Interface (102 page)

Finally he stood up, harvested a few remaining faxes that had
come out of the machines earlier that day, and fed them into the
shredder. He typed a command into the computer system that
would cause it to re-format all of its disks seven times in a row,
destroying all of the information in the system.

Otho was lying in his bed. He had been lying there since earlier
today and was now beginning to go into rigor mortis. Otis bent
over him and closed his eyes and smoothed back what was left of
his hair.

Then he climbed on the lift and took it up to the surface. It was
a bleak midwinter day, a strong steady wind coming out of the
northwest prairie, whistling and gusting between the heaps of lead
tailings as it picked up a load of toxic metal dust. Otis put on his
warm coat and his mittens and his hat with the earflaps. Then he
started to walk down the shoulder of the highway, headed
southward, where he thought it might be warmer.

Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar was poised above his anaesthetized patient, just about to flick the power switch on his
bone saw, when the first tendrils of noise began to infiltrate the reinforced-concrete walls of the Radhakrishnan Institute. It was a
noise that was senses through the soles of the feet - not so much an
actual sound as a change in the way the ground felt. Perhaps there
had been another earthquake up in Uttar Pradesh. He flicked the
switch and pressed the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw
against the freshly peeled skull of Sasha Yakutin, a promising young
up-and-coming Russian politician who had just been cut down in
the prime of his life by a tragic stroke.

When he finished cutting a hatch through Mr. Yakutin's head
and turned off the saw, the room became quiet - but not entirely
quiet. A palpable noise was penetrating the walls of the operating
room.

A nurse entered the operating theater. "Your brother Arun in on
the telephone," she said.

"Can't you see I am in the middle of an operation?"

"He says it's an emergency. He says you should get out of the
country."

A tremendous impact reverberated through the structure of the
building, causing the steel instruments to vibrate against their trays.
Down the hallway, someone screamed.

"Continue the operation," Dr. Radhakrishnan said to Toyoda,
one of his most promising young proteges."

"Doctor?" Toyoda said.

Dr. Radhakrishnan stripped off his gloves and tossed them into a rubbish can.

When he stepped out into the corridor, the noise became louder; but it was still indistinct. He had heard something like this once in
Elton. He had been awakened early in the morning by the most
frightening noise, a noise that could peel paint from walls, the noise
that madmen must hear in their nightmares, and had shivered under
the covers for a few moments, thinking it was the end of the world;
finally he had peered out under a windowshade and discovered that the trees in his front yard had been taken over by a vast flock of starlings, millions of them, all screeching at the tops of their lungs.

Dr. Radhakrishnan was approaching a closed door at the end of
a hallway. The noise was coming through that door, seeping
around its edges.

He opened the door. The sound was crushing, maddening, a
noise that could cave your skull in. This room was a third-story
office with a picture window that faced on to a major street. But the window had been smashed out. Slivers of smoked glass had
been strewn explosively all over the room. A few rocks and bricks
littered the floor, looking crude and dirty in this clean high-tech space. Hot polluted air streamed in through the window and blew
over Dr. Radhakrishnan's face. He stepped forward, walking
carefully on the broken glass, and looked out the window.

The Radhakrishnan Institute had been surrounded by two
million people.

They were all pumping their fists in the air and chanting. Like starlings. They covered the ground for miles in every direction,
flowing in a smooth carpet around buildings and vehicles, like the
monsoon floods.

The mob seemed to have no particular center. But a few
hundred yards away, he could see a kind of vortex, a swirling center
of activity, moving slowly through the crowd. Moving toward the
institute.

It was an elephant. Unlike the mob, most of whom were poorly, minimally clad, the elephant was stunningly clothed in gold and brightly colored, embroidered silk. A man was sitting on the back
of the elephant. Sitting in a chair on the animal's back. Tied into
the chair, actually, so he wouldn't flop out.

Dr. Radhakrishnan recognized the man. He was an ex-patient.
And then, at last, he figured out what the crowd was chanting.

WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA
WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA.

Zeldo's telephone rang again in the late afternoon; probably
another one of his friends calling to ask him if he had heard about
Presidents Cozzano and Richmond. Zeldo didn't have time for it
now. He had been at the California branch of the Radhakrishnan
Institute for almost twenty-four hours, going over some data from
one of their newest patients - one Aaron Green. Green had been
committed here around the time of Election Day, plagued by
psychological troubles - posttraumatic stress from the Pentagon
Towers bloodbath. Finally, he had volunteered to have several
chips implanted in his head.

Zeldo jerked the phone out of its cradle. "What?"

"It's me." Zeldo would have known the voice anywhere: it was
Mary Catherine Cozzano. "They're covering their tracks. We've
been hearing some weird stuff from the Pentagon and we think
you're in trouble. Get on that bike of yours and pedal like your life
depends upon it, because it does. See you at dinner."

Something in Mary Catherine's voice got Zeldo up out of his chair. He grabbed his backpack, skittered down the stairs, and
yanked his mountain bike from the employee bike rack out front.
He rode across the small parking lot of the Radhakrishnan Institute
and into the entrance of the bicycle path.

He was about half a mile away from the Institute when some
thing caught his eye: an airplane. Usually you didn't notice
airplanes, they were part of the scenery. But this one drew his attention because it was flying incredibly low. He thought maybe
it was coming in for a landing at the airstrip. But it was going way
too fast to make a landing. It was streaking across the landscape,
actually kicking up a dust trail from the ground. It was very small,
and dark.

Zeldo recognized the shape. He had seen a documentary about
these things once, on
60 minutes,
a few years ago. It was a Gale
Aerospace Stealth Cruise Missile. It had achieved great notoriety
for going way off course during its test flights.

The cruise missile shot over the airstrip, made a minor course
correction, and then headed directly toward the Radhakrishnan

Institute, making no effort to slow down. Finally, to Zeldo's relief,
it popped up in the air. It was going to miss the building and fly
harmlessly out to sea.

But it didn't. It shot up several hundred feet, then nosed down
into a power dive. It covered the last mile of its trajectory in a few seconds and finally entered the Institute through a skylight, which
took it straight down a central atrium.

Vast surges of white flame vomited out of every door and
window in the Institute. The image was burned on to Zeldo's
retina in an instant and then he was blinded for a moment. The
shock wave knocked him off his bicycle and sent him sprawling off
the bike path, into the dust.

He didn't feel a things. His mind was stuck on the last thing she'd
said:
See you at dinner.

President Richmond traveled up Pennsylvania Avenue and took possession of the White House at five
p.m.,
bringing the party and
congressional leaders with her. The first thing she did was to fire all of the administrative assistants and transition team, who had moved
into the place during the change of power. Several of these people were also taken into custody by the formidable FBI contingent that
was now following her around, under the direction of the Attorney General, scooping up conspirators and loading them into buses en
masse.

There was a lot to do. She ensconced herself in the Oval Office even while the FBI men were scanning it for listening devices. At
seven o'clock, all the important people in Washington came into
the office: the Congressional leaders, party leaders, several of the
Joint Chiefs, all of the acting Cabinet members, heads of various
major agencies including the CIA and the NSA. She was not in any
mood, or any position, to be ceremonious; these people piled into
her office like a tour group from Oskaloosa and stood around the
edges of the room staring at her. She stared back at them over a desk
piled with cardboard boxes and loose documents from the black
envelope.

"I
 
know what you're thinking," she said. "This can't be
happening. This bitch can't possibly be our president. It won't last. Well, it is happening. I am the President. And I will continue to be
for the next eight years. You'd better get used to it. Thank you for
coming in. Now go out there and do your jobs."

There were boxes all over the place. Cozzano's boxes had been moved in this morning. Eleanor's boxes had been moved in at the Naval Observatory. Now Cozzano's boxes were being taken away and Eleanor's boxes were being hustled down and brought into the
White House.

She had one of the movers keep his eye out for one item in
particular: a very long, skinny one. An eight-foot cardboard tube.
Eventually he showed up carrying the tube over his shoulder like a
spear. He got the tape off the end for her and then she pulled out
what was inside: a strip of cheap wooden moulding with a few nails
sticking out of it. Eleanor borrowed a hammer from the White
House maintenance people and put it up herself, nailing it right
into the wall of the Oval Office, to the shock and chagrin of the housekeeping staff, who came running when they heard those
pounding noises. It looked flimsy and cheap, and it was. But
anyone who came closer could see horizontal lines drawn across it
in ballpoint pen, with dates and the names of her children written
next to them. Eleanor liked it.

It wasn't until about nine o'clock that she was able to keep her date with Mary Catherine. They met on the steps of the Jefferson
Memorial, accompanied by the motley assortment of football
players and graying Vietnam vets who had been following them
around all day.

The area was checked out and cleared. Eleanor and Mary
Catherine climbed up the steps of the Memorial, turned around,
and looked out across the Tidal Basin toward the White House, a
mile and a half away, brilliant under the lights.

Eleanor and Mary Catherine sat together on the top step,
huddled together against a chilly wind coming off the Potomac.
Mary Catherine put her head on Eleanor's shoulder and cried for a
while. Eleanor held her patiently, stroking her hair in the way of
mothers, and waiting for her to get it all out.

Then she waved her arm toward the Mall. "Look. It's beautiful,"
she said.

The air-traffic moratorium was still in place over D.C. National Airport, just across the river and it was quiet for the first time in
decades. Consequently the Tidal Basin was the way it was supposed
to be: placid, undisturbed by the shrieking and thundering of 767s
veering in for their slam-dunk landings. The sky was cobalt blue
and Venus was out, looking exactly like a diamond over the curved towers of the tall buildings in Rosslyn. The ring of half-staffed
American flags around the Washington Monument flickered their silhouettes, lower than usual, against the white limestone.

"It is nice," Mary Catherine said, feeling better all of a sudden.
"But I'm freezing."

"Me too," Eleanor confessed. Then she nodded across the Mall
toward the White House. "Would you like to come over to my
place and help me unpack?"