He kept walking. His brain was reeling. He went up and down the escalators several times and eventually walked out through the huge doorway and into something that looked very much like a shopping mall. But not like any shopping mall that Vishniak had seen in the Quad Cities. For him, a mall was a single narrow concourse, one story, lined with tiny shops, a few benches, and maybe a fountain in the middle.
Compared to the malls he was used to, this place was like - well, like Washington, D.C., compared to Davenport, Iowa. It was four stories high. The floors were gleaming white marble. A central atrium was filled with light streaming down through a glass ceiling; looking up through it, Vishniak could see the sky, and airplanes taking off from the airport, and the office skyscrapers towering overhead.
It went on forever. Thousands of people were here, visiting hundreds of stores. Some of the stores were tiny rinky-dink ones, but a lot of them were huge and fancy. It was no longer possible to support the belief that this was all a false-front operation for Ogle Data Research. This was a real, honest-to-god shopping mall, albeit an incomprehensibly vast and rich one.
He kept walking. On the one hand, he was confused and a bit disappointed that he had failed to locate Ogle Data Research. On the other hand, he was relieved, and breathing easily for the first time since he had entered the city. This business was clearly much more complicated than he'd thought at first. He was going to have to settle in and put a lot more thought into the intelligence-gathering phase of the operation.
Before long, he came to a big electric sign: a color-coded directory of the Pentagon Mall. It contained floor plans of each of the four levels, each store identified by number with a listing of all the stores by category.
It was almost too much to hope for that he could find ODR in this way, but he gave it a shot. The stores were arranged by category: WOMEN'S APPAREL, MEN'S APPAREL, RESTAURANTS, JEWELRY, GIFTS, and so on. Vishniak was unclear about which category described Ogle Data Research, and so he just began at the beginning and read through the names of every single business in the mall, which took several minutes. There was no Ogle Data Research listed.
Inspiration came in the form of a HELP WANTED sign in the window of one of the stores. Applying for jobs was one good excuse to get into a store and check it out without actually spending money. And - unthinkable as it might seem - if he could actually get a job here at Pentagon Plaza, he would be able to spend all his time here, and recon the place in detail. An inside job was always the best way to do a crime.
He had filled out enough job applications in his day to known that you had to have an address. So he exited the mall the way he had come, paid an outrageous fee for parking, and, under the name Sherman Grant, rented a room at a motel near National Airport, only a mile or two from Pentagon Plaza. Then he found a post office where he was able to rent a box, giving him that all-important mailing address, by this point his money was beginning to run low, but he had spent the summer accumulating credit cards that had been mailed to him, unasked-for, by fatuous banks in places like Delaware and South Dakota, and these went a long way.
Thus did Floyd Wayne Vishniak set up his own little base of operations in the nation's capital, joining every other person, company, pressure group, trade association, and maniac with a national agenda. A second trip to Pentagon Plaza that evening (this time via the less expensive Metro) netted a dozen more job applications. He stayed up until one in the morning filling them out in his best sixth-grade penmanship, and was down at the mall bright and early the next morning, as soon as the stores opened up, to hand them all in. And on this, his third trip to the mall, he didn't even bother to bring his gun.
Success came surprisingly quickly; the mall management offered Sherman Grant a job working in the food court, clearing and wiping down tables. A yuppie bastard interviewed him for the job, just to make sure that he, who had formerly assembled giant tractor transmissions for a living, was intelligent enough to pick garbage off of tables and wipe them with a damp rag. Vishniak swallowed his resentment and averred that he would try his very best to handle the unprecedented challenges of the job.
He considered holding out to see if any other jobs were offered to him, but decided to take the first one that came along. He had to keep his eye on the ball here. The purpose of this trip was not to develop new career paths. The purpose was to put bullets in the heads of the top management stratum of Ogle Data Research and then destroy as much of their high-tech brain-wave equipment as he could get into his gunsights before he himself was gunned down by the SWAT teams that showed up, so inevitably, at these kinds of events.
He started immediately. They issued him an apron and a hat. The training period lasted for about ten seconds and then he was working. The food court at Pentagon Plaza was on the ground floor, filling up a big open space in the floor plan that, in higher stories, was occupied by a hole with a railing around it: a huge atrium that looked down on the sea of tables and chairs shared by all of the fast-food places lining the food court. The atrium and the court were vaulted by a huge glass ceiling that let in so much light that Vishniak often wore sunglasses.
At first he was humiliated to take the job. He was the only English-speaking person doing it. He never felt good about the job itself, but after a short while he began to understand that, from a reconnaissance standpoint, it could hardly have been more perfect. Vishniak ambled across a large territory all day long, sizing up thousands of people, overhearing snatches of their conversations, learning where they worked and what they did. It was exactly the job he needed.
One day, after he'd been there for about a week and scanned tens of thousands of faces, he actually saw one he recognized: Aaron Green. Green was all by himself at one of the stand-up tables, eating raw fish - sushi, they called it - and reading a computer magazine. He was wearing a suit. On the floor, a briefcase stood up between his legs. Vishniak circled around him once or twice, watching his face, and confirmed an ID.
Vishniak got that adrenalized feeling again for the first time since he'd made his first approach to Pentagon Plaza. If Aaron Green looked up and recognized him, he was as good as dead. Fortunately he was wearing his sunglasses. And since he had begun working here he had taken the precaution of wrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist every morning to conceal the wristwatch Green had given him.
Vishniak watched Green through his sunglasses the same way that he watched babes down along the river on hot summer days: his head turned sideways to the target, his eyes swiveled in their sockets so the women didn't know they were being watched. Eventually Green finished eating his sushi, flipped through the last few pages of his computer magazine, and picked up his briefcase. He maneuvered through the crowded floor of the food court and climbed on the up escalator. Vishniak followed him, climbing on to the bottom of the escalator just as Green was getting off at the top.
Green went up a couple of floors and then began to walk through the mall, skirting the edge of the atrium. Vishniak followed him at a distance. Finally Green stopped at a pair of elevator doors set unobtrusively into the wall, between a leather store and an electronics place. He took a key out of his pocket and shoved it into a wall switch. The elevator doors opened and Green climbed on board and disappeared.
Vishniak gave the elevator doors a closer inspection, cursing himself for having been so dense. He had walked past these doors a hundred times and never really noticed them. He had assumed that they were a freight elevator or something else - not a secret entrance to Ogle Data Research.
This discovery did not help him much; you had to have a key to get on the elevator. But still, a lead was a lead. That day, Vishniak took an early lunch, went to a haircutting place in the mall, and spent his day's salary getting his long hair cut short and his beard shaved off. He couldn't risk being recognized by Aaron Green. With the new hair and the sunglasses he was unrecognizable.