Read Online Interface by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George - Free Book Online Page B

undying enmity and noncooperation.
    The dumbwaiter was stopped in the storage room, doors open.
     
    Governor William A. Cozzano was sprawled out on the basement floor with his head and shoulders cradled in the lap of the janitor who was talking to him softly. Bell did not look up as the gurney approached. He said something to Cozzano, something about "medevac." He slipped one arm under Cozzano's shoulders and one under his knees and picked the two-hundred-fifty-pound Governor up as if he were a six-year-old.
    "Just leave him there," one of the EMTs said, but Bell stepped forward and gently laid Cozzano out full length on the gurney, ready for transport.
    The EMTs worked over Cozzano for a few minutes. Then they rolled him out into the corridor and back toward the civil defense tunnel. Marsha glanced up the stairs as they went by and saw the knees and feet of a nocturnal journalist heading for the first-floor men's room.
    The gubernatorial stretcher, with its motorcade - the EMTs, the secretary, the cop, and the janitor - moved quickly and silently through the basement, down the tunnel, and into the basement of the building that Marsha had glimpsed earlier. No one said any- thing except for Cozzano, who said, jovially. "Why is everyone so wallpapered?"
    The janitor in the other building was holding the freight elevator for them. They all rode it up to the ground floor, along a short hallway, and out through a roll-up steel door and into a parking lot where an ambulance was waiting. The cold air of the January night came through Marsha's blouse as if she were naked. She pirouetted slowly, looking around, trying to establish her bearings.
    The ambulance had backed into a three-sided nook that opened out on to an empty gravel parking lot covered with gray hard- packed snow. They were in back of a one-story building of rough-hewn limestone. This building had a notch taken out of its corner, and the back wall of that notch contained the roll-up door. The building was separated by a gap of just a few feet from a much larger seven- or eight-story building whose solid, windowless back wall formed the third side of the nook.
    The big building was the Illinois State Armory, which also housed the Illinois State Police. The small building from which they'd just exited was the Emergency Services and Disaster Agency, its roof studded with funny-looking antennas. Marsha, who'd been working in the capitol for twenty years, was astonished to realize these things: that the Governor of Illinois had a secret escape route, a vestige of the Cold War, a secret bolt-hole to escape from atomic attack and deliver himself into the protection of the Illinois National Guard.
    She wondered how many other secrets about the capitol and the office of the Governor, and about this Governor himself, she had never learned or even suspected. She wondered why she'd never been told about these things. And she wondered how Mel Meyer had known. For Marsha the acquisition of knowledge had always been an orderly process pursued in public schools, but Mel was different, Mel came by his knowledge in mysterious ways. He didn't even have a government job, he was just the Governor's lawyer and friend, he hardly ever came to Springfield, and still he c arried all the secret blueprints and phone numbers in his head.
    As the EMTs were pulling the doors of the ambulance closed on Cozzano, she saw Bell standing there, staring at Cozzano through t he rear windows.   As the driver shifted the transmission into forward gear, the ambulance's backup lights flashed once like heat lightning and illuminated Bell's face, burning the still image into M arsha's retinas. Bell's forehead was wrinkled in the middle, his ey ebrows angled upward in the center, his eyes were glistening and red. As the engine revved, he suddenly straightened up, clicked the h eels of his boots together, and snapped out a salute.
    Cozzano was staring back at Bell through the tiny windows in the back of the