Interface (83 page)

He started immediately. They issued him an apron and a hat.
The training period lasted for about ten seconds and then he was
working. The food court at Pentagon Plaza was on the ground
floor, filling up a big open space in the floor plan that, in higher
stories, was occupied by a hole with a railing around it: a huge
atrium that looked down on the sea of tables and chairs shared by
all of the fast-food places lining the food court. The atrium and the court were vaulted by a huge glass ceiling that let in so much light that Vishniak often wore sunglasses.

At first he was humiliated to take the job. He was the only English-speaking person doing it. He never felt good about the job itself, but after a short while he began to understand that, from a
reconnaissance standpoint, it could hardly have been more perfect. Vishniak ambled across a large territory all day long, sizing up
thousands of people, overhearing snatches of their conversations,
learning where they worked and what they did. It was exactly the
job he needed.

One day, after he'd been there for about a week and scanned tens
of thousands of faces, he actually saw one he recognized: Aaron
Green. Green was all by himself at one of the stand-up tables, eating
raw fish - sushi, they called it - and reading a computer magazine.
He was wearing a suit. On the floor, a briefcase stood up between his legs. Vishniak circled around him once or twice, watching his
face, and confirmed an ID.

Vishniak got that adrenalized feeling again for the first time since
he'd made his first approach to Pentagon Plaza. If Aaron Green
looked up and recognized him, he was as good as dead. Fortunately
he was wearing his sunglasses. And since he had begun working
here he had taken the precaution of wrapping an Ace bandage
around his wrist every morning to conceal the wristwatch Green had given him.

Vishniak watched Green through his sunglasses the same way that
he watched babes down along the river on hot summer days: his
head turned sideways to the target, his eyes swiveled in their sockets
so the women didn't know they were being watched. Eventually
Green finished eating his sushi, flipped through the last few pages of his computer magazine, and picked up his briefcase. He maneuvered
through the crowded floor of the food court and climbed on the up
escalator. Vishniak followed him, climbing on to the bottom of the escalator just as Green was getting off at the top.

Green went up a couple of floors and then began to walk through the mall, skirting the edge of the atrium. Vishniak
followed him at a distance. Finally Green stopped at a pair of
elevator doors set unobtrusively into the wall, between a leather
store and an electronics place. He took a key out of his pocket and shoved it into a wall switch. The elevator doors opened and Green climbed on board and disappeared.

Vishniak gave the elevator doors a closer inspection, cursing
himself for having been so dense. He had walked past these doors a
hundred times and never really noticed them. He had assumed that
they were a freight elevator or something else - not a secret
entrance to Ogle Data Research.

This discovery did not help him much; you had to have a key to
get on the elevator. But still, a lead was a lead. That day, Vishniak
took an early lunch, went to a haircutting place in the mall, and
spent his day's salary getting his long hair cut short and his beard
shaved off. He couldn't risk being recognized by Aaron Green.
With the new hair and the sunglasses he was unrecognizable.

Not far from the elevator doors was a bench where tired
shoppers could rest their legs. During his off hours, Vishniak took
to spending a lot of time on that bench, watching the elevator
doors.

Most of the people who went in and out of the elevator were
typical office workers, all nicely dressed. But very soon Vishniak
began to notice a pattern: certain of these office workers would habitually come out of the elevators, always in pairs. One of them
would stand by the elevator doors with a key. The other would go off into the mall. Within a few minutes, unfamiliar people would
begin to gravitate toward the elevator doors - plain, old, off-the-
street types. The person stationed by the elevator doors, would use
the key to open the doors and dispatch them up to the eleventh
floor. An hour or two later, these people would emerge again and then go their separate ways.

Vishniak was curious as to what was being done to these regular
people during the hour or two that they spent up on the eleventh
floor. Was it some kind of brain surgery? Were they all being
turned into robots like Cozzano?

After a while he came to recognize the people who went into the mall to rope these people in, and he took to following them around
to see what they were doing. They always carried clipboards; the
clipboards always had lists on them, and as they persuaded different
people to come up to the eleventh floor they would cross an item
off the list. And they did not go up to people at random; they
would go to particular stores, or busy intersections in the mall, and
scan the faces of the shoppers, looking for particular types.

Vishniak overheard an interesting bit of conversation on one
occasion, as he was trailing a young woman with a clipboard. She
happened to run into another clipboard-toting woman who was
out in the mall trolling for subjects.

"Marcie! Hi!"

"Oh, hi, Sherry. What are you looking for?"

"The usual - a mall concubine and a porch monkey. How about you?"

"I've got everything on my list except for a Post-Confederate
Gravy Eater."

"Oh. You know what you should do? See that newsstand over
there?"

Sherry gave some instructions to Marcie. Marcie thanked her
and went to the newsstand, where she found a long-haired young
man, wearing a T-shirt and a confederate flag on the back, leafing
through a copy of
Guns & Ammo.
After a short conversation, this
young man nodded, put the magazine back on the rack, and
followed Marcie out of the store.

Pentagon Plaza was not the kind of mall where you could come by
Confederate flags easily, but there were many such places in the less
affluent stretches of northern Virginia, and that night Floyd Wayne Vishniak hit a few of them. He also stopped in at a newsstand and
bought a few gun magazines - a subject that interested him anyway.
The next day, after finishing his shift wiping tables, he went to the men's room, locked himself into a stall, and took off his apron
and his hat. He pulled on a Confederate T-shirt. Over that he put
on his shoulder holster. He was wearing his cargo pants with the ammo clips in them. Finally he pulled on a bright red windbreaker
with the Confederate flag on the back and zipped it up just enough
to hide the gun. Then he went upstairs and sat on the bench near
the elevators and settled in comfortably to read his gun magazines.
He was going to have to come up with a new name - Lee Jackson
or something.

In the end, he read those magazines pretty thoroughly, and got
to know everything a man could know about the latest in weapons
technology, because he ended up spending three solid eight-hour
shifts on that bench before he was finally noticed.

"Excuse me, sir?" a young woman said.

Vishniak looked up. It was Marcie. She had her clipboard.

"I work for an opinion research company called Ogle Data
Research," she continued, "and I was wondering if you'd mind if
I asked you a few questions? Are you in the twenty-six to thirty-
five age group?"

"Yes, I am," he said.

"Are you from the South, and do you consider yourself to be a
Southerner?"

"Proud of it too," he said.

"And would you consider yourself unemployed or under
employed?"

"Absolutely."

"Well, how would you like to make fifty dollars? It'll take about
an hour?"

"Fifty bucks in an hour?" Vishniak said. "Well, yee-ha! This is my lucky day."

50

This was where he'd have to be careful. He still had no idea
what the Ogle Data Research people were actually doing to their
test subjects up there on the eleventh floor. If it was some kind of brain surgery, then Vishniak would have to open fire before they could get him under anaesthesia. Otherwise he would become one
of the living dead, a robot slave like Cozzano.

To outward appearances, everything seemed real nice. They had
a big lobby by the elevators. It was all decorated. A nice young
woman, whom Vishniak recognized from his reconnaissance, greeted him and led him around past the big curving desk where
the receptionist sat with her space-age headset. Two security guards
stood by, shifting their weight from one tired foot to the other; one
of them was about ninety years old and the other one was
overweight. Vishniak considered picking them off right here and
now but decided against it; as long as they kept leading him deeper
into the bowels of ODR, there was no reason to get feisty.

The girl offered him coffee but he refused; maybe that was how
they knocked people out. She ushered him into a room with half a
dozen chairs, all facing a big fancy TV set. Made in Japan, naturally.
Three other people were already sitting there, and Vishniak
recognized them as the sort of typical mall-cruising Americans that
the ODR agents were always trying to recruit. A couple of them
were drinking coffee but seemed to be suffering no ill effects so far.

Vishniak took a seat and waited for the usher gal to leave the
room. Then he stood up, ambled over to the door, and stuck his
head out into the hallway, trying to get a sense of the layout. They
were not far from the receptionist's station. In the other direction,
the hallway led past a line of offices. All the offices had big picture
windows to let in the light, and so Vishniak could tell from a
distance which doors were open and which were closed. Glancing
back the other way he saw that the fat security guard was eyeballing
him. He withdrew into the room and went over to the windows.

They had an incredible view. A fellow could probably make
money, Vishniak reflected, by renting out an office in this building
and charging mall shoppers a quarter to ride the elevators up and
look out the windows. They were so close to the Pentagon that
you could probably hawk a loogie into its central courtyard. Off to
the left of the Pentagon was a huge cemetery with millions of white
gravestones. This juxtaposition made good horse sense in that the
Pentagon had to do with killing people. Beyond these landmarks
was a river, and on the far shore of that river, Vishniak looked right
into the heart of Washington. He didn't recognize it at first
because, compared to Chicago, it was sparse and low-slung, like a farm or a park.

A long, narrow strip of grass ran off into the distance and it was
lined with white buildings. In the middle of it was a tall spiky thing.
At the far end of it was a dome that Vishniak recognized as being
the Capitol. Beyond that, he could not really tell one building from another: there were a million of them, they were all white, they had lots of columns and the occasional squat dome. The only other one
that looked familiar was located on the far side of the strip of grass,
off the main drag: he thought it was the White House.

But it didn't look exactly right. He had seen the White House
on TV a million times, always with a TV reporter standing in front of it, and thought it had a simple crackerbox shape with a verandah
bulging out from the long side of it, but from this vantage point he
could see that this thing he had always thought of as the White
House was just the central unit in a sprawling, far-flung affair. The
thing had wings sticking out to both sides, and the wings had
additions tacked on to them. It was like a simple crackerbox house
that the owner kept adding rooms to, until it rambled crazily all over the lot.

Seeing this, Vishniak felt betrayed. He had been raised to believe
that the White House was just the President's house. His family
lived there and his kids hunted Easter eggs on the lawn. It was big
and nice by house standards, but still a house. But now he could see
that the White House wasn't a real house at all. It was a false front
for a rambling complex of sinister-looking additions that were
cleverly concealed behind trees and bushes. And a fellow had to ask
himself what happened in those additions, and what kind of people
worked there, that their existence was so carefully kept hidden
from the American public.