The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  Having survived that cataclysm, the red buildings had been immune to just about all other ravages except for the human failings of bad taste and cupidity. Some of the best ones had been torn down and replaced with modern boxes, sheathed in metal and glass and covered with flat, leaky roofs. The First National Bank of NishWap had established its Courthouse Square branch in one of these. The upper story contained a small office suite that was occupied primarily by buckets and plastic garbage cans positioned under the worst leaks. From time to time their custodians would swing through and empty out the buckets.

  A few years ago they had found a more lucrative use for that top-floor suite: they had rented it to the federal government, which had sited the Forks County office of the FBI there.

  And so it was that, two days after his crushing defeat in the 1990 election at the hands of longtime incumbent Kevin Mullowney, Clyde Banks angle-parked his big wagon in front of that glass-and-metal box in Courthouse Square and turned off its big 460.

  He did not, however, turn off the radio, because an interesting item was running on the news. It was President Bush, explaining to the nation that he was going to send a whole lot more troops to the Gulf. A whole lot more. Clyde sat and listened to the President for a while, drumming on the steering wheel. This did not exactly come as news to him, because Desiree had told him last week that the Big Red One was deploying. Knowing this so far in advance of the President’s speech gave him quite an unfamiliar sense of being a savvy insider. This, Clyde supposed, was probably how Terry Stonefield felt every day of his life.

  Clyde did not listen to President Bush because the information was new to him. He listened because his heart fluttered and skipped beats all the time; because he could not sleep at night for thinking about Desiree; because he had lost his appetite and would only pick at his food; because a powerful urge to weep came over him at the oddest times. His courage needed bolstering. In some strange way the campaign had served this purpose for him until the day before yesterday.

  Now there was nothing to occupy him except worry, and so he sat there in his station wagon for a few minutes, its woody sides all gummed up with duct-tape stickum from the recently stripped-off campaign signs, and listened to President Bush, hoping that he would hear something reassuring. He had inherited a skepticism of politicians from Ebenezer and was not in the habit of looking to Washington for comfort and spiritual guidance. But today he would take comfort wherever he could get it.

  He did feel a little better by the time he switched off the radio and got out of the car. He wasn’t sure why; the speech had been all about how hundreds of thousands of military personnel, including his wife, were going to Saudi to clobber Saddam. But it always helped a little when the President complained about what a son of a bitch Saddam was. And it helped more to know that Desiree would be accompanied by half a million other people. If the President sent half a million people off on a fool’s errand, it would hardly be the first time. But half a million people possessed a good deal of common sense among them; if they were sent off on a fool’s errand, there would be repercussions. Half a million good people with tanks and helicopter gunships and telephone charge cards ought to be able to take care of themselves to some degree.

  It was late afternoon and dusk already. Heavy November clouds had sealed off the sky like steel plates. Light shone from the windows on the top floor. Clyde entered the door in the corner of the building and ascended a long, narrow flight of stairs. Numerous empty buckets and garbage cans were stacked on the landing at the top; weather had been dry recently. Clyde rapped on the door and then pushed it open.

  Marcus Berry had the whole office to himself. He’d spread out some papers on a big old folding table and draped his jacket over the back of a chair as he worked. When Clyde came in, he thrust his arms into the sleeves of the jacket and shrugged it on and stood up all in the same motion, then crossed the room to shake hands.

  “It was nice to see you at Jack’s place the other night,” Clyde said.

  “Hey, when Jack Carlson invites me to a defeat party for Clyde Banks, who am I to turn it down?” Berry said. “Have a seat, Clyde.”

  “Can’t stay. Left my baby with the neighbors.”

  “Well, I hope you’re here to drop off the job application,” Berry said brightly.

  Clyde felt himself blushing. He handed over the completed form. “Excellent,” Berry said.

  “Well, you might change your mind after you read this,” Clyde said. He was about to lose his nerve, so he took a sheaf of handwritten notes out of his back pocket and threw it into the middle of the table, like a desperate riverboat gambler laying down a pair of sixes.

  “Typewriters all busted down there at the sheriff’s department?” Berry said.

  “This ain’t an official report,” Clyde said. “It’s a tip from a concerned citizen.”

  Berry pondered this as he walked slowly up and down the length of the room, stretching his muscles.

  “Not to bring up a sore subject,” Berry said, “but have you raised this with your boss?”

  “I think it’s more of a federal issue,” Clyde said.

  “Some bad guys crossed a state line, huh?”

  “I think these bad guys have crossed some national borders,” Clyde said.

  “Ah. You think we should send a copy to the DEA?”

  “It’s not a drug thing,” Clyde said.

  “Not a drug thing,” Berry repeated.

  Clyde was getting less and less sure of himself and felt his face getting very hot. The report looked foolish resting there on the table, handwritten on lined paper like a child’s homework assignment. “If I tell you straight out, you’ll laugh,” he said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “But if you read that,” Clyde said, nodding at his report, “I’ve got it all explained from start to finish, and maybe it won’t seem so foolish.”

  “Well, I’ll be certain and have a good look at it, then,” Berry said. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Clyde?”

  “You already did it,” Clyde said. “I’ll see you around, Marcus.”

  “Watch your step,” Berry said, “those stairs are not for the faint of heart.”

  Clyde considered these words as he walked down the steps, wondering whether he was faint of heart. Sometimes he sure felt that way.

  forty-four

  “JUST TO expedite this,” Hennessey said as the cab pulled away from Langley, “let’s just stipulate that I’m an amoral, manipulative son of a bitch and that what I did was unforgivable.”

  The man did have an infuriating talent for taking the wind out of Betsy’s sails. She heaved a big sigh and looked away from him, staring out the window at the wooded parkland surrounding the G.W. Parkway.

  “If you needed a Trojan horse into the Agency,” she finally said, “why didn’t you just ask? Why go to the trouble to set me up with a fake life and fake friends?”

  “The first thing that ought to be said,” Hennessey said, “is that although those people have gotten to know you for professional reasons that are sort of nasty and sneaky, some of them have come to love, or at least like, you for personal reasons that are perfectly sincere, and you should not make the mistake of rejecting them.”

  “I appreciate your saying that,” Betsy said. “But I know that I’ll never forgive you.”

  Hennessey sipped his coffee and thought about that one for a while, tilting his head back and forth as he worked through some kind of internal debate. “No,” he finally said, gently and almost reluctantly. “No. That’s not acceptable.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not acceptable? What you did sucks and I’ll never forgive you. Accept that!”

  Hennessey held up one hand. “Oh, by all means. I’ll stipulate from the very beginning that I suck. A lot of my associates suck, too—or else I wouldn’t bother to hire them. We all suck for a living. But what’s not acceptable is for you to be high-handed and condemnatory.”

  “What’s wrong with cond
emning it?”

  Hennessey sat up straight and became coolly angry. “What the fuck do you think you’ve been doing the last five years, sitting at that workstation? You type in requests for information, and the information appears, as if by magic. Where the fuck do you think that information comes from? You think it’s all from the Encyclopedia Britannica?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Of course not. It comes from the world, Betsy. It comes from sources who are really out there embroiled in the fly-blown streets of shitty Third World cities all over the globe. And I’m not talking about noble James Bond types, either. I’m not romanticizing this. That information is gathered in any way possible. Any way. Up to and including killing people, or sending them to their deaths. Blackmailing them. Threatening them. Buying them off. Stealing from them. Defrauding them. Preying on their weaknesses for cute boys or cute girls. You ever seen war, Betsy? I have, and I can tell you it is like a fucking universe of total moral degradation. That’s the kind of environment that the information comes out of. And you sit there at the Castleman Building and pull it up on your screen like some kind of a fucking librarian and have no concept of how it got to be there. So don’t get high-handed and condemnatory with me. You wanted to work for the CIA. You got what you wanted. And whatever naughty things I’ve done to you don’t even register on my moral Richter scale.”

  Betsy could find nothing to say to Hennessey. But she knew better than to challenge him. He could blend into the background when it suited his purposes. But when he wanted to command a room—or the backseat of a taxicab—he could do that, too.

  They rode in silence for a few minutes. Finally she said, “Just tell me that it was worth it. Tell me that something good has come out of all this.”

  Hennessey smirked. “Good?”

  “Useful, then. Is anyone paying attention to the problems I was talking about?”

  “We’ve been working on it,” Hennessey said. “Expanding on your ideas.”

  “Expanding how?”

  “Well, you assumed, and we agreed, that the Iraqis are using university classrooms to train their people. University lab facilities to do their research. University computers to store their data and send their E-mail. And all that is true.” Hennessey took another gulp of coffee and sat up straight, warming to the subject. “But you didn’t go far enough, and neither did we. Until now. And now it’s probably too goddamn late to do anything about it.”

  Betsy was still nonplussed. She shrugged, waiting for the rest. Hennessey stared out the window at the Potomac for a minute and then continued. “Production. The sons of bitches may have set up a biological-weapons production facility somewhere in this country. Probably Forks County, Iowa.”

  “Anthrax?”

  “Botulin.”

  “Figures. That would be easier to grow,” Betsy said. “You know, it makes sense in a way.” She thought about it for a while, then shook her head. “But I don’t buy it. Why would they do it on foreign ground?”

  “Millikan and the task force agree with you. They refuse to believe the story. Millikan won’t go to Bush with this information.” Hennessey nodded at the notes. “Not unless we can back it up with something respectable. And I have to admit that what we’ve got is pretty tenuous. I believe it on even days and don’t believe it on odd days.”

  “What do you have?”

  “At this moment, Betsy, the linchpin of our national security vis-à-vis biological weapons is the random observations of a big, dumb-looking deputy county sheriff who just got the shit beat out of him in a local election and whose wife is a nurse going off to the Gulf.”

  “Isn’t Marcus there? Can’t he dig anything up?”

  “What’s to dig up? This whole operation is so far under the radar that there simply isn’t any objective evidence to support it. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: the deputy county sheriff has a sidekick. A Vakhan Turk nationalist and suspected terrorist who has been personally running a mole at Langley for the last three years. I almost have enough evidence to arrest this character, and I definitely have enough to arrest his goddamn mole. But instead I’ve got to play hands-off because I don’t want to blow the botulin thing.” Hennessey shook his head sourly. “Life is fucking crazy sometimes.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Hennessey threw up his hands. “I don’t know. If Millikan hadn’t cobwebbed me with this goddamn task force, I’d move our whole office out to Nishnabotna. But the fact is I am cobwebbed. The only person who has any freedom of action is this poor son of a bitch in Iowa.”

  The cabbie took them to Arlington and dropped them off in front of a barbecue restaurant. Hennessey got out and said, “Thanks, Hank, good job.”

  From the Bangladeshi came a Mississippi accent so thick that Betsy couldn’t understand it. Hank looked around, enjoying the surprise on her face, and said, “I was a theater major at Ole Miss. Couldn’t make it on the stage. Ended up joining Hennessey’s li’l group.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Heck, Renaissance Man, I guess I’ll tell you my life story some other time.”

  Paul Moses had emerged from the restaurant and was standing there looking sheepishly at Betsy. He and Hennessey exchanged nods, and then Hennessey got back into the cab with Hank and drove away, leaving the two of them standing on the sidewalk staring awkwardly at their shoes.

  Paul had handled all of the details after Kevin’s death, even flying out to Idaho with the body. He had presumed nothing, had given Betsy plenty of space, and had been flawlessly polite and professional from start to finish. He had stayed at the Days Inn in Nampa and dedicated one day to driving up to the Palouse to visit his parents, then, after making sure that Betsy needed nothing more, had flown back to D.C. Betsy had been back for almost a week now but hadn’t seen him yet. For that matter, she hadn’t seen any of the other members of the gang—not even Cassie, who had been out of town on TDY.

  “Welcome back,” Paul said. “We put together a little shindig for you, if you’re not too alienated to come in and say hi.”

  She could not keep from feeling a wave of affection for him. What had happened that night in Wildwood said everything about his character. He had been hard as a lead pipe for two hours while they’d necked on the couch, but when the time had come to actually do it, he had lost his erection and been unable to get it back. Betsy understood that there were many factors that could cause male impotence. But she liked to think that in Paul’s case, on that night in Wildwood, it had been caused by his own feelings of shame—shame over the deception that he and Hennessey’s other people were practicing on Betsy. Paul had talked in Wildwood about how much he looked forward to escaping from D.C., and while that might have been part of the deception—a way of getting Betsy to drop her guard—she was convinced that he had been sincere.

  “I might as well at least poke my head in,” she said.

  Paul led Betsy into the restaurant and straight back to a private function room, where several people jumped up and shouted, “Surprise!” Cassie was there, and Marcus Berry, and so were their friends Jeff and Christine who had been on the Wildwood trip. They’d hung up a banner: WELCOME BACK IDAHO!

  Hennessey had chosen his words carefully in the cab: he had allowed that some of these people genuinely liked Betsy and hadn’t been faking it the whole time. Looking around at their faces, Betsy could rapidly tell who really cared for her (Paul and Cassie) and who had just shown up to be social (everyone else). And, indeed, most of them drifted away after having a drink and shaking her hand, and the party dwindled to Paul and Cassie and Betsy. After an hour or two Paul gave the women a ride back to the Bellevue, and finally Betsy and Cassie were left to themselves, sprawled out on the furniture, staring across the living room at each other.

  “Sorry,” Cassie said after several long minutes had gone by.

  “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 reass
ured 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.”