Interface (84 page)

"Excuse me, sir?" someone was saying. He felt a hand placed
gently on his arm, and startled away from it. It was one of the ODR
gals. "Would you like to have a seat? We're about to get started."

"Sure," he said, and took a seat, one that had a good view of the
door. While he had been standing at the window analyzing the
structure of the U.S. Government, two other mall folk had come into the room, making a total complement of six.

What happened next was kind of amusing: they passed out wrist
cuffs, one per customer. They were just like the one that Vishniak was already wearing, except that these didn't have the built-in TV
screens. Playing dumb, Vishniak watched the gal explain how to
put them on your arm, and followed her instructions with artificial
clumsiness. Now he had one on each wrist.

Then she closed the blinds, turned off the lights, and showed
them about fifteen minutes of television. Most of it consisted of
advertisements but there were a few news stories in there too. All
of it had to do, one way or another, with William A. Cozzano.
Some of the ads were fuzzy-warm, touchy-feely numbers showing
past events in Cozzano's life, including some grainy home videos of Cozzano recovering from his stroke that made Vishniak get choked
up. Some of the ads were attacks on the President or Tip McLane.
And then there were news stories - excerpts from what looked like
network broadcasts. But the anchormen were unfamiliar to
Vishniak. And the news events being reported had not actually happened.

Watching the anchorman read the stories, Vishniak sensed,
somehow, that he was familiar. But not as an anchorman. As
something else. Then it came to him: this man had played the
captain of a starship - not the
Enterprise -
in an episode of
Star Trek:
The Next Generation.
He was an actor. And this news story was a
fake. It hadn't really happened. It was just
a potential
news story.

"Huh. Getting some interesting reactions from our Post-
Confederate Gravy Eater," Aaron Green said. He was sitting in the
next room, looking at half a dozen monitor screens. Next to him
was Shane Schram.

"What's this guy's problem?' Shane Schram said. He looked at the TV monitor showing the face of the Post-Confederate Gravy
Eater, who was staring fixedly at the screen, jaw muscles throbbing.

"Incredible cortex activity," Aaron said, scrutinizing the
readout.

"What does that mean?"

"It means his mental gears are spinning at a million rpm. He's
thinking way too hard about everything."

"Can't have that. We'll just throw out his results," Schram said.

The videotape came to an end. Schram got up, walked next
door, and turned on the lights in the focus group room. Then he
delivered his usual self-introduction, which Aaron Green had now
listened to a million times.

The door opened and Mr. Salvador came into the room, joining
Aaron. Everyone called him Mr. Salvador because he had a kind
of intercontinental breeding that inspired un-American levels of
formality and because he was their boss. Even Cy Ogle's boss. But
he wasn't just some figurehead who golfed and went to the
occasional board meeting. He was very much a hands-on type. He
spent days at a time holed up in the room where they had set up all
of the monitors for the PIPER 100.

"We're doing a PIPER broadcast in a couple of minutes,"
Mr. Salvador said. "I'd like you to join me and give me your
analysis."

"What's up?"

"Cozzano's giving an address to a convention of gun nuts in Tulsa," Salvador said. "It's going to be his major statement on the
gun control issue. Which, in this country, seems to be hysterically
emotional."

"That's for sure."

"I'm just sick of all this gutter politics," the lady said. She was a
solidly built, bifocal-wearing woman with a conservative mid-western haircut, wearing a lavender jogging suit. Fresh off a tour
bus from Indiana, no doubt. "I just don't want to see any more of
this trash."

"I think you
do
want to see it," Schram said, "I think you are
fascinated by this kind of thing. I think that, when you go to the
grocery stores, you deliberately stand in the longest checkout line
so that you will have time to pull the tabloids off the racks and leaf through them. And then you put them back on their racks. Because
you're not the kind of person who would read sleazy tabloids - are
you?"

The woman was utterly dumbfounded. "How - how did you
know that? Have you been following me around or something?"

"Stop messing with her brain waves!" said the Post-Confederate
Gravy Eater. Contrary to his assigned stereotype, he did not have a
southern accent. More midwestern.

"How's that again?" Schram asked.

"You get into people's brains. I know you do. Can't you see you're bothering that woman?"

Schram shrugged innocently and held up his hands, palms up.
"Hey. I'm just here having a conversation with her. I don't know
anything about brain waves."

"Oh, yeah?" the man said, yanking the cuff off his wrist. "Then what's this?"

"That's already been explained," Schram said.

"Your explanations are all lies and cover-ups," the man said.

"Look," Schram said, "let me be honest. We're done with your
interview, sir. Why don't you go ahead and take off. You can pick up your fifty dollars at the desk."

"What about these others?"

"I'd like to talk to them a little bit more."

"Why don't you want to talk to me? Isn't my opinion important?"

"We had a bug in our equipment," Schram said. "It didn't work
in your case. So to keep you here any longer would be a waste of
time. Thank you for coming in."

The man stood up out of his chair, facing the door, and then
hesitated. He had grabbed the zipper pull on his red Confederate
flag windbreaker with his left hand and was nervously zipping it up
and down. He seemed to be deep in thought.

"Sir? That's all we need from you," Schram said. "You can go
home now. Thanks for coming."

"Okay," the man said, finally zipping his zipper all the way up to
his neck. "Okay, I think I'll go back home now. Thanks. It was real
interesting. I learned a lot."

"You're welcome," Schram said.

The man started for the exit. Then music began to come out of
him, as if he were carrying a transistor radio in his pocket. He
stopped and froze for a moment.

The music was tinny and compressed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.

The man took his hands out of his pockets. One wrist had an Ace
bandage wrapped around it. The music became louder. He ripped
the Ace bandage off. The sound of applause was now coming from
his wrist.

William A. Cozzano stepped to the lectern and waved down the
applause and cheers of the attendees at the Tulsa Gun and Knife
Show.

"My Secret Service people wanted to provide additional security for me today," he said, "because I was addressing a bunch of gun owners, and for some reason that made them nervous. Well, I have
one thing to say to you gun owners: if any one of you really wants
to take a shot at me,
here I
am!"

Cozzano stepped back from the lectern and held his arms out
wide. The hall was filled with stunned murmuring for a few
moments. Then the gun owners exploded. Peals of cheers,
applause, and foot-stomping overwhelmed the sound system on the
PIPER watch.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was staring into Shane Schram's face, sizing
him up. Schram's eyes were jumping back and forth between the
little TV and his face.

"You're Economic Roadkill," Schram said. "You're Floyd
Wayne Vishniak!"

Floyd Wayne Vishniak unzipped his windbreaker and reached
inside. "That was a really stupid thing for you to say," he said. Then
he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at Schram. Everyone else in
the room collapsed out of their chairs.

"I can see that you're very upset," Schram said.

"How many times do I have to tell you," Vishniak said, "to stay
the hell out of my brain waves!" Then he fired a single round that
entered Schram's head through the bridge of his nose and left
through an exit wound, in the back of his skull, that would have
accommodated a grapefruit.

"Don't worry," Vishniak said to the five people on the floor,
who could scarcely hear a word he was saying because their ears were ringing from the incredible blast of the handgun. "You don't
have to worry about these bastards anymore!"

"What the hell was that?" Mr. Salvador said. He and Green were in the PIPER monitor room, watching Cozzano shake his hands
together above his head, basking in the waves of applause.

"Nothing," Green said. "Another one of Schram's psychological
experiments."

"I thought we were finished with the calibration phase," Mr.
Salvador said.

"Believe me," Green said, "this place is like Dodge City
sometimes. It's all fake."

Vishniak popped his head into the hallway and withdrew it before
anyone could get off a shot. But the precaution was unnecessary.
No one was there.

He chanced a second look and saw the fat security guard in the
lobby, looking back at him with only mild concern, as if high-
ranking executives at ODR got their brains blown against the
walls every day. Vishniak drew back into the room, his back to
the doorway. He gripped the Fleischacker in both hands, spun
around into the hall while bringing the gun downward, steadied
his arm against the door frame for a second, and fired three quick
shots. The first two hit the guard in the chest and the last one was
high.

Now he had to move fast. He ran toward the lobby, spun
through the doorway, and took aim at the old guard, who was in
the act of unsnapping his holster. He fired two rounds into the
man's head and upper body from a distance of about six feet. Then
he spun toward the receptionist's desk.

She had already vaulted her desk and was cowering and
screaming on the far side. That was okay, she was just a gnome. The
key was to take out the switchboard. Vishniak fired a spread of
some half-dozen bullets into her computer and her telephone
switchboard.

He turned back into the hallway, reached down with one hand,
and unsnapped the flaps on the tops of his cargo pockets. He tucked the flaps down into the pockets, as he had practiced many times, so
that they would not get in the way when he reached down to pull
out more clips.

Then it hit him: though it was a bit early in the day to be getting
cocky, he was doing an incredibly good job so far. He had wiped out their pathetic security detail and blown their communications
to shreds. Now he'd be able to clean out the remainder of the
eleventh floor in a thorough and methodical way.

"Generally good results so far," Mr. Salvador said. "Of course, the
gun control advocates will never like this kind of thing."

"Yeah. But check out some of our gun owners," Green said.
"Look at Vishniak?"

"Who?"

"Economic Roadkill," Green said, tapping a screen that had
suddenly gone brilliant emerald. "He's one of my guys. And you can see how happy he is with the speech so far."

He had gone almost completely deaf from the blasts of the
Fleischacker and could barely hear the voice of William A.
Cozzano coming from his PIPER watch:
"...
would go out in the
fields with my father, each of us with a shotgun tucked under his
arm, and look for the pheasants that would go through the
harvested fields for loose corn. Our retriever Lover would
accompany us, often staying well back because he had learned that
the blasts of the shotgun hurt his ears."