Cozzano finally paused for a moment, to draw a breath and to shuffle his notes around. Finally, the silence broke, and a murmur began to sweep through the crowd.
People began to move. The in-crowd on the inaugural platform included a number of high-ranking military officers; several of them got to their feet and strode to the passageway leading back into the Capitol. As soon as they thought they were out of sight of the TV cameras, they broke into a run. A number of nonuniformed officials did the same thing.
Members of the Justice Posse now entered the front row of chairs and converged on four men: the secretaries-designate of Defense, State, Commerce, and Treasury. Each of the four men was strongly encouraged to rise to his feet and then hustled out. Their family members were not allowed to come along; some of them were too stunned to move, some burst into tears, and some tried to get physical. An initial tremor of panic propagated down the Mall.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak was watching Cozzano from the crowd below. Ogle's special invitation had gotten him through several layers of security. But he had not actually climbed up on to the inaugural platform itself. His invite supposedly would have gotten him through the final cordon. But he had watched a few of the bigwigs and seen that the final layer of security was especially stringent. He didn't want to take a chance on that, and it wasn't even necessary. From down below, he had a clear view of the entire platform.
He could have picked off any of the bigwigs sitting up there. Any of the people who were controlling Cozzano's mind. It would have been easy. But it would have been pointless. Vishniak had come to an astonishing realization as he had listened to Cozzano's speech: he was too late. Cozzano was lost.
Vishniak had personally demolished the computer control room where Ogle and the other media manipulators were controlling Cozzano's mind. He had set Cozzano free. But Cozzano had started his term as President by declaring martial law and threatening to execute people in the streets. Cozzano was staging a coup d'etat. He was turning America's great democratic system into a dictatorship. Right before Vishniak's eyes.
"My fellow Americans, I come to you at a moment of great peril," Cozzano said, trying to use the authority of his voice to quiet the rising anxiety - the ugly fights going on behind him, the murmuring that had grown into a low roar. "We have narrowly averted a disaster. I am speaking to you, now, as a free man, for the first time in a year. Exactly one year ago, as you may know, I was struck down by a stroke. I have been away for a while. Today, I am here to tell you that I am back!"
It was the first thing Cozzano had said, all day long, that sounded like what a triumphant new president should say. The crowd was enormously relieved. The shrill chattering and nervous buzzing was overwhelmed by a cheer that started in the throats of the Justice Posse and grew explosively until it rang up and down the length of the Mall.
And it did not die down; it grew into an ovation. Those listening to Cozzano had experienced more anxiety during the last couple of minutes than they had since the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Kennedy assassination. Now, Cozzano was telling them that everything was going to be fine. He told them this, not just with his words, but with the deep resonant tone of his voice and with his posture, his facial expression.
No one really knew what was going on. But hearing his words and watching his face, they came to know one thing beyond question: President Cozzano was doing what he had been elected to do. Finally, a leader was in the White House, and he was leading.
The people on the inaugural platform were the last ones to rise to their feet and join in the ovation.
Cozzano was about to resume his speech, but he realized that there was no way to talk over the voices of half a million people. He paused, smiled at the crowd, waited for a couple of moments. The cheering continued. He stepped back away from the lectern, now just a couple of paces in front of his daughter and Eleanor Richmond and her family, and raised both of his arms in the air as if he had just scored a touchdown.
The first bullet did just what it was supposed to do. Its teflon coating took it smoothly through the seven layers of bullet-proof-fabric making up President Cozzano's bulletproof vest. After that, momentum and plain old-fashioned lead did the rest. It passed into his thorax a couple of inches below the right nipple and exploded against a rib, spraying fragments of lead, bone, and teflon through Cozzano's chest cavity. Most of his right lung was turned into hash. Numerous holes were blown through the heart and a major vessel pierced in his left lung. Nothing emerged from the other side of Cozzano's body; the bullet, which was specifically designed to kill human beings wearing bulletproof vests, had been totally efficient in transferring all of its energy into Cozzano's flesh.
Vishniak saw a jet of steam and blood spurt from the entrance wound and knew that Cozzano was dead. He angled the weapon a couple of degrees to the right and took aim at Eleanor Richmond. But just as he was pulling the trigger, a bulky man in a black T-shirt jumped in front of her.
Darryl Garfield, an offensive linesman for the Skins, took the second bullet in his massive upper arm, which was nearly as big as Eleanor's waist. The bullet ricocheted off his humerus and ended up shattering a window in the Rayburn Building, a thousand feet due south, whence it was later recovered. As the bullet exited Garfield's arm it drove before it a shock wave of blood and pulverized muscle tissue that burst out of his body in a crudely hemispherical pattern, spraying Eleanor Richmond with blood.
Vishniak lowered his weapon a bit, surprised by Garfield's sudden intervention, and did not see the precipitous approach of Rufus Bell. Bell threw all of this momentum behind the heel of his right hand, which impacted on the bridge of Vishniak's nose and collapsed the bone structure of his entire face, driving a number of small bone fragments all the way into Vishniak's brain. Vishniak was a vegetable before he hit the ground. Ten minutes later he was dead.
Most of the people on the platform knew only that Darryl Garfield had been shot, because his wound had been so spectacular. In the ensuing confusion, Mary Catherine was the first person to notice that President Cozzano was sitting down behind the lectern, looking stunned and pale.
At first they thought he was just stunned by the near miss. But a look at his face proved otherwise. Pink foam had collected at the corners of his mouth. Mary Catherine, James Cozzano, and Mel all converged on Cozzano at the same moment and helped him to lie on his back. Within a few moments they were surrounded by the Posse.
A few moments after the shooting, Eleanor Richmond had vanished, completely surrounded by huge Posse members who practically encased her in bulletproof vests. The guests on the inaugural platform drained back into the Capitol as though a plug had been pulled and they were being sucked back into the building. Eleanor and her escort were swept along.
Mary Catherine ripped Cozzano's shirt open down the middle and discovered the entrance wound on his thorax. Her eyes met his.
"I'll be okay," Cozzano said.
"One of the guys has called for a chopper," Mel said. "Hang in there, buddy."
Cozzano didn't pay any attention to Mel. He was looking at James and Mary Catherine, kneeling next to him side by side.
"Listen, peanut," the President said. "James will stay with you. You stay with Eleanor."
"No!" Mary Catherine said.
"They have no choice but to kill Eleanor," Cozzano said. "They'll try to do it now. Natural causes. Go! By order of the President."
Tears burst over the rims of Mary Catherine's eyes and cascaded down her face. "I love you more than anything, peanut," Cozzano said.