Interface

61

William A. Cozzano took the oath of office at twelve noon. Holding the Bible was Mary Catherine. Administering the oath was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. After a very intense quarter of an hour running and subwaying across D.C., the Cozzanos had reached the Rotunda in plenty of time and been able to hit the bathrooms and freshen up a little. They looked great and showed little trace of the earlier excitement; television viewers who had heard rumors of wild goings-on up and down the length of Pennsylvania Avenue were comforted to see the Cozzanos looking calm, relaxed, and happy.

Only one detail seemed out of place: as Cozzano had emerged from the West Front of the Capitol and walked through the passageway in the center of the stands, he had moved slowly and with a limp. He moved like an old man, not the spry athlete who had become so famous during the campaign. And then he raised his hand and recited the oath of office, his voice sounded different: deeper, slower, not as distinct. He tripped over a few words, something he had never done during the campaign.

But it didn't matter. He looked great. He smiled confidently through the oath, presenting a strong profile for the cameras, towering over the Chief Justice. His daughter was facing directly into the cameras and her face was suffused with joy and pride. She wasn't bothered by her father's gait, or his voice; why should America be?

It was over. President Cozzano shook hands with the Chief Justice and bent down to kiss Mary Catherine on the cheek.

Then he stepped up to the Presidential lectern, still moving slowly and carefully. Before him, the Mall was covered with people, all the way to the Lincoln Memorial, and all of them were applauding. The applause from the invited guests on the platform, and from the lucky few just below, around the Capitol Reflecting Pool, was distinct. Beyond that it merged into a generalized hissing roar, coming from the horizon.

President Cozzano reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a few typewritten sheets folded in half down the middle and flattened them out on the lectern. He waited for a few moments, smiling to the crowd, as the applause died down.

"Thank you," he said, "thank you." That brought the applause to a close. Then he began to read from the notes on the lectern, calmly, pronouncing the words with conspicuous precision, like a drunken man who is trying not to sound drunk.

"My first act as President is to declare martial law in the District of Columbia and to suspend the following constituted bodies: the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Park Police, and the Capitol Police. The CIA is reminded that their activities begin at the water's edge. Any violation of martial law may be penalized by summary execution. In their place, to maintain order among executive branch and the government, I federalize the police force of the District of Columbia for a period of one week and place it at the disposal of the Department of Justice."

At this moment, half of the men on and around the platform stood up and stripped off their jackets and dress shirts to reveal black T-shirts emblazoned with white stars on the front and "Dept. of JUSTICE" across the back. As Cozzano continued his address, these men converged on all of the uniformed Capitol police officers in the area, and on anyone who looked like a Secret Service agent.

The men in the black T-shirts - the Justice Posse - looked as though they were ready for a fight, and they were. Some of them actually got into fights. But most of them didn't. The President's words could not have been any clearer.

The Posse men were not very discriminating. They went after anyone in a uniform and anyone who looked like Secret Service: that, is, men with earplugs. Unfortunately that included one or two journalists. The journalists put up a scuffle. The scuffles ended pretty quickly.

All of these movements took place against a backdrop of dead silence. Everyone else, within a quarter-mile radius of President Cozzano, was utterly motionless and perfectly silent. Everyone was in shock. Beyond that, out on the Mall, it was possible to hear murmuring from the crowd, and even a few screams. But most of the people in the vicinity of the President were directly, personally, massively affected by the words coming out of his mouth. They didn't want to miss anything. Especially since a misinterpretation could lead to summary execution.

Cozzano continued without pause. "The FBI, one of the few federal agencies to live up to its oath to protect, defend, and uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States, will coordinate all security arrangements at all levels during the period of martial law. I hereby designate Melvin Israel Meyer the acting Attorney General and place the FBI and the D.C. Police under his direct authority. In my capacity as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, I hereby suspend the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a period of one week and place all military forces under my direct command. I order the Air Force and all other military aircraft in the continental U.S. grounded immediately and until further notice. I order the Federal Aviation Administration to ban all air traffic over the District of Columbia, effective immediately, and to close National Airport until further notice. This air traffic moratorium is to be enforced by the new Attorney General."

Men had already begun to appear on the roof of the Capitol and atop other buildings around the Mall, carrying long, bulky equip­ment cases. They nipped the cases open and pulled out four-foot-long, tubular objects with flat, slotted antennas that unfolded on their tops: Stinger missile launchers.

"I assure our allies and promise our adversaries around the world that this is a purely domestic affair and that the global balance of military power will not be affected."

"I declare a one-week holiday on all banks and stock exchanges. I call upon our financial leaders to cooperate with me so that calm can be restored to the markets as soon as possible."

"Finally, I ask the indulgence of the American people in this time of crisis. While the steps I have just taken are unprecedented and severe, I can assure you all that the peak of the crisis has passed, and that within hours, or at the most days, the government will be returned to an even keel."

"A complete explanation of what has happened to me, my family, and the electoral process of this country would fill a lengthy book. I cannot give you a full account here. But the people deserve an explanation, and so, at this moment, a summary of these events is being transmitted over all wire services worldwide. The same information is being provided to all governmental offices and major military bases. Videotape cassettes are arriving at all major networks and television stations."

Cozzano finally paused for a moment, to draw a breath and to shuffle his notes around. Finally, the silence broke, and a murmur began to sweep through the crowd.

People began to move. The in-crowd on the inaugural platform included a number of high-ranking military officers; several of them got to their feet and strode to the passageway leading back into the Capitol. As soon as they thought they were out of sight of the TV cameras, they broke into a run. A number of nonuniformed officials did the same thing.

Members of the Justice Posse now entered the front row of chairs and converged on four men: the secretaries-designate of Defense, State, Commerce, and Treasury. Each of the four men was strongly encouraged to rise to his feet and then hustled out. Their family members were not allowed to come along; some of them were too stunned to move, some burst into tears, and some tried to get physical. An initial tremor of panic propagated down the Mall.

Floyd Wayne Vishniak was watching Cozzano from the crowd below. Ogle's special invitation had gotten him through several layers of security. But he had not actually climbed up on to the inaugural platform itself. His invite supposedly would have gotten him through the final cordon. But he had watched a few of the bigwigs and seen that the final layer of security was especially stringent. He didn't want to take a chance on that, and it wasn't even necessary. From down below, he had a clear view of the entire platform.

He could have picked off any of the bigwigs sitting up there. Any of the people who were controlling Cozzano's mind. It would have been easy. But it would have been pointless. Vishniak had come to an astonishing realization as he had listened to Cozzano's speech: he was too late. Cozzano was lost.

Vishniak had personally demolished the computer control room where Ogle and the other media manipulators were controlling Cozzano's mind. He had set Cozzano free. But Cozzano had started his term as President by declaring martial law and threaten­ing to execute people in the streets. Cozzano was staging a coup d'etat. He was turning America's great democratic system into a dictatorship. Right before Vishniak's eyes.

"My fellow Americans, I come to you at a moment of great peril," Cozzano said, trying to use the authority of his voice to quiet the rising anxiety - the ugly fights going on behind him, the murmuring that had grown into a low roar. "We have narrowly averted a disaster. I am speaking to you, now, as a free man, for the first time in a year. Exactly one year ago, as you may know, I was struck down by a stroke. I have been away for a while. Today, I am here to tell you that I am back!"

It was the first thing Cozzano had said, all day long, that sounded like what a triumphant new president should say. The crowd was enormously relieved. The shrill chattering and nervous buzzing was overwhelmed by a cheer that started in the throats of the Justice Posse and grew explosively until it rang up and down the length of the Mall.

And it did not die down; it grew into an ovation. Those listening to Cozzano had experienced more anxiety during the last couple of minutes than they had since the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kennedy assassination. Now, Cozzano was telling them that everything was going to be fine. He told them this, not just with his words, but with the deep resonant tone of his voice and with his posture, his facial expression.

No one really knew what was going on. But hearing his words and watching his face, they came to know one thing beyond question: President Cozzano was doing what he had been elected to do. Finally, a leader was in the White House, and he was leading.

The people on the inaugural platform were the last ones to rise to their feet and join in the ovation.

Cozzano was about to resume his speech, but he realized that there was no way to talk over the voices of half a million people. He paused, smiled at the crowd, waited for a couple of moments. The cheering continued. He stepped back away from the lectern, now just a couple of paces in front of his daughter and Eleanor Richmond and her family, and raised both of his arms in the air as if he had just scored a touchdown.

The first bullet did just what it was supposed to do. Its teflon coating took it smoothly through the seven layers of bullet-proof-fabric making up President Cozzano's bulletproof vest. After that, momentum and plain old-fashioned lead did the rest. It passed into his thorax a couple of inches below the right nipple and exploded against a rib, spraying fragments of lead, bone, and teflon through Cozzano's chest cavity. Most of his right lung was turned into hash. Numerous holes were blown through the heart and a major vessel pierced in his left lung. Nothing emerged from the other side of Cozzano's body; the bullet, which was specifically designed to kill human beings wearing bulletproof vests, had been totally efficient in transferring all of its energy into Cozzano's flesh.

Vishniak saw a jet of steam and blood spurt from the entrance wound and knew that Cozzano was dead. He angled the weapon a couple of degrees to the right and took aim at Eleanor Richmond. But just as he was pulling the trigger, a bulky man in a black T-shirt jumped in front of her.

Darryl Garfield, an offensive linesman for the Skins, took the second bullet in his massive upper arm, which was nearly as big as Eleanor's waist. The bullet ricocheted off his humerus and ended up shattering a window in the Rayburn Building, a thousand feet due south, whence it was later recovered. As the bullet exited Garfield's arm it drove before it a shock wave of blood and pulverized muscle tissue that burst out of his body in a crudely hemispherical pattern, spraying Eleanor Richmond with blood.

Vishniak lowered his weapon a bit, surprised by Garfield's sudden intervention, and did not see the precipitous approach of Rufus Bell. Bell threw all of this momentum behind the heel of his right hand, which impacted on the bridge of Vishniak's nose and collapsed the bone structure of his entire face, driving a number of small bone fragments all the way into Vishniak's brain. Vishniak was a vegetable before he hit the ground. Ten minutes later he was dead.

Most of the people on the platform knew only that Darryl Garfield had been shot, because his wound had been so spectacular. In the ensuing confusion, Mary Catherine was the first person to notice that President Cozzano was sitting down behind the lectern, looking stunned and pale.

At first they thought he was just stunned by the near miss. But a look at his face proved otherwise. Pink foam had collected at the corners of his mouth. Mary Catherine, James Cozzano, and Mel all converged on Cozzano at the same moment and helped him to lie on his back. Within a few moments they were surrounded by the Posse.

A few moments after the shooting, Eleanor Richmond had vanished, completely surrounded by huge Posse members who practically encased her in bulletproof vests. The guests on the inaugural platform drained back into the Capitol as though a plug had been pulled and they were being sucked back into the building. Eleanor and her escort were swept along.

Mary Catherine ripped Cozzano's shirt open down the middle and discovered the entrance wound on his thorax. Her eyes met his.

"I'll be okay," Cozzano said.

"One of the guys has called for a chopper," Mel said. "Hang in there, buddy."

Cozzano didn't pay any attention to Mel. He was looking at James and Mary Catherine, kneeling next to him side by side.

"Listen, peanut," the President said. "James will stay with you. You stay with Eleanor."

"No!" Mary Catherine said.

"They have no choice but to kill Eleanor," Cozzano said. "They'll try to do it now. Natural causes. Go! By order of the President."

Tears burst over the rims of Mary Catherine's eyes and cascaded down her face. "I love you more than anything, peanut," Cozzano said.

"I love you too, Dad," Mary Catherine said.

"Now go and do your job," Cozzano said.

Mary Catherine bent down and kissed her father's cheek. Then she stood up, turned, and ran into the Capitol.

The Rotunda had gone nuts. Several dozen Capitol Police had been herded into one corner and were being guarded by a couple of Posse members carrying M-16s with fixed bayonets. More justice men, and several men wearing FBI windbreakers, were stationing themselves around the entrances, trying to establish some control over who came in and who left. A couple of media crews were here, unable to make up their minds what they should be pointing their cameras at; several radio and television reporters were running around seemingly at random, shouting a stream-of-consciousness narration into their microphones. It didn't matter what they said as long as they said it with authority.

But most of the people in the Rotunda were invited guests who had been seated in the rows of chairs on the inaugural platform. It was easy to tell them apart. The men were all wearing intensely formal garb and the women were dressed, coiffed, and bejeweled to the nines. These people had gathered into knots scattered around the floor of the Rotunda. Each knot consisted of a few people turned inward, slack-faced with shock, jabbering at one another, and a few people, mostly men, constantly craning their necks in all directions, eyes wide and staring, trying to get some sense of what was going on. One or two men were jabbing at cellular phones with stiff index fingers, screaming into them, getting nothing but static. A man in black tie and morning coat slammed his cellular phone on to the floor in frustration and it slid across the polished stone like a hockey puck.

Mary Catherine couldn't see Eleanor anywhere. A Posse member walked in front of her in his black Justice shirt. Mary Catherine jumped forward and put her hand on his shoulder. "Where's Eleanor?" she said.

As soon as he recognized her, he told her: "She went to the ladies' room to clean up. She's got blood on her." "Who's with her?"

"I dunno," the man said, "we don't have any female deputies in this outfit."

"Where's that bathroom?" Mary Catherine said kicking off her shoes.

The man pointed. Mary Catherine headed across the floor of the Rotunda, building up to a full sprint.

It wasn't hard to find the bathroom where Eleanor was holed up: the entrance was almost obscured by a knot of black-shirted Posse members. Mary Catherine just aimed at the door and relied on them to recognize her, and to get out of the way.

They did, but she had to slow down to a brisk walk. She entered the women's lounge. The first thing she saw was Eleanor's dress spread out across a couch near the entrance, spattered with blood. She rounded a corner and saw a row of sinks. Eleanor was bent over one of the sinks, hot water blasting. She had stripped down to a camisole and panties. Her arms were wet up to the shoulders and she was bent over the sink splashing water on her face; flecks of blood were still visible in her hair.

One other woman was in the bathroom: from her appearance, obviously one of the invited guests. Mary Catherine had spent enough time with people of the advanced upper crust to know one when she saw one.

She even recognized this woman. It was Althea Coover. DeWayne Coover's granddaughter. She and Mary Catherine had gone to Stanford together and attended a lot of the same parties. Because of Coover's support of the Radhakrishnan Institute, his family had gotten several invitations to the Inauguration.

Althea Coover was standing at the sink next to Eleanor's. She had put a few small cosmetics containers out on the shelf beneath the mirror, as though she were here to fix her face. But just as Mary Catherine was rounding the corner, althea was pulling something else out of her bag: a capped hypodermic needle.

Mary Catherine headed straight for her.

Althea saw Mary Catherine and startled. Her eyes jumped to the hypodermic needle, then Eleanor, then up to Mary Catherine's face. She pulled the cap off, exposing the hair-thin needle, and raised it like a dart, aiming it at Eleanor's exposed shoulder.

Then Mary Catherine shoved her stun gun into the side of Althea Coover's neck and pulled the trigger.

Althea dropped the needle, collapsed, and smacked her head into the marble floor with a shocking thud. Eleanor straightened up, blinked water out of her eyes, and jumped to see Mary Catherine suddenly standing there with lightning in her hand, and Althea Coover gone.

When Mary Catherine and Eleanor returned to the Rotunda, now surrounded by very nervous and trigger-happy men in black T-shirts, they discovered that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had not been as lucky. He was collapsed on the marble floor, unconscious and unresponsive. Immediately before his collapse he had been seen talking to another invited guest who had made a hasty exit; later, an empty hypodermic syringe was found in an ashtray by the door. The Chief Justice was being attended to by a couple of old and distinguished doctors who had made it on to the guest list. A few Posse members picked him up and carried him into the Capitol infirmary.

Anyone wearing white tie or a formal gown was now being viewed with intense suspicion by the Posse. Mary Catherine and Eleanor found themselves dead center in the Rotunda, surrounded by Posse members facing outward, as the remaining guests were herded toward the outside of the room.

Between the knot in the center and the people crowded to the edges, there was a broad, doughnut-shaped, empty space, now occupied by a grand total of three people: a minicam operator from CNN, his sound man, and a bald, middle-aged man in a long black robe. The robe was a flimsy thing made of synthetic fibers and looked as though it had been wadded up into a ball and then sat on for a few days. It was unzipped to reveal a bulletproof vest underneath; beneath the vest, a black T-shirt could be seen. This guy was a member of the Posse.

In his right hand he was carrying a thick black book with the words HOLY BIBLE printed on the cover in gold letters. A single sheet of typing paper was clasped in the front cover.

"Excuse me," said the man in the black robe, standing up on tiptoes trying to see over the shoulders of the bodyguards, "but I could not help but notice that the Chief Justice has been incapacitated. Can I be of some assistance here?"

"Who are you?" Mary Catherine said, peering at him between a couple of Posse members.

"Stanley Kotlarski, Fifth Circuit Court Judge, Cook County, Illinois," the man said. "Mel asked me to hang around in case something happened to the Chief Justice. Are you ready to do the honours, or are we going to stand around here all day?"

The circle of bodyguards opened up to admit Judge Kotlarski and the camera crew. Judge Kotlarski pulled the sheet of paper out of the Bible and then handed the Bible to Mary Catherine. "You know the drill," he said.

She did know it. She had just done it about fifteen minutes before. Now, tear-streaked, blood-stained, barefoot, and dishevelled, she did it again: held the Bible out in front of the President-to-be. Eleanor Richmond didn't hesitate. She put one hand on the Bible and held up the other one. Judge Kotlarski looked at the cameraman. "You ready?"

"We're live to planet Earth," the cameraman said. Judge Kotlarski began to read from the sheet of paper. "Repeat after me. In the middle of the oath of office, Eleanor and the Judge had to raise their voices; they were nearly drowned out by the sound of a medevac chopper setting down out front, then, within a few seconds, lifting off again.

Mary Catherine didn't pay much attention to the oath. She was looking out the windows, watching the chopper carry her father away. The first thing she really heard was the voice of the President issuing her first order: "Evacuate and seal the Rotunda."

Then President Richmond bent down, pulled a thick black envelope out of her bag, and ripped it open.

William A. Cozzano arrived at the Lady Wilburdon Gunshot Wound Institute via helicopter, roughly fifteen minutes after the bullet had entered his body. By that point, he had lost roughly half of his blood supply. He was trucked straight into a trauma room, where his chest was split open by Dr. Cornelius Gary. The President was in good hands: between his service in the Gulf War and the trauma centers of D.C., Dr. Gary had personally treated more gunshot wounds than any other physician in the United States.

Before going under anaesthesia, Cozzano's last words to his son, James, were: "You're free now, son. Go out and be a good man."

Dr. Gary worked to mend Cozzano's shattered organs for thirty minutes. William A. Cozzano died on the operating table at 12:58 p.m., having been President for just under one hour.