Interface (82 page)

"People think that when I speak of education I mean kinder
garten, 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 beginning to understand why.
William A. Cozzano was reading his mind. He was reading
Vishniak's brain waves and telling him exactly what he wanted to
hear! How was he doing it? Through the wristwatch, no doubt.
That was the key to the whole thing.

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.

He could park outside and walk in or - daring idea - he could
actually drive on to the parking ramp. This latter idea, while it
might seem impossibly audacious, held major advantages. It was
worth checking out. He drove past the entrances to the parking ramp several times, going very slowly, his window rolled down,
and observed people driving into the place. Everyone got in
without hassle. They pulled up to a little machine, slammed a
button, and pulled out a ticket. The gate rose up and they drove on
in. No one inspected them. You didn't have to show any kind
of ID.

It was worth a try. The worst thing that could happen was that he'd have to crash through the gate. He pulled into the chute. So
much adrenaline was pumping through his system now that his
teeth hurt and his gums felt hot and swollen.

He stopped by the little machine, and, trying to look nonchalant,
like he did this every day, he reached out and punched the button.
A cardboard ticket spat out of the machine. He jerked it out. The
gate rose up.

Calmly, like he belonged here, Floyd Wayne Vishniak piloted
his pickup truck into the bowels of Pentagon Plaza.

The parking ramp held no secrets. He found a space and backed
into it. This unorthodox maneuver caused consternation and horn-honking among several other would-be parkers, but (a) they could
all fuck themselves, (b) he had a gun, and (c) he needed to park this
way so he could pull out rapidly when the time came.

The Fleischacker was hanging in his armpit. He had purchased
several overly long thirty-round magazines for it. Loaded with
teflon armor-piercing bullets, these were secreted in the long cargo pockets built into the thighs of his trousers. By reaching down and
unsnapping the flaps on the tops of these pockets, he could whip
out a new magazine in a fraction of a second. One magazine was already stuck into the handle of his Fleischacker, making the gun
huge, unwieldy, and L-shaped. His QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH
windbreaker hid the weapon adequately as long as he kept it zipped
up most of the way, and kept his arm down to his side.

He locked up his truck (wouldn't do for his getaway vehicle to get ripped off while he was busying himself inside) and then followed a
few other people toward the sky bridge and a set of glass doors that
joined the parking ramp to the huge, squat building next to it.

The headquarters of Ogle Data Research was cleverly disguised
as a fancy department store!

Vishniak forced himself to keep calm. He walked through the
middle of a huge display of women's shoes, trying to act just as cool
as all the other people, like he came through here all the time. He
did this on the assumption that the department store was just a false-front operation like the ones
of Mission: Impossible
and that it would
be all of about thirty feet deep. Once he passed through this shoe
display he would begin to see the brain-wave monitors and satellite
dishes. Then the Fleischacker would come out and Ogle's evil
operation would come to an end. Vishniak would die, probably,
and Cozzano would be released from electronic bondage.

But when he made it through the shoe display, he came to a section full of purses. Then more women's clothes. Perfume.
Cosmetics. He went up an escalator (Keep walking! Don't stop and look!) and found a display of television sets, then a little gourmet
restaurant. It went on and on and on.

He kept walking. His brain was reeling. He went up and down
the escalators several times and eventually walked out through the
huge doorway and into something that looked very much like a
shopping mall. But not like any shopping mall that Vishniak had
seen in the Quad Cities. For him, a mall was a single narrow
concourse, one story, lined with tiny shops, a few benches, and maybe a fountain in the middle.

Compared to the malls he was used to, this place was like - well,
like Washington, D.C., compared to Davenport, Iowa. It was four
stories high. The floors were gleaming white marble. A central
atrium was filled with light streaming down through a glass ceiling;
looking up through it, Vishniak could see the sky, and airplanes taking off from the airport, and the office skyscrapers towering
overhead.

It went on forever. Thousands of people were here, visiting hundreds of stores. Some of the stores were tiny rinky-dink ones,
but a lot of them were huge and fancy. It was no longer possible to support the belief that this was all a false-front operation for Ogle
Data Research. This was a real, honest-to-god shopping mall, albeit
an incomprehensibly vast and rich one.

He kept walking. On the one hand, he was confused and a bit
disappointed that he had failed to locate Ogle Data Research. On
the other hand, he was relieved, and breathing easily for the first
time since he had entered the city. This business was clearly much
more complicated than he'd thought at first. He was going to have
to settle in and put a lot more thought into the intelligence-
gathering phase of the operation.

Before long, he came to a big electric sign: a color-coded
directory of the Pentagon Mall. It contained floor plans of each of
the four levels, each store identified by number with a listing of all
the stores by category.

It was almost too much to hope for that he could find ODR in
this way, but he gave it a shot. The stores were arranged by
category: WOMEN'S APPAREL, MEN'S APPAREL,
RESTAURANTS, JEWELRY, GIFTS, and so on. Vishniak was
unclear about which category described Ogle Data Research, and so he just began at the beginning and read through the names of
every single business in the mall, which took several minutes.
There was no Ogle Data Research listed.

Inspiration came in the form of a HELP WANTED sign in the
window of one of the stores. Applying for jobs was one good
excuse to get into a store and check it out without actually spending
money. And - unthinkable as it might seem - if he could actually
get a job here at Pentagon Plaza, he would be able to spend all his
time here, and recon the place in detail. An inside job was always
the best way to do a crime.

He had filled out enough job applications in his day to known
that you had to have an address. So he exited the mall the way he
had come, paid an outrageous fee for parking, and, under the name
Sherman Grant, rented a room at a motel near National Airport,
only a mile or two from Pentagon Plaza. Then he found a post
office where he was able to rent a box, giving him that all-
important mailing address, by this point his money was beginning to run low, but he had spent the summer accumulating credit cards
that had been mailed to him, unasked-for, by fatuous banks in
places like Delaware and South Dakota, and these went a long way.

Thus did Floyd Wayne Vishniak set up his own little base of
operations in the nation's capital, joining every other person,
company, pressure group, trade association, and maniac with a
national agenda. A second trip to Pentagon Plaza that evening (this
time via the less expensive Metro) netted a dozen more job
applications. He stayed up until one in the morning filling them out in his best sixth-grade penmanship, and was down at the mall bright
and early the next morning, as soon as the stores opened up, to
hand them all in. And on this, his third trip to the mall, he didn't
even bother to bring his gun.

Success came surprisingly quickly; the mall management offered
Sherman Grant a job working in the food court, clearing and
wiping down tables. A yuppie bastard interviewed him for the job,
just to make sure that he, who had formerly assembled giant tractor
transmissions for a living, was intelligent enough to pick garbage off
of tables and wipe them with a damp rag. Vishniak swallowed his
resentment and averred that he would try his very best to handle
the unprecedented challenges of the job.

He considered holding out to see if any other jobs were offered to
him, but decided to take the first one that came along. He had to keep
his eye on the ball here. The purpose of this trip was not to develop
new career paths. The purpose was to put bullets in the heads of the top management stratum of Ogle Data Research and then destroy as
much of their high-tech brain-wave equipment as he could get into
his gunsights before he himself was gunned down by the SWAT
teams that showed up, so inevitably, at these kinds of events.