The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “I can’t guess. Maybe to pay the mortgage?”

  “That’s part of it,” Hennessey said. “But the real reason is character defects.”

  Hennessey let that one hang in the air for a while as the waitress showed up with the two number fives. She feigned surprise at their nearly empty coffee thermos, filled both their mugs, and replaced the thermos with a fresh one.

  Both men went for the hash browns first: disks of golden brown, the outer shell as crisp as ice on a puddle, the center moist and soft but still chewable. Their eyes locked across the table. Hennessey sighed and looked as if he were about to weep. “Oh, yeah,” he said through his food. “Oh, yeah.”

  “What’s yours?” Clyde said after they had been eating for a minute or two.

  “Pardon?”

  “What’s your character defect?”

  “Exactly!” Hennessey said, stabbing his fork at Clyde. He spoke the word so loudly that heads turned around the room. Then he quieted down. “That’s exactly how you have to think in D.C. If you’re dealing with anyone who’s been there for more than five years, you have to ask yourself, ‘Okay, what’s this guy’s character flaw?’ After a while you develop a taxonomy. A classification system. So you have your people-on-a-power-trip. Your self-deluded types. The occasional fanatic, though the system tends to weed those out.” Hennessey paused long enough to pop another bite into his mouth. “Me? I like to win.”

  “That’s your flaw?”

  “It is when you like it as much as I do. It’s kind of a sick thing, the pleasure of winning.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Clyde said.

  Hennessey laughed ruefully. “Your problem with this Iraq thing is that you’ve got tangled up, unwittingly, with people who long ago decided it wasn’t sophisticated to be sincere, that sincerity was for fools, that sincere people were put on earth to be manipulated and exploited by people like them—for the greater good, of course. This is currently the most common character flaw in the Washington establishment—attempts to be Machiavellian by people who lack the talent, the panache, to pull it off. So here you are, good old Clyde Banks, desperately trying to deal with this very real problem here on the ground, and it’s as if you’re in a nightmare where these fucking bush-league Machiavellis listen to what you’re saying but don’t really understand.”

  “That’s pretty much what it feels like,” Clyde said, frowning at his corned-beef hash and nodding his head.

  “You and I know that something is going on in Forks County, and we would like to do something about it,” Hennessey said, “but between the two of us are about ten thousand of these people who are too busy looking down their noses at us to actually grasp the problem and take action. You must know that taking action is looked down upon, Clyde. This is the postmodern era. When events come to a cusp, we’re supposed to screw our courage to the sticking place and launch a reanalysis of the eleventh draft of the working document. Actually going out and doing stuff in the physical world is simply beyond the comprehension of these people. They’re never going to do anything about the Iraqis in Forks. Never.”

  “That sort of confirms what I was thinking,” Clyde said.

  “Which brings us back, unless I’m mistaken, to your sudden desire for a last will and testament.”

  Clyde nodded and ate for a while. Hennessey did the same, both men gathering strength for the next round.

  “’Course,” Clyde said, “Army wants you to have a will anyway, when one of you goes overseas on a combat mission.”

  “Of course,” Hennessey said.

  “But you’re right in what you’re thinking,” Clyde said. He swallowed hard and turned his head to look out the window. His rib cage shuddered like an old truck engine trying to start up, and hot tears suddenly sprouted from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. He shifted his body toward the window, rested his head on one hand, and let the tears run for a minute or so, knowing that no one but Hennessey could see him.

  Hennessey sipped coffee and looked out the window, too. “Sheriff Mullowney won’t help. FBI won’t help. CIA can’t help,” Hennessey said after a while. “Old Clyde is on his own, and this time he’s not going to lose, is he?”

  Clyde shook his head and tried to say “Nope,” but his voice didn’t work.

  “That’s the spirit,” Hennessey said. “You’ve got to love to win. Should we go out and win one, Clyde?”

  “We?”

  “I’m not going to sit here and bullshit you. In a little while I’m going to fly back to D.C., and I probably won’t leave until this thing is over. I won’t be here with you on the front line, I won’t be risking my life. Currently my stock is very low with both the CIA and the FBI, because I haven’t been winning recently. I’ve been getting my ass kicked, frankly, which really pisses me off—but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I cannot arrange for planeloads of heavily armed federal agents to descend from the skies. Or anything like that. But I may be able to make myself useful in smaller ways.”

  forty-nine

  BETSY THOUGHT it was appropriate that she would have her session with the inspector general on the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year. As long as she had been in government work, the two most awesome words in tandem were “inspector” and “general.” These people had, depending on one’s point of view, the power of God at the minimum, or, at the maximum, of the IRS. IGs could be Torquemadas—who delighted in giving pain—or Thomases—who falsely embodied tiresome principles—or, perhaps worst, Siricas, who would nibble you to death. They wrote their own charges, and it was alleged that in the Agency there were no procedural niceties like habeas corpus to get in their way.

  Betsy had hardly been surprised when her supervisors at the Agency had informed her that her polygraph with the redoubtable Kim McMurtry hadn’t gone very well. It had, in fact, gone so badly that it had set into motion a new investigation of which little was revealed to her. But from its very slowness she inferred that it must be a gigantic, multiagency engine of destruction. Now, a month and a half later, it had come to this: be in such-and-such an office on the tenth floor of the New Executive Office Building at nine-thirty A.M. on 21 December, to have a little chat with the inspector general.

  No formal statement of the charges against her had been made. She knew she was in trouble, but she could not tell how serious it might be. She knew only that there was one way out of Washington, and it passed through a certain doorway in the NEOB.

  She took the metro over to Farragut West and checked through security at nine-fifteen. She took the elevator to the tenth floor and went to the ladies’ room to wash her face and get ready for what was to come.

  She was shocked by the face in the mirror. In the last year new lines had creased her forehead. The beginnings of a permanent frown could be seen. She had never been the kind of girl who dotted her i’s with smiley faces. But she didn’t think of herself as a sad or tragic person and was disturbed to see that she now wore the mask of a victim, of one who had undergone great pain.

  The door was a solid unmarked slab of wood that could have led to a janitor’s closet. There was no answer to her knock, so she tried the knob and found that it was unlocked. She entered a dimly lit anteroom with a desk, a chair, no telephone, and the standard picture of George Bush on the wall. She thought back to that day in August when he’d taken her out on his Cigarette boat and told her to hang in there. She could take some satisfaction in knowing that she’d done that.

  It was nine thirty-three and no one seemed to be around, so she went to the next door and knocked. A thin, rather high-pitched voice said, “Come in, please.”

  She opened the door and entered a conference room, much more brightly lit. One person was in there, seated at the end of a table that could have handled twelve people. She was struck by how large he was, for a man with a high-pitched voice. He had a high forehead, emphasized by advanced baldness, and wore rimless glasses. On the table in front of him was a blotter with a yellow legal pad on
it, three government-issue Skilcraft pens, and an archaic reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  Betsy looked around reflexively. He said, “There are no cameras, no one-way mirrors, none of that. You’ll be dealing with just me. And our government in its wisdom appointed me to find the truth, which is a pretty simple job description by local standards.” He stopped for a moment, then mused, “Probably the next generation will have no need for human beings in this job—just chemical tests and voice-stress analysis. Hmm, hmm.” Then he stood up. He must have been six-seven or six-eight. “My name is Richard Holmes. I always tell people that’s no relation to Sherlock. I’m actually a shirttail descendant of Oliver Wendell. He used up six or seven generations’ worth of brains, so the rest of us have labored in obscurity as bureaucrats or tax lawyers. Though I do have a granddaughter who shows promise.”

  Betsy shook his hand and said, “Pleased to meet you. Betsy Vandeventer.” She’d been around long enough not to fall too quickly for this kind of folksy, self-deprecating chatter. But Holmes did not seem blatantly insincere.

  “That’s a relief,” Holmes joked. “Well, shall we get on with this?”

  He sat down and motioned for Betsy to sit to his left, near the tape recorder. “You’ll like the view,” he said, and she did. A little snow squall was coming down, and it looked glorious—for those who weren’t driving. “Before I get started asking questions of you, do you have any for me?”

  “Is this it? Just you and me?”

  “Yes.” And then, leaning toward her, sotto voce: “I hope people won’t talk.” He delivered his jokes ponderously and almost apologetically, like a professor.

  Betsy smiled politely. “One more. Am I in trouble? Are there charges against me?”

  “That was two. The answer to the first question is yes. Dr. Millikan feels that you have committed security violations—passing information around to those with no need to know, or, to be specific, to Mr. Hennessey. That’s a hard one to make stick. You are very conscientious about basic security procedures. As to the second question, no. There are no charges against you. You never handled budget, which is where most of the problems come from. You never hired or fired anyone, which is another common source of trouble. You were never in Operations, so you didn’t kill the wrong people or overthrow the wrong government.” He paused, reached under the table, and brought up a thermos and two cups. “You’re going to be talking a lot, so I brought something to wet your whistle. I hope you like hot chocolate.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  “Now I’m turning on the tape recorder. This should be the only recording of this conversation, because this is supposed to be one of the designated secure rooms in this building.” He cleared his throat and turned on the machine; the reels spun smoothly and silently, exerting a sort of hypnotic effect on Betsy. He spoke for a few moments, rattling off the who-what-where-when-why of the interview. Then he turned off the machine and stared directly into her eyes for the first time since she’d entered the room.

  “You know we’re quite close to war in the Gulf. You also know that you were largely on the mark with your views. Based upon your unofficial consultation work with Mr. Hennessey, I think you think that some elements of this crisis are to be found in the middle part of this country. I will ask you to tell me your views on this. You have total immunity on this subject. You must trust me when I tell you that.”

  Even after all she’d gone through, Betsy believed the words of this strange, tall old man. She wanted to ask many questions about where this report would go after he’d finished it. It was strange that the interview was happening in the NEOB and not at Langley.

  He reached for the switch on the tape recorder. She held up one hand to stop him and said, “What’s the downside for me?”

  “If your hypothesis is wrong, you will be scapegoated, for internal USG consumption. It is almost inconceivable that any actual penalties will be levied against you. You’ll never work for government again.”

  “Sounds like a good deal to me,” Betsy said. “Roll that sucker.”

  He started the machine again. “Ms. Vandeventer, I understand from your file that you will be leaving your current position at the end of the year.”

  “That is correct.”

  “What were your duties?”

  Betsy recapitulated her five years at the Agency, out of practice describing her work only in the most general terms.

  “Ms. Vandeventer, I should have reminded you that this interview is classified at the very highest level, so feel free to go into detail, complete with any discussion of sources and methods that may be relevant, and any commentary you may wish to make, pro or con, on Agency personnel and practices.”

  Twenty minutes later she was still talking. Holmes refilled her hot chocolate and gently reminded her to move on to the fateful briefing with the Agricultural attaché.

  Betsy burned her lips on the chocolate, fresh and boiling hot from the thermos, and forged on. With the exception of a time-out to turn the tape over, Holmes did not interrupt her. He simply looked at her through the scratched and smudged lenses of his glasses and made incredibly intricate doodles on his tablet. Finally she told the tale of her final polygraph test and summarized the ensuing several weeks of meaningless make-work.

  “Is that all?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then one last question. During your time at the Agency you were strongly enjoined from doing forward-leaning analysis. When you broke this rule, you were severely reprimanded. Now I would like you to do some forward-leaning analysis for me. Based on everything you’ve seen and experienced in the last year, what is your analysis of our current situation vis-à-vis Saddam?”

  It was a very strange request from an inspector general, but Betsy saw no harm in playing along—they had only ten more days in which to persecute her. She cleared her throat, drained the last of the hot chocolate, sat up straight, and composed her thoughts for a moment before answering. “Saddam has shown a baffling level of stubbornness in Kuwait. It’s crazy for him to keep his forces there in the face of such enormous odds. No one can figure out why he hasn’t backed down—most people just shrug their shoulders and say he must be a madman.

  “But I don’t think he’s a madman. I think that his strategy relies on the assumption that he’s holding a weapon of mass destruction in his hands. When we get down to crunch time, he can lob biological-warfare agents into Israel and force the Israelis to attack him. This will destroy the coalition that Messrs. Bush and Baker have worked so hard to build. The anti-Saddam forces will fall into disarray, and there’s a good chance he’ll be able to remain in Kuwait with no repercussions other than some economic sanctions.”

  “And you think that the weapon in question is now within our borders.”

  “I think that some very bad men were dispatched from Baghdad and inserted into this country shortly before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. They must have been sent to do something extremely important. They killed my brother, and Margaret Park-O’Neil, to cover their tracks. I think it is not unreasonable to suspect that these men may be producing biological weapons within our borders even as we speak, most likely somewhere in the vicinity of Forks County, Iowa.”

  That was as simply and clearly as she could put it. Holmes seemed satisfied; he nodded deeply and turned off the tape machine with a satisfying clunk. He stood up and looked out the window—the snow was already melting under a bright winter sun. “You know,” he said, “at moments like this I always like to recall Bismarck’s statement that God protects drunks and the United States of America.”

  Betsy felt invigorated and renewed. Holmes looked drained and exhausted, as if she had passed her burden of knowledge onto him and it was already weighing him down. He looked at her somberly and said, “I understand why you’re leaving government service. But it’s a shame. We need people like you.” He unplugged the tape recorder and began neatly coiling up its power cord. When this was finished, he put his pens and papers aw
ay into a big lawyer’s briefcase. Then, as if suddenly struck by a thought, he took off his glasses and looked at her with the nicest, deepest blue eyes she’d ever seen. “Please believe me when I tell you I’m so sorry about your brother.”

  “Thank you,” Betsy said, and then, to her own surprise, dissolved into tears. She pulled a new packet of Kleenexes from her purse, put one to her face, and began to sob out loud. It was a strange combination of sadness over Kevin combined with relief that she wouldn’t be thrown into jail, that she could get out of town and begin her life again, that she’d told someone who had listened.

  Holmes sat down. He didn’t know what to do. He patted her on the shoulder once or twice and waited.

  “Boy oh boy,” Betsy finally said when it was over. “Sorry about that.”

  “Quite all right.”

  “I hope I’ve been of some help.”

  Holmes winked at her. “It’s safe to say that you have,” he said. He opened the door and held it for her. Betsy walked into the darkness of the anteroom and nearly tripped over Ed Hennessey, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup the size of a paint bucket.

  “What are you doing here?” she blurted.

  “Christmas shopping,” Hennessey shot back, “which is what you should be doing.”

  “I can take a hint. I’ll get lost,” Betsy said. She walked out through the slablike door, and as it closed behind her, she could hear Hennessey greeting Holmes and chaffing him mercilessly about his baldness.

  fifty

  MOST OF Eastern Iowa University’s seniors wanted to graduate in spring, when they could do their walk in front of the regents and the president of the university, and some worthy speaker such as Dan Quayle or Mike Ditka would be there to talk and receive an honorary doctorate. Besides, the campus would look pretty and there would be plenty of parties.

  The December ceremony, on the other hand, had the ambience of an Organization of Asian and African States meeting. The foreign graduate students had to go through the ceremony for the pictures to take back home, not only for their families but for their governments as well—a photograph of a scholar standing in his robes and hood next to his graduate adviser seemed a more tangible proof of completion than a faked-up piece of sheepskin. Most of them had to be out of the country within a week after finishing their degrees, so the winter ceremony also had an air of finality about it.