41
Mary Catherine extricated herself from the reception around midnight and snuck upstairs to her room. Once inside, she stuck a bent paper clip into the keyhole of the old door hardware and shot the bolt, a skill she had picked up through long practice at the age of eight. Now that most of the techies and therapists had left, she had her room back the way it was supposed to be, with her old single bed with the handmade quilt on it, family pictures, her own little TV set on a table at the foot of the bed. She kicked her shoes off and stretched out full length on top of the old quilt. For the first time she realized how completely exhausted she was.
The red digits of the bedside clock flipped over to 12:00. A barrage of firecrackers went off all over town, ringing out the Fourth of July. "God forgive me for this," Mary Catherine said, reaching for the remote control on her bedside table, "but I have to see how this looked on TV."
It was the top story on CNN. And it looked fantastic. Mary Catherine had always known, vaguely, that things looked different on TV than they did in reality. But she didn't understand that well enough to predict how something would turn out on the small screen.
Ogle, obviously, had the knack. The rally had been impressive enough in person. But on television, you didn't see any of the boring, grungy stuff around the edges. All you saw was the good stuff. They covered the smoke divers. They showed most of Cozzano's run across the football field, and even a brief glimpse of a string of firecrackers being set off. The shower of confetti looked incredible.
And she looked incredible. She almost didn't recognize herself, but was embarrassed anyway. Could it be that she was destined to wear this sort of clothes?
The CNN report didn't last long. They hit all the high points of the rally, airing all of the shots that Ogle had handed them on a silver platter, and then tossed in a few shots of the picnic, including some great footage of Cozzano throwing the Hail Mary.
CNN moved on to other topics. Mary Catherine picked up the remote control again and wandered up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, catching glimpses of fishing shows, Home Shopping Network, Weather Channel, and Star Trek before finally locating C-SPAN, which was playing Dad's speech back in its entirety. For the first time, she got a chance to hear what he had been saying while she was looking around and chatting with all the little kids.
"About half a mile from here there's a factory that my father built, largely with his own capital and with the sweat of his brow, during the 1940s. The Army wouldn't let him fight - his mother had already lost one son to a German torpedo - but he was determined to get into the war one way or the other."
This was not true. He didn't build it with his own capital. The Meyers raised most of the money.
On the TV, Dad continued. "That factory made a new product known as nylon, which was an inexpensive replacement for silk - the main ingredient in parachutes. When the D day invasion was finally launched, my father couldn't be there. But the parachutes that he manufactured right here in Tuscola were strapped to the backs of every paratrooper who ventured into the skies of France on that fateful day."
He didn't make the chutes. Just the nylon fiber. The Army bought nylon from a whole bunch of suppliers.
"After V-E Day, a young man showed up in my father's factory one beautiful spring morning, asking to see Mr. Cozzano. Well, in a lot of places he would have gotten the brushoff from the receptionists and the P.R. people but in my father's company you could always go straight to the top. So in short order this man was ushered into John Cozzano's office. And when he finally came face-to-face with my father, this strapping young lad became positively choked up with emotion and couldn't bring himself to speak for a few moments. And he explained that he was a paratrooper who had been in the very spearhead of the D day invasion. A hundred men had parachuted down from his unit and a hundred of them landed safely and took their objective with a minimum loss of life. Well, it seemed that these troopers had noticed the Cozzano label printed on to their chutes and decided that they liked that name and they had begun to call themselves the Cozzano gang. That became their rallying cry when they would jump out of the airplane. And at that point, my dad, who never shed tears in my presence in his entire life, well, he just burst out crying, you see, because that meant more to him than any of the money or anything else that he had gotten out of his factory-
The TV set went dark. Mary Catherine was sitting up in bed, holding the remote control, aiming it at the screen like a gun. She was frozen in place.
The man she had been watching on the TV set wasn't her dad. Everything he'd just said was an out-and-out fabrication. And Dad would never tell a lie. Mel was right.
A familiar feeling came back. It was the clammy fear that had gripped her on the night of her father's first stroke. For weeks she had thought it would never go away. Then it had begun to relax its hold over her mind and her heart, and as Dad had recovered after the operation, it had gone away completely. She had thought that she and her family were out of the wood.
She'd been wrong. They weren't out of the woods. They had just walked through a little clearing. Now she found herself in the heart of a deeper and vaster forest than she'd ever imagined.
The party noise downstairs had faded to a low murmur. She could hear a new sound from the next room. James's old room. It was the sound of fingers whacking a keyboard with the speed and power of a drumroll.
Zeldo was sitting at his workstation. He had turned off the lights and inverted the screen so that it was showing white letters on a black background. He had a huge high-resolution monitor with at least a dozen windows open on it, each one filled with long snaking lines of text that Mary Catherine recognized, vaguely, as computer code.
"Hi," she said, and he almost jumped out of his skin. "Sorry to startle you."
"That's okay," Zeldo said, taking a deep breath and spinning his chair around to face her. "Too much Jolt. You can turn on a light if you want."
"It's okay," she said. She grabbed another swivel chair and sat down.
"Thanks. I'm running in blackout mode here," Zeldo said, "been on this damn machine too long and my eyes won't focus anymore."
"What's going on?" she said. She had to assume, from what Mel had told her, that they were probably being listened to right now. For that matter, Zeldo himself was presumably part of the Network, though he seemed like a nice enough guy. And today, in the football game, she had seen a side of Zeldo that he didn't normally show. She could tell that, whatever devious schemes Zeldo might be involved in, he genuinely liked William A. Cozzano.
"We've had interference problems when your father goes near microwave relay stations," Zeldo said. "We're going to keep him away from those things, maybe work up some kind of a hat with EM shielding in it."
"But TV trucks use microwaves, don't they?"
"Exactly. And he spends a lot of time around TV trucks. So as a last line of defense, I'm building some safeguards into the software so that when the chip starts getting stray signals; it'll be smart enough to realize that there's a problem."
"Then what?"
"It'll go into Helen Keller mode until the interference goes away."
"What happens then? Dad goes into a coma?"
"Not at all," Zeldo said. "The chip will keep doing what it's supposed to do, filling in for the damaged parts of his brain. It's just that it won't be able to send or receive data anymore."
"That's not an important function anyway, is it?" Mary Catherine said. "You only send signals into his brain when you are fixing a bug in the software. Right?"
There was a long pause, and Mary Catherine wished that she had turned on the room lights. She suspected that she might be able to read some interesting things on Zeldo's face right now.