All the way from Grant Park southward, the pedestrian traffic had been getting heavier. At the southern end of the parking lot, all the people were funneled down a wide staircase and into McCormick Place's subterranean entrance. The floor was backed up a little bit, the crowd milled rather than streamed down the stairs. Working his way slowly down the steps, Vishniak was able to get a clear view of the metal detectors bracketing the doors.
He immediately got scared shitless. His heart was going so fast it was more of a vibration, like an idling truck engine, than a beat, and he was sweating like a pig. But it was a warm humid night and he was wearing a windbreaker, so he had every excuse to sweat.
Looking up, he could see into the underside of McCormick Place's huge flat overhanging roof, which was supported and stiffened by a latticework of black girders. Laced through the structural members was a barely perceptible network of thin red lines - a system of pipes carrying water to the automatic sprinkler system. As Vishniak worked his way down the steps, swept along by the eager Cozzano supporters, he wondered whether anyone else ever bothered to look up in the air and take notice of these things, these hidden connections and networks that were laced imperceptibly through the structure of everything.
Then he was there, confronted with the metal detector, people pushing him from behind, and all he could do was give himself up to the force of the crowd, the pressure of history, and walk on through.
Nothing happened. As he kept on walking with the crowd now filling the main floor of William A. Cozzano's National Town Meeting, becoming invisible and anonymous, he was overcome with relief, which showed up as a vivid green on the monitors in the Eye of Cy and ODR headquarters in Pentagon City.
The National Town Meeting was a political convention in all but name, and it followed some of the same protocols. One of these was the hierarchy of introductions. It wouldn't do just to have the nominee stroll out on stage and start talking. He had to be introduced by someone. Preferably by someone very, very important. And anyone who was important enough to make that introduction was, likewise, too important to step out in front of an ice-cold audience and just start talking. He would have to be introduced by someone else. That person had to be important enough that his role as introducer did not seem to belittle the stature of the introduced...
Suffice it to say that the first person who stepped out in front of the microphones that evening was as completely anonymous as any person could be. His job was to get the attention of the crowd. To sever all of the conversations that had sprung up among the people standing shoulder to shoulder on the convention floor. Then he introduced an alderman, who introduced a former mayor of Chicago, who introduced a former Governor of New York, who introduced a movie star, who introduced a former Secretary of State, who introduced Governor William A. Cozzano. At each stage of the hierarchy, the dull roar of bored conversation diminished and the excitement of the crowd built.
Twenty thousand people were in the hall. The original roster of the National Town Meeting had been ten thousand but these people were just statistical abstracts who had been snatched off the streets and transported into town to spout their opinions and represent their demographic groups. Many of them supported Cozzano, many didn't, and the ones that did, did so in the same moderate, reasonable way that most average people supported political candidates. Which was to say that, while they might vote for Cozzano, they would not be willing to paint his name across their foreheads and jump up and down screaming at every mention of his name.
Consequently, Cy Ogle had brought in an additional ten thousand people who would do exactly that. They tended to stand closer to the dais, crowding the National Town Meeting participants into the back of the hall. The fact that these riotous supporters were not the same as the ten thousand average Americans who had been appearing on TV all week was not, of course, explained to the nationwide television audience, which was watching on no fewer than eight networks.
This was a good thing for Floyd Wayne Vishniak, because, until tonight, you couldn't have gotten into the convention center without a special National Town Meeting photo ID. Vishniak didn't have one. But neither did any of the other ten thousand fanatical Cozzano supporters who had packed the hall tonight.
Tables had been set up at the back of the hall and piled high with Cozzano paraphernalia: signs, bumper stickers, skimmers, buttons. Vishniak scored an armful of stuff and festooned himself like the hard-core Cozzano supporter that he, in fact, was. He even filled out a little COZZANO FOR PRESIDENT stick-on name tag: HELLO, MY NAME IS Sherman Grant. He was amid relatively glum, drab National Town Meeting participants who had now been relegated to the outer darkness. As the hierarchy of introductions rose toward its peak, he shouldered his way through them, working toward center stage.
Like a lot of other secretaries of state, the one who introduced Cozzano had not been allowed to die a natural political death. He had resigned or been forced out, or something like that, in the middle of a term. Everyone concerned had agreed that it was over a question of principle on which reasonable people could honestly disagree, which gave this man the image of a person who was willing to stake his job on a matter of principle. As such, he was exactly the right guy to introduce Cozzano.
He delivered a lengthy and somewhat less than thrilling address about his career in big-time Washington politics and how disgusted he had been by the decadence and corruption of it all. He talked about the need for change. Finally, his voice began to rise in pitch, he started to pump the crowd back up out of the comatose state into which he himself had placed them, to pull them back in from the lines at the rest rooms, and by the time he bent forward to shout the name of William A. Cozzano into his microphone, he was completely inaudible, even to himself: thousands of people were screaming the name.
Cozzano appeared on the stage, holding hands with Eleanor Richmond. Behind them were four younger people: Mary Catherine and James Cozzano, and Clarice and Harmon Richmond, Jr., all holding hands.
The screaming, and the sound of the air horns, seemed loud enough to split the molecules in the hot sweaty air from the convention hall. The candidates and their families stood in a pool of blue carbon-arc light that set them apart from everything else, which now looked dim and yellowish by comparison, like a TV screen blaring in the middle of an antique living room.
It was just like when the Quad Cities Whiplash scored a winning goal with one second remaining in a playoff game, thought Floyd Wayne Vishniak, standing just below the dais, a stone's throw from William A. Cozzano.
He had a clear shot from here. But shooting him was not really part of the plan. The idea was not to hurt Cozzano, but to protect him.
Cozzano was a great man. A hero. The only honest politician in the United States. But even a great man could be led astray by the forces of evil, and Vishniak had been forced to the conclusion that it was happening to Cozzano right now.
Why couldn't anyone else figure it out? It was so obvious. They were all stupid. The world was full of morons. In all of the United States, only a tiny number were capable of seeing the truth.
They knew, of course. The people who were manipulating Cozzano had access to all kinds of secret FBI and CIA files. They could use their computers and satellites to pry into people's school records, police records, and bank accounts. They had figured out that Floyd Wayne Vishniak, and a few other people around the country, would see through the charade and would represent a threat to their conspiracy.
The couldn't just send out hit men to kill Vishniak and the others. No, that was just a little too obvious. Instead they were taking the subtle approach. All the way across Illinois, Vishniak had been laughing at himself. To think he had actually believed the ridiculous story that the little Jew had told him! "We're doing research on public opinion and we want you to wear this Dick Tracy watch."