25

Aaron Green put his feet up on his desk at Green Biophysical Systems in Lexington, Massachusetts, enjoying the first lull in the action since his big conversation with Cy Ogle back in January. They had ironed out all of the problems that they could think of having to do with the PIPER miniaturization project. Responsibility had been transferred to the shoulders of the Pacific Netware people. Aaron had brought in a New York Times and a Boston Globe, and was reading some astonishing results from the Illinois primary, which had taken place the day before.

Several members of the party in power had challenged the incumbent President. Usually such efforts were purely symbolic, but the President's policy on the national debt had provided fodder for a more serious challenge this time around, and these candidates had racked up some surprisingly high numbers.

The situation in the other party was even more interesting. There were two announced candidates - three, if you counted the Reverend William Joseph Sweigel, which almost no one did. Everyone knew, and had known since Super Tuesday, that the real race was between Tip McLane and Norman Fowler, Jr., the boy billionaire of Grosse Pointe.

But apparently in the last week before the Illinois primary, unspecified persons had initiated a write-in campaign for William A. Cozzano, the Governor of Illinois, who was in the hospital recovering from a stroke. It seemed to be a genuine, spontaneous ground swell. People had begun showing up in T-shirt stores and asking to have Cozzano printed on shirts and hats. Crudely fashioned, xeroxed Cozzano posters had begun showing up on mailboxes and in car windows.

In yesterday's primary, a lot of people had written in the Governor's name. A lot of people. So many that the counting of the ballots had been delayed. But the results available as of the middle of the night before, when the newspapers had gone to press, suggested that Cozzano had actually won a number of precincts, made a strong showing overall, and might actually come in second to Normal Fowler, Jr. He had been so strong, in fact, that he had actually gotten several thousand write-in votes in the other party's primary.

When Aaron saw the preliminary numbers printed in the paper, he turned on the TV in his office to see if he could get some up-to-date numbers. He never used to pay attention to this stuff, but since he had started hanging out with Ogle he had become very election conscious.

The news networks were full of Cozzano. Cozzano in Vietnam. Cozzano being carried around on the shoulders of fellow Bears. Cozzano raking leaves in front of his big house in some backwater town in Illinois. Cozzano waving from the window of his hospital room in Champaign. And the name Cozzano, crudely printed on T-shirts and homemade yard signs.

He was startled to realize that someone was standing in his office doorway. It was Marina, the office manager, word processing and desktop publishing genius, fixer, diplomat, you name it. She looked a little dreamy. If this had been a Warner Brothers cartoon, she would have had stars and birds circling around her head.

"I just got the weirdest phone call," she said.

"Tell me about it," Aaron said.

"This guy called up. A guy with a southern accent. I think it's that guy you've been dealing with out in California."

"Cy Ogle."

"Yeah."

"Well, what did Mr. Ogle have to say?"

"That I was fired."

"He said what?"

"That I was fired. That the corporation was undergoing a restructuring and that I could apply for reemployment later."

Aaron was more nonplussed than he was angry. It had to be Ogle's weird sense of humor at work. "Well, who the hell is Ogle to be saying stuff like that?"

"Exactly what I asked him. He said he was the chairman of the board of directors."

"I'm the chairman," Aaron said.

"I know that."

Another person appeared in the hallway, standing behind Marina. It was Greg. College buddy of Aaron's. Cofounder of the corporation. Chief biologist. "I have just been informed that I'm fired too," he said. "But maybe it's not so bad since our stock is selling for twice its normal value today. So I'm worth twice as much."

"Good," Marina said, "so am I." Marina had lots to stock too.

"Selling?" Aaron said. "None of our stock has changed hands in months."

"Get with it," Greg said. "Fifty-five percent of it changed hands at 9:05 this morning."

"What you're saying is that our venture capitalists sold us to someone else."

"That's what it amounts to."

"And Cy Ogle claims to be that someone," Marina said.

The telephone on Aaron's desk began to purr. Aaron picked it up, indicating with a hand gesture that it was, okay for Greg and Marina to stay in the room.

"You're probably pissed because I just fired half of our company," Ogle said. "Which is understandable. It's hard to run a tight ship based on emotion and personal loyalty. Damn hard."

"Who's next? Me?"

"Nope. You're staying on, along with your two electronics guys. We can use them. Everyone else has served their purpose."

"How am I supposed to run an office without Marina?"

"You don't have to worry about running an office anymore. We have plenty of room down here in Falls Church."

"But I don't live in Falls Church, Virginia. I live in Arlington, Massachusetts."

"Then you better get used to a hell of a long commute," Ogle said, "because a moving truck is showing up at your office door in five minutes to pick up all your equipment and drive it down here."

"Now, wait just a second," Aaron finally said. He had been fighting the impulse to get pissed off ever since this weirdness started. "This is just totally unacceptable. You can't just uproot our lives like this. Hell, I don't even know for sure that you're the real chairman!"

"I am," Ogle said, "but there's no point in your getting pissed off at me."

"There certainly is," Aaron said, "if you're the chairman."

"I'm the chairman of Green Biophysical Systems as of 9:05 a.m.," Ogle said, "but as of 9:03 a.m. I was no longer the chairman of Ogle Data Research."

"Huh?"

"I got bought out too."

"By whom?"

"A whole bunch of folks. MacIntyre Engineering. The Coover Fund. Gale Aerospace. Pacific Netware. They own me now. And the first thing they did was tell me to buy you. So I did. And then they told me to initiate a radical downsizing program. So I did. And part of that is closing the Lexington office and moving it down here to Falls Church."

"And all of these events took place during the first five minutes of the business day."

"Yup."

"Gee," Aaron said, "a guy could almost get the impression that the groundwork for this whole thing had been laid well in advance."

"Draw your own conclusions. Throw a tantrum. Call me names. Just don't be late for the meeting."

Aaron rolled his eyes. "What meeting would that be?"

"Emergency board meeting for Ogle Data Research, which you're invited to sit in on, to be followed immediately by an emergency board meeting for Green Biophysics."

"When and where?"

"Right here at Seven Corners, at two o'clock this afternoon. That should give you time to grab a pair of shuttle flights. Oh, and Aaron?"

"Yes?"

"We bought you out at twice your book value."

"So I heard."

"We'll double that figure again if any of your existing stockholders want to sell out. But they have to do it today."

"I'll pass that along."

"See you at two o'clock."

Aaron hung up his phone. Cy Ogle's phone. MacIncyre's, Gale's, Coover's, and Tice's phone.

"The bad news is, we just got hit by the financial equivalent of Desert Storm," he said, "and we lost. The good news is that we all just quadrupled our net worth."

Marine laughed, verging on hysteria.

"Not bad for an hour's work," Greg said, looking at his watch. It was ten o'clock.

A big, handsome head shot of Governor William A. Cozzano flashed up on the television screen. Roaring white noise came out of the speaker, the sound of a wildly cheering multitude.

Aaron sold his stock. There was no point in hanging on to the stuff when he knew that it would drop to one-quarter of its current value by the end of the day. He took a taxi to Logan, hopped the shuttle to LaGuardia, walked across the concourse and hopped another shuttle to National Airport in Washington.

As the shuttle twisted and veered down the lower Potomac, Aaron looked out the window and saw the Washington Monument, the Mall, which seemed prematurely green to a person used to New England winters, and the dome of the Capitol. He realized, somewhat to his own astonishment, that this was the first time he had been to Washington, D.C., since his high-school band trip fifteen years before.

It was thirty degrees warmer here, humid, green, with flowers coming out all over the place. Spring, which hadn't even started in Boston, was a memory here. It gave him a feeling of being out of it, of being way behind the times. He got on a little bus that inched its way through the airport's pathetically constricted traffic pattern and finally let him off at Avis. There, he climbed into a brand-new navy-blue Taurus. It was about a hundred and twenty degrees inside the car, and the controls for the air conditioner were already set to MAX.

D.C. was going to take getting used to. His car in Boston didn't even have air-conditioning. He was going to have to buy a new goddamn car.

He went right out and got badly lost. That was okay, he had plenty of time, and he felt like driving around lost for a while. Eventually he pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a big oversized street map atlas for northern Virginia and figured out where Falls Church was: just a few miles due west of D.C. Right in the middle of that was a place called Seven Corners, where a whole lot of roads came together. It was difficult to miss. From its folksy name, Aaron was expecting it to be sort of a quaint, woodsy crossroads.

It wasn't. It was a place where seven different franchise ghettos intersected and piled their congestion on top of each other, a universe of asphalt parking lots stewing in the Virginia sun. And most of it was a couple of decades old, and showing its age. It had been superseded by newer and nicer competitors farther away from the center of the metropolis.

And because Aaron Green had come to know and appreciate the style of Cyrus Rutherford Ogle, he knew where to look. He eventually found his way into the vast, mostly empty parking lot of a big old shopping center at the heart of Seven Corners. It was a ghost mall. The anchor store, the behemoth at the dead center of the mall, was a windowless monolith, sheathed in a sort of white-gravel substance that had probably been sparkling and clean back in the fifties but which had now gone dully gray and become stained with long vertical streaks of rust. A constellation of rusty, decapitated bolts projected from the wall way up high, and

Aaron could see that it had once been a major department store. But now the sign was torn down and the row of plate-glass display windows and double doors that stretched along the entire front of the building at sidewalk level had been replaced by particle board, painted black. Aaron walked into the place without hesitation.

It was just like the Cadillac dealership, except bigger. And, at the moment, it was somewhat noisier and more crowded than Ogle's operations tended to be when he was between campaigns. More colorful, too. A lot of people were working here right now, mostly young people, most female, mostly black. Most of them were wearing bright new T-shirts. And all of the T-shirts had the word Cozzano printed on them. They were operating T-shirt printing machines. Printing up more of them.

But they weren't fancy. The insignia going on to those shirts (and hats and sweatshirts and windbreakers) was not a nifty logo, like a national campaign would use. Everything was being done in simple block letters, with no graphics. It was exactly what you would get if you went into a seedy discount T-shirt printing place at a carnival midway and asked them to print the word Cozzano on to a T-shirt.

The same could be said of the crude 8 1/2 -by-ll campaign posters floating out of the xerox machines, and of the campaign signs, being stapled together from fence pickets and refrigerator boxes and hand-lettered by more women in cheap Cozzano T-shirts.

One corner was given over to folding tables with many telephones on them. Young people sat behind the tables talking on the phones. There were also a dozen desks with older people, suit-wearing people, sitting behind them, and these people were talking on the phones too. On the wall behind all of this was a large map of the fifty states, nearly obscured with little colored pins, streamers, flags, and yellow notes.

"That right there," said the familiar voice of Cy Ogle, "is the spontaneous ground-swell department."

Aaron ignored him. Ogle walked around until he was standing in Aaron's peripheral vision. He had pulled a bright yellow Cozzano T-shirt over his dress shirt and donned a Cozzano skimmer.

"See, the problem with spontaneous ground swells is they are so damn disorganized," Ogle said. "And that don't cut it, because the ballot rules in the various states are just unbelievably complicated. For example, in New York-"

"Spare me," Aaron said. "Spare me."

"Anyway, welcome to the metacampaign," Ogle said.

"Okay, I'll bite. What is the metacampaign?"

"Y'know how, after the New Hampshire primaries, the com­mentators always concentrate on the runner-up? They never seem to give a shit about who actually won the damn thing. All they want to talk about is who came in second. Who's got momentum. Big Mo. That's the metacampaign. The struggle for the hearts and minds of the media, and of big contributors."

When Aaron first came into the Pentagon Towers offices of Ogle Data Research, carrying half a dozen PIPER prototypes in a box, he knew that Ogle must be serious about something, because he had never known his new boss to own, rent, or come anywhere near real estate that was so civilized.

This particular nice new office building was rooted in a big shopping mall called Pentagon Plaza. It was one of the nicest malls in the D.C. metro area, which was saying something. It was a self-contained metropolis; in addition to the mall it had a parking ramp, movie theaters, a Westin, a Metro station, and office space. From the suite that Ogle had rented, on the eleventh floor, you could look out over the vast geometry of the Pentagon itself, across the Potomac, and into Washington. Or, if you looked in the other direction, you could stare straight down through the spectacular glass roof of the mall, down through its atrium, and into the food court, half-full of tired shoppers, half-full of lunching brass from the Pentagon.

The office had been professionally decorated by someone with a serious thing about sleek. It was sleek from top to bottom and end to end, the kind of place where any man who didn't have his hair slicked back felt like some kind of a shit-kicking redneck. A sleek receptionist sat at the polished-granite cyclorama of the front desk, ensconced beneath the ODR logo, answering phone calls and routing nearly all of them to the shabby department store in Falls Church or the shabby Cadillac dealership in Oakland. Behind her was all windows, chrome and glass - beautiful offices that no one ever used except, apparently, when they had some kind of an important meeting with someone fatuous enough to be impressed by this kind of thing. Which probably included 99 percent of all politicians.

But Ogle hadn't chosen this building because it was new, sleek, or convenient. As he told Aaron repeatedly, he liked it for one reason and one reason only: you got into the place by walking through a mall. The point was all in the symbolism of the thing. Rooted in a goddamn shopping mall. The ultimate symbol of the American middle class. The very people that Ogle made his money and staked his reputation on.

It was also practical at times like this, when Ogle wanted to do what was known as focus group interviews. The idea behind an FGI was that you got a few people together who represented a cross section of America and you interviewed them, maybe showed them a few proposed campaign commercials, and got their reactions.

Finding a cross section of America was pretty easy at Pentagon Plaza. Take the elevator down to the mall level, wait for the doors to open, fling out a lasso, and you could reel in a complete focus group before they even knew what was happening.

People who assembled focus groups for Ogle were very good at wandering through the mall and sizing people up. By watching a person's clothing, hair, jewelry, the way they walked, the things they looked at, the stores they were fascinated by and the stores they ignored, the kind of food they selected at the food court and how they ate it, these observers could peg a person's income bracket to within about ten thousand bucks and make some pretty accurate guesses about what part of the country they were from, whether they came from a big city or a small town, and even what sorts of political views they were likely to hold.

These Ogle employees were officially called Focus Group analysts, but in the corporate parlance they were simply referred to as ropers. The ropers had a parlance all their own, a system of classifying the American population. It was a vast field of expertise and Aaron didn't have more than a foggy idea of how it worked. He didn't need to. They assembled the focus groups. Aaron ran the equipment.

They attached half a dozen PIPER prototypes to the backs of chairs. Each one had a cuff dangling from it. The chairs were arranged in a cozy semicircle in a nice little carpeted room in a nice, proper office in the Pentagon Towers offices.

When they had gotten their little room all hooked up with the prototypes and some video stuff, Shane Schram, the burly, rumpled, prematurely bald, tough-guy psychologist, materialized from some other part of the country and sent a couple of ropers down into the mall. Within a few minutes, sample Americans began to drift out of the elevators.

Schram met them right there in the elevator lobby with a hearty hello and a thank-you for having agreed to participate. The receptionist showed them into the interview room, where they filled out little information cards, drank coffee, and ate doughnuts. Pretty soon, they had a full complement of half a dozen. Schram came into the room, shut the door, thanked them all one more time, and launched into his spiel.

Each of the six subjects was being paid a hundred dollars for this. Ogle was spending a total of six hundred bucks to test a system that cost millions. It was a heck of a deal.