He started immediately. They issued him an apron and a hat. The training period lasted for about ten seconds and then he was working. The food court at Pentagon Plaza was on the ground floor, filling up a big open space in the floor plan that, in higher stories, was occupied by a hole with a railing around it: a huge atrium that looked down on the sea of tables and chairs shared by all of the fast-food places lining the food court. The atrium and the court were vaulted by a huge glass ceiling that let in so much light that Vishniak often wore sunglasses.
At first he was humiliated to take the job. He was the only English-speaking person doing it. He never felt good about the job itself, but after a short while he began to understand that, from a reconnaissance standpoint, it could hardly have been more perfect. Vishniak ambled across a large territory all day long, sizing up thousands of people, overhearing snatches of their conversations, learning where they worked and what they did. It was exactly the job he needed.
One day, after he'd been there for about a week and scanned tens of thousands of faces, he actually saw one he recognized: Aaron Green. Green was all by himself at one of the stand-up tables, eating raw fish - sushi, they called it - and reading a computer magazine. He was wearing a suit. On the floor, a briefcase stood up between his legs. Vishniak circled around him once or twice, watching his face, and confirmed an ID.
Vishniak got that adrenalized feeling again for the first time since he'd made his first approach to Pentagon Plaza. If Aaron Green looked up and recognized him, he was as good as dead. Fortunately he was wearing his sunglasses. And since he had begun working here he had taken the precaution of wrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist every morning to conceal the wristwatch Green had given him.
Vishniak watched Green through his sunglasses the same way that he watched babes down along the river on hot summer days: his head turned sideways to the target, his eyes swiveled in their sockets so the women didn't know they were being watched. Eventually Green finished eating his sushi, flipped through the last few pages of his computer magazine, and picked up his briefcase. He maneuvered through the crowded floor of the food court and climbed on the up escalator. Vishniak followed him, climbing on to the bottom of the escalator just as Green was getting off at the top.
Green went up a couple of floors and then began to walk through the mall, skirting the edge of the atrium. Vishniak followed him at a distance. Finally Green stopped at a pair of elevator doors set unobtrusively into the wall, between a leather store and an electronics place. He took a key out of his pocket and shoved it into a wall switch. The elevator doors opened and Green climbed on board and disappeared.
Vishniak gave the elevator doors a closer inspection, cursing himself for having been so dense. He had walked past these doors a hundred times and never really noticed them. He had assumed that they were a freight elevator or something else - not a secret entrance to Ogle Data Research.
This discovery did not help him much; you had to have a key to get on the elevator. But still, a lead was a lead. That day, Vishniak took an early lunch, went to a haircutting place in the mall, and spent his day's salary getting his long hair cut short and his beard shaved off. He couldn't risk being recognized by Aaron Green. With the new hair and the sunglasses he was unrecognizable.
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."