The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “Cassie,” Betsy said, “it doesn’t even register on my emotional Richter scale.”

  They talked for an hour or so, about nothing in particular, and both were reassured to see that the friendship was much the same as it had been before. Cassie had gone through a striking change in demeanor: cooler, more sober, much less the party girl, but still with a perverse sense of humor.

  “How about you and Marcus? Is that for real? I can’t resist asking you,” Betsy said.

  Cassie got a hint of a smile on her face. “Marcus is gay. So am I. We’re probably the only two gay black agents in the whole damn Bureau. So it’s a natural we’d end up in Hennessey’s shop.”

  “Why? Is Hennessey black and gay?”

  Cassie laughed. But she didn’t throw back her head and scream with laughter as the old Cassie would have. “Straight and Irish,” she said. “But he hires unconventionally.”

  “Why’d he pick me as his Trojan horse? Because I’m single and alone and a Mormon from Idaho?”

  “Partly that,” Cassie said without hesitation. “Partly because you had already been working on the Iraqi thing. But when he found out that you had a brother working in Larsen’s shop, that was it.” Cassie winced. “Sorry. Sore subject.”

  “I’m over it, Cassie,” Betsy said. “As much as I’ll ever be.”

  forty-five

  “CLYDE, THANKS a lot for calling in to Washington today,” said the voice of Marcus Berry, sounding hollow and distant. Clyde pressed the phone against his ear a little harder. He was standing in the Hy-Vee grocery store in north Nishnabotna, right next to the little snack bar where all the oldsters gathered each morning for the ninety-nine-cent breakfast special. They had interrupted their socializing and political discourse when Clyde had pulled up in his unit, come in from the cold in his deputy-sheriff uniform, ordered a cup of coffee, planted himself by the phone, and, at six-thirty A.M. on the dot, punched in the collect call to Washington.

  Now they were getting back into it, and Clyde was having a difficult time hearing the person or persons on the other end of the line. He pushed the stainless-steel button on the front of the phone that made it louder—a popular feature here. Now he could hear chairs creaking and papers shuffling at the other end of the line.

  “Sorry to put you on the box,” Berry said.

  “Box?”

  “Got you on a speakerphone.”

  Clyde said, “I’ve heard of those.”

  “Is this a good time for you? Or—”

  “Good as any,” Clyde said. “Just got done working the night shift. So I’m well rested.”

  “Okay, well, just wanted to go over some things with you,” Berry said, shuffling papers and not even noticing that Clyde had made a joke. Clyde was crestfallen and a little bit irritated. But he could hear dim chortling way in the background, and a muffled voice interrupting Berry and pointing something out to him.

  “Oh, sorry, that one went right by me!” Berry said. “Yes, well, hopefully we can find you some work that’s not so relaxing. By the way, I passed your application on through the proper channels, so you may be hearing from the regional office soon.”

  “Appreciate it,” Clyde said. So the purpose of this call was not to discuss his job application, but his report. That was a surprise.

  “You dug up some really interesting stuff here, Clyde,” Berry said. He spoke slowly, with long pauses, shuffling the papers again and again. “Your ID of Abdul al-Turki is the talk of the counterintelligence division. Quite a victory. Congratulations.”

  “Well, thanks,” Clyde said. “It was the cauliflower ears that did it. Uh, I don’t know much about immigration law—that’s why I came to you guys. Can we arrest this guy?”

  “Pardon?” Berry said after a long pause.

  “We can prove he’s Iraqi. But he’s here on a Jordanian passport, under a different name. So can we arrest him for an immigration violation?”

  Berry seemed stunned and uncertain. The muffled voice in the background surfaced again for a short exchange. “That’s a good question, Clyde,” Berry said, sounding like a teacher complimenting a second-grader. “I can’t say I know that much about immigration law.”

  That seemed to close the issue as far as Berry was concerned.

  “Been doing some extracurricular work,” Clyde said. “The people who live across the street from these three fellas are the brother and sister-in-law of some friends of my sister’s neighbor. So I got their permission to sit in their spare room and keep an eye on the house for a day.” Clyde left out the fact that he’d had Maggie with him the whole time. “Got the license plates of their two vehicles—the ones with the tinted windows—and ran the plates. One of them is registered to one of the local Iraqi graduate students who has been here for a couple of years. The Escort was bought from a used-car lot in Davenport in late July. The salesman there says customer paid cash. Windows were not tinted at that time—the tinting appears to be an aftermarket product applied recently. We may be able to get them on a minor violation there—there are limits on how dark the windows are allowed to be.”

  Another muffled conference in Washington. “Excuse me, Clyde, I’m not sure if we understand the part about the windows,” Berry said. “You are accusing these guys of running a biological-weapons production facility, correct?”

  “Not accusing. Suspecting,” Clyde said.

  “So why would you want to hassle them about their windows being too dark?”

  Clyde was startled that Berry needed to ask this question. “If you can stop them for a minor, legitimate violation, you may have probable cause to search the vehicle and uncover evidence of larger crimes—say, a weapons violation, or something.”

  “And then what?” Berry said, playing dumb.

  “Well, then you can arrest them for the weapons violation, maybe get them kicked out of the country.”

  “Ah, I see,” Berry said, apparently finding this a novel and interesting thought. He mulled it over for a minute. “But what do we learn from something like that?”

  “Pardon?” said Clyde, shoving his finger into his free ear and leaning so far forward that his forehead pressed against the cold steel of the pay phone.

  “What do we learn? We already know they’re traveling under fake IDs. And we can be damn certain they’ve got weapons, probably unlicensed. If we arrest them for those things and kick them out of the country, we don’t learn anything new.”

  Clyde was at a loss for words. He had never heard police work characterized as an educational process before. But maybe the FBI was different. He decided to try another tack. “What about the FCC?” he said.

  “You mean, as in Federal Communications Commission?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, the radio transmissions from this house are coming in over people’s toasters,” Clyde said. “That’s clearly in violation of FCC regulations.”

  The muffled voice said something to Berry; Clyde could just make out the words “Iraqi military frequencies.”

  “They know their phone lines aren’t secure,” Berry said, “and they’re not stupid, so they’re using, uh, some frequencies they shouldn’t be using in this country.”

  “Now, I don’t know anything about that kind of law,” Clyde said, “but someone there in Washington must. They must be violating a law somewhere. We ought to be able to turn that into a warrant that would get us inside the house.”

  “I have to say your strategy escapes me, Clyde,” Berry said. “These all seem like really minor violations. We could give these guys traffic tickets, too, right?”

  Clyde couldn’t believe that Berry didn’t understand this. It was just basic police work. You used minor violations to work your way up to the big stuff.

  Something Berry had said to him earlier finally went off in his head, like a firecracker with a slow fuse. “You said that they know their phone lines aren’t secure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wel
l, are they secure, or aren’t they?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you guys already have a tap on their phone?”

  “Clyde, I’d be reluctant to get into specifics about that over the phone.”

  That sounded like a yes to Clyde. “That’s great,” he said. “How’d you get the warrant?”

  “Pardon?”

  “In order for you guys to get the warrant for the phone tap, you must have had some evidence on these guys! What have you got on them?”

  “What we’ve got on them is that they stink to high heaven,” Berry said, laughing. “Listen, Clyde, we’re operating under a time constraint here, and we need to jump ahead real quick.”

  “Ahead?”

  “What can you tell us about your friend Fazoul?”

  Clyde was taken aback and stumbled around for a minute. “Oh, well, I don’t know. He’s not an Arab. Doesn’t care much for the Arabs.”

  “We know that.”

  “Seems to be real smart with technology. Stays in touch with the other members of his ethnic group.”

  For some reason these observations caused Berry and the other man in the room to laugh giddily.

  “You participated in a ceremony with Fazoul and some of his buddies in the park a few months ago,” Berry said when he’d calmed himself down. “What was the deal with that?”

  “Oh, some kind of traditional shindig they do with their infant sons,” Clyde said. “He named his son after me and some other fellows.”

  “He named his son,” Berry said, apparently writing the words down, “after more than one person?”

  “Well, for starters, they’re all named after Mohammed,” Clyde said. “And then the boy got some other names, I suppose to tell him apart from all the other Mohammeds.”

  “What were those names?”

  Clyde was at a loss to understand what this had to do with Iraqi biological-weapons production. But he answered the question. “Khalid, which is how they pronounce my name.”

  More muffled conversation. “Clyde, not to burst your bubble or anything, but Khalid is a very common name among Muslims. Khalid was a great Islamic general—they call him the Sword of the Faith. So lots of Muslims—especially ones with revolutionary leanings—name their sons Khalid.”

  Clyde didn’t say anything, but he resented this. He knew all about this Sword of the Faith stuff. The fact that there had been a real Khalid didn’t mean that Fazoul might not have chosen that name because it was similar to Clyde’s.

  “Any other names?” Berry said.

  “Yeah. The name of some other fella. I-you something.”

  “Clyde, is there any possibility that that name might have been Ayubanov?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Yeah. But this Ayubanov character wasn’t there.”

  More giddy laughter from Berry and his anonymous cohort. They laughed at the strangest times.

  “So they just used a picture of him as kind of a stand-in,” Clyde said.

  The laughter stopped instantly and was replaced by a long silence. “You saw it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said picture—you mean photograph, I hope?”

  “Yeah. It was a color snapshot.”

  “You’ve personally seen a photograph of Mohammed Ayubanov?” Berry said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay, we’ll get a sketch artist out from Chicago sometime soon,” Berry said after conferring with his friend again. “In the meantime, can you give us a description of the man? Any identifying marks, any remarkable physical characteristics?”

  “Well, tall and dark and sort of Middle-Eastern looking,” Clyde began.

  “What color are Ayubanov’s eyes?” Berry said.

  “’Scuse me,” Clyde said, “I got a call coming through from the dispatcher.”

  “What color are Ayubanov’s eyes?” Berry said again.

  “Sorry, fellas, but duty calls. Talk to you again soon,” Clyde said, and hung up the phone.

  Everyone in the snack bar was staring at him interestedly. As soon as he turned around, twenty sets of dentures bit into as many ninety-nine-cent breakfast specials, and conversation resumed. Clyde walked slowly out to his unit and sat there behind the wheel for ten minutes or so, staring off across the cornfields, covered with frozen stubble.

  There were so many strange things about this conversation, he hardly knew where to begin.

  They were trying to send him a message. They couldn’t just come out and say it, for some reason, and so they were saying it in other ways.

  He had expected that either they would believe him, in which case reinforcements would arrive shortly, or else they’d think he was full of shit, in which case they would ignore him. But instead the message seemed to be, We believe you and you’re on your own.

  And there was another thing, too. Something about the way their minds operated.

  “Those guys aren’t cops,” he said to no one in particular.

  Out on the highway someone stretched a yellow light into red. Clyde pulled out of the Hy-Vee, chased them down, and wrote them a ticket. Which is what real cops did.

  What we’ve got on them is that they stink to high heaven.

  What was that supposed to mean? You couldn’t get a warrant with some vague nonsense like that. Any evidence they were getting from their phone tap was useless in court. A complete waste of time.

  Except that they didn’t seem to care about what would or wouldn’t stand up in court. These guys acted as if the judicial system didn’t exist.

  They acted as if they’d never stepped into a courtroom their whole lives. By cop standards they were clowns. Amateurs who never could have graduated from the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, who would have been drummed out of even Sheriff Mullowney’s department.

  So who the hell were they, and what were they doing pretending to be FBI agents?

  forty-six

  I’m writing this about six hours into our luxury charter flight to the Gulf. They picked us up in a big, nice new 747. Strange to see all these folks in Army green, piling their duffel bags on the edge of the runway and climbing up onto this nice plane. We have stewardesses and everything. For once everyone sat up straight and paid attention when they showed how to use the oxygen masks. We’ve also got our gas masks in the overhead luggage bins in case a Scud hits the airport in Dhahran.

  They served us a meal—not too bad, but nothing like the hot dishes you are probably getting from the Dhonts. Doused the lights a few minutes ago and I tried to sleep but can’t. Walked back to the rest room and looked at the faces of all the people in their green camo (Army doesn’t have enough desert camo to go around yet!). All these regular-looking folks just listening to their Walkmans, or leaning back trying to sleep, or sitting in pools of light like I am right now writing to loved ones. Not a single G.I. Joe among them. Just plain old people like you see on the street, except we all wear the same clothes and call ourselves soldiers. I hope when the time comes we will be.

  Clyde read the letter several times over as he sat there in the station wagon in the parking lot of Wapsipinicon Senior High School. Directly in front of him was the breezeway where, long ago, he had watched Desiree handle that Nishnabotna boy and decided that he had to marry her.

  Maggie woke up and needed to be changed and fed, which occupied body and mind for a few minutes; a good thing, since the sight of the breezeway had led his thoughts down a sentimental and dangerous path.

  Another letter was resting on the front seat of the Murder Car. This one had been postmarked in Washington, D.C., and bore no return address. It was addressed to Clyde in care of the Forks County Sheriff’s Department. It contained a single sheet of paper that had come out of a laser printer or something. It said:

  The man with the cauliflower ears murdered my brother. Regardless of what the Bureau does or doesn’t do, you must s
top him.

  You must not rely on the United States government to do anything worth doing. You must get it through your head that you are totally on your own.

  Believe me, it’s better that way.

  Clyde heard a rapping on the window and wiped fog away with one hand to reveal the face of Jonathan Town, steaming like a locomotive as he breathed into his clenched fists. Clyde beckoned him in. Town pulled at a door handle and was startled to find that it was locked. Clyde was a little bit startled himself and reached across the car with one arm to unlock the door while holding Maggie’s bottle steady with the other. He snatched up the mystery letter from D.C. and stuffed it into his coat pocket as Town climbed into the car.

  “Sorry,” he said as Town came in from the wind.

  “That’s okay,” Town said quickly. “Can’t be too careful here. Someone might force their way in and try to sell you some band candy.”

  Jonathan Town had got a journalism degree at Iowa State and done time on some newspapers in Minneapolis and Chicago. He had come back from this sojourn with a quick, sarcastic wit that eternally set him apart from most of Forks County. Clyde always had to remind himself not to be offended by it; in a way, Town was giving him some credit, assuming Clyde was smart enough to get the joke. It was just a difference in style, nothing more.

  Clyde reached up above the sun visor with his free hand and took out a scrap of paper on which he had written the words, Car is bugged—just small talk for now, please. He handed it to Town, who pulled a face and looked askance at him. “Soon as Maggie finishes her bottle,” Clyde said, “I can take you out and show you that property.”

  “Okay, whatever,” Town said, and settled back into his seat, prepared for a long spell of boredom. But this was nothing new for Town, who always acted bored.

  “How’s things at the school newspaper?”

  “The usual. My football reporter forgot to mention some third-stringer in his story about the Waterloo game, and I heard about it from the parents. Someone’s been sneaking into the darkroom to smoke pot. And the yearbook is already in crisis.”