Interface (95 page)

Cozzano: FOR WHAT.

Mary Catherine: INAUGDAY

"I defy you to find that word in any dictionary," Cozzano said.

DuLafayette Webster, Heisman trophy winner for the Elton State Comanches, scored three touchdowns singlehandedly in the first half of the Fujitsu Guacamole Bowl on Christmas Night. As soon as the first half clock ticked down to zero, the broadcast cut away
to the cheerful theme music of the Cozzano Family Christmas
Special.

A live shot from a hovering chopper zoomed down on the
twinkling Christmas lights of Tuscola, which had begun billing itself as "America's hometown." The Christmas decorations had
been heavily enhanced by the largesse of Ogle, and coordinated by
his designers. The camera panned across church steeples, small
businesses, and the city park, all decked with boughs of electric
holly, and then settled on the now-familiar Cozzano residence. A street level camera peered through the large front window to view
the roaring fire and the happy, smiling group gathered around the
eggnog. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From Tuscola,
Illinois, America's hometown, we bring you an address by the
President-elect, William Anthony Cozzano. Governor Cozzano."

Cut to a shot of Cozzano, James, and Mary Catherine sitting together on the sofa. Zoom into a talking-head shot of Cozzano
alone.

The President-elect made a heartfelt statement of thanks to the
American people, expressed his happiness with his daughter's career
plans and his son's excellent book, and incidentally, announced his
cabinet nominees.

Then he stood up and introduced them personally. The cabinet-
to-be were all gathered around the huge dining room table, dressed
in cozy sweaters, drinking cider. They interrupted the convivial routine for a moment as Cozzano introduced them, one by one, to
the American people. They were good-looking, confident,
bipartisan, and multicultural.

Finally Cozzano returned to his seat by the fire to address a few last words of greeting and holiday cheer to the American people.
Cozzano had developed a sense of timing that was positively eerie. He brought his little speech to a close just in time to cut back to the
Scoreboard clock at the bowl game.

On the eighteenth of January, the Cozzanos climbed on to a
chartered plane and flew to Washington, D.C. Journalists from
around the world were converging there at the same time. So were
members of the incoming administration and transition team, all of
Cy Ogle's top people, several big GODS trucks full of electronics,
Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and an irregular caravan of buses, cars, and
airplanes carrying old teammates and Marine comrades-in-arms of
William A. Cozzano.

58

At eight o'clock on the morning of Inauguration Day, a
cluster of Secret Service agents burst from the elevators and into the
lobby of the Georgetown Four Seasons Hotel, striding calmly but
implacably across hardwood floors, green oriental carpets, and
weathered brick. At the same time, a motorcade of three dark cars was spiraling out of a parking garage down the street. The motor
cade pulled into the brick driveway at the front entrance just as the
cluster of agents, and the dignitaries hidden among them, was
bursting through the brass front doors. Within a few seconds, the
cars and the people were gone, trailed by a few journalists who had
been quick enough to notice that the President-elect was on the
move.

At the same time, William A. Cozzano himself was emerging quietly from an elevator tucked into a dimly lit corridor near the restaurant on the next floor down. He was accompanied by his son
and daughter and two Secret Service agents. The Cozzanos were dressed in running clothes. They padded down a gray-carpeted
stairway and exited on to a brick patio behind the hotel, two stories
below street level, which led directly on to a herringbone-brick
jogging path. Beyond the path was the C&O Canal, a narrow
trench of stagnant water lined with massive, moss-covered masonry
blocks.

The President-elect wanted to go for a damn jog with his family.
Was it too much to ask? It would be his last opportunity to do so
as a private citizen. He wanted to do it in Rock Creek Park, which
was where he normally jogged when he was in D.C., but the Secret
Service didn't like that idea. They had gotten positively jumpy
about Floyd Wayne Vishniak, who was still at large. During his
escapade at Ogle Data Research, Vishniak had displayed cunning
and well-developed marksmanship skills. He was still firing off
demented manifestoes to various newspapers and magazines.
Everyone knew that Cozzano liked to jog in Rock Creek Park, and with its dense vegetation and myriad ways in and out, it would be
like the happy hunting grounds for Vishniak.

Cozzano was a demanding sort. He didn't merely want to go
jogging in an incredibly dangerous place: he was insisting on
privacy too. He wanted to stage a diversion and send the journalists
on a wild goose chase so that he could just run with his son and
daughter.

The Secret Service agreed to a compromise. If Cozzano would
go running in Arlington - in an area that was not quite so Floyd-
friendly - then the Secret Service would stage the diversion for
him. So far it was working perfectly.

Fifty feet away, the canal passed underneath the Rock Creek Parkway and joined up with Rock Creek itself. Three more Secret Service cars were idling on the side of the Parkway, wheels up on
the curb, waiting for them with doors open. This little motorcade
would spirit them away to Arlington, where they could go jogging
on the flawlessly groomed parade grounds of Fort Myer, next to the
National Cemetery, under the protection of military police and
Secret Service.

Cozzano had been talking football with the Secret Service men
all the way down the stairs. As they crossed the brick patio, Mary
Catherine drew close to her brother and said, "James, this is
important. Remember when we were kids? Remember Follow the
Leader?"

"Sure," James said sunnily, mistaking this for idle nostalgia.

"We're about to play the world's most important game of
Follow the Leader. Don't screw it up," Mary Catherine said.

"Huh?"

They were stepping on to the jogging path. Mary Catherine
reached into the open top of her belt pack and flipped the toggle
switch on the end of her black plastic Radio Shack contraption.

William A. Cozzano stopped dead for a moment and shouted,
"Hey!"

He was staring off into the distance, focusing on something that
wasn't there.

"Dad?" James said. "Are you okay?"

Cozzano shook his head and snapped out if it. He looked at
James and Mary Catherine for a moment, thinking about something. Then he glanced at the Secret Service men as if noticing
them for the first time. "Nothing," he said. "I just remembered something. D
é
j
à
vu, I guess."

The family, trailed by the two agents, began to jog down the
path, which angled up and away from the canal toward the edge of
the parkway. A few yards short of the waiting cars, Mary Catherine
broke sharply to the right, thrashed through some brush, and skittered down the jumbled pile of boulders that made up the
creek's bank. She was followed by her father and, somewhat
uncertainly, by James.

"Sir" one of the Secret Service men said. They had fallen well
behind the Cozzanos and were watching them pick their way
toward the confluence of the canal and Rock Creek.

"Just stay there," Cozzano said. "We're going to pick up some
of this litter. It's a national disgrace."

The whole family disappeared beneath the parkway. The Secret Service men stood dumfounded for a few moments, then ran down the bank, awkward in their suits and trench coats and leather shoes,
trying to regain sight of the Cozzanos. But all they saw was the
creek.

Three of them charged under the bridge, but ran into an
obstacle: several homeless men. They had apparently been
awakened by the Cozzanos. Now they were up on their feet and
feeling frisky. These men occupied a bottleneck: a rocky stretch of
bank between the buttress of the bridge and the bank of the creek.
One of them was even standing in the water, thigh-deep.

There were harsh words and some shoving. The Secret Service men did not fare well in the shoving match, because, as they had started to notice, all of the homeless men were astoundingly large,
and, considering their lifestyle, inhumanly strong. By the time the Secret Service got around to pulling guns, and the homeless men held up their hands apologetically and let them pass, they had completely lost track of the Cozzanos.

Above them, tires were squealing out on the Rock Creek
Parkway. The noise was made by half a dozen large rental cars
skidding sideways, across both sets of lanes, blocking all traffic.

The drivers of these vehicles, an unexceptional lot of reasonably
well dressed, middle-aged men, seemed to be the least excited
people in all of Washington. They ignored the honking horns and
shouted obscenities from the instant traffic jam that had
materialized behind their roadblock. With the calm self-possession
of a combat veteran, each driver strolled around his vehicle and jabbed a knife into each of the four tires before turning his back on
his crippled vehicle and sauntering into the park.

If any of the furious drivers in the traffic jam had bothered to look up at the Four Seasons, which stood at the intersection of M
and Pennsylvania like the cornerstone of the whole neighborhood,
they would have seen Cy Ogle looking back at them from the
window of his suite.

He had just received a telephone call from the man on duty in
the closest GODS truck, informing him that a sudden burst of
microwave noise had broken their link with Cozzano, and that
they were unable to reestablish the connection. "Argus is not
receiving any inputs," the man said. "Repeat: Argus is on his own."

The stream channel was shallow and lined with large blocks of
brown rock. As soon as they got past the "homeless" men, the
Cozzanos plunged into it, picking up their knees as they ran,
Walter Payton style, to keep them up out of the icy water, and
forded Rock Creek. Far above their heads was another bridge,
much larger and higher: Pennsylvania Avenue. As soon as they got
past the buttresses of the bridge they scrambled up on to the eastern
bank, which even in winter was covered with a mixture of
bamboo, ivy, and reeds. This was difficult territory, but William
and Mary Catherine had been training hard for this and they didn't
object to getting wet. Mary Catherine had been using all the slings
and arrows of sibling rivalry to get James to whip himself into
shape; he couldn't really keep up with them, but he had the minor advantage of being in a state of shock.

Rock Creek now ran between them and the parkway. This side
of the park was more heavily wooded and had no road or bicycle
path, just a little footpath paralleling the bank. All of them were still
running as hard as they could, Mary Catherine leading the way,
James bringing up the rear, still trying to gasp out questions when
he wasn't sucking wind. His confusion was only deepened when he
noticed that his father and sister had begun to rip off their clothes
as they ran, dropping a trail of sweatshirts and tank tops in his path.
Mary Catherine looked over her shoulder, into his eyes, and he
knew that he was supposed to do the same. The world had gone
crazy anyhow, why not run around Washington D.C., stark naked?

They paused somewhere between N and P streets. Mary
Catherine and William had gotten all the way down to gym shorts
and running shoes, and James was able to catch up as soon as they
stopped running.

William crashed down the bank. A cube of solid masonry
projected from the bank and into the stream, carrying a storm sewer
outfall a couple of feet in diameter. William A. Cozzano, thigh-
deep in icy water, leaned into it for a moment with his left arm and shoulder, and emerged carrying a couple of plastic garbage bags
weighted with stones. He threw them up on to the bank and then
climbed up after them.