The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  Despite the fact that each individual moment of September seemed to last forever, the month as a whole flew by. Starting on Labor Day, Dr. Jerry Tompkins, as a way of garnering some free publicity, had begun to release weekly polling results to the newspaper, and they showed that Clyde’s popularity had surged to within a few points of Sheriff Mullowney’s in the weeks following Desiree’s move to Fort Riley. This was small comfort to Clyde, who no longer cared about the election. It did help give him the energy to keep campaigning for another week or two, until more poll results came out showing that his standings had dropped to a bit short of where they had been to begin with. Man-in-the-street interviews on the front page of the Times-Dispatch suggested that, in the view of the electorate, Clyde ought to be concentrating on taking care of his baby and not out campaigning, or for that matter trying to run the sheriff’s department.

  I see butts in my sleep: white butts, black butts, hairy butts, smooth butts, pimply butts. Some of the owners of these butts squawk and fuss, but generally they take it pretty well. Some of these people were even more surprised than I was when they were called up. They believed (like me) that the call-up would never happen. Some of them are claiming hardship, which makes me PO’d because some have fewer hardships than we do. All the motels and campgrounds are full of wives and kids. If you bring Punkin down again, we will have a harder time sneaking you into the BOQ. Maybe we could rendezvous in Kansas City.

  Do you remember the Post Gas Chamber?

  Clyde remembered it. It was a low concrete-block structure standing off to itself near the entrance to the post, identified as such by a stark general-issue Army sign. When Desiree had picked him and Maggie up at the airport, she had slowed down and pointed it out to him, and they’d laughed at the very Army-ness of it.

  Well, it’s been busy, if you can believe it. They march the men in there, give them gas masks, expose them to tear gas, and then make them practice getting the masks on under “combat” conditions. Hopefully they won’t make us medical weenies do it. But they say Saddam has a lot of NBC capabilities, and so we are going to get a lot of training in MOPP gear and chemical mass casualties and all the rest. Talked to a doc who says they are hitting the books and learning all about good old anthrax. I wonder why. Anyway, I told him I grew up on a farm and am immune to it.

  That was just like Desiree: turning it into a joke. Clyde put his hands over his face when he read that and wondered whether anyone else in the Medical Corps was laughing.

  The doorbell rang just then, and Clyde got up and ran to answer it, fearing that a second ring might wake Maggie from her nap.

  “How do people die in Forks County?”

  Dr. Kevin Vandeventer was asking the question. He had shown up unexpected, much as Clyde had materialized on Kevin’s doorstep a few weeks earlier. But Vandeventer wasn’t running for anything and so had no clear excuse. He looked about ten years older than he had during their last conversation.

  “Beg pardon?” Clyde said through his screen door. Vandeventer hadn’t got around to saying hello-how-are-you yet. Clyde could see that Vandeventer was all worked up and did not really want this man bringing his troubles into the Banks home, which was troubled enough. Maggie was inside napping, so Clyde stepped outside and joined Vandeventer on the front porch. It was about ninety-five degrees out there. Clyde immediately began to sweat freely—something that Vandeventer had evidently been doing for hours.

  “How do people die around here?”

  “What are you getting at? Would you like some iced tea?”

  Vandeventer didn’t seem to hear the offer. “In D.C. it happens several times a year that some black kids will come over to the west side of town, mug a white guy in a suit, and end up shooting him to death in the bargain.”

  “Dang,” Clyde said.

  “So when that happens, of course everyone’s shocked and outraged and all that—but the important thing, Clyde, is that no one is surprised. That kind of thing doesn’t make anyone suspicious.” He leaned forward into Clyde’s face as he delivered this punch line, then bounced back away from him with a triumphant look on his face.

  “Sounds pretty suspicious to me.”

  “But what I’m saying is, if you wanted to assassinate someone, and you set it up to look like just another one of those crimes, no one—not even the D.C. police—would have any reason to suspect it was anything different.”

  “Okay,” Clyde said, after cogitating for a while. “So the reason you came round this afternoon is to ask me if you wanted to assassinate someone in Forks County without making the cops suspicious, what kind of crime would you set it up as?”

  “Precisely.”

  Clyde sucked his teeth and squinted off into the distance, getting his brain in gear. But Vandeventer interrupted him. “Just let me say that if anything of the kind happens to me, Clyde, look a little deeper. I know that when Marwan Habibi died, you were the only cop in Forks County who bothered to look a little deeper. And I have confidence in you.”

  “Are you saying someone’s trying to assassinate you?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Clyde looked searchingly at Vandeventer, then decided to let this pass for the time being. “Well,” he finally said, “usually when I see a stiff in my line of work, it’s a stiff in a smashed-up car.” He was about to launch into a canned peroration about Sheriff Mullowney’s abysmal record when it came to catching drunk drivers, but Vandeventer didn’t seem to be in the mood for it, and, besides, it appeared that Clyde had already earned his vote. “Also,” he offered, “a lot of people get drowned in the rivers, especially in that Rotary at the dam where Habibi spent a couple of weeks caught in the spin cycle. Then there’s hunting accidents, but this isn’t the time of year for that.”

  “Well, Clyde, just for the record, I don’t plan to go swimming or hunting.”

  Clyde’s cop instincts were finally coming into play. “Who do you think is going to assassinate you?”

  “The Iraqis,” Kevin said.

  From time to time Clyde got the job of driving a prisoner down to the state mental-health facility in Iowa City for testing, observation, treatment, and, sometimes, an open-ended stay. Consequently, Dr. Kevin Vandeventer was not the first Forks County resident—not even the first Ph.D.—who had insisted to Clyde that he was the target of secret, carefully disguised assassination attempts by foreign governments.

  He had learned a few rules of thumb for identifying certain broad categories of mental illness and now began to apply his rudimentary knowledge to Kevin Vandeventer. He seemed sincere, rational, and convincing. But these guys always did—especially the ones with Ph.D.’s.

  “I hadn’t known until now,” Clyde said carefully, “that Baghdad was running those kinds of operations inside our borders.”

  Vandeventer laughed, much too loudly. “You and me both, Clyde, we’re both babes in the woods. Shit. The university is one big nest of foreign spooks.”

  “I know it is,” Clyde said. In part he was just trying to placate Vandeventer so that he would go away and leave the Bankses alone. The absence of Desiree was a howling void in their household and their lives—a sucking chest wound. Clyde felt like a soldier on a battlefield who has been shot in the abdomen and is using both hands just to keep his insides from falling out on the ground. All he wanted was for Desiree to be back in this house. And so when people came to the house who were not Desiree, it just emphasized her absence and aggravated the pain. He frankly could not care less about Kevin Vandeventer and his impending assassination.

  But Clyde wasn’t precisely lying. In the months since he had recovered the fatal rowboat from the rushes of Lake Pla-Mor, in the course of following the Marwan Habibi murder case, and of getting to know Fazoul and his family, he had come to realize that Eastern Iowa University was, as Kevin averred, a snake pit of foreign intrigue.

  And he could hardly care less. He had overwhelming problems of his own.

  “If you see anything goo
fy, call the cops,” Clyde said. “If you have evidence that foreigners are involved, call Marcus Berry down at the FBI.”

  Kevin nodded eagerly, as if this were all incredibly new advice to him. He kept staring expectantly at Clyde, his eyes glittering.

  Clyde heaved a big sigh. Through the screen door he could hear Maggie shifting around in her crib, beginning to fuss. “If that doesn’t work, give ol’ Clyde a call,” he said, wishing that he could kick himself in the ass even as he was saying it.

  Kevin nodded and took half a step back. But he was still waiting for something.

  Clyde said, “If you turn up dead or mangled, I will attempt to look beyond the obvious.”

  “Thank you, Clyde,” Kevin Vandeventer said. Like every other paranoid schizophrenic Clyde had ever humored in this fashion, he then said, “Watch your back!” And he turned his back on Clyde and walked down the front steps of the Banks home in the cautious, measured gait of a man who was convinced he had a bull’s-eye painted between his shoulder blades. Or maybe he just didn’t want to work up a sweat.

  thirty-one

  LARKIN SCHOENDIENST had told Betsy that in D.C. there were two ways to murder policy without appearing to have committed a crime. One was cobwebbing, in which a person with an idea—usually a young and bright person with a good, new idea—would fall victim to the surrounding bureaucrats, who would exclaim, “Why, that’s a good idea!” and throw out a web of reporting requirements, consulting requirements, or new budgeting procedures. Soon the person and his idea would be totally immobilized by a shimmering silken cocoon, to be put away and devoured another day.

  The second method was the interagency task force.

  “You have to remember, Betsy,” Schoendienst would say, “that D.C. is not about solving problems. If we solved problems, there would be nothing else left to do and we would all have to go out and do something honest—like fry hamburgers. No, D.C. is about keeping jobs, which we do by managing problems. There is no higher achievement than making a problem your own, managing that problem, nurturing that problem along until you’ve made it to retirement and hopefully mentored a whole new generation of young bureaucrats to whom you can bequeath the problem. The purpose of the interagency task force is to bring the resources of several agencies and many bureaucrats to bear on a promising new problem that needs special care and nurturing.”

  By that time Betsy had grown used to the cynicism of this alcoholic old man, but his words came back to her forcefully during the first meeting of the group in the big antenna-covered barn at Kennebunkport. It soon became evident that this was a dog and pony show for Millikan—a chance for him to demonstrate his superior clout, especially to Hennessey. It also became painfully evident that there was absolutely no reason for them to be there—they were just having their chains yanked.

  Some new satellite photos were displayed, which would have meant nothing to Betsy in and of themselves. But the DIA representative led them patiently through an elaborate chain of analysis and deduction to demonstrate the true import of these photographs: namely, that the Iraqis had adapted their South African G-5 missiles to carry chemical and bacteriological payloads. This was not unexpected; no one had shown a greater willingness to use such weapons in the past than Saddam. However, two weeks after the invasion the thought that Americans might be the target—not Kurds or Vakhan Turks—lent a special and ominous urgency to the information.

  After that they flew back to D.C., and each went his or her separate way in his or her separate bureaucracy. Betsy went back to her job, and, she assumed, so did the other members of the task force. The only difference was that they had to meet once a week, on the tenth floor of the New Executive Office Building, to discuss their progress, in a living reenactment of the old Indian tale of the blind men and the elephant. All of the members had been terribly busy even before they’d been named to the task force, and the weekly two-hour meeting was a huge bite out of their time budgets. Since everybody could simply read everybody else’s stuff, Betsy didn’t understand, at first, why they had to go through the formal oral presentations every Monday.

  Each member of the task force had his or her weekly presentation ready and weekly paper turned in on time, with the exception of Hennessey, who played mum. The first time this happened, Betsy assumed that it was an oversight. The second time she realized it was a pattern, and all her good-girl instincts were appalled. What would the taxpayers say? When Hennessey showed up for the third meeting with nothing to say and nothing to hand out, a subtle change came over the task force. Simply by not having said anything, Hennessey had taken on a certain air of authority. Millikan, of course, did not preside over the meetings—his assistant, Dellinger, did. Since Dellinger’s only role seemed to be to remind the group over and over that anything of substance had to go through Millikan, the members of the task force rapidly stopped paying attention to him. An unspoken competition arose. When people took their seats around the table, they turned toward Hennessey. When they gave their presentations, they faced Hennessey. When one of them handed out a newly minted classified document, the author would watch Hennessey’s face as he scanned through the pages; and if Hennessey didn’t bother even to leaf through it, the author would be humiliated and defensive for the rest of the meeting. In this way, simply by doing nothing—by withholding information—Hennessey took on a certain gravity that made him into the éminence grise, the undisputed defacto leader of Millikan’s task force.

  The NSF guys believed that the Iraqis had been carrying out some advanced research in DNA technology, to develop a means to alter their forces’ genetic codes in such a way so that when they attacked with their chemical/biological agents (the distinction between chemical and biological was blurry in this case) only those with the genetic protection would survive. This had the advantage that changes in wind would not alter the weapons’ usefulness, and conquered territory could be occupied without delay. They had some substantial evidence that the Iraqis had tried to work with such techniques in experiments with animals, and Betsy was able to bolster that theory with the information she had developed about the distribution of Iraqi student visas to schools with advanced veterinary-medicine programs.

  The Army knew gas. Had worked with gas since World War I. Was afraid of germs. Knew little about them. The military guys came in with their flip charts and meteorological charts to explain how and why the Iraqis would use gas. They were not stupid. As the group that had to actually put the rubber to the road, they had to deal with the situation with the tools they had at hand.

  The people at NSA always prided themselves on knowing things—which they did. But they weren’t good at organizing their knowledge into a decent presentation. They were like people who owned a large furniture store but had no idea about how to arrange things. They had incredible infrared satellite imagery, they could spot small buildings that might be rather large biological warfare sites, they had phone intercepts, they had every Iraqi checking account under surveillance. But they had no overall notion of what Saddam was up to in this area.

  A couple of treasury types sat in and had interesting ideas on the flow of cash to and from Iraq, as well as a complete guide to the financial structure of the European chemical industry as it had evolved since the days of I. G. Farben. But nothing came together.

  The State observer updated the group on his department’s current policy: a psychological attack on all fronts to convince people of the Hitlerian tendencies of Saddam, the beginnings of the drive through Mubarak to isolate Saddam within the Arab community, the freezing of all Iraqi assets, and the use of the UN as a rallying point for the coming counterattack. Domestically, the spin doctors were trying to figure out the best way to justify the sending of American people out to a vast and foreboding desert to face unknown threats.

  Spector and Betsy represented the Agency, and they split the work. Spector reviewed everything the Agency had done on the subject, from all aspects of the vast resources available to Langley, with no firm
conclusion except that Saddam was probably up to something. Betsy pulled together all her records since 1989, and all the little think pieces she had written to herself, together with what she had learned, and what she suspected, about what was going on in the domain of Professor Larsen—and all the other Larsens at the other universities.

  The night that Kevin and Margaret were attacked in Adams-Morgan was the one, ghastly interruption in the cobwebbed life that Betsy led in the weeks following her trip to Kennebunkport. On that Friday night, she had come home late from work, where she’d been trying to pull her report together in preparation for the Monday meeting. The streets of Rosslyn had been crowded with foreign students and officials in town for the NAISS convention, which had only reminded her of the futility of her quest.

  When she got back to her apartment, she smelled vomit in the hallway, not quite masked by the sharp scent of ammonia floor cleaner. She knew that it must be connected to Kevin somehow.

  She opened her door and found Kevin sprawled across the living-room sofa, looking sick unto death, and Cassie in the kitchen talking on the telephone in low tones. Cassie was wearing a T-shirt. On top of that she wore a shoulder holster with a large gun in it.