Interface

The huge ones were former professional football players. The others were Vietnamese veterans. They instinctively formed up into two separate groups, on opposite ends of the room. The Vietnam veterans had served with Cozzano in the mid- to late-sixties and were, for the most part, older than the football players, and from a wider economic range: this group included corporate presidents, highly paid lawyers, janitors, auto mechanics, and homeless people. But today they were all dressed more or less the same, and they greeted each other wordlessly, with hugs and long, intense, two-handed handshakes.

A few minutes after the second bus had arrived, one of the veterans, a big, round-headed, round-shouldered black man, walked to the center of the room, whistled through his fingers, and shouted, "Listen up!"

The conversation rapidly dropped to zero. All of the men moved to the edges of the room, facing inward. "My name is Rufus Bell. For today, you can call me Sarge," said the man. "I have three people to introduce. First of all, the woman who will be our new Vice President in an hour and a half: Eleanor Richmond."

She had been standing by the coffee table. Now she walked to the center of the room. Scattered applause started up and rapidly exploded into an ovation. Rufus Bell whistled again.

"Shut up!" he yelled. "We don't want to bother the neighbors."

"Thank you all," Eleanor said.

Bell continued. "I would also like to introduce Mel Meyer, who will be the acting Attorney General of the United States."

Mel acknowledged by removing the cigar from his mouth momentarily.

"Finally," Bell said, "the Chief of the District of Columbia Police, who's going to swear you all in."

The Chief was snappy in full dress uniform. He walked to the middle of the room and got no applause at all; his appearance, and his bearing, radiated no-nonsense authority. He turned to face the men around the edges of the room and examined them closely for several moments, making individual eye contact with every man in the room.

"This is some serious shit," the Chief said, "not some kind of a fun little field trip. If you're not willing to lay down your life in the defense of the Constitution of the United States, right now, then stay in this building for the next three hours and you'll be fine."

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 begi

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

60

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.