Interface

That was okay. Images were all fakery and manipulation cobbled together by the evil gnomes of Ogle Data Research, who had their secret headquarters just a short distance away, in the mysterious place called Pentagon Towers. What counted was words. So when Cozzano stepped up to the microphones to make the formal campaign kickoff speech, Vishniak emptied his Fleischacker into a hapless beer can, set the safety, put the gun into the shoulder holster under his QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker, and sat down on the tailgate of his pickup to listen to the murmuring of the stream and the speech that William A. Cozzano was delivering to him and the rest of the American people. As the introductions were being made, Vishniak pulled a small reporter's notebook out of his pocket. The last page read:

COZZANO'S HATS (CONTD.)

SUN AUG 25 CHICAGO CUBS BASEBALL CAP

MON AUG 26 HARD HAT (STEEL MILL VISIT)

TUE AUG 27 NO HAT - BUT HE STAYED IN-DOORS!!!

WED AUG 28 THE HOMBURG

THU AUG 29 U.S. FLAG BASEBALL CAP

FRI AUG 30 BIKE HELMET (ORLANDO BIKE-A-THON)

SAT AUG 31 THE HOMBURG

SUN SEP 1 NO HAT - WENT TO CHURCH

and now he added a new line:

SUN SEP 2 THE HOMBURG AGAIN

Some kind of spooky shit was definitely going on with those hats. They were all saying now that the homburg was some kind of a Fashion Statement, but William A. Cozzano had never felt any need to make such statements until he had gotten that chip stuck into his brain. It obviously had something to do with brain waves.

In his speech, Cozzano covered the usual bases: the corruption of big-party politics, the need for change. Change not only in the political system but in the values system of the entire country. Change that would renew our commitment to education and to long-term investment in the future. This topic led, inevitably, to the subject of the economy, at which point Vishniak finally started to pay attention. The economy was the only thing that mattered to him.

"There are those who say that we are doomed to be a secondrate power, subjugated to the Japanese," Cozzano said, just as the big Boeing jet was begi

"To those people," Cozzano continued, "I have only one thing to say: BEHOLD!" He turned aside and swept out one arm toward the jet, then watched it take off. To shout above the scream of its turbofans would have been futile, would have made him look tiny by comparison. As Vishniak watched the miniature figure of the jet take off on his little screen, saw it bank into its turn, exposing the Rising Sun logo painted on its tail fin, his anger was replaced by a surge of defiant pride. Sure the economic situation looked bleak, but a country that could make airplanes like that could accomplish anything if it just set its mind to it.

Cozzano turned to the microphones and said, "No matter how bleak the economists and the pundits say our situation is, I think that any country that can make airplanes like that one can, with hard work and determination, accomplish anything."

Vishniak felt relieved that a great man like Cozzano felt the same as he did, that his feelings weren't just stupid, blind patriotism. But he was a jittery and suspicious fellow by nature and could not be satisfied with this kind of happy talk for long.

"Now, I would be lying if I stopped there, and left you with the impression that happy talk is going to close the trade deficit," Cozzano said. "Uplifting speeches and slick media images do not an economy make. What we need is to educate our children. But not just to cram their heads with facts and figures - to teach them values as well, values of hard, steady work."

That was a little better. Cozzano was talking some sense there. Although Vishniak was begi

"People think that when I speak of education I mean kinder­garten, elementary school and high school," Cozzano said, "but

education is more than that. Education is a lifelong process. An unemployed, down-and-out factory worker in the Midwest can benefit from education just as much as a five-year-old child."

"Wait just a goddamn minute," Floyd Wayne Vishniak said, out loud.

It was just a little too much - that bit about the down-and-out midwestern factory worker. He rewound his mental tape of the last few minutes and played it back inside his head, ignoring the rest of Cozzano's speech (Cozzano had now gone on to talk about the need for corporate America to shape up and restructure itself).

Vishniak held the Dick Tracy watch up to his eye and scrutinized the scene carefully. Cozzano didn't have any notes up there on the lectern. And it didn't seem like he was using a TelePrompTer. He was looking around naturally, seemingly speaking off-the-cuff, making everything up as he went along. This was a habit that had been noticed and remarked upon by all the papers that Vishniak had been reading over the summer: Cozzano, who in years past had written his own speeches and read them back, hewing closely to a fixed script, had, in the last few months, taken to speaking extemporaneously.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was begi

Vishniak rotated his forearm, the palm of his hand facing upward, to expose the little button that would release the ratchet and pop the watch off his wrist. All he had to do was take it off and then he would be a free man again, and William A. Cozzano would no longer be able to read his brain waves. He had been wearing it continuously for a couple of weeks, and underneath it his skin was itching fiercely. But he couldn't take it off, no matter what. He had to trust his instincts. He knew that they were watching him and that to remove the wristwatch meant certain death, a nice dose of shellfish poison straight into his arm. He'd never get that thing off. He was on a suicide mission.

He jumped off the tailgate, climbing into the cab of his truck, dug his road atlas out from under the seat, and began to contemplate possible approach vectors to the seat of all evil in the world.

49

Shortly after Floyd Wayne Vishniak entered the greater Washington metropolitan area, something completely shocking and unprecedented happened to him: he got a job.

It happened in Pentagon Plaza, of all places. He had gone there expecting to stage a bloodbath and ended up filling out job applications. The unpredictability of life in America was a constant source of amusement to him.

He had spent half a day doing recon. Pentagon Plaza, he concluded after driving around it at high speed several dozen times, was a single building that just happened to look like a whole bunch of different buildings very close together. There was a parking ramp (the rich and powerful had to have their parking spaces!) and a low, squat, enormous structure mostly concealed behind that, and rising up from it were a couple of skyscrapers - Pentagon Towers. But they were all part of the same complex. The fortress of darkness owned and opened by Ogle Data Research.

How best to make his approach? His maps told him that there was a Metro stop beneath Pentagon Plaza. That would be a good way to get in close. But in the end he decided against it. He had no idea what was going to happen. If he didn't get killed, he would want to get out of there fast, and taking the subway wasn't the way to do it. Better to have his truck handy.