The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the older fellow said, tossing a newspaper onto the bench. “My niece says it’s all about oil.”

  “Beg pardon?” Clyde said.

  “My niece. Nice girl. College student—you know how they are.”

  “I suppose.” Clyde hadn’t been a college student himself, but he had arrested enough of them to know their patterns.

  “So last week I’m trying to carve the goddamn turkey, and all she wants to do is talk about how the Gulf thing is just a grubby squabble over oil.”

  “What do you think?” Clyde said. He had participated in enough lunch-counter discussions to know that this was always a sure-fire comeback.

  “Well, I suppose she’s got a point, in her self-righteous college-student way. I don’t imagine we’d have half a million people over there if it was some shitty little country in Africa. So maybe it is about oil.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Clyde said.

  “So should we be over there like we are, just to keep dibs on a shitload of oil?”

  “Yep,” Clyde said. “We should.”

  “But all we hear about from Bush is that Saddam is like Hitler. It’s always gestapo this and Hitler that, and how we’re going to uphold democracy in Kuwait—which is a feudal aristocracy, for Christ’s sake.”

  Clyde put his Trib in his lap and nodded out the window. The man turned round to see what Clyde was nodding at. The only thing in that direction was a First National Bank of NishWap; beyond that the barren cornfields stretched away to infinity. “What you looking at?” he inquired.

  “The electric sign,” Clyde said.

  The sign on the bank said 8:37, and then it said 6°F and then the equivalent in centigrade.

  “Six degrees,” Clyde said. “Pretty damn cold. And I don’t see many trees out there that we could use for firewood. So. We get oil, we live. We don’t get oil, we die.”

  The man turned back around and looked at Clyde. “Simple as that,” he said.

  “Oh, there’s probably a lot more to it that I don’t know about,” Clyde said, “but that’s how I look at it.”

  “Six degrees,” the man repeated. He picked up a USA Today and looked at the weather map on the back page. “That’s forty degrees cooler than Washington. Big difference. Forty degrees clarifies a lot of issues, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Clyde said, “I’ve never been to Washington.”

  “Well, you haven’t missed anything,” the man said. “You can take my word for it.”

  Something finally occurred to Clyde. He looked out into the parking lot and saw a couple of large navy-blue cars sitting in the lot with great clouds of steam coming from their tailpipes. Young men in suits and sunglasses sat in the cars talking into cellular telephones. He looked back at the other man, who had a slightly sheepish look on his face.

  “You the guy?” Clyde said, rising to his feet.

  “I’m the guy. Ed Hennessey,” the man said, rising and extending his hand. “Shit, you’re a big guy. But you weren’t a heavyweight?”

  “Nah,” Clyde said. “One weight class below heavyweight. I’m not that big by local standards.”

  “Well, certainly not compared to this Tab Templeton. He was a fucking behemoth,” Hennessey said. “I remember watching him years ago in the Olympics with this kind of morbid fascination. So when the file came across my desk, it was a real blast from the past. That poor son of a bitch.”

  Hennessey beckoned Clyde forward and into the restaurant. Clyde felt a little edgy walking past the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign so cavalierly. But Hennessey, as if he owned the place, led him straight back to a large booth in the corner, which could have seated the whole Dhont family. They drew a few stares as they sat down—not because Clyde was semifamous as a wrestling and political failure, and not because Hennessey was a stranger wearing a suit, but because only two of them were taking up a whole booth. Hennessey folded up his long overcoat and laid it out on the orange vinyl seat, and Clyde, knowing that the corner of the restaurant would be cold, just kept his parka on. Hennessey corralled the table’s ashtray and set up a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter in front of him, as if this fuel would keep him from freezing in the chill draft pouring down off the big picture windows. “I like this place,” he said, looking around. “Everyone is a real human being here.”

  Clyde did not really understand what Hennessey was talking about; it seemed like an odd thing to say. “They are pretty good with hash browns here,” he said.

  “Good! I’ll keep that in mind,” Hennessey said. He seemed sincerely pleased, as if this were the best news he’d heard all year. “Anyone can flip a burger, but hash browns are a black art,” he said.

  “I’ve fried up a few potatoes down at the jail,” Clyde said, “and always found it hard to achieve the right balance.”

  “I’m shanty Irish. A south Boston boy—you’ll hear the accent when I get excited or drunk,” Hennessey said. “We know potatoes. But most of us still can’t make a decent slab of hash browns to save our lives. We can boil stuff like nobody’s business, but frying is too exotic.”

  The waitress came around with an insulated pitcher of coffee. Hennessey thanked her warmly and poured mugs full for both Clyde and himself. Both men reached for the mugs as if they were life preservers in the wintry North Atlantic. “Didn’t realize your duties extended to cooking,” Hennessey said.

  “It’s a long story,” Clyde said.

  “Anyway, you’ll be out of the deputy business—when?”

  “Christmas Day at four in the afternoon.”

  “Shit. That bastard stuck you with the Christmas Day shift?”

  “I volunteered,” Clyde said, “since my wife isn’t home anyway.”

  “So that the others could spend it with their families. What a mensch,” Hennessey said. “What happens for you after Christmas?”

  “Try to live on Desiree’s combat pay. I’ve got some real-estate things going. We’ll find a way,” Clyde said.

  “You know, I’m tremendously impressed that I wasn’t able to sucker you with the prospect of an FBI job,” Hennessey said. “I did sucker you for a couple of weeks there, didn’t I? But not for long—which makes it all the more impressive.”

  “I guess you did have me going for a while,” Clyde said, taken aback by Hennessey’s frankness. The man used speech in a completely different way from anyone Clyde had ever known. People around here spoke like the Nishnabotna in February, when it was all jammed up with ice, and the movement of water underneath was only suggested by occasional groans and pops. Hennessey spoke like a free-running stream. Like a man whose speech was a tool of his trade, a tool he’d spent many decades perfecting.

  “Thought I was playing you like a fish,” Hennessey said, “and then I get this.” He reached into his breast pocket and took out a sheet of lined paper covered with Clyde’s neat handwriting. He pulled a pair of half glasses out of his other pocket and slipped them on. “I am withdrawing my application to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he read, “as I do not think it would advance my personal goals at this time.” He looked up over the glasses into Clyde’s eyes. Hennessey had emerald-green eyes in an otherwise colorless and withered face. They could be very cold and penetrating eyes, Clyde realized. “Now, that’s an interesting sentence. ‘Advance my personal goals.’ What does that mean, Clyde? Other than the obvious stuff like raising your kid.”

  Clyde’s heart jumped to a higher gear. He said nothing.

  “Does it have anything to do with Fazoul and the Iraqis? I need to know.”

  Clyde felt his chest getting all tight. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down.

  “Clyde, you’re scaring me,” Hennessey said. “Cool it with the emotions for a second. I want to know what are your intentions regarding those fucking ragheads and their botulin factory.”

  Clyde looked out the window and started grinding his teeth.

  “Yesterday,” Hennessey said, �
�you spent an hour and a half on the telephone with a JAG lawyer at Fort Riley, drawing up a last will and testament. True? You don’t have to speak. Just nod.”

  Clyde nodded.

  “Clyde, I’m a three-pack-a-day smoker with four kids and three ex-wives, and I didn’t draw up a will until a couple of years ago. What’s going on with you?”

  “Bullshit,” Clyde said. “That’s bullshit.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You’re CIA,” Clyde said. “I don’t think they’d let you out of the country without a will.”

  Hennessey raised his eyebrows and whistled. “Okay. Let me rephrase. I know some heavy smokers with kids and ex-wives who don’t work for the CIA, and who didn’t get around to thinking about their wills until they were twice as old as you, and a whole lot closer to the end of their life expectancy.”

  “What’s the CIA doing inside the United States?” Clyde said. “That’s unconstitutional.”

  “Oh, nice change of subject, Clyde. Don’t think I won’t come back to this. By the way, it isn’t unconstitutional. It’s just illegal as hell,” Hennessey said.

  “What are you doing illegally, then?”

  “Promise not to tell?”

  “Yup.”

  “Cross your heart and all that shit?”

  “I either promise or I don’t.”

  “Okay. Clyde, I shouldn’t tell you any of this, but I know my secrets are safe with you. None of the people who want to know this stuff will take you seriously—which is their fault, not yours. But that doesn’t matter. You’ll never tell because you promised you wouldn’t. You’ll never reveal what I’m going to tell you here at the Happy Chef, any more than you’ll describe to me the face of Mohammed Ayubanov. Just as Fazoul entrusted you with the face of Mo, as we affectionately call Mr. Ayubanov in certain precincts of northern Virginia, I’m entrusting you with the Tale of Ed.”

  The waitress came by. Hennessey ordered the number five, with extra hash browns on the side, and Clyde ordered the same thing; he reckoned that Hennessey would probably pay the tab, and so the extra potatoes did not seem extravagant.

  “Okay, Sherlock. As you have correctly deduced, I really work, and have always worked, for the CIA, which happens to be a dangerously screwed-up and mole-ridden organization. We recruit the most wonderful youngsters from places like Wapsipinicon and send them off to exotic lands and they never come back. Someone is selling them out—perhaps several someones are. We call these someones moles. Now, if you were running such an organization, how would you find the moles, Clyde?”

  “I guess I’d try to hire better people.”

  Hennessey threw his head back and laughed delightedly. When he’d got calmed down, he said, “But it’s the fucking federal government, Clyde. That’s not an option. We take what they send us. Now, in all seriousness, if you knew that moles existed, and you were pretty certain that they were posted here in CONUS, what would you do?”

  In the last couple of months Clyde had seen enough military paperwork to know that CONUS meant “continental United States.” “Well,” he said, “it’s illegal for you to actually do anything here.”

  “Right.”

  “Doesn’t the FBI handle counterintelligence?”

  “Yes. They keep saying so, anyway.”

  “Wouldn’t that extend to mole hunting?”

  “So far you are one hundred percent right, Clyde. It’s just that, at this point, there is a little hitch. See, catching foreign agents is one thing. Usually they are posted at foreign embassies, or at places like Eastern Iowa University. They are on alien soil. They are more vulnerable. They are easier targets for the FBI’s counterintel people. But a mole is a different thing. A mole is an American, hence operating on his own home territory, which makes everything a hundred times easier for him. And rather than having to penetrate our institutions from outside, he’s already ensconced in the holy of holies—the CIA. Do you have any idea how hard it is for the FBI to tackle a problem like that?”

  “Pretty hard, I guess.”

  “It’s a fucking nightmare. They can’t possibly make any headway without extensive cooperation from the CIA itself. And when we start down that road, we run into legality problems in no time flat. The lines are terribly ambiguous. If we sit down in a conference room with the FBI guys and tell them about someone we think is a little suspicious, are we violating the law against operating in the U.S.? Who the fuck knows? The way things are in Washington now, almost anything we do could be exposed and picked apart in some congressional hearing.

  “Besides, Clyde, if you think about it, we’ve got something of a catch-twenty-two here anyway. If the CIA is compromised by moles, then any efforts the CIA makes to find the moles, or to help the FBI find them, are also compromised. Makes you tear your hair out,” he said, running one hand back over his scalp, thinly veiled with steel-wool-colored hair. “So a few years ago, this one tired old war-weary son of a bitch came up with an idea. He was going to deal with this mole problem once and for all. He officially resigned from the CIA. He spent a year doing basically nothing—supposedly he was teaching on a part-time basis at Boston College, but that was bullshit. Then he came back down to Washington and began a new career—working for the FBI, in the counterintelligence office. And he brought a few handpicked people along with him from the Agency—some of those better people we should have hired to begin with, as you said. And he set about trying to root out moles from the CIA. For all intents and purposes, he was a CIA man. But he was operating under an FBI flag of convenience, which did two things for him: one, made the whole thing legal, and two, created a firewall between him and the mole-ridden Agency, so that his efforts would not be compromised before they could come to fruition.”

  “So how has your plan been working so far, Mr. Hennessey?”

  Hennessey grimaced and shrugged. “It was okay for a while,” he said. “We made some headway. But last week the shit really hit the fan. There are some people out there in Washington who don’t like me very much, and all of a sudden they are shocked, shocked to find that I’m doing what amounts to CIA work inside the U.S. They have managed to launch an investigation of yours truly by an inspector general, which, in D.C., is very scary and serious business.”

  “You going to prison?”

  “Oh, hell no. I’m much too careful. I’ll be back in a nice office at Langley within a month. But it does cramp my style pretty badly.”

  “What have you been doing in Forks County? The Iraqi thing doesn’t have anything to do with moles, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t. We’ve been here keeping an eye on your friend Fazoul.”

  “Why?”

  “We found a CIA person at Langley who was doing the wrong things—had too much money in his bank account, didn’t do so hot on the polygraph, etcetera. We put him under surveillance. We found that he was being run by a foreign agent based in Wapsipinicon, Iowa, of all places—obviously a graduate student at your fine university. This person turned out to be very hard to pin down—he was very good. We put Marcus out here with the task of finding which foreign graduate student was running the mole. And although we never found a smoking gun, we did build up some circumstantial evidence that the culprit was none other than your friend Fazoul. Which was a big surprise, because Fazoul is a Vakhan Turk—a man without a country. Your average dispossessed, landless ethnic group doesn’t have its act together well enough to place and run moles at the CIA, so I took an interest in Fazoul and his boss, Mohammed Ayubanov. The Vakhan Turks have become sort of like my hobby.

  “Then this goddamn horse-mutilation thing happened. Then I find myself in a turf battle. Marcus is my guy, remember, and he’s in Nishnabotna for one thing and one thing only, and that is to keep tabs on Fazoul and his merry men and wait for them to get in touch with their supposed mole at Langley. But all of a sudden the FBI is saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a man stationed there, let’s get him working on the horsies.’ So Marcus, who as you noticed is not a cop and never
will be, suddenly has to pretend to be a cop in order to preserve the fucking cover story about why he’s there, and instead of chasing Fazoul he’s running around after a bunch of goddamn horses.” Hennessey rolled his eyes. “Jesus. Never work for the government, Clyde.”

  “Doesn’t seem likely that I ever will.”

  “That’s good. People go into the government thing with these romantic ideas—just like you, a few weeks ago, when you filled out the job application. Then they encounter the reality and become cynical and jaded. Most of them quit at that point, which is the rational thing to do. But some of us stay on. Why would anyone stay on even after he had become cynical and jaded?”

  “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?”