Neal Stephenson - Interface

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 moni­tored 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.