Part 49 (1/2)
The music was tinny and compressed, as if coming from a very small speaker. It was a patriotic fifes-and drums number. Shane Schram stared in astonishment.
The man took his hands out of his pockets. One wrist had an Ace bandage wrapped around it. The music became louder. He ripped the Ace bandage off. The sound of applause was now coming from his wrist.
William A. Cozzano stepped to the lectern and waved down the applause and cheers of the attendees at the Tulsa Gun and Knife Show.
”My Secret Service people wanted to provide additional security for me today,” he said, ”because I was addressing a bunch of gun owners, and for some reason that made them nervous. Well, I have one thing to say to you gun owners: if any one of you really wants to take a shot at me, here I am!”
Cozzano stepped back from the lectern and held his arms out wide. The hall was filled with stunned murmuring for a few moments. Then the gun owners exploded. Peals of cheers, applause, and foot- stomping overwhelmed the sound system on the PIPER watch.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak was staring into Shane Schram's face, sizing him up. Schram's eyes were jumping back and forth between the little TV and his face.
”You're Economic Roadkill,” Schram said. ”You're Floyd Wayne Vishniak!”
Floyd Wayne Vishniak unzipped his windbreaker and reached inside. ”That was a really stupid thing for you to say,” he said. Then he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at Schram. Everyone else in the room collapsed out of their chairs.
”I can see that you're very upset,” Schram said.
”How many times do I have to tell you,” Vishniak said, ”to stay the h.e.l.l out of my brain waves!” Then he fired a single round that entered Schram's head through the bridge of his nose and left through an exit wound, in the back of his skull, that would have accommodated a grapefruit.
”Don't worry,” Vishniak said to the five people on the floor, who could scarcely hear a word he was saying because their ears were ringing from the incredible blast of the handgun. ”You don't have to worry about these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds anymore!”
”What the h.e.l.l was that?” Mr. Salvador said. He and Green were in the PIPER monitor room, watchingCozzano shake his hands together above his head, basking in the waves of applause.
”Nothing,” Green said. ”Another one of Schram's psychological experiments.”
”I thought we were finished with the calibration phase,” Mr. Salvador said.
”Believe me,” Green said, ”this place is like Dodge City sometimes. It's all fake.”
Vishniak popped his head into the hallway and withdrew it before anyone could get off a shot. But the precaution was unnecessary. No one was there.
He chanced a second look and saw the fat security guard in the lobby, looking back at him with only mild concern, as if high-ranking executives at ODR got their brains blown against the walls every day.
Vishniak drew back into the room, his back to the doorway. He gripped the Fleischacker in both hands, spun around into the hall while bringing the gun downward, steadied his arm against the door frame for a second, and fired three quick shots. The first two hit the guard in the chest and the last one was high.
Now he had to move fast. He ran toward the lobby, spun through the doorway, and took aim at the old guard, who was in the act of unsnapping his holster. He fired two rounds into the man's head and upper body from a distance of about six feet. Then he spun toward the receptionist's desk.
She had already vaulted her desk and was cowering and screaming on the far side. That was okay, she was just a gnome. The key was to take out the switchboard. Vishniak fired a spread of some half-dozen bullets into her computer and her telephone switchboard.
He turned back into the hallway, reached down with one hand, and unsnapped the flaps on the tops of his cargo pockets. He tucked the flaps down into the pockets, as he had practiced many times, so that they would not get in the way when he reached down to pull out more clips.
Then it hit him: though it was a bit early in the day to be getting c.o.c.ky, he was doing an incredibly good job so far. He had wiped out their pathetic security detail and blown their communications to shreds. Now he'd be able to clean out the remainder of the eleventh floor in a thorough and methodical way.
”Generally good results so far,” Mr. Salvador said. ”Of course, the gun control advocates will never like this kind of thing.”
”Yeah. But check out some of our gun owners,” Green said. ”Look at Vishniak?”
”Who?”
”Economic Roadkill,” Green said, tapping a screen that had suddenly gone brilliant emerald. ”He's one of my guys. And you can see how happy he is with the speech so far.”
He had gone almost completely deaf from the blasts of the Fleischacker and could barely hear the voice of William A. Cozzano coming from his PIPER watch: ”... would go out in the fields with my father, each of us with a shotgun tucked under his arm, and look for the pheasants that would go through the harvested fields for loose corn. Our retriever Lover would accompany us, often staying well back because he had learned that the blasts of the shotgun hurt his ears.”
At this point Cozzano paused in his speech as the audience laughed indulgently. It wasn't really that funny, but he had delivered it in the cadence of a joke, and they knew their cues.
Vishniak kicked open an office door and saw nothing but a desk, and the knees and elbows of a man in a suit who was cowering behind it. This was not much to go on, but he was able to use his mind's eye to reconstruct the approximate shape and position of the owner of those knees and elbows, and pumped several rounds into the probable locations of his vital organs. When he saw what looked like an appropriate quant.i.ty of blood on the floor, he left the office, leaving the door ajar as a reminder that he had already visited this particular room.
”This is a bit excessive, wouldn't you say?' Mr. Salvador said. ”I shall have to speak with Dr. Schram about this. It's too late in the campaign for these distractions.”
”There is an incredible amount of gunfire,” Green said, a little nervous.
On the central TV screen. Cozzano continued: ”On one of my first trips, after Lover had flushed a pheasant, Iswung my gun in its direction, as I had practiced so many times with clay pigeons. But suddenly the barrel swung up in the air and I held my fire. My father had suddenly reached out and pushed the barrels up in the air, ruining my aim, and I was very upset.
”By way of explanation, he pointed to our neighbor's house, which had been directly in my line of fire - almost a mile away from us! I protested that there was no way that birdshot could travel for such a distance. 'Better safe than sorry,' he said.”
Vishniak moved on to the next room. This one contained half a dozen TV screens and an equal number of computer monitors. One of the computer monitors was dead and the other five were glowing a brilliant red color. He put a bullet into each. This clip was running low, so as long as he was in a safe room, he ejected it, put it in his trouser pocket, and put in a fresh one. Cozzano's voice was still coming from his wrist.w.a.tch. ”When I first learned that there were some people in Was.h.i.+ngton who wanted to take our guns away from us, I were more astonished than offended. The idea seemed ludicrous. My father - and all the other gun owners I knew - practiced firearm safety, and were at pains to pa.s.s those practices on to their children. The notion that some person in Was.h.i.+ngton could come out to Tuscola, Illinois, and take our guns away from us, because we were not, in their view, fit to own them, was completely baffling to me. And it still is.”
The audience laughed; the laugh deepened into a cheer.
”Something's definitely going on out there,” Aaron Green said. ”I'm going to lock the door.”
”Good idea,” Mr. Salvador said, picking up the phone, holding it to his ear. ”It's dead. The phone's dead.”
Aaron had almost reached the door when the k.n.o.b rotated and it opened. A man with a gun was standing in the hallway looking him in the eye.
The man's eye was drawn to the enormous racks of computer monitors that covered every wall of the room, the banks of computer systems. His jaw dropped open as he took it all in. While the man was gaping, Green had time to recognize him: it was Floyd Wayne Vishniak with a haircut.
Vishniak's gaze finally returned to Aaron's face. And it was clear that the presence of Aaron Green, here in this room, was the final piece in some kind of mental puzzle that Vishniak had been a.s.sembling in his head.
”This is it,” Vishniak said, talking way too loud, as if he was deaf. ”Isn't it?”
Never argue with a man with a gun. ”Yes,” Green said, ”this is it.” He turned to Mr. Salvador for support.
”Isn't it?”
”Yes, this is it,” Mr. Salvador said, climbing very gingerly out of his chair, holding his hands together in front of his chest, fingertip to fingertip, in an att.i.tude halfway between contemplation and prayer. He had the presence of mind to look over at Vishniak's monitor screen; it had gone pale and colorless.
Then it turned brilliant green.
”You're the Big Boss of it all!” Vishniak said. He stepped forward, shoved Aaron out of the way, leveled his gun at Mr. Salvador, and began to pull the trigger. He pulled it over and over again and the muzzle flashed like a strobe. Mr. Salvador was backing across the room with his hands dangling numbly at his sides, and before long he collapsed against a window.
But the window wasn't there anymore; it had long since been blown out of its frame, and the only thing there was a closed Venetian blind with a lot of holes in it, flopping outward into the wind, betraying the warm Virginia suns.h.i.+ne. Suddenly, Mr. Salvador was no longer in the room.
”Jesus, where'd he go?” Vishniak said. He stepped forward into the room, looking around suspiciously. He went over to the window, pushed the blind out with one hand, and looked down.
But by that point, Aaron Green was already in the elevator.
The lunchtime crowd in the foodcourt at Pentagon Plaza had first been alerted by a loud rattling noise on the gla.s.s overhead. The roar of conversation mostly drowned this out, but a few perceptive diners looked up to see fragments of broken gla.s.s sparkling in the sun as they bounced on the greenhouse roof.