Interface (85 page)

At this point Cozzano paused in his speech as the audience
laughed indulgently. It wasn't really that funny, but he had
delivered it in the cadence of a joke, and they knew their cues.

Vishniak kicked open an office door and saw nothing but a desk,
and the knees and elbows of a man in a suit who was cowering
behind it. This was not much to go on, but he was able to use his
mind's eye to reconstruct the approximate shape and position of the
owner of those knees and elbows, and pumped several rounds into
the probable locations of his vital organs. When he saw what
looked like an appropriate quantity of blood on the floor, he left
the office, leaving the door ajar as a reminder that he had already
visited this particular room.

"This is a bit excessive, wouldn't you say?' Mr. Salvador said. "I
shall have to speak with Dr. Schram about this. It's too late in the
campaign for these distractions."

"There is an incredible amount of gunfire," Green said, a little
nervous.

On the central TV screen. Cozzano continued: "On one of my
first trips, after Lover had flushed a pheasant, I swung my gun in its
direction, as I had practiced so many times with clay pigeons. But
suddenly the barrel swung up in the air and I held my fire. My
father had suddenly reached out and pushed the barrels up in the
air, ruining my aim, and I was very upset.

"By way of explanation, he pointed to our neighbor's house,
which had been directly in my line of fire - almost a mile away
from us! I protested that there was no way that birdshot could travel
for such a distance. 'Better safe than sorry,' he said."

Vishniak moved on to the next room. This one contained half a
dozen TV screens and an equal number of computer monitors.
One of the computer monitors was dead and the other five were
glowing a brilliant red color. He put a bullet into each. This clip
was running low, so as long as he was in a safe room, he ejected it,
put it in his trouser pocket, and put in a fresh one. Cozzano's voice
was still coming from his wristwatch. "When I first learned that
there were some people in Washington who wanted to take our
guns away from us, I were more astonished than offended. The idea
seemed ludicrous. My father - and all the other gun owners I knew
- practiced firearm safety, and were at pains to pass those practices
on to their children. The notion that some person in Washington
could come out to Tuscola, Illinois, and take our guns away from
us, because we were not, in their view, fit to own them, was
completely baffling to me. And it still is."

The audience laughed; the laugh deepened into a cheer.

"Something's definitely going on out there," Aaron Green said.
"I'm going to lock the door."

"Good idea," Mr. Salvador said, picking up the phone, holding
it to his ear. "It's dead. The phone's dead."

Aaron had almost reached the door when the knob rotated and
it opened. A man with a gun was standing in the hallway looking
him in the eye.

The man's eye was drawn to the enormous racks of computer
monitors that covered every wall of the room, the banks of
computer systems. His jaw dropped open as he took it all in. While
the man was gaping, Green had time to recognize him: it was Floyd
Wayne Vishniak with a haircut.

Vishniak's gaze finally returned to Aaron's face. And it was clear
that the presence of Aaron Green, here in this room, was the final
piece in some kind of mental puzzle that Vishniak had been
assembling in his head. "This is it," Vishniak said, talking way too
loud, as if he was deaf. "Isn't it?"

Never argue with a man with a gun. "Yes," Green said, "this is
it." He turned to Mr. Salvador for support. "Isn't it?"

"Yes, this is it," Mr. Salvador said, climbing very gingerly out of
his chair, holding his hands together in front of his chest, fingertip
to fingertip, in an attitude halfway between contemplation and
prayer. He had the presence of mind to look over at Vishniak's monitor screen; it had gone pale and colorless.

Then it turned brilliant green.

"You're the Big Boss of it all!" Vishniak said. He stepped
forward, shoved Aaron out of the way, leveled his gun at Mr.
Salvador, and began to pull the trigger. He pulled it over and over
again and the muzzle flashed like a strobe. Mr. Salvador was
backing across the room with his hands dangling numbly at his
sides, and before long he collapsed against a window.

But the window wasn't there anymore; it had long since been
blown out of its frame, and the only thing there was a closed
Venetian blind with a lot of holes in it, flopping outward into the
wind, betraying the warm Virginia sunshine. Suddenly, Mr.
Salvador was no longer in the room.

"Jesus, where'd he go?" Vishniak said. He stepped forward into
the room, looking around suspiciously. He went over to the
window, pushed the blind out with one hand, and looked down.

But by that point, Aaron Green was already in the elevator.

The lunchtime crowd in the foodcourt at Pentagon Plaza had first
been alerted by a loud rattling noise on the glass overhead. The roar
of conversation mostly drowned this out, but a few perceptive
diners looked up to see fragments of broken glass sparkling in the
sun as they bounced on the greenhouse roof.

Then the body came toward them in a smooth silent arc and
punched through the ceiling without any perceptible loss in speed. When it hit the glass it lost its sharply edged silhouette as a lot of
stuff was forced out of it by the impact. It continued through the
central atrium of the mall, now more a cloud of loosely organized

remains of a corpse, and burst across four separate tables. A couple
of seconds later, the broken glass came down in a hailstorm.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak, esq.

Parts Unknown

United States of America

Letters to the Editor

Washington Post

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. (Or Miss, Mrs., or Ms.) Editor:
I have a bone to pick with you. Your coverage of my shooting
spree (your way of describing it, not mine!) was the most
biased and inaccurate piece of newspaper reporting I ever saw.
All this year I have been reading a lot of newspapers (more
than $300 spent so far) so that I could be an informed voter
come November. But when I read a piece of garbage like your
articles of 14, 15, and 16 September it makes me wonder if I
have been informing myself at all. Or was I just filling up my
head with all kinds of trash that your reporters just made up
when they decided it was too much work to just go out and
find out the Real Truth?

1.
     
It was not a "bloodbath," as you have called it over and
over. Only five people got killed. And the injuries to the
diners in the food court do not count as this part was an
accident. Just today you had an article about a car accident on
the Beltway where five people got killed, but you never said
it was a bloodbath.

2.
     
You said I "roamed through the office suite firing indis
criminately." This is totally biased. I was not roaming. And I
was not firing indiscriminately, or else why didn't I kill the
five people who were in the brain-washing room with me? I
will
 
tell you why:
 
because
 
these
 
five
 
were
 
average
 
all-
American citizens who I was trying to protect, not kill.

3.
 
The part about the "spray of gunfire" really made my
blood boil. There was no spraying. I decided what to shoot
and I shot it.

4.
    
Then in the article on 16 Sept. you said that I calmly and
methodically went through the office suite executing people.
If I was so calm and methodical then why did you write all that stuff about roaming, spraying, firing indiscriminately, etc. This
shows the bias that is in your writing.

5.
    
I am not a reclusive loner. As you would understand if
you had to WORK for a living, it is cheaper to live out in the
middle of nowhere. This does not make me a loner, just a
poor honest working man.

6.
    
Finally (this is the BIG POINT of my letter), every single word of your coverage makes me out to be a psycho. Like you
would never even consider the idea that I might ACTUALLY
BE RIGHT!

WAKE UP AMERICA! The so-called election of the
president is a SHAM controlled by the MEDIA MANIPU
LATORS who have turned Cozzano into a ROBOT by
planting a CHIP IN HIS HEAD that receives secret coded
transmissions from SATELLITES. These same MEDIA
MANIPULATORS have also put BRAIN WAVE
MONITORS on average people's wrists disguised as DICK
TRACY WRISTWATCHES.

One day I will be recognized as the hero I am for
uncovering this secret conspiracy. Then you, the
Washington
Post,
will be exposed for what you are: A TOOL OF THE
CONSPIRACY that helps to control people's brains by
putting out BIASED SO-CALLED NEWS.

You will be hearing from me again soon, I am sure.

Sincerely,

Floyd Wayne Vishniak

51

The Cozzano campaign was a third-party effort, which meant
that it had to fight for every voter and every state. It had gotten off
to a relatively late start in July and hadn't really gotten rolling until
August; then Cozzano had suffered in the polls for a couple of
weeks from his surprising choice of Eleanor Richmond as running
mate.

Since then, Cozzano had crushed everything in his path. In city
after city he strode up to the microphones, utterly relaxed and con
fident, shrugging off his aides, ignoring the notes and tele-
prompters, and spoke. The words poured out of him effortlessly.
He wasn't speaking to the journalists; he seemed to be speaking
directly to the American people. In his homburg he looked like a
figure from the middle of the century, like one of the men who had
defeated Hitler and charted the course of empires and alliances. Compared to the sniping, weasely sons of bitches who had been leading America for the last few decades, he seemed like a throw
back to the days when leaders were leaders, when there was such a
thing as a great man. He looked as if he would have been right at
home at the Yalta Conference, sitting with Roosevelt, Churchill,
and Stalin. Whether he was meeting with foreign leaders or tipping a hotel doorman, he conducted himself with surefooted dignity and
gentlemanly grace mixed with a kind of earthy, scab-knuckled
vigor.

He did not seem to be running for anything at all. He seemed to
be going around the country just being himself.

Mary Catherine didn't know a lot about presidential politics, but
she knew it was significant when they ended up in Boston for an
overnight stay. Massachusetts never went to anyone except Democrats; the fact that Cozzano was there meant that it was now up for
grabs. It meant that her father was heading for a fifty-state sweep.

They stayed at a magnificent hotel along the waterfront with a
huge arch that opened up like a gateway on Boston Harbor. This
was, of course, Ogle's choice; the arch made a great backdrop for
television appearances, and the proximity to the harbor made it
easier to bash the Democrats on environmental issues.

The campaign had rented out a floor of suites. Mary Catherine and William A. Cozzano shared a two-bedroom suite, which was
normal. She came straight from the airport and got settled in while her father hit a number of campaign stops, including tours of some
high-tech firms in Cambridge.