Interface

42

Mel Meyer drove into Miami, Oklahoma, in his black Mercedes 500 SL at 4:30 on a hot mid-July afternoon. The sky was a sickening, yellowing white. He stopped at the Texaco station to fill up with gas and check his oil. He checked his oil religiously -though the car used none to speak of- because thirty years ago the Cozzanos had made fun of him for not knowing how.

He also needed to ask for directions. As he opened the window to talk to the attendant, the 103-degree heat poured in on him like boiling water. He ordered ultrapremium from the Texaco pump and popped the hood for the oil check. "How far to Cacher," he asked the grease-streaked, acne-ridden kid smearing his windshield with an equally appetizing-looking rag.

The kid had never seen anything like Mel Meyer - dapper, intense, clad in a perfect black silk suit - nor had he seen many 500 SLs. "Why d'ya wanna go to Cacher? Nobody lives in Cacher except some crazy old farts," he said. He went to the front of the car, could not figure out how to raise the hood, looked pleadingly at Mel.

Mel did not like the kid, did not like Miami, Oklahoma, and would have given anything to avoid being there. But this was the closest thing to a lead he had come across in four months of investigating the Network. He could have hired a private investi­gator in Tulsa or Little Rock and had him drive out to the place and look around. But he knew that, whatever this Network might be, it was good at hiding itself. A private investigator, who made his living watching unsubtle people commit marital infidelities in cheap motels, could not be trusted to pick up the nearly invisible spoor of the Network. In the end Mel would have to come out and look around himself. He might as well get it over with.

"Why do you think people in Cacher are crazy?" Mel asked, thinking to himself that he had no right to ask that question, sitting in a black silk suit in a black car in July in Oklahoma.

He had found precious little in absolute terms as he chased down lead after lead: the institutional roots of the Radhakrishnan Institute; the fascinating pattern of stock trades surrounding the takeover of Ogle Data Research and Green Biophysical Systems in March; the interlocking directorates of Gale Aerospace, MacIntyre Engineering, Pacific Netware, and the Coover Fund; and the even more shadowy group of very private investment funds that held majority shares in them.

He had even placed intercepts on the lines and numbers of various people, hiring monitors placed in vans near microwave relay towers. Nothing had come up. He had gone through financial reports, he had gone to friends in the FBI, he had tried everything, but he could not find the Network. He had hired private detectives, he had hired investigative accountants. He had spent a whole month pulling strings and working various connections in order to get his hands on some IRS data that he thought would be promising. It had turned out to be worthless.

The one lead that he had was the GODS envelope that Mary Catherine had pulled from the Cozzanos' burn bag on the night of July fourth. Mary Catherine was the one to blame for his being here.

The envelope did not bear anything as obvious as a return address. It had code numbers instead. GODS was a well-run com­pany, highly centralized, and was not interested in helping Mel decipher those codes. He had provided some financial aid to a financially troubled GODS delivery man in Chicago and eventually gotten the information that the envelope appeared to have been routed through the Joplin Regional Airport in extreme southwest Missouri, near where that state came together with Kansas and Oklahoma.

Mel had spent four days living at a Super 8 Motel on Airport

Drive outside of Joplin. He claimed to be a businessman from Saint Louis, working on a big project of some kind. He spent several hundred dollars express-mailing empty packages to an address in Saint Louis, and quickly became a familiar sight to the three people who worked at the Joplin GODS depot.

One of them had informed Mel that he was now their biggest customer. Mel pursued this line of conversation doggedly and got the man to say that they had another fellow across the border in Oklahoma who mailed almost as much as Mel did. Finally, yester­day afternoon, Mel had gotten them to specify a town: Cacher, Oklahoma.

He snapped back to the steamy reality of Miami. The gas station kid was peering at him. "You okay, mister?"

"Yeah. How's the oil?"

"Fine." Then, continuing to pursue his endemic insanity theory, he said, "It's the lead."

"Lead?"

"Yeah. Even though the lead mines are shut down, Cacher is soaked through with lead pollution, and like we learned in school, that will make you crazy."

Mel muttered genially, as if this information were fascinating, and handed over his credit card. The kid took it into the battered old station and swiped it through the electronic slot. Their building didn't look like much but they had the latest point-of-purchase electronics.

"You got something else, buddy?" asked the kid with a satisfied leer on his face, waggling the card in the air. "You've got to pay your bills from time to time, you know... just kiddin'."

Mel was too surprised to be embarrassed. He compulsively paid every bill within twenty-four hours of receipt, especially the national ones. You didn't let bills get overdue. Unlike the people who ran Washington, Mel understood that an overdue bill was a club that other people could wave over your head.

"It's a mistake," he said, "but why don't you try this one." He handed the kid another credit card. Once again, it was rejected.

"Shit buddy, don't you every pay your bills? What about cash?"

Mel looked in his wallet. It contained several hundred-dollar bills, a ten, and a five. The bill was $16.34.

"Can you break a hundred? Mel asked, already feeling he knew the answer.

The kid yukked it up for a little bit. "I can't remember the last time I saw a C-note. We never got more than a few bucks in change."

Down the street, set anachronistically into the sandstone facade of an old bank, was an ATM machine with a familiar logo. Mel took off his jacket, ambled slowly down the street, trying not to get hotter than he was, and stuck his bank card into the slot.

The video screen said PLEASE WAIT.

An alarm bell began ringing on the side of the bank.

A siren began to sound from the direction of the police station in downtown Miami, two blocks away.

Mel lurched back down the street, got to the car, and turned on the ignition.

"Hold it right there, hot shot," said the kid. Mel looked over and was astounded to see a twelve-gauge pump shotgun cradled in the kid's hands. "You might as well wait for Harold to come."

The Miami P.D. patrol car, an aging Caprice, swung around the corner. Mel knew that he could easily outrun it. But it wouldn't be a good idea. Instead he shut off the ignition, and, as a good faith gesture, took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them up on the dashboard, in plain sight. He rolled the window back down and put both hands on the steering wheel.

A lean, small, pox-faced cop emerged reluctantly from the Caprice, winced from the heat, and walked over toward Mel, moving with exaggerated slowness.

"Harold, I presume." Mel said, when he got close enough.

"What we got here li'l buddy?" Harold said to the kid.

"Looks like it's credit card fraud to me," said the kid.

"Come on out of there, fellow," said Harold, shooting a mean, judgmental look at Mel. "Don't make a bad thing worse for you."

Mel was pissed off, hopelessly out of any chance to control things. He eased out of the car, frustrated, frightened, feeling helpless for the first time in years, and said, "I don't know what the hell has happened."

"Nothing yet, and nothing will, unless you do something stupid."

"All I want is to pay for my gas and go to Cacher."

Harold looked at the kid and said, "Why in the name of God would anybody want to go to Cacher?" Mel knew what was coming next, Harold said it anyway. "Ain't nobody there, but a bunch of loony-tunes."

Mel said, "Let me talk to you straight." He had spent enough time downstate to know that this attitude might be appreciated. "I'm not trying to pull a fast one, and I don't know why none of my cards don't work. Look, take the AMEX, call the eight hundred number and you'll see I've got a huge line of credit, and Texaco's been all paid up, and I don't know why the ATM went crazy."

Harold looked at him and then at the kid. "He broke any laws?"

"Not exactly."

"Fella, you look decent enough. Let's go rescue your bank card and send you on your way out of town."

They strolled down to the bank, which had closed at three o'clock. Harold banged on the front door, and a Big Hair Girl peered out the door.

"Honey, your machine's done eaten this man's card. Think you could dig it out so's he could leave to go to" - and here Harold could not keep a straight face - "Cacher."

"Cacher," she shrieked, "who the hell would want to go there?" Mel by this time had heard all he wanted to about the deficiencies of Cacher and simply said, "I've got some relatives out there."

Honey retreated into the bank, opened up the machine from the back side, and retrieved Mel's card. "Before I can let you have this, mister, I got to make sure you're who you say you are," she said. She sat down at a desk, called Chicago, asked a few questions, whistled, shook her head in wonderment.

"Buddy," she said, handing the card over, "I'm going to treat you with a lot more respect. You're one rich sucker."

Mel relaxed, realizing for the first time that he was probably going to get out of Miami alive. "Could I get change for a hundred so I can pay off boy wonder over at the Texaco?"

Harold didn't like that. "Now slick, you just be careful. That's my nephew over there, and you bad-mouth any of my kin, you might be spending a night in jail."

Mel fumed at his own stupidity, considered a number of replies, and decided to shut up.

Honey gave him his change. Mel thanked her and resolved to get out of Miami as quickly as he could, saying as little as possible. He handed boy wonder a twenty.

"Seriously mister," the kid said, getting Mel's change, "take care of yourself. We had people go out there and not come back. Those shafts go down a couple of miles, and those crazy people are not accountable."

Mel got back in the Mercedes and drove carefully out of town, accompanied by Harold and his radar gun. That's all I need, he thought, to fall into one of Harold's speed traps. As soon as he got out of radar range, he turned the car toward Cacher and put the hammer down.

As he drove, the vegetation thinned away and vanished, and the rolling hills took on a steep, foreboding quality. The road itself was potholed asphalt that shook the Mercedes' frame. In the distance he could see the malevolent tips of the mine tailings, looking much like the Welsh coal tips that periodically unloaded and covered small villages in sad valleys. There were no farms, no ranches, only ancient weather-beaten abandoned shacks, a legacy of the thirties. Running along the road was a single telephone line. There was no evidence of electricity. On the road was regional roadkill: armadillos, 'possums, the occasional dead cat. As the evening approached, the whole scene made Mel want to turn around and go back home.

And as he approached the scattered buildings of the town, he did just that. He stopped half a mile short of Cacher, turned directly north on to a section line road, and drove north at a hundred miles an hour, turning up a rooster-tail of yellowish lead-saturated dust. Mel prided himself on being a rational man. Usually that meant controlling his fear. Today it meant giving into it.

The faster he drove, the more frightened he became, and as the crossroads flashed by every six miles, he did not look either way. He was convinced that he was being pursued, and not until he crossed the Kansas line did he begin to slow down. His heart was pounding dangerously and his forehead was stiff from sweat, which poured out of his body and was dried to a crust by the air conditioner running full blast.

Cacher was made up of an old two-story brick school tilted at a precipitous angle, undermined by a mine shaft that went to close, or a water table that was drained. There was no sign of life, no dogs, no cats, no lights. Gas stations were boarded up. The only inhabited building was a shabby general store, the paint long since blistered away from its rough, knotty wooden siding. In front was a set of thirties-style, manually powered gas pumps, and, as an afterthought, a U.S. post office zip code sign bearing the WE DELIVER FOR YOU emblem.

Inside the store, it was as dry and hot as a sauna. The heat strengthened the smell of stale urine that emanated from Otho Stimpson, who was sitting in an old wooden swivel rocker with the canes busted out. His son, Otis, was standing by the entrance holding a small 9mm automatic weapon with a long clip. It was a crude and awkward device, almost as clumsy as Otis himself, but he had gotten good at using it. He would take it out among the mine tailings and fire clip after clip, lead thudding into lead. No one was around to complain about the noise.

If Mel Meyer had pulled into Cacher, the gun would have turned his Mercedes into scrap metal in seconds. Otis would have pushed the car down a mine shaft. It would have fallen a mile or two into the earth and never been seen again.

"Looks like the little Jew got scared," Otis said. "Got some sense in his head. Won't have much more trouble with him."

Otho said nothing. A couple of decades ago he would have sighed hopelessly at the racial slur, but he had long since reconciled himself to the fact that his son was a product of his environment and would never be as cosmopolitan as Otho was, with his fancy education at the Lady Wilburdon School for Mathematical Geniuses on the Isle of Rhum. "He's good," Otho said. "He's gotten closer to us than anyone."

Otho was shaken. No one had ever come to Cacher before. The very fact that Otis had been placed in this position - standing in the door of the old general store with a machine gun, locked and loaded - was disastrous. If the Network knew that they had been reduced to such methods, they would probably be cut off, and Otho's responsibilities transferred to someone else. Otho knew that there were others - like Mr. Salvador - waiting to take his place as soon as he slipped up.

"Should we kill him?" Otis said. It was a painfully stupid question, but it was good that Otis had come out and asked it. Otis had spent an unhealthy amount of time watching spy movies and thrillers on HBO. Since he had become aware of the nature of the current undertaking, he had let his imagination run away with him, thinking that they were in the middle of some asinine James Bond movie.

"That's not what this is about," Otho said. "This is not violence, son. It's not war. It's not espionage. The whole point here is to get this country back to basics: contracts, markets, keeping your promises, meeting your responsibilities. Meyer's an honorable man and if we killed him we'd cut the ground out from under our feet." Otho paused for a moment and stared through a dusty window-pane. "If we were killers, I'd kill Mr. Salvador."

"How come?" Otis said, astonished. "I thought he was doing a real good job."

"If he was doing a real good job," Otho said, "Mel Meyer never would have come here. He wouldn't even have known that anything was going on."