Interface. Part 4

Then she went back into the Governor's office to make sure that he was comfortable in his chair. He had slumped over to one side. His right arm kept las.h.i.+ng out like a gaff, trying to hook on to something st.u.r.dy enough to pull his full weight, but the surface of his desk offered no purchase.

Marsha grabbed the Governor's upper left arm in both of her hands and tried to move him. But Cozzano reached across his body with his right hand and gently, firmly, pulled her hands loose. She watched his hand for a moment, confused, then noticed that he was staring directly into her eyes.

He glanced significantly at the telephone on his desk. "f.u.c.k me," he said. "Get the maculator!" Then he closed his eyes tight in frustration and shook his head. "No, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!"

"The maculator?"

"The old Egyptian. Glossy head. He'll fix this muggle. Get the boy of my father's acehole! Ace in the hole."

"Mel Meyer," she said.

"Yeah."That was an easy one; Mel was the second preset on the Governor's phone, a one-b.u.t.ton job. Marsha picked up the phone and pushed that b.u.t.ton, with a sense of relief that made her decisive. Mel was the guy to call. She should have called him first, before calling the ambulance.

She ended up having to try a couple of numbers before she reached him on his car phone, somewhere on the streets of Chicago.

"What is it!" Mel snapped, getting things off to a typically brisk start, "It's Marsha. The Governor has had a stroke or something."

"Oh, no!" William A. Cozzano said. "You're right. I had a stroke. That's terrible."

"When?" Mel said.

"Just now."

"Is he dead?"

"No."

"Is he in distress?"

"No."

"Who is aware of this?"

"You, me, an ambulance crew."

"Is the ambulance there?"

"Not yet."

"Listen carefully." In the background, Marsha heard honking, the squealing of tires, the dim filtered sound of other motorists shouting at Mel, their voices Dopplering wierdly as they veered and accelerated around him. He must have pulled on to the shoulder, sidewalk, or wherever else he saw clear s.p.a.ce. Mel kept talking smoothly and without interruption. "You don't want an ambulance there. Even at night the Capitol is crawling with media jackals. d.a.m.n that gla.s.s wall!"

"But-"

"Shut up. I know you have to get him medical attention. Who's on security detail? Mack Crane?"

"Yes."

"I'll call and tell him to get w.i.l.l.y into the dumbwaiter. You take the stairs down to the bas.e.m.e.nt - don't wait for the d.a.m.n elevator, don't talk to any press - and find Rufus Bell, who's down in the boiler room, smoking Camels and waiting for the lottery numbers to come up on TV. Tell him that the Governor needs his help. Tell him to clear a path to the civil defense tunnel."

Then Mel hung up. Marsha was saying, "Civil defense?"

The Governor was smiling at Marsha with one side of his face. The other side was expressionless. "He is a smart back," he said. "No! You know what I mean. Do what he said."

The Governor's offices were separated from the rest of the capitol by a huge gla.s.s wall that completely sealed off the east wing. Just inside the gla.s.s wall was a generously sized reception area, furnished with leather chairs and davenports, where visitors waited to see the Governor or his staff. Right up against the gla.s.s was a security desk where Mack Crane or another member of the Governor's security detail was always stationed, twenty-four hours a day, keeping a sharp eye on anyone who approached from the direction of the rotunda. Mack was a plainclothes Illinois cop, bald head fringed with straight, steely hair, wearing an unfas.h.i.+onably wide tie over a short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt. By the time Marsha had made it out of the Governor's office; through her own office, and out into the reception area, Mack's phone was already ringing, and as she punched her way out through the gla.s.s doors, heading for the Rotunda, she could hear him saying, "Hi, Mel."

Rufus Bell was downstairs in his little asbestos empire, smoking unfiltered Camels and watching television on a little black-and-white set he had poised on an upended bucket, when Marsha drove her shoulder into the steel door of the boiler room. Something in her manner caused him to rise to his feet.

"This is an emergency," she said. "The Governor needs your help."

Bell flicked his cigarette into a coffee can full of water, scoring a direct hit from ten feet away, simultaneously punching the TV's off switch with a knee. Then he just stared at her and Marsha realized he was waiting for instructions."Is there a civil defense tunnel or something?"

By way of saying yes, Bell strode over to a big sheet of stained and lacquered plywood bolted to a wall.

The plywood had dozens of cup hooks screwed into it. A key chain dangled from each cup hook. He grabbed one.

"w.i.l.l.y's coming down," Marsh said, she swallowed. "On the dumbwaiter."

Rufus froze solid for a long moment, then turned around and looked searchingly at Marsha.

"You need to clear a path from the dumbwaiter to the civil defense tunnel. Big enough for a stretcher."

Bell shrugged. "Shouldn't be hard," he said, exiting the room. He was a big round man with a rolling gait that looked slow, but Marsha had to hurry to keep up.

As they came into the hallway, Bell turned and held the key chain out to her, suspending it by a single one of its myriad keys, held between his thumb and forefinger. "You want me to clear that hallway, you gotta do the tunnel yourself. End of this hall, take a right, go to the very end."

Marsha had thought that she knew her way around the state house but now was beginning to feel lost and uncertain. But Bell was staring at her remorselessly, holding the key chain right up in her face, and she had to do it. She took the keys, getting a firm grip on the important one, and ran down the hallway.

"Yo!" Bell said, "you'll need this!"

She turned around to see Bell holding up a thick black rubber-coated flashlight. He clicked it on, waved it back and forth a couple of times, and underhanded it to her down thirty feet of hallway. She plucked it out of its spinning trajectory with a one-handed-grab, shattering two fingernails, and spun on her heel.

Behind her she could hear a tremendous clattering; looking back she saw Rufus beginning to shove entire file cabinets this way am that. That was all she took in before she turned down the next corridor.

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 battles.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+ns.

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 ma.s.sive 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 bas.e.m.e.nt somewhere. Four people were staring at her in amazement: one custodian and three emergency medical technicians, fully equipped with a gurney and several big fibergla.s.s 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 pa.s.senger 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 stairs 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 must 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, down the tunnel, and into the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 hadalways 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 carried 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 the rear windows. As the driver s.h.i.+fted 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 Marsha's retinas. Bell's forehead was wrinkled in the middle, his eyebrows angled upward in the center, his eyes were glistening and red. As the engine revved, he suddenly straightened up, clicked the heels 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 pa.s.sage through hostile territory. She hauled the strap of her purse up over her head so that it ran diagonally across her body, s.n.a.t.c.h-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 gla.s.s (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 s.h.i.+ft in a sprawling hospital.

Finally, as the elevator was pa.s.sing 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 p.r.o.ngs about a quarter of an inch long, making it look like the mouthparts of a tremendously magnified chigger. The p.r.o.ngs were symmetrically arranged: an outer pair that stuck straight out from the end of the device, and an inner pair, closer together, angled toward each other as they sprouted from the concavity. When Mary Catherine found the box inside her purse, it fell naturally into her hand in such a way that her index finger was resting on a black b.u.t.ton, just under the crook, near the p.r.o.ngs. 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 innerp.r.o.ngs. It created an alarming, crusty buzzing noise that seemed to penetrate deep into her 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 a.s.sume, 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 inst.i.tutional 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.

Mary Catherine was not the kind of woman who would carry a weapon in her purse. She was not sure what kind of woman would, but certainly not her. She did it anyway. At first it had been a concession to her father. Ever since the death of her mother, her father's concern for her safety had become an obsession with him. When she had moved into her apartment, he drove up from Tuscola with all of his tools and spent a weekend reinforcing the deadbolts, putting bars on the windows, caging her in from the outside world. The people who lived in the apartment across the air shaft - an extended family of Brazilian immigrants - spent most of that weekend gathered in the living room, almost as if for a family portrait, staring in astonishment as the Governor of Illinois dangled halfway out of a sixth-story window sinking bolt hole after bolt hole into the brick window frames with a ma.s.sive three-quarter-inch electric drill that he had borrowed from one of his farmer cousins.

The next time her birthday rolled around, Dad had given her a small, neatly wrapped box. Mary Catherine had been embarra.s.sed and flushed with grat.i.tude, thinking it was a necklace - and coming from Dad, it was sure to be too formidable to wear. But when she had gotten it out of the box, it turned out to be a stun gun instead. A fitting weapon for a neurologist.

Dad had never observed any limitations on his life. He saw nothing remarkable in a.s.suming that one day he would be President of the United States. He had always a.s.sumed that Mary Catherine would feel the same way. He always told her that she could do anything she wanted with her life, and while she never doubted him, she always took it with a grain of salt. And when he first became aware that, as a woman, she was in danger in ways that he was not, and that this danger limited what she could do, he was deeply troubled. He refused to accept it for a long time. But he was starting to understand and was trying to find ways to exempt her from the regulations that society imposed on all women. Because, G.o.dd.a.m.n it (she could hear him say), it just wasn't fair. Which was all the reason he needed to do anything.

She was halfway to her car when her beeper detonated, scaring her half out of her scrubs. She had been awake or virtually awake for thirty-six hours and was running on a lean, rancid bland of caffeine and adrenaline. One reflex told her to grab the beeper and push the b.u.t.ton that would make it shut up. The other reflex told her to pull the trigger on her stun gun and get it up into the solar plexus of any bad guys who might be in her vicinity. The reflexes got a little confused and the two little black boxes collided, the stun gun and the beeper, and the stun gun won; the beeper went silent.

(a) This was no time to stand still and figure out the problem and (b) as of thirty minutes ago, she was no longer on call. This had been a mistake on the part of the operator. She had paged the wrong doctor. Sooner or later, they would figure it out, they always did. Right now, Dr. Cozzano needed to get home and sleep.

When she got back to her apartment, her answering machine was taking down a message from a man whose voice she did not recognize. She just caught the tail end of it as she was coming through the door: ". . . condition is stable and he's under the personal care of Dr. Sipes, who of course is a very fine neurologist, Thanks. Bye."She recognized the name Sipes; he was on the faculty of the Central Illinois University College of Medicine and he showed up at all the conferences. Apparently this call had come from down-state, where some colleague had a question about something. Didn't sound urgent; she would call him back later.

She turned down the volume on the answering machine, locked all of the locks that Dad had installed to keep her safe, fed the cat, and went into the bathroom.

There was a mirror in the bathroom. Mary Catherine had not looked in a mirror for something like a day and a half. She took this opportunity to see if she still recognized herself.

Her father was the Governor of Illinois, which meant that this face of hers showed up on television and in the newspapers with some regularity. She had to look respectable without being dowdy. She was also a doctor, so she had to look smart and professional. She was a resident, so she had no money and couldn't spend any time at all worrying about how she looked. And she was the product of a small town in Illinois and had to go back there every couple of weeks and not seem uppity and strange to her old Girl Scout chums.

Once you left the city limits of Chicago you were in Big Hair Territory. Mary Catherine had been the only girl in her high school who had escaped the syndrome. She had extremely thick, black, luxuriant Italian hair with a natural wave that, during the humid summers, turned into a curl. She would have preferred to shave her head for the duration of the residency. Dad was never happy unless she let it grow down to her waist. In compromise, she had settled on a cut that let it hang just above her shoulders.

She showered and climbed into bed with wet hair. A few bits of mail had arrived, notes and cards from friends and family members in other parts of the country, and she leafed through them by her bedside lamp.

Her eyes could not trace the handwriting, and the contents penetrated her brain only feebly. It was a waste of time. She reached to turn off the ringer on her telephone, but discovered that it was already turned off.

She had probably turned it off the last time she had attempted to get some sleep, whenever that was. The time was 9:15 P.M. She set her three alarm clocks for five o'clock in the morning. She tossed the pager and the stun gun on to her bedside table. The pager no longer responded when she pushed the TEST b.u.t.ton. Apparently the stun gun had fried its microchips.

When she woke up, the bedside clocks all read within a few minutes of 9:45 and someone was pounding rhythmically on her front door with a heavy object. For a moment she thought she had overslept and that it was 9:45 in the morning, but then she realized that it was dark outside and her hair was still wet.

It sounded like someone was trying to break in with a sledge-hammer. She pulled on jeans and an ILLINI sweats.h.i.+rt, went to the door, and peered out through the peephole.

It was a cop. The wide-angle view in the peephole made his body very large and his head very small, amplifying his already cop-like appearance. He had a hug L-shaped billy club in one hand and was patiently ramming the b.u.t.t of it into her door. Standing behind the cop was a man in a trench coat with his hands in his pockets. He was shorter than the cop, so that the peephole magnified his face rather than his body. It was Mel Meyer.

"Okay!" she shouted. "I'm up." She sounded cheerful and ready for anything, even though she was neither. Women of the prairie did not b.i.t.c.h, nag, or whine.

Then she thought: Why is Mel here?

Dad had as many lawyers as a mechanic had wrenches. He embodied a large business, a fortune, a few charities, and the state of Illinois, and lawyers came with all of those things. They were always around.

Always calling Dad, taking him to dinner, coming over to his house with papers to sign. Sometimes she couldn't tell which were his friends, which were his business a.s.sociates, and which were actually representing him. To Mary Catherine, lawyers had always seemed as common as air, the taxi drivers, bag boys, and janitors of the world of affairs.

But if all those other lawyers were William A. Cozzano's army, then Mel Meyer was the stiletto strapped to his ankle. Mel was the eschatological counselor of the Cozzano clan, drafter of wills, executor of estates, G.o.dfather of children, and if the whole world turned to decadence and strife one day and civilization collapsed, and Dad were trapped on a hilltop surrounded by the heathen, Mel would shoot himself in the head so that Dad could use his corpse as a rampart. He was small, bald, rumply, tired-looking, lizard-eyed, anddidn't talk much, because he was always thinking everything out two hundred years into the future.

And now he was standing in her hallway, with a cop, quiet and motionless as a fire hydrant, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, staring at the wallpaper, thinking.

She undid the locks and opened the door. The cop stepped aside, clearing a wide s.p.a.ce between Mel and Mary Catherine. "Your pa needs you," Mel said. "I got a chopper. Let's go."

Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick Hospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly shorter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that looking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine could see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wandering around lost. The roofs were mostly flat tar and pea-gravel, totally dark at this time of night, though in areas that were perpetually shaded, patches of snow glowed faintly blue under the starlight. But the roof of one of the old, original wings was a patch of high noon in the sea of midnight. It bore a red square with a white Swiss cross, a red letter H in the center of the cross, and some white block numerals up in one corner. Well off to the side, new doors - electrically powered slabs of gla.s.s - had been cut into the side of the old building's central tower.

It made her uneasy. This wasn't Dad's style. As the governor of one of the biggest states in the union, William A. Cozzano could have lived like a sultan. But he didn't. He drove his own car and he did his own oil changes, lying flat on his back in the driveway of their house in Tuscola in the middle of the winter while frostbitten media crews photographed him in the act.

Zooming around in choppers gave him no thrill. It just reminded him of Vietnam. He took this to the point where he probably wouldn't have known how to get a chopper if he had needed one. Which is why he had to have people like Mel, people who knew the extent of his power and how to use it.