The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  Kevin was a sweet drunk—during college he had frequently awakened next to girls he didn’t know, who had always assured him of this. As he drove over the Mississippi, looking at the barge trains headed downstream, he resolved that he would have to get a grip on himself—learn what to drink, and how much of it.

  The Chicago stations were dying out, and all he could pick up was country and western, which he didn’t like. He turned off the stereo, fished a pocket tape recorder out of his briefcase, and began to dictate his trip report for Professor Larsen. One of the secretaries in Larsen’s pool would type it and expertly clean up the phrases that weren’t very coherent. “Arrived D.C. 3 July for appointments at USDA’s Foreign Ag desk. Checked out the rumors that there might be some recision on our subcontinent wheat-rust grant. Your golfing buddy Congressman Fowler has great staff. They homed in on that sucker just as it was coming into committee and covered our butts. The National Geographic piece still works wonders, though it has precious little to do with science.”

  Whoops, better erase that. He backed the tape up while passing a couple of semis at eighty-five miles an hour, fishtailed a bit, and got back into the right lane just in time for a red Corvette to whoosh by him doing at least one hundred. “Reggie Marsh, desk officer for Brazil, sends his regards. Then across the Mall and down a ways to State and a chat with our friends at USAID. They wanted us to make sure to keep in contact with your Iraqi students so that in case of more hostilities between them and Iran, they could serve as channels for technology and funding and (reading between the lines a little bit) intelligence. Hugh Reinckens, one of your former students, sent his regards. FYI, he isn’t doing so well careerwise.”

  He pulled over at a rest stop, emptied his bladder, bought a Coke, and climbed back in for the final half hour of the drive. “University liaison at USIA bitched at us—they are getting picky about some of the documentation on our current stable of Jordanian grad students. Someone in town is pressuring them to the effect that some of those students should have their papers rechecked or else lose their student visas. Probably fallout from the Habibi murder. Anyway, I asked for a half year, because most of the Jordanians will be gone by Christmas anyway. In a classic example of right hand not knowing what left hand is doing, the folks at the student visa office checked our three brand-new Jordanians right through.

  “Went to the Jordanian Embassy to talk to the cultural attaché. He was very pleased to hear about the three new students. Didn’t want to talk much after that.

  “The next day I celebrated our nation’s independence.

  “On the fifth I made the rounds of National Academy of Sciences, Ag, AID offices in Rosslyn, NSF, and Food for the Future. Good reports across the board—everyone is pleased with the work we’re doing for them, eager to continue supporting that work. NSF wants to funnel some cross-discipline work your way—I’ll pass the papers along.”

  After that Kevin had spent three days making the rounds of the embassies of countries in Africa, South America, and Asia where EIU had set up research stations. He glossed over these meetings in his report. There wasn’t much to say about them. Everyone was happy. They had no reason not to be—much of the money channeled through Larsen’s operation ended up in the private Swiss bank accounts of the officials concerned. Kevin barely remembered these meetings anyway, since many of these people had served him drinks. The mere memory of this made him powerfully thirsty—the dry, cold air blasting from the Camry’s air conditioner, combined with the hot sun coming in through the left-side window, had left him dehydrated. A big glass of iced tea, perhaps with a shot of whiskey in it, would go down well. He could think of little else as he blasted across the town line into Wapsipinicon and headed for his duplex north of the university. He punched the button on his garage-door opener, pulled inside, and entered the place through his kitchen door. The blast of the air conditioner almost knocked him down—he had forgotten to turn it off before he’d left. The electric bill would be a thing of excess. Dad would never have left any room or building without first turning off everything that was there to be turned off.

  There were fifteen calls on the answering machine, most of them telephone sales—lots of no-load mutual funds. Apparently he had found his way onto some list of newly affluent suckers that was circulated among marketing companies.

  Larsen had called to tell him to check in as soon as he got back. He left a message on Larsen’s answering machine. “Everything went great, I’ll have the report on your desk by noon tomorrow.”

  Mom called to say that she wanted a full report on Betsy in D.C. He called and assured her that Betsy was okay, that he was okay, that D.C.was beautiful with all of the fireworks (none of which he had seen).

  And then a vaguely familiar voice, clearly Midwest born and bred. “Howdy, Dr. Vandeventer, sorry to bother you again—this is Deputy Sheriff Clyde Banks. Came in to the jail this morning and found out that Sayed Ashrawi had been deported in the middle of the night. He’s back in Jordan now, I guess. Just wondered if you had any comments. Good-bye.”

  There was something deeply troubling to Kevin about the whole Habibi murder, and especially about the doggedness of Clyde Banks in pursuing the issue. Hearing Banks’s voice coming out of his answering machine, he felt the pit of his stomach tighten up right away. He should have stayed in D.C., where all he had to do was ride around in taxis and have foreigners buy him drinks. He felt suddenly sweaty. He went to the fridge, pulled out a container of iced tea that had been sitting there for a week and a half, and poured some into a Flintstones jelly glass. Then he opened the high cabinet above the fridge, took out a bottle of Jim Beam, and dumped some in—he thought it looked like about one jigger, maybe a shade more. In his haste to get home he had forgotten to buy groceries or even to stop at a drive-through, so he grabbed a handful of saltines from a cupboard. His bowels went into action at the mere sight of food, so he strode to the bathroom, set the jelly jar and the crackers down on the counter, dropped his pants, and took a seat.

  Banks had not divulged his theory of the Habibi case to Kevin, but Kevin could read between the lines easily enough: Banks believed that Marwan Habibi had been dead that night in Lab 304—that Kevin had seen not a drunk and unconscious colleague, but a warm corpse. It followed that all of the other men in Lab 304 that night had been not jovial party animals but cold-blooded plotters hatching a scheme to dump Habibi’s corpse in the way least damaging to them, their activities, and—by extension—Larsen’s rainmaking operation.

  It was a preposterous theory. But the mere idea that Kevin might have been that close to a bunch of foreign agents coldly manhandling a dead man around the Sinzheimer gave him chills.

  His cordless phone was sitting there on the counter in front of him. Kevin picked it up and dialed the direct-line number of one of his buddies in the Jordanian Embassy in Washington. There must be some simple explanation of the sudden deportation of Sayed Ashrawi. But the voice at the other end was that of a secretary. She politely but firmly rebuffed him. She must have been a new hire, because this was the first time Kevin had been treated so rudely.

  The doorbell rang. Kevin didn’t move, hoping that whoever it was would go away. But he had left his garage door open, so everyone who came by knew perfectly well that he was at home.

  He pulled his pants up and went to the door. The image in the peephole was that of the paperboy.

  “Hello, Scott,” Kevin said, hauling the door open.

  “It’s Craig,” the paperboy said. “Uh, you owe me for two months—fourteen fifty.”

  Kevin had taken his wallet out of his pocket when he’d come in, so he went back into the kitchen to get it. It was still full of crisp twenties from a D.C. cash machine, so new, they stuck together treacherously. He walked back to the front door, trying to pick them apart, and when he looked up, he was startled to see that Craig had been joined by a large and sturdy man with a stubbly haircut, looking sweaty and awkward in neatly pressed jeans and a striped dress shirt.
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  “Deputy Banks!” Kevin said weakly. “Just got your message—I just got back a few minutes ago.” He thrust a twenty at the paperboy and hardly noticed when the change and receipt were handed back to him. “The business with Ashrawi—I don’t know what to tell you. I tried making a phone call—”

  “This isn’t about that,” Banks said, blinking in surprise through his thick glasses. “As you may’ve heard, I’m running for sheriff, and I’m trying to knock on every door in Forks County. And now it’s your turn.”

  The paperboy had moved on to the next duplex. Banks looked at Kevin appraisingly. “You okay?”

  “Just got back from D.C. Bad airline food,” Kevin essayed.

  “They tell me it’s pretty bad,” Banks said. “Speaking of which, mind if I use your bathroom? Too much iced tea.”

  “Sure,” Kevin said.

  “I already know the way. All these duplexes are the same,” Banks said. He entered the duplex, seeming to nearly fill the doorway, and found his way back. Kevin heard a clattering sound and a muffled curse. When the deputy came out a minute later, he looked sheepish. “Knocked your glass and your crackers into the sink,” he said. “I owe you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Can I at least mix you another drink or something?”

  “Please don’t give it another thought,” Kevin said, appalled that Banks had smelled the whiskey.

  “Say, as long as I’m here, I was wondering if you could tell me again what old Marwan Habibi was working on in that lab.”

  “A kind of bacterium that lives in the bovine digestive tract,” Kevin said automatically. He had dropped into Interrogation Mode without even thinking about it.

  Banks blinked in surprise again. Kevin reminded himself that, as of four hours ago, he was back in the Midwest, where he was actually allowed to take his time in conversation, where hasty responses might strike some people as suspicious. He wished Banks hadn’t spilled his drink.

  “Could they live in a human?” Banks asked.

  “I don’t know the specifics. But I’d be surprised if they couldn’t,” Kevin said.

  “Could he have died from those bacteria, then?”

  “Not unless he died from farting too much, Deputy.”

  Banks didn’t seem to find that very funny. But he did change the subject. “Seems that Ashrawi was suspected of having killed someone in Jordan—some kind of family-feud type of deal. Supposedly, while he was sitting in our jail in Nishnabotna, some new evidence happened to turn up over there, and they just had to bring him back so that their courts could have first crack at him. Then we can have him back. What do you think they’ll do to him—cut his head off?”

  “I believe you’re thinking of Saudi Arabia,” Kevin said.

  “I’m not sure we could have convicted him anyway,” Banks offered.

  “Really? I thought you had great evidence.”

  “Well, I did, too, until the quarterly death statistics came out at the beginning of July.”

  “Quarterly death statistics?”

  “For the whole state of Iowa. Health department plots all the deaths on a little map. Color coded. Most of the dots are on nursing homes and they’re green, which means, more or less, that the person died of old age. A few red dots in Des Moines and the university towns—those are AIDS deaths. Yellow dots for traffic accidents.”

  Kevin wanted Banks to go home. Banks was supposed to be here on a brief campaign stop, a charade that had now vanished. This mercilessly detailed explanation of the death map had to have a point. Kevin kept waiting for the nightstick to come out and crack him over the head.

  “Could I please have a glass of that iced tea?” Banks said.

  “Sure,” Kevin said, and got up.

  “No whiskey in mine, thanks,” Banks said as Kevin left the room.

  There were no clean glasses, only a thermal coffee cup from APCO to which he’d lost the lid. Kevin filled it with the tea, threw a couple of cubes into it, and came back to find Banks leafing through some scientific papers he’d left on the coffee table.

  “So you were saying?” Kevin finally said.

  “Well, usually each quarterly map looks the same as the last. But during the second quarter of this year, it was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Along the Iowa River, between Nishnabotna and where it joins the Mississippi, there were a whole lot of deaths from lung and heart ailments. Way more than usual. Now, the state health department came and checked it out, but you know bureaucrats—their dream is to have a quiet day. So they said that the lung deaths were a consequence of the flu epidemic, and the heart deaths were a statistical anomaly.”

  Kevin couldn’t help noticing that Banks pronounced the words “statistical anomaly” easily and perfectly, as if the sheriff’s department forced every deputy to pass a monthly diction test.

  What do you think they’ll do to him—cut his head off? Banks was good at playing stupid.

  “You have a different theory?” Kevin asked.

  “Funny thing is, none of the deaths occurred upstream of Lake Pla-Mor,” Banks said. “And none occurred prior to the night you saw Marwan Habibi carried out of Lab Three-oh-four.”

  “Ah,” Kevin said.

  “Half of these cases were in Forks County, so our county coroner, Barney Klopf, signed the death certificates. And I know old Barney, so he let me have a peek at the records. And you know what? The lung deaths looked just the same as the heart deaths. There was no difference between ’em.”

  “Is that your opinion, or—”

  “And you know another thing? All of those people had had contact with fish from the river before they died. Lutefisk makers, fishermen, fellows out shooting carp with bow and arrow.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, I got lots of doors to knock on,” Banks said, “so I think I better see myself out. Thanks for the tea. And don’t go eating any fresh carp, all right, Kevin?”

  Kevin retrieved his glass from the sink, went to the kitchen, and made himself another drink. As he was doing so, it occurred to him for the first time to wonder whether Banks had just made up that whole story about the death map. It didn’t make much sense, when he thought about it. Kevin couldn’t believe he’d fallen for the ruse.

  twenty-three

  JUST AT the moment Clyde was halfway between his unit and Thomas Charles “Tick” Henry’s screened-in porch, Henry’s dog made its presence known by coming round the corner of the garage, raising its hackles, crouching, and beginning to emit a low growl almost like the purr of an idling diesel. The dog had not revealed itself until Clyde was halfway between the unit and the front door, exposed on a barren glacis of creeping Charlie, crabgrass, and faded aluminum beer cans. Clyde unsnapped his holster.

  The important thing was not to show fear.

  Clyde changed direction and lunged straight toward the onrushing dog, which, like all other bad dogs he had ever seen, was some kind of offshoot of the race of German shepherds (or, as people around there called them, perhaps ironically, police dogs). Tick Henry’s dog was so startled that it actually faltered; and when Clyde shouted, “Get the hell out of here!” into its face, it planted its feet and came to a complete stop, its scraggly dewclaws snagging long skeins of creeping Charlie so that the whole surface of the lawn moved around him.

  There was a moment of silence, and Clyde heard a low hissing noise from the screened-in porch. The sound of someone drawing on a cigarette. Clyde looked that way, but the only illumination now came from the big hissing farm light on the garage, which was enshrouded by a more or less infinite number of small insects. Larger black shapes briefly eclipsed it from time to time: bats going after the bugs.

  Finally the dog’s ears rotated to the side a few degrees, flattened just a bit. Instantly Clyde stomped forward two more strides and shouted, “Get the hell out of here!” The dog turned, ran away, and looked back at Clyde, beginning to wag its tail.

  “You maced my dog!�
�� shouted Tick Henry, kicking the screen door open. “You maced my dog!” He stepped out into the yard, moving stiffly on the front steps, hindered by his football-ravaged knees. He must be pushing fifty, Clyde realized.

  “You maced my dog,” Tick Henry said. It was clear from the conviction on his face that he was one of that breed of mankind, frequently encountered in Clyde’s line of work, who could make themselves believe anything simply by uttering it three times.

  “I don’t carry Mace,” Clyde said, “because I got a gun. And if your dog had taken one more step toward me, I would have shot it.”

  “That’s police brutality!”

  “If you could read, Tick Henry, you would know that I ain’t police but sheriff’s department. You know the difference?”

  “Huh?”

  “The sheriff’s department’s main job seems to be serving papers on the likes of you—and your houseguest,” said Clyde, stepping forward and waving a court summons in the air.

  Tick Henry said nothing at all, just drew on his cigarette and squinted at Clyde. The farm light went out for a moment as an especially large bat, or perhaps even an owl, eclipsed it.

  “I know he’s in there,” Clyde said. “Everybody knows you’ve been sheltering him.”

  “So Grace went out and got herself a goddamn lawyer,” Tick said, and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Everyone’s entitled to a lawyer,” Clyde said. “Buck could have got one if he’d been on his toes. Then the divorce could have happened right here. As it is, it’s going to happen in Seattle—more hassle for Buck.”

  “Seattle? Grace took off to Seattle?” Tick Henry shook his head again. “I suppose Seattle’s dyke paradise or something.”