Interface (9 page)

It was built from several different kinds of masonry pieced
together and then painted the same color, a thick glossy industrial
yellow. The ceiling was obscured by bundles of heavily insulated
pipes and ventilated steel conduits carrying thick black electrical
cables. The corridor was narrowed by flimsy steel cabinets and racks
lining
  
the
  
walls,
  
stuffed
  
with
  
maintenance
  
supplies,
  
gutted
Selectrics, and ancient civil defense biscuits.

The door at the end of the hall was small, heavy, and almost too
dimly illuminated to see. A heavily yellowed cardboard sign was
stuck to it, bearing the FALLOUT SHELTER emblem. Once it
was unlocked, it took a mighty tug just to budge it. Then it opened
slowly and steadily, with the momentum of a battleship, and
slammed into the wall hard enough to knock off chips of the thick
old yellow paint. Beyond was a circular tunnel stretching away,
ruler-straight, for as far as the beam of the flashlight could penetrate
It was barely high enough for her to enter without stooping. Cold
air oozed out and flowed over her shins.

She aimed the beam at the floor, because her main concern at
this point was to notify any vermin of her approach so that they
would at least have the option of getting out of her path. Then she
ducked through the low frame of the door.

Running down the tunnel, she tried to figure out which
direction she must be going now. Her trip down the stairway has
gotten her all spun around. She decided that she must be going
north, under Monroe Street, toward the squat limestone building
the former steam plant, that housed the Illinois Emergency Services
and Disaster Agency.

Finally she reached the end of the tunnel. There was another
massive blastproof door here, which opened using the same key;
clearly Rufus Bell had been through from time to time, oiling the
lock and the hinges. She threw the bolt and put her shoulder against
the door, the silky filaments of her blouse snagging on the rough
layers of rust and flaked paint.

But it seemed to open by itself. Brilliant light poured through. She was looking into a wide hallway in another basement some
where. Four people were staring at her in amazement: one
custodian and three emergency medical technicians, fully equipped
with a gurney and several big fiberglass equipment cases.

One of the EMTs, a tiny, athletic-looking young woman with a
short bristly haircut, peered down the length of the tunnel. "Does
that lead somewhere?" she said. "I guess it does."

The capitol only had three passenger elevators and they all opened
directly on to the Rotunda, a yawning four-story-high well where
privacy was pretty much out of the question. But buried in the wings of the building were large dumbwaiters used by house,
senate, and gubernatorial staff to shuffle cartons of papers back and
forth. They were easily large enough for a person, even a big person
like Cozzano, to sit in.

Marsha led the EMTs through the basement, and into the storage
room under the east wing where the Governor stored inactive files.
Along the way they picked up Mack Crane, who was loitering in a
corridor intersection, keeping a sharp eye in the direction of the s
tairs that led up to the first floor, looking for what Mel Meyer had referred to, alternately, as "jackals" and "witnesses." Marsha could
not help darting one glance up the stairs. She was expecting a
phalanx of photographers and video crews, poised to capture her wide-eyed expression so that they could splash it up on the front
page of the
Trib
tomorrow. But the top of the stairs was guarded by
a sentry line of orange cones warning of a WET FLOOR. Bell m
ust have done that; while no one was really afraid of a wet floor,
anyone who knew the ways of the statehouse would try to avoid
walking through the middle of one of Bell's mopping projects and
earning his undying enmity and noncooperation.

The dumbwaiter was stopped in the storage room, doors open.

Governor William A. Cozzano was sprawled out on the basement
floor with his head and shoulders cradled in the lap of the janitor who was talking to him softly. Bell did not look up as the gurney
approached. He said something to Cozzano, something about
"medevac." He slipped one arm under Cozzano's shoulders and one under his knees and picked the two-hundred-fifty-pound
Governor up as if he were a six-year-old.

"Just leave him there," one of the EMTs said, but Bell stepped
forward and gently laid Cozzano out full length on the gurney,
ready for transport.

The EMTs worked over Cozzano for a few minutes. Then they
rolled him out into the corridor and back toward the civil defense
tunnel. Marsha glanced up the stairs as they went by and saw the
knees and feet of a nocturnal journalist heading for the first-floor
men's room.

The gubernatorial stretcher, with its motorcade - the EMTs,
the
secretary, the cop, and the janitor - moved quickly and silently
through the basement, down the tunnel, and into the basement of
the building that Marsha had glimpsed earlier. No one said any-
thing except for Cozzano, who said, jovially. "Why is everyone so
wallpapered?"

The janitor in the other building was holding the freight elevator
for them. They all rode it up to the ground floor, along a short
hallway, and out through a roll-up steel door and into a parking lot
where an ambulance was waiting. The cold air of the January night
came through Marsha's blouse as if she were naked. She pirouetted
slowly, looking around, trying to establish her bearings.

The ambulance had backed into a three-sided nook that opened
out on to an empty gravel parking lot covered with gray hard-
packed snow. They were in back of a one-story building of rough-hewn limestone. This building had a notch taken out of its corner,
and the back wall of that notch contained the roll-up door. The
building was separated by a gap of just a few feet from a much larger
seven- or eight-story building whose solid, windowless back wall formed the third side of the nook.

The big building was the Illinois State Armory, which also
housed the Illinois State Police. The small building from which
they'd just exited was the Emergency Services and Disaster Agency,
its roof studded with funny-looking antennas. Marsha, who'd been
working in the capitol for twenty years, was astonished to realize these things: that the Governor of Illinois had a secret escape route, a vestige of the Cold War, a secret bolt-hole to escape from atomic
attack and deliver himself into the protection of the Illinois
National Guard.

She wondered how many other secrets about the capitol and the office of the Governor, and about this Governor himself, she had
never learned or even suspected. She wondered why she'd never been told about these things. And she wondered how Mel Meyer
had known. For Marsha the acquisition of knowledge had always
been an orderly process pursued in public schools, but Mel was
different, Mel came by his knowledge in mysterious ways. He didn't even have a government job, he was just the Governor's
lawyer and friend, he hardly ever came to Springfield, and still he c
arried all the secret blueprints and phone numbers in his head.

As the EMTs were pulling the doors of the ambulance closed on
Cozzano, she saw Bell standing there, staring at Cozzano through t
he rear windows.
 
As the driver shifted the transmission into
forward gear, the ambulance's backup lights flashed once like heat
lightning and illuminated Bell's face, burning the still image into M
arsha's retinas. Bell's forehead was wrinkled in the middle, his ey
ebrows angled upward in the center, his eyes were glistening and red. As the engine revved, he suddenly straightened up, clicked the h
eels of his boots together, and snapped out a salute.

Cozzano was staring back at Bell through the tiny windows in
the back of the ambulance. The Governor moved his right arm,
heavy with blood-pressure cuff and intravenous lines, and returned
the salute. The ambulance moved forward on twin jets of steamy
exhaust and angled across the parking lot, headed for the trauma center at Springfield Central Hospital, less than a mile away.

6
As
soon as Dr. Mary Catherine Cozzano got on the down
elevator, headed for the parking garage, she began to go through a
ritual she had developed for passage through hostile territory. She
hauled the strap of her purse up over her head so that it ran
diagonally across her body, snatch-proof. It hung on her right hip
so as not to interfere with her pager, which was clipped to her left
hip.
 
She unzipped the purse, pulled out her key chain,
 
and
clenched it in her right fist so that the keys stuck out from between
her fingers like spikes on a medieval weapon. As she carried her
keys in her purse, she observed no size limitations; her key chain
was as sprawling and ramified as a coronary artery, branching out to include a miniature Swiss Army knife, a penlight, a magnifying glass
(all freebies from drug companies), and a stainless steel police
whistle. The whistle dangled on a thick length of metal rope. She
got it between her thumb and index finger, ready to use. She had
already made sure that she was wearing her running shoes - not
high heels, not boots - and a pair of scrub pants that offered her legs
freedom of movement. That was a given, because these were the
only clothes anyone could tolerate on a thirty-hour shift in a
sprawling hospital.

Finally, as the elevator was passing downward through the lobby
level and into the subterranean parking levels, she reached into her
purse and pulled out a black box that fit neatly into her left hand. It was rectangular with a bend near one end. The bent end was
concave and sprouted four blunt metal prongs about a quarter of an
inch long, making it look like the mouthparts of a tremendously
magnified chigger. The prongs were symmetrically arranged: an

outer pair that stuck straight out from the end of the device, and an inn
er pair, closer together, angled toward each other as they s
prouted from the concavity. When Mary Catherine found the box
inside her purse, it fell naturally into her hand in such a way that h
er index finger was resting on a black button, just under the crook, n
ear the prongs. Mary Catherine pulled it out of her purse, held it
away from herself, and pulled the trigger.

A miniature lightning bolt, a purplish-white line of electrical
discharge, popped between the two inner prongs. It created an a
larming, crusty buzzing noise that seemed to penetrate deep into h
er head. The spark whipped and snapped in the air like a slack clothesline caught in a November wind.

She tested it like this, every day, because she was William A.
Cozzano's daughter, and because her father was John Cozzano's
son, and everyone in their family learned, when they were very
young, not to be sloppy, not to assume, not to take anything for
granted.

Then the elevator doors opened, like the opening curtain on a
cheap horror film, and she was staring into a low-ceilinged catacomb, filled with greenish, inexpensive institutional light that was
hard on the eyes but did not really seem to illuminate anything.
These were the tombs where doctors and nurses buried their cars
while they worked. Most of the cars were shambling zombies, long
since turned undead by the depredations of mobile chop shops that
 
cruised up and down the ramps night and day.

During these trips through the catacombs, Mary Catherine liked
to tell herself that her chosen speciality gave her an advantage in
self-defense: she could diagnose people from a distance. By the way
they walked, by the reactions on their faces, she could tell active
psychotics from healthy, run-of-the-mill radio thieves.