The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  Knightly finished prepping the coffeemaker and fired it up. “We have to compare notes on this Iraqi thing. I have to tell you that I just got fed up with these SOBs after about mid-November and told them that they had to clean up their act. Even doing that was a hassle and a half because they refused to come in and see me, or to answer my phone calls. But when I did get through to them, they were insolent, and I got really pissed. So I went to the feds to see about getting them kicked out of the country, and I got cobwebbed. And when I complained about that, I was finally told, confidentially, some shit about how there might be difficulties for our students abroad if we got tough here. And that’s about all I know of my own knowledge, though Fazoul here has filled me in on the botulin thing.”

  “I’ve been following them around town,” Clyde said. “Sometimes I do it on my days off, and sometimes I do it when I’m on shift, if there’s nothing else going on. But I just keep coming up dry. None of them ever changes his movements. They get up, they go to the university or the vet-path lab, they come home at the end of the day.”

  “What do they do during the day?” Knightly said.

  “All of them work in buildings that have key-card entry systems,” Clyde said, “because of the animal-rights protesters. So I can’t follow them in. But I don’t imagine they’ve got their factory built inside one of the campus buildings. So I can’t figure out who’s tending the factory, wherever it may be.”

  An inspiration came to Knightly. “They’re using the goddamn steam tunnels! All of those buildings are connected by steam tunnels. Those boys must know you’re tailing them. When one of them wants to go to the factory, he goes to work like it’s a normal day, then slips down into the steam tunnels and emerges half a mile away, hops on a bicycle or something, and goes wherever.”

  “That sounds believable,” Clyde said. “But if that’s true—if the students we’ve been watching are the ones doing the work—then they have to shut down the operation soon. Because I just watched most of them graduate. They have to be out of the country within seventy-two hours.”

  “I agree,” Knightly said. “So the question is, are they going to release the toxin here in the States, as a terrorist operation—or threaten to do so—or ship it back to Iraq somehow?”

  “We think they are going to ship it,” Fazoul said. “They have been making transport arrangements within the last few days. One of those who received his Ph.D. today went directly to Ryder after the ceremony and rented a flatbed semitrailer rig. The Iraqis and their various front organizations have leased several shipping containers designed for transporting bulk fluids.”

  “I’ll bet it’s a shell game,” Knightly said. “They’re all decoys. They’re not going to ship the stuff out of the States.”

  Clyde found Knightly’s theory perversely encouraging, because it suggested that Desiree would be safe. “Why do you say that?”

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” Knightly said, pouring out mugs of coffee. “Why would they make it here and then ship it to Iraq? Why not just make it in Iraq? The technology is nothing special.”

  Fazoul shook his head no. He seemed very sure of himself. “It was out of the question for them to build it in Iraq. If they did, word would get out to the Israelis, who would bomb the facility and send tons of botulin toxin into the air.”

  “But it’s a tiny thing! Couldn’t they just hide it under a gas station or something?”

  This seemed logical to Clyde. It had occurred to him before, in fact. Knightly wouldn’t stop pressing Fazoul until he answered: “The Iraqi ministry responsible for this research has been penetrated and compromised by a hostile organization. No matter where in Iraq they concealed the facility, word would be sure to leak out—Israeli and American military planners would soon have the precise coordinates.”

  Knightly laughed. “A hostile organization. The Vakhan Turks, maybe?”

  Fazoul wouldn’t say. Knightly laughed again. “Did it ever occur to Ayubanov that if he weren’t so goddamned good, he wouldn’t force people like the Iraqis to hide their bioweapons facilities among innocent bystanders out in the middle of fucking Iowa?”

  Fazoul cringed at Knightly’s mention of the name Ayubanov. He did not laugh at Knightly’s good-natured but sharply pointed heckling. Finally Knightly gave up. “Shit,” he said, “Mo Ayubanov. What a guy I picked to owe favors to.”

  They sat and sipped coffee and ate doughnuts for a while.

  “That’s a very important piece of information—what you just told us about the ‘hostile organization,’ ” Knightly said. “Has Mo considered passing that along to someone in Washington?”

  Fazoul blanched at this suggestion.

  “Because the people in Washington are probably in the same boat that I was until you enlightened me just now,” Knightly continued. “They see no reason to believe the Iraqis would build such a thing in Iowa. If Mo made one phone call and set them straight, maybe they’d take some goddamn action!”

  “I doubt it,” Clyde said. He sketched out the vague understanding of the Washington situation that he’d got from Hennessey. When Clyde mentioned the interagency task force, Knightly rolled his eyes and moaned. When he mentioned the inspector general, Knightly set his coffee down, put his face in his hands, and remained in that position until Clyde was finished.

  “Jesus,” he said, “I know how those Washington people operate. We’re really fucked now.”

  fifty-one

  WHEN CLYDE was on duty, he usually did his dining at places like the drive-through window at Wendy’s. No shift was complete without running a Dustbuster over the driver’s seat of his unit to pick up all the spilled salt, french-fry ends, and straggly bits of lettuce he had left behind.

  But this was his last shift, possibly the last time he would ever wear a law-enforcement uniform, and it was Christmas Day, and nothing was going on. There weren’t enough cars on the road to make the necessary quorum for a road accident. And he had spent the last two days chasing Iraqis on numerous different modes of transport, at all hours of the night and day. So he decided to take his breakfast in sit-down luxury at Metzger’s Family Style Buffet in downtown Nishnabotna, which could be relied upon to have a fine spread laid out along its mighty banks of steam tables.

  As he came down the street, he saw a red Corvette with vanity license plates reading BUCK in front of the restaurant. His first impulse was to gun the motor and get out of there; he’d almost rather park in a frozen barnyard and eat french fries behind the wheel than share Christmas dinner with Buck Chandler. But he mastered this urge to flee and parked next to the Corvette. Buck had parked it badly, angling across two parking spaces, and one corner of the bumper was actually rammed up against the high curb.

  Metzger’s, Where Iowa Meets and Eats, had a big neon sign to that effect on its facade. After Clyde clambered up the high and precipitous stone curb, he involuntarily turned and looked up into the west, which is what most people around there did several times a day in lieu of tuning in a weather forecast. The sky in that direction consisted of a mass of dense and featureless gray extending hundreds of miles from south to north. A gauzy veil of high ice crystals had already drawn itself across the face of the sun, smudging it into a bright soft-focus splotch in the southern sky, within which the disk of the sun could be crisply resolved. The empty streets of Nishnabotna were illuminated by bright but bluish light that cast no shadows.

  The big picture windows of Metzger’s Buffet were framed in synthetic green garlands and plastic holly, and thickly fogged by the vapor escaping from the steam tables. Clyde hauled the massive door open, jangling innumerable sleigh bells and detonating a cacophony of synthesized electronic carols from various motion-sensitive gewgaws that had been hung from the doorknob. The “Please Seat Yourself” sign was up; Metzger’s was running on a skeleton crew.

  Clyde was pleased to find himself there. He had eaten so many meals and attended so many banquets and rehearsal dinners in this place that it made him feel more
at home than he would have felt in his own house without Desiree.

  It had been an active couple of days. Fazoul had told him, during their late-Saturday-night conference in Knightly’s hidey-hole, that the Iraqis had rented a truck, so Clyde had done a routine records search and discovered that one of the newly arrived “Jordanian” Ph.D. candidates had, in the last few months, somehow found the time to obtain a truck driver’s license. This person was none other than Abdul al-Turki, the wrestler with the cauliflower ears.

  On Sunday, Clyde had taken it upon himself to follow al-Turki around town—not very difficult, given the size of his rig. He had to admit that the Iraqi handled it as if his postgraduate studies had been not in the field of chemical engineering but rather in advanced theoretical truck driving. Clearly the years since his ejection from international wrestling had been put to good use learning an honest trade.

  But the chase had been short-lived. Al-Turki had driven the rig down to the Matheson Works on Sunday afternoon and swung it expertly through an arrow gate in the high brick wall that surrounded that vast property. The gate was promptly closed and locked behind him.

  There were three possible exits from the Matheson Works. Clyde had slept in the station wagon near one of them, Fazoul in the Knightlys’ Mazda near another, and Knightly himself, in his capacious four-wheel-drive Suburban, near the third.

  On Monday morning—yesterday—the truck had emerged from Clyde’s gate with a reconditioned shipping container on its back and made the short trip down to the barge terminal, where the container had been loaded on a barge bound for New Orleans, which departed immediately. Clyde drove down the river a few miles, hiked out onto a sandbar he knew, and checked it out as it went by, using a big pair of binoculars he’d borrowed from Ebenezer; “Aqaba,” its port of destination, had been freshly stenciled onto it. Clyde had called Hennessey, who had called some of his friends in the brown-water division of the Coast Guard, who had done an investigation of the container at Lock and Dam Number Thirty-one, where the Iowa River joined the Mississippi. The container was found to be full of corn oil, and nothing else.

  Almost immediately after dropping off the container at the barge terminal, the Ryder semi had returned to the Matheson Works, followed closely by Knightly, vanished through the now-familiar gate, and emerged an hour later with a new container loaded on its back. Al-Turki proceeded to head east on U.S. 30. Fazoul chased him, just to make sure he didn’t double back, and Clyde, when he returned from his excursion to the sandbar, called Hennessey again. Hennessey pulled some strings at the Illinois Highway Patrol. They pulled the truck over on the pretext of searching for drugs. Once again, nothing but corn oil.

  Then, late in the afternoon yesterday, a freight train had pulled out of the Denver–Platte–Des Moines yards adjacent to the Matheson Works, headed west, carrying several hundred shipping containers, several hoboes, and—by the time it had cleared the metropolitan area—three Ph.D. candidates belonging to the Vakhan Turk ethnic group, all dressed in the same gear they would have used for riding ponies over Central Asian mountain passes in the dead of winter. As the big freight had lumbered across the state of Iowa, these three had crawled up and down its length, one car at a time, checking the serial numbers and destinations of the shipping containers, and relaying them via citizens-band radio to none other than Ken and Sonia Knightly, who were shadowing the train in the four-wheel-drive Suburban. Ken did the driving, and Sonia wrote down the numbers and the destinations. Ken pulled in at every pay phone he saw so that Sonia could relay the information back to Fazoul, who typed it into his laptop, encrypted the data, and E-mailed it God knows where to be checked over by whatever intelligence apparatus Fazoul’s people were running.

  By the time Clyde had got back from the Christmas Eve Mass late last night, they had identified one suspicious container, leased by a Jordanian company that was thought to be a front organization for Iraqi interests, and bound for Aqaba by way of Tacoma—an odd bit of routing that was suspicious in and of itself. While the Vakhans on the train could not get the container open to inspect its contents (and dared not, lest they spill botulin toxin along hundreds of miles of track), they did notice some suspicious welds and fittings along the bottom, which looked as if they might have been added recently. Perhaps it was a tank within a tank, the outer one containing corn oil to deceive any customs inspectors, the inner one full of toxin.

  “Third time’s a charm,” Hennessey had said, and had proceeded to ruin the holidays of many FBI agents by mobilizing a C-130 and vectoring it westward. Notwithstanding his pessimistic statements in the Happy Chef, he seemed, within the last day or two, to have suddenly amassed tremendous power and resources.

  As Clyde entered Metzger’s diner, Hennessey was probably passing overhead, making ready to intercept the train in a little crossroads town in western Nebraska where not too many people would be killed if it turned out to be booby-trapped. The rendezvous was going to happen in about four hours. Until then Clyde had nothing to do but be nervous, and to try to keep himself from foolishly hoping for too much. He had just talked to Ken and Sonia Knightly, who had encountered heavy snow on their way back across the state and had checked into a Best Western on the northern outskirts of Des Moines to wait the storm out.

  “Morning, Clyde. Merry Christmas,” said a man’s voice, a polished and fine voice. Clyde looked to the end of the smorgasbord and saw Arnie Schneider sitting there before a bloody mastodon roast, gripping a giant two-pronged fork and a knife or short sword, using them to tap out a metallic rhythm on the edge of the butcher block. He was listening to a Walkman, probably to drown out the sound of the Christmas-music tape on the overhead speakers. He was eerily lit from below by the red glow of a powerful battery of heat lamps, and his bifocals, flecked with tiny droplets of juice and blood, reflected the meat table, upside down and miniaturized, a carnal microcosm. Clyde nodded at the mighty roast, eschewing the almost equally stupendous turkey. Arnie slid his weapon through the meat, cutting off an inch-thick slab, and the newly exposed face sighed out a glittering sheer waterfall of juices.

  The first room had eight or ten circular tables, each capable of seating a dozen people. Solitary male diners were scattered across the room, one per table, listening to the fuzzy, rasping, oddly distorted Christmas music and having at their meat and potatoes. One of them was Buck Chandler. He had his back turned to the room, facing the corner, and sat hunched over, chewing his food very slowly and staring fixedly at a waterfowl mural that had gone all brown with cigarette smoke.

  Buck hadn’t seen him yet, and so, in the short term, Clyde could get away with choosing another table. But Buck would probably see him eventually and then be offended. So Clyde shuffled forward awkwardly, bumping into an empty chair in an effort to make some noise so that Buck would notice him. But Buck kept staring at those ducks on the wall. As Clyde came around the table, he was shocked by Buck’s appearance: his eyes were red and bleary, and he had not shaved, or even combed his hair, in a couple of days. Buck inhaled convulsively through a mouthful of beef and then uncorked a slow, gassy belch that inflated his cheeks and eventually escaped through his nostrils, suffusing the corner of the room with a strong chemical vapor that reminded Clyde of his soon-to-be-ex-boss.

  “Buck,” Clyde said, “you mind?”

  Buck swiveled his eyes toward Clyde, then dropped them toward his plate and bowed his head. Clyde took a seat.

  “Merry Christmas,” Clyde said. It might have been a cruel thing to say. But Clyde reminded himself that his life situation was, if anything, worse than Buck’s, and he was keeping his chin up.

  Buck Chandler did not respond to this salutation for several minutes, and when he did, it was with the words, “Fucking camel jockeys.”

  Clyde had grown up listening to Buck Chandler’s voice announcing Twisters football games from the press box at the stadium, the roar of the crowd in the background, and he could never get over hearing that voice saying such words.

  He
didn’t know what to say in response to “Fucking camel jockeys” and so he kept eating. After some minutes he noticed that Buck was staring at him disgustedly.

  “Oh, I know you’re buddies with those kinds of people.”

  “Would you like me to leave you alone?” Clyde said.

  “That’s real nice of you, Clyde, to be buddies with our foreign guests. But you keep in mind something.” Buck set his steak knife down with exaggerated caution and began shaking his finger at Clyde, gripping the edge of the table with his other hand to steady himself. “Don’t trust ’em, Clyde. ’Cause they got no principles.”

  Since Buck Chandler was not being too coherent, Clyde brought his Sherlockian capabilities to bear on the problem. One good hypothesis was that Buck had got involved in a real-estate transaction with some foreign students, which had ended badly.

  “Shit,” Buck said, “you might have thought they’d at least wait until after Christmas to burst my goddamn bubble. But no. Hell, they don’t even have Christmas. Why would they?”

  “Don’t know,” Clyde said.

  A new, and apparently terrifying, thought occurred to Buck. “My ’vette,” he blurted. “You came to repo my ’vette, didn’t you, Clyde?”

  “Sheriffs don’t do repo work, Buck. You can rest easy about that darn Corvette.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thank God.”

  Clyde chewed and pondered. When he’d dropped off the divorce summons at Tick Henry’s house, it had been sometime in midsummer. Buck had been homeless and living in squalor. After that he hadn’t seen Buck until around Halloween, when he was on the wagon, well dressed, and driving a new Corvette.

  He didn’t know much about the real-estate business, except that it worked on a commission basis—a large number of small transactions, the income accumulating slowly and steadily over time. It did seem remarkable, now that he thought about it, that Buck had turned his business around dramatically enough to buy a Corvette—in no more than three months’ time.