleanor said. "White is good and black is bad."

"No," Mel said. "White is Willy and black is Eleanor."

The Chief had finished deputizing the men by now, and Rufus Bell was beginning to stride up and down the room, perusing a list of names, ordering men this way and that, forming them up into several groups of various sizes.

Eleanor opened up the envelopes, took a black ball-point pen (SKILCRAFT U.S. GOVERNMENT) out of her purse, and started signing her name to documents. All of the documents in the white envelope said:

Eleanor Richmond

Vice President, United States of America

All of the documents in the black envelope said:

Eleanor Richmond

President

Rufus Bell and Mel Meyer were dragging cardboard boxes across the floor and shoving them across the concrete in the direction of the various platoons that Bell had organized. The men began to rip the boxes open and pull out T-shirts. They were all black, 100 percent cotton, extra large. On the front was a white star and the words DEPUTY - D.C. POLICE. And on the back of each shirt were the words

DEPT. OF JUSTICE

Lines of authority were never especially clear in Washington, D.C., where the jurisdiction of a dozen different law-enforcement agencies all overlapped. The presence of so many people with guns and badges made it impossible to figure out who was in charge of what. So when men with guns and badges had gone to several locations in the District of Columbia during the last few days and laid claim to numerous parking spaces - some on the street, some in parking lots of federal buildings - there had been disputes, arguments, even threats. But the issues raised could not have been untangled short of calling a convention of Constitutional scholars and locking them all in a room until they made up their minds. The people who had the parking spaces won the argument. The decision was sealed when those parking spaces were occupied by flatbed semitrailer rigs with big GODS shipping containers on their backs. One of them took up a position in front of the headquarters of the Teamsters Union on Louisiana Avenue, only a block north of the Capitol Building. From there, it had a direct line of sight across Taft Park and Constitution Avenue on to the Capitol grounds; a person could climb on to the roof of the truck and get a clear, side-on view of President Cozzano delivering his inaugural address, not much more than a thousand feet away.

Another GODS truck seized a position along Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. Others parked on Fourteenth Street, in the shadow of the Commerce Department; on C Street, in front of the State Department; in front of the Treasury Department on Fifteenth Street; and in the parking lot of the Pentagon.

Once the trucks were in place, they weren't likely to move. The owners - and the mysterious people who went in and out of the containers on their backs - seemed to have an infinite fund of bewildering paperwork, from various D.C. and federal agencies, justifying their presence. Any authority figure, at any level, who tried to move those GODS trucks, would soon find that each one had a lawyer living in the back, on call twenty-four hours a day, complete with cellular phone and portable fax machine. These were not just plain old lawyers either; they were asshole lawyers, ready and willing to issue threats and talk about their friends in high places at the slightest provocation.

And if things escalated beyond that level, each truck also had a couple of imposing plainclothes security guards who would emerge, crack their knuckles, flex their muscles, and glare threaten­ingly when anyone tried to get them to move. The only people in the world who had the guts to confront these people were D.C. meter maids, and so the GODS trucks stayed where they were, accumulating stacks of D.C. parking tickets under their windshield wipers but incurring no further retribution.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of Inauguration Day, Cyrus Rutherford Ogle could be found in the truck that was parked in front of the Teamsters Building, a thousand feet from the inaugural podium. He was seated in the Eye of Cy, keeping tabs on the PIPER 100, and trying to reestablish radio contact with the chips in Governor Cozzano's head.

The radio transmissions were short-range, line-of-sight affairs and so they were used to breaking contact whenever Cozzano strayed more than a couple of thousand feet from the truck. But Cozzano had gone out of his way to be elusive this morning. The listening devises secreted in his clothing and in that of this children were not transmitting any sounds other than the soothing burble of running water. The Secret Service had converged on Rock Creek Park, hindered by a nightmare traffic jam, and found no sign of the Cozzanos other than the abandoned clothes.

It looked a hell of a lot like a kidnapping. But the outgoing President, and several news outlets, had received brief, untraceable telephone calls from Mary Catherine Cozzano, assuring them that everything was okay. She promised that her father would show up for the Inauguration.

Ogle had been planning to reinstate contact with Cozzano's biochip from the truck in Lafayette Square when he paid a call at the White House, which was traditionally what an incoming president did on Inauguration morning. Then, as the outgoing and incoming presidents made their way down Pennsylvania for the inaugural parade, control would be relayed to the truck at Treasury and then at Commerce. Then there would be a blackout of several minutes as the motorcade proceeded down Pennsylvania.

But those moments of freedom were useless to Cozzano. He would have to come to the Capitol eventually. As the motorcade emerged from the shadow of the U.S. Courthouse, the truck at Teamsters - Cy Ogle's truck - would be able to establish contact with the biochip. From that point onward, Cy Ogle would have full control through the inauguration.

William A., James, and Mary Catherine Cozzano emerged from the Farragut West Metro station at eleven o'clock. They had reached Pennsylvania Avenue before anyone recognized them.

The person who did was a well-dressed man in a trench coat, with a neatly trimmed beard and very short hair, proceeding west on Pennsylvania. He was standing at a street-corner waiting for the light to change when he saw the Cozzanos coming toward him. "Good morning President Cozzano," he said.