The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  Only one person was in the place, a man in his fifties or sixties who looked vaguely familiar to Clyde. When he pulled the front door open and looked at Clyde through the screen door, his mouth was open and turned down at the corners like one of those thespian masks. He was lacking teeth, and this made his mouth seem especially large, further emphasizing the mask analogy. Also, his eyes were wide-open and greatly magnified by a pair of exceptionally thick eyeglasses, and he seemed to be staring at Clyde with kind of a haggard, amazed, slack-jawed look.

  “Deputy Banks,” the man said. “Why are you here?”

  “Hello, Mr. Frost,” Clyde said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  What should he say now? It seemed kind of rude for Clyde to ask if he could come in. He should leave that up to the individual voter. Besides, he had said only that he’d knock on every door in Forks County, not go into every living room. He was going to have to learn how to do this stuff quickly if he was going to hit every door between now and November.

  “I just wanted to talk to you for a second,” Clyde said.

  Mr. Frost opened the storm door wordlessly and backed out of the way, holding it open with one arm, apparently indicating that Clyde could come into his house. So he walked into Mr. Frost’s house. It was dark and fairly empty, and it smelled of mildew and old cigarette smoke not well vented to the outside.

  He turned around in the middle of the living room and saw that Mr. Frost was still standing there by the front door, staring at him with that expression of tragic astonishment. By now Clyde was beginning to convince himself that this all had to do with the shape of Mr. Frost’s mouth without dentures. If Mr. Frost had his choppers in place, it would change the shape of his whole face, and he would be beaming confidently at Clyde.

  “How are you today, Mr. Frost?” Clyde said.

  “Don’t feel so good,” Mr. Frost said.

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that.” Now Clyde felt like a heel. “I’ll just do what I came to do very quickly, then.”

  “Go ahead and get it over with,” Mr. Frost said.

  “As you know, Mr. Frost, I’m a deputy county sheriff and have been for the last five years.”

  Mr. Frost let out a soft, aching moan as the word “sheriff” was making its way across the living room. He walked over to a footstool and sat down on it and grabbed his left forearm with his right hand and began to squeeze and rub it.

  “You ain’t gonna handcuff me, are you?” Mr. Frost said. “Please, I won’t make no trouble.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Mr. Frost, that’s not why I’m here!” Clyde said.

  “God, my arm hurts like hell,” Mr. Frost said.

  “Oh, man,” Clyde said, and put one hand up to his face and began to rub his eyebrows, staring at the old cigarette-burned carpet. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Frost. I’m new at this, and I should have just told you right up front that I didn’t come here on official business.”

  All of a sudden he remembered where he had seen Mr. Frost before. Mr. Frost had beaten up his wife a couple of years ago on their farm south of town and broken one of her cheekbones so that her eye got out of place. Clyde had arrested him and taken him down to the station, and later Mr. Frost had pleaded to a lesser charge and got off with six months. Now it kind of looked as if Mr. Frost was living alone.

  Mr. Frost was just gaping at Clyde with his mouth still turned down. He had stopped rubbing his forearm and put one hand on his chest. As Clyde watched, he made that hand into a fist and pressed it against his breastbone.

  “Did you punch me in the chest?” Mr. Frost said.

  “No, sir, I did not touch you. I’m sorry if—”

  “I feel like barbecued shit,” Mr. Frost said, and slumped back so he was leaning against the wall. Clyde noticed that he had got all sweaty. Once again Mr. Frost made the chest-punching motion.

  Clyde remembered a piece of nurse lore that Desiree had told him, which was that when heart-attack patients came in, they almost invariably made chest-punching motions.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” Clyde said. He went over and picked up the phone. It was dead.

  “Didn’t pay my bill,” Mr. Frost said. “Paid all my money to the alimony.”

  “Then we have to get you to a hospital,” Clyde said. “Come on.”

  He went over and picked up Mr. Frost in a fireman’s carry, slinging the old man over his shoulders like a bag of charcoal briquettes, and carried him out to the station wagon. Mr. Frost had gone limp, so Clyde buckled him in to keep him upright. Then he started the engine and punched the gas and sent the Murder Car chortling through deep gravel onto the road, southbound.

  The next farmhouse was just half a mile down the road, but Clyde figured that he could get to the hospital faster than he could call up an ambulance and have them come out there, so he just drove into Wapsipinicon at about a hundred miles per hour, noting with professional embarrassment that no sheriff cars even noticed this breach of posted speed limits.

  He came into town on U.S. 30, which was known as Lincoln Way in populated areas, passed the main campus on the left, then the mile-wide parking lot of the Events Center, with the auditorium and then Twister Stadium and then the coliseum rising out of the asphalt, past the Twister’s outdoor and indoor practice fields, then hung a screaming left onto Knapp Avenue and went up about half a dozen blocks and pulled into the medical center, following the red signs to the emergency room at Methodist Hospital, which was so brand-new and so good that it was not called an emergency room but a trauma center. Clyde could find the trauma center with his eyes closed; he went there all the time, on business.

  He did not feel it would be decent to leave the grounds until he knew how things turned out with Mr. Frost. But he also knew from experience that drinking foul, watery coffee in the hospital cafeteria was not a good way to kill time, and so, after a decent interval had passed, he parked the wagon in the visitor lot and went for a stroll.

  A few moments’ walk took him down into the greenbelt along the Wapsipinicon. A bike path ran along the bank, with occasional bizarre-looking suspension bridges (engineering-student projects) over to the EIU campus on the opposite side. Clyde strolled across one of these and soon found himself on the sculptured quadrangle of the two-year-old marble-sheathed Henry Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center, the House That Larsen Built. It was a campus within a campus, free from the unwashed mobs of undergraduates who thronged the rest of the university’s twenty-five hundred acres, populated mostly by foreigners with stratospheric IQs. Clyde sat down on a bench that said it had been donated by the government of Nigeria and watched them coming and going in their dashikis and saris and turbans and white lab coats, and wondered whether Frank Frost was still alive, and if he was, whether he had any idea that a place like this existed just a few minutes’ drive away from the run-down farm where he had chosen to seclude himself from the world.

  Clyde sat on that bench for fifteen minutes, watching the foreign students come and go, and thinking not about Frank Frost but about the missing Marwan Habibi.

  He stood up, stretched, then ambled into the main entrance of the Scheidelmann. He dawdled around the giant electric globe for a few minutes, looking at the electric pins thrust into so many exotic parts of it, every one of them a place where Eastern Iowa University had somehow got itself tangled up with some other nation’s government and laws. He consulted a map on the wall and made his way into the Sinzheimer Wing, then up to the third floor, to door 304, which had been sealed off with yellow crime-scene tape.

  “Can I help you?” said a voice. An American voice. Clyde looked up, startled, to see a young man standing there, holding an unopened can of Coke and a small bag of chips. He was about Clyde’s height but probably forty or fifty pounds lighter. He had large pale-blue eyes and strawberry-blond hair and a history of acne that was not entirely history. He had an alert, birdlike look about him.

  “Pardon?” Clyde said.

  “You’ve been standing here for ten minutes,” the m
an said. “I’m Kevin Vandeventer. That’s my lab right there.” He nodded at the adjoining room.

  “Clyde Banks,” Clyde said, and shook Kevin Vandeventer’s hand. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Deputy county sheriff and candidate for sheriff.”

  “Oh. So you’re here on the investigation.”

  Clyde remembered something. “You talked to the Wapsipinicon detectives already, didn’t you?” Clyde had read the report of Vandeventer’s interview during his recent efforts to play catch-up and not look like a complete idiot.

  “Yeah.” Vendeventer shook his head. “Boy, it’s a real shame about Marwan. I’m hoping they find him alive and well—but that seems less and less likely.”

  Several dozen questions had already come to Clyde’s mind. But almost all of them had been asked by the Wapsipinicon detectives. Vandeventer’s answers had been detailed and grammatically perfect—interviewing scientists was a piece of cake. Besides, it wasn’t Clyde’s job to be grilling witnesses—he had to go out and win an election first. And he wasn’t winning any elections here in this corridor inhabited by foreign students who couldn’t vote.

  “Gotta run,” Clyde said. “Vote Banks.”

  eleven

  THE CABBIE drove the five miles up to the CIA entrance off the parkway and stopped a bit past the curve that concealed the guardhouse from the highway. Betsy, deep in thought, had not got her badge out, but she didn’t need to. The cabbie and the gate guard knew each other. He drove past the Bucky Fuller Auditorium, into the U drive, and dropped her off at the Nathan Hale statue. Betsy reached into her purse for the fare, but the cabbie waved his hand—“No need, madam, the gentleman took care of it. Have a good day.” Then, motioning toward Nathan Hale, he said, “Remember, be glad that you have only one life to give for your country.”

  She was early and the day was beautiful, so she found a nearby bench to collect her thoughts. How curious, she mused, to have uttered one sentence and caused all this. How curious, too, was Spector, and what he had said about the President. Could that be for real?

  How should I play this? she asked herself. She remembered her first graduate seminar at the University of Idaho. She was the only woman in an econometrics seminar. She knew very little at that time about economic modeling and number crunching, but she knew that the men in the class had real contempt for her. She was new, she was not pretty, and she was there for the thrashing. She had remained quiet, had given her paper, and had been hammered without mercy. The professor who ran the seminar, and who hated her mentor, Larkin Schoendienst, urged his men on much like Caligula urging on the gladiators at the colosseum. She had survived. But she had felt raped.

  She was a good girl, but she wasn’t stupid enough to repeat that experience. Betsy would follow Spector’s advice. She would say, “Gee whiz, sir, I just don’t know.” Or, “Gee whiz, sir. I haven’t got the whole story.” She was as much at risk here as she had been out in the irrigated potato fields of the Snake River basin. There were rattlesnakes all over here, too, except that she didn’t have her pellet gun and dog, Katie, with her. But she had her survival skills. Her spirits began to rise. She fished in her purse and pulled out her billfold. Cassie had wanted to see what pictures Betsy carried and had let out a whoop when the only one she saw was of Katie, a Labrador mix, sitting in the back of the pickup with her doggie grin on and red tongue hanging out. Betsy looked at that picture and a broad smile spread across her face. It felt strange. She hadn’t smiled in days.

  Spector was right. She would not make the mistake she’d made with the attaché back in March. She would not exceed her task. She would not fall into the bureaucratic trap. She would complete her task to the letter and walk out bloodied but unbowed.

  As she walked in, the limousine carrying the DCI—her boss for the last week—pulled up. She had seen him once before, when he had come to the Castleman Building to eat pizza with the staff, something his personnel people had encouraged after Casey had stroked out. She smiled at him, he opened the door for her. As she walked in, she heard him ask an assistant, “Who’s that?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Vandeventer?”

  She stepped aside and let him and his people go through security together while she dug her badge out of her purse. When she went through, the DCI was waiting for her. He introduced himself and said, “We look forward to hearing your report today.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir. I feel so honored to be able to share my findings at that level.”

  “By the way, you should know that Dr. Millikan will be coming out to join us.”

  “Oh! So much the better!”

  “See you on seven,” he said, exchanged a What a ditz look with his aide, and headed for the executive elevator.

  Betsy crowded onto the staff elevator, which stopped at all the intervening floors. She finally got to seven and went straight to her nook. She logged on and paged through her bioweapons report, the best she’d been able to come up with over the last week. No doubt the DCI’s minions had already copied it and pored over it, highlighting all the soft spots—of which there were many.

  She closed that document, pulled up her soybean report, and printed all forty pages of it on the laser printer. She carried it to the other end of the hall and had fifteen copies printed up. While the machine was running, she went to the rest room to straighten herself up. Through the frosted-glass window she heard a helicopter descending on the nearby helipad. Millikan had arrived.

  She went to the supplies closet and got twelve binders for her report, then back to the photocopy room to collate them, humming to herself as she stacked the pages and snapped them into the binders. Then she sensed a hostile presence, smelled the same kind of perfume that her least-favorite third-grade teacher had always worn. It was the DCI’s executive secretary, Margaret Hume. Betsy turned and said, “Hi!” as chirpily as she could.

  Hume merely glowered and blocked the door. Behind her she could see Millikan walk by with his entourage, followed shortly by the director of the Iraqi task force out of Operations—she didn’t know his name. The director of the Office of Program Analysis and Coordination. The director of Economic Analysis. The director of Science and Technology. The deputy DCI, liaisons from DIA and NSC, the deputy director of Operations. All of them men in dark suits, moving quietly and purposefully, all waiting for her performance. She should have been too intimidated to stand up.

  “Time for me to go,” Betsy cooed sweetly.

  “When it’s time,” the steely Mrs. Hume replied.

  “Maggie,” Betsy asked, taking great pleasure in watching the anger flare in the thirty-year veteran’s face, “do you think the Agency is guilty of treating its female employees unfairly?”

  “Absolutely not. The Agency loves its people.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed,” said Betsy, getting up. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Not till it’s time.”

  “Maggie,” Betsy said, “I grew up moving irrigation pipe and digging potatoes. I weigh two hundred pounds. It’s time for my meeting. In about five seconds all two hundred pounds of me is going to come through that doorway as fast as I can walk, which is pretty fast. Now, please don’t tell me that I have to resort to physical intimidation to get out of this room.”

  Betsy turned her back on Margaret Hume, gathered up her binders into a stack, and cradled them in her arms. She turned to the door to find the executive secretary still doggedly planted there in her path. Betsy fixed her gaze on a point somewhere behind Margaret Hume’s head and strode forward, building quickly up to the full head of steam that she used when stomping down the hill from work. At the last minute Mrs. Hume lost the game of chicken; realizing that Betsy wasn’t kidding, she backed awkwardly out of the way. Betsy heard the satisfying snap of a heel coming loose from Mrs. Hume’s shoe. She slumped against the corridor wall and Betsy pushed by. “Have a lovely day, Maggie.”

  She arrived at the door of the conference room just as a lackey came out for her. “You’re he
re?” he said with some surprise.

  “It’s time for the meeting, isn’t it?”

  She walked into the room with its splendid kidney-shaped Florentine-marble table. Every chair was taken. She turned to the lackey and said, “Where am I to go?”

  “Over there,” he whispered, gesturing to the spotlighted podium.

  “Gentlemen,” the DCI began, for there were surely no women there except for Betsy and, bringing up the rear, the limping Margaret Hume, “our stated agenda today is what to do with Iraq’s export-import credits. As you know, there is severe pressure from certain circles on the Hill to cut these sources of support for Mr. Hussein. The President has already received our reports on Mr. Hussein’s use of funds both foreign and domestic, both internally generated and externally donated.” He paused, as if to consider the rhetorical elegance of what he had just said. “As most of you know, we reached no stated consensus on what to do and recommended further study on the Hill of this issue.”

  Polite, barely perceptible smiles spread around the room. The DCI had just stated that the intelligence community had cobwebbed the anti-Iraqi forces. There were enough pro-Iraqi factions on the Hill to schedule hearings that would last until Saddam died of old age.

  “Consequently, the actual agenda for today is to consider Ms. Vandeventer’s reports on possible misuse of agricultural funds by Iraq. If you’ll open the envelope in front of you, you will see the history of this particular question. In February, Ms. Vandeventer was on a briefing team for our agricultural attaché to Baghdad. After finishing her report she added her concerns about the distribution and application of the Food for Peace grants. Word made its way up the chain to the ambassador, who communicated her concern to the secretary of state.” He looked around and saw that there was nobody there yet from State. “Mr. Baker considered it important that that concern in turn be communicated to the President. Dr. Millikan, will you continue the story?”

  Millikan cleared his throat. “I hate this time of year in Washington. The allergies set off a river in my head.” The assembled directors indicated their sympathy. Betsy, the only one standing, began to notice that her nose was running, too. She felt a sneeze building.