He could park outside and walk in or - daring idea - he could actually drive on to the parking ramp. This latter idea, while it might seem impossibly audacious, held major advantages. It was worth checking out. He drove past the entrances to the parking ramp several times, going very slowly, his window rolled down, and observed people driving into the place. Everyone got in without hassle. They pulled up to a little machine, slammed a button, and pulled out a ticket. The gate rose up and they drove on in. No one inspected them. You didn't have to show any kind of ID.
It was worth a try. The worst thing that could happen was that he'd have to crash through the gate. He pulled into the chute. So much adrenaline was pumping through his system now that his teeth hurt and his gums felt hot and swollen.
He stopped by the little machine, and, trying to look nonchalant, like he did this every day, he reached out and punched the button. A cardboard ticket spat out of the machine. He jerked it out. The gate rose up.
Calmly, like he belonged here, Floyd Wayne Vishniak piloted his pickup truck into the bowels of Pentagon Plaza.
The parking ramp held no secrets. He found a space and backed into it. This unorthodox maneuver caused consternation and horn-honking among several other would-be parkers, but (a) they could all fuck themselves, (b) he had a gun, and (c) he needed to park this way so he could pull out rapidly when the time came.
The Fleischacker was hanging in his armpit. He had purchased several overly long thirty-round magazines for it. Loaded with teflon armor-piercing bullets, these were secreted in the long cargo pockets built into the thighs of his trousers. By reaching down and unsnapping the flaps on the tops of these pockets, he could whip out a new magazine in a fraction of a second. One magazine was already stuck into the handle of his Fleischacker, making the gun huge, unwieldy, and L-shaped. His QUAD CITIES WHIPLASH windbreaker hid the weapon adequately as long as he kept it zipped up most of the way, and kept his arm down to his side.
He locked up his truck (wouldn't do for his getaway vehicle to get ripped off while he was busying himself inside) and then followed a few other people toward the sky bridge and a set of glass doors that joined the parking ramp to the huge, squat building next to it.
The headquarters of Ogle Data Research was cleverly disguised as a fancy department store!
Vishniak forced himself to keep calm. He walked through the middle of a huge display of women's shoes, trying to act just as cool as all the other people, like he came through here all the time. He did this on the assumption that the department store was just a false-front operation like the ones of Mission: Impossible and that it would be all of about thirty feet deep. Once he passed through this shoe display he would begin to see the brain-wave monitors and satellite dishes. Then the Fleischacker would come out and Ogle's evil operation would come to an end. Vishniak would die, probably, and Cozzano would be released from electronic bondage.
But when he made it through the shoe display, he came to a section full of purses. Then more women's clothes. Perfume. Cosmetics. He went up an escalator (Keep walking! Don't stop and look!) and found a display of television sets, then a little gourmet restaurant. It went on and on and on.
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.