Not far from the elevator doors was a bench where tired shoppers could rest their legs. During his off hours, Vishniak took to spending a lot of time on that bench, watching the elevator doors.
Most of the people who went in and out of the elevator were typical office workers, all nicely dressed. But very soon Vishniak began to notice a pattern: certain of these office workers would habitually come out of the elevators, always in pairs. One of them would stand by the elevator doors with a key. The other would go off into the mall. Within a few minutes, unfamiliar people would begin to gravitate toward the elevator doors - plain, old, off-the-street types. The person stationed by the elevator doors, would use the key to open the doors and dispatch them up to the eleventh floor. An hour or two later, these people would emerge again and then go their separate ways.
Vishniak was curious as to what was being done to these regular people during the hour or two that they spent up on the eleventh floor. Was it some kind of brain surgery? Were they all being turned into robots like Cozzano?
After a while he came to recognize the people who went into the mall to rope these people in, and he took to following them around to see what they were doing. They always carried clipboards; the clipboards always had lists on them, and as they persuaded different people to come up to the eleventh floor they would cross an item off the list. And they did not go up to people at random; they would go to particular stores, or busy intersections in the mall, and scan the faces of the shoppers, looking for particular types.
Vishniak overheard an interesting bit of conversation on one occasion, as he was trailing a young woman with a clipboard. She happened to run into another clipboard-toting woman who was out in the mall trolling for subjects.
"Marcie! Hi!"
"Oh, hi, Sherry. What are you looking for?"
"The usual - a mall concubine and a porch monkey. How about you?"
"I've got everything on my list except for a Post-Confederate Gravy Eater."
"Oh. You know what you should do? See that newsstand over there?"
Sherry gave some instructions to Marcie. Marcie thanked her and went to the newsstand, where she found a long-haired young man, wearing a T-shirt and a confederate flag on the back, leafing through a copy of Guns & Ammo. After a short conversation, this young man nodded, put the magazine back on the rack, and followed Marcie out of the store.
Pentagon Plaza was not the kind of mall where you could come by Confederate flags easily, but there were many such places in the less affluent stretches of northern Virginia, and that night Floyd Wayne Vishniak hit a few of them. He also stopped in at a newsstand and bought a few gun magazines - a subject that interested him anyway. The next day, after finishing his shift wiping tables, he went to the men's room, locked himself into a stall, and took off his apron and his hat. He pulled on a Confederate T-shirt. Over that he put on his shoulder holster. He was wearing his cargo pants with the ammo clips in them. Finally he pulled on a bright red windbreaker with the Confederate flag on the back and zipped it up just enough to hide the gun. Then he went upstairs and sat on the bench near the elevators and settled in comfortably to read his gun magazines. He was going to have to come up with a new name - Lee Jackson or something.
In the end, he read those magazines pretty thoroughly, and got to know everything a man could know about the latest in weapons technology, because he ended up spending three solid eight-hour shifts on that bench before he was finally noticed.
"Excuse me, sir?" a young woman said.
Vishniak looked up. It was Marcie. She had her clipboard.
"I work for an opinion research company called Ogle Data Research," she continued, "and I was wondering if you'd mind if I asked you a few questions? Are you in the twenty-six to thirty-five age group?"
"Yes, I am," he said.
"Are you from the South, and do you consider yourself to be a Southerner?"
"Proud of it too," he said.
"And would you consider yourself unemployed or underemployed?"
"Absolutely."
"Well, how would you like to make fifty dollars? It'll take about an hour?"
"Fifty bucks in an hour?" Vishniak said. "Well, yee-ha! This is my lucky day."
50
This was where he'd have to be careful. He still had no idea what the Ogle Data Research people were actually doing to their test subjects up there on the eleventh floor. If it was some kind of brain surgery, then Vishniak would have to open fire before they could get him under anaesthesia. Otherwise he would become one of the living dead, a robot slave like Cozzano.
To outward appearances, everything seemed real nice. They had a big lobby by the elevators. It was all decorated. A nice young woman, whom Vishniak recognized from his reconnaissance, greeted him and led him around past the big curving desk where the receptionist sat with her space-age headset. Two security guards stood by, shifting their weight from one tired foot to the other; one of them was about ninety years old and the other one was overweight. Vishniak considered picking them off right here and now but decided against it; as long as they kept leading him deeper into the bowels of ODR, there was no reason to get feisty.
The girl offered him coffee but he refused; maybe that was how they knocked people out. She ushered him into a room with half a dozen chairs, all facing a big fancy TV set. Made in Japan, naturally. Three other people were already sitting there, and Vishniak recognized them as the sort of typical mall-cruising Americans that the ODR agents were always trying to recruit. A couple of them were drinking coffee but seemed to be suffering no ill effects so far.
Vishniak took a seat and waited for the usher gal to leave the room. Then he stood up, ambled over to the door, and stuck his head out into the hallway, trying to get a sense of the layout. They were not far from the receptionist's station. In the other direction, the hallway led past a line of offices. All the offices had big picture windows to let in the light, and so Vishniak could tell from a distance which doors were open and which were closed. Glancing back the other way he saw that the fat security guard was eyeballing him. He withdrew into the room and went over to the windows.
They had an incredible view. A fellow could probably make money, Vishniak reflected, by renting out an office in this building and charging mall shoppers a quarter to ride the elevators up and look out the windows. They were so close to the Pentagon that you could probably hawk a loogie into its central courtyard. Off to the left of the Pentagon was a huge cemetery with millions of white gravestones. This juxtaposition made good horse sense in that the Pentagon had to do with killing people. Beyond these landmarks was a river, and on the far shore of that river, Vishniak looked right into the heart of Washington. He didn't recognize it at first because, compared to Chicago, it was sparse and low-slung, like a farm or a park.
A long, narrow strip of grass ran off into the distance and it was lined with white buildings. In the middle of it was a tall spiky thing. At the far end of it was a dome that Vishniak recognized as being the Capitol. Beyond that, he could not really tell one building from another: there were a million of them, they were all white, they had lots of columns and the occasional squat dome. The only other one that looked familiar was located on the far side of the strip of grass, off the main drag: he thought it was the White House.