The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  They didn’t talk much more as Knightly slammed his ZX across the rolling territory of northern Illinois, through the outskirts of Chicago, and into Midway Airport. Kevin tried to put all this out of his mind by running through his mental checklist for the dozenth time. He’d turned off the air conditioner in his apartment, the oven and burners were off, the iron unplugged. He’d left forwarding addresses and numbers. Larsen’s full-time, in-house travel specialist had reserved him a room at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, right across the Key Bridge from Georgetown where the meeting would take place, and only four blocks from Betsy’s apartment building—and Margaret’s.

  Once he had cleared his mental desk of all the reassuring normality, reality came back, and the fear and anxiety with it. For the last several months he had been constantly worrying that the IRS would audit him. The Habibi case, and Clyde Banks’s ongoing interest in the subject, also bothered him. Now to these nagging low-level anxieties was added a much more profound fear of this business with the new Jordanian students. Prior to the arrival of these new people in Wapsipinicon in mid-July, he had been on the phone with his friends at the Jordanian Embassy every day—sometimes several times a day. Since then they hadn’t called him once, and when he called them, they were always in meetings, or out of town.

  It had occurred to him that if he ever did find himself in trouble, he could expect very little help from the Rainmaker. Larsen treated Kevin with the same respect as he treated the keyboard of his laptop—something useful, functional, and eminently replaceable. The more authority Larsen gave him—the deeper into this business Kevin got—the more Larsen withdrew from him personally. Kevin’s bowels spasmed and he felt short of breath.

  He went through his mantra. I’m really okay. Nothing has changed. I just have to watch my drinking and stay calm. I’ve done nothing wrong.

  They went on board with their garment bags and found places to stuff them. Their seats were together. Dean Knightly took the window seat and seemed to enjoy the view of the Chicago skyline contrasted against the deep-blue waters of Lake Michigan. He could peer almost directly down into his beloved Wrigley Field, where the Cubs were being slaughtered by the Pirates.

  After the flight attendants had come through with sandwiches, Knightly picked up where he’d left off. “Look, NAISS has all of these panels, luncheons, banquet speakers, and the like. You can go if you want to. You’ll either run into people like yourself, many of whom are just looking for a way to drink on someone else’s tab and get laid in someone else’s bed, or the NAISS gerontocracy, who want to have their hands shaken and get awards for their distinguished service. The real business will take place in the bars and hotel rooms. I like to watch the people work each other and to see my old friends—all two of them. So you won’t see anything more of me after we hit National.”

  That was fine with Kevin, who wanted to see only one person in Washington. To his great delight Margaret had left a message at his hotel, saying that she would swing by after work so they could have a drink together. Kevin had every reason to think he could stretch the drink into dinner—and if he could, what was to prevent him from stretching dinner into something more intimate?

  He took a shower and shaved for the second time that day, leaving his face hot and razor burned, then made dinner reservations in a funky Caribbean restaurant in Adams-Morgan.

  He met Margaret in the lobby, and they took the elevator to the top floor of the hotel. She looked too good to be true—he couldn’t believe she’d just come off a long day at work. Betsy always looked blown and frazzled when she came back from work—maybe it was because she insisted on walking everywhere.

  Margaret blew past the “Please Wait to Be Seated” sign and grabbed the choicest table in the bar, by a window looking down toward Roosevelt Island. Margaret ordered club soda; Kevin ordered Stoli straight up and hold the water. “And we need some finger food.”

  “Finger food,” the waiter echoed, coolly mimicking Kevin’s country vowels. “Thumbs or pinkies?”

  “Pretzels and nuts, asshole,” Kevin said. The waiter raised his eyebrows, turned, and walked away, punching keys on his electronic order pad.

  “Not a good evening, huh?” Margaret said, resting her hand on his for a moment. The sensation ran up his arm and exploded in his brain. “What’s bothering you?”

  Kevin sat back. He wanted to stare at Margaret’s face all night long, but she was looking back at him with a penetrating gaze that forced him to look away. Instead he looked out the window at the traffic jam on the parkway and the Roosevelt Bridge, the planes landing at National. “It’s a long way from Forks County, Iowa,” he said. “And Forks is a long way from the potato farm. A lot of people come here to D.C. like it’s nothing—they use the city like a public phone booth. To me this is a big deal.” He shook his head. “Shit. I’m so jealous of Betsy. The work she does. The access she has. She talked to the President!”

  “Kevin, if you only knew . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know her job has a big downside, too. But so does mine. If you only knew about my downside!” He laughed. “I put up with it because it gets me here. To D.C. Where I can look down the river every night to the Jefferson. And go out with incredibly beautiful women like you.”

  “Women? You’ve got more than one?”

  Kevin blushed, horrified to have made such a gaffe. But Margaret laughed—just teasing.

  He’d never opened up to her this way before. Until tonight he’d been all pretense. He had done his best to make her think that he really was one of those beltway insiders. It felt wonderful to unburden himself. Margaret didn’t seem to mind—she hadn’t jumped up and stormed out of the place yet. In fact she was smiling at him warmly, eager to hear more. “Tell me about the downside,” she said. “What’s troubling you?”

  “I’ve probably made some bad choices, Margaret. If I get out now, I can get a job as an untenured teacher at some dipshit four-year school in central Mississippi. If I ride this wave I’m on, I might get out okay.”

  “Depends on where the wave is going,” she said.

  “Okay,” Kevin said, and drained his glass. “I’ll tell you about it. Hell, you’re CIA, you’re fire-walled from all domestic affairs, and this is domestic, so this shouldn’t interfere with your work—right?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Can’t talk about my work,” she said.

  “I know about your work,” Kevin said. “You sit in front of a workstation and write reports, like my sister.” But Kevin didn’t really care. It all had to come out now. So he started telling her about everything—how he’d found his way into the Rainmaker’s empire years ago and worked his way to the top, and how an odd bit of work had come across his desk in May, involving some new Jordanian grad students who absolutely had to get into the country no later than mid-July, and who seemed to have an infinite amount of money and influence behind them. About all of the strings he’d pulled, bureaucracies he’d manipulated, little white lies he’d told, laws and regulations he had bent to make it happen. How, having used him for this one purpose, his Jordanian friends had cast him aside like a used condom, and how Larsen himself was becoming ever more distant in recent weeks.

  At some point he realized he’d been talking for a solid hour and had made his way through three or four Stolis. He paid the bill and led Margaret down to the garage where he had parked his rental car.

  “Now that I’ve shucked my pretense of being the ultimate Washington insider,” he said, “do you think you could give me directions to Adams-Morgan?”

  “Easy,” she said. “Give me the keys and I’ll drive.”

  “It’s a rental—you’re not an authorized driver,” he said.

  “Neither are you, when you’ve had five shots in an hour and a half,” she said. “Shall we take a cab?”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, and handed her the keys.

  She drove them across the Key Bridge, through the strange mixture of posh and tawdry that was Georgetown, and got them onto the Rock C
reek Parkway. “Secret shortcut to points north,” she said, accelerating around a curve into the darkly forested vale. A few minutes later they shot up a steep exit ramp and resurfaced in a different part of the city. Margaret took them eastward, into the border zone between the affluent west side of the District and the war-torn east side, and onto a crowded and neon-lit street of ethnic restaurants, fast-food outlets, newsstands, and bodegas. It was the antithesis of Wapsipinicon, and it was pretty exotic even by the standards of D.C. Margaret braked to a stop in front of the restaurant. “Hop out,” she said, “and grab our table. I’ll park.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m just enough of an old-fashioned macho shithead that I’m not going to let you walk around here alone.”

  “Have it your way,” she said, and then spent fifteen minutes circling for a parking space. The widening gyre of their search took them into darker and less pleasant parts of the neighborhood; finally they found a space on the street, underneath a streetlamp, a block away from the main drag. It looked dark and hazardous from inside the car, but when they got out and began walking down the sidewalk, it didn’t seem so bad. There were a lot of pedestrians about, Hispanics of all ages and both sexes.

  The restaurant was great—Kevin had called it right. Dynamite Caribbean beer, ice cold. Chicken, black beans, rice, curried meat wrapped in flat bread, grilled marlin. They did not talk anymore about Kevin’s troubles—instead they talked about his research, and his dreams.

  In the back of his mind Kevin was dimly aware that they had spent all their time together talking about him and that he barely knew anything about Margaret. But it wasn’t his fault. It was hard to get the woman to open up when her work was classified, and her family background was apparently a tender subject to be carefully avoided. He made a mental note to redress this imbalance one of these times.

  But not right now. Everything was going too well.

  Kevin racked up the meal and the drinks on his Gold Card, and they stepped out into the night. The crowd on the streets was different now, mostly young people, not the cross section of ages they’d seen earlier in the evening. And when they turned off the main street and headed into the desolate neighborhood where they’d parked, they found the sidewalk deserted—except for a couple of young Hispanic males carrying a car battery they’d just stripped from a vehicle.

  “Hope it wasn’t ours,” Kevin said, and couldn’t help laughing.

  Margaret let go of his arm and unzipped her purse.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Getting the car keys,” she said.

  They walked another few yards.

  “So where are they?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The car keys. You said you were getting them.”

  She said nothing. Then Kevin took the car keys out of his pocket and jangled them. “You gave them to me, remember?” He laughed delightedly, but she didn’t seem amused. In fact she didn’t seem to be paying attention to him at all.

  “Where’s that damn streetlight we parked under?” he said, looking up the street.

  “Three cars ahead of us,” she said. “It’s gone out for some reason.” She stopped in her tracks. “Kevin, I don’t like this. Let’s get out.”

  “Get out? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, back to the main street.”

  “Margaret, the car’s right there. If you want to get out, we should get in the car and go.”

  This seemed obvious enough to Kevin. For some reason Margaret wasn’t buying it. She stood there indecisively for a few moments, then strode forward and snatched the keys from Kevin’s hand. “Let’s do it,” she said.

  She was in her seat and shoving the keys into the ignition before he’d even got his door open. By the time he’d sat down and closed the door, she was furious about something. “Goddamn it!”

  “What’s up?”

  “Car won’t start.”

  “Want me to give it a try?”

  “Sit back and don’t move!” she said in a strong voice, a voice of someone who was used to giving commands. Kevin looked over at her, astonished, and saw that she was gazing out the windshield.

  Kevin looked up and saw a man on the sidewalk right outside the car, a bulky man wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up around his head. He had brown skin and a thick mustache and dark glasses. He was pulling something out of his waistband.

  There was a crisp metallic sound in his left ear. He looked over to see that Margaret had reached down between her legs into her purse and pulled out something big and heavy.

  It was a gun. A semiautomatic. Right in front of Kevin’s face. He could see the maker’s mark and serial number stamped on the barrel. She had just chambered a round. The hammer was cocked. She shouted something, not at Kevin but at the person outside. Two different male voices began shouting in an unfamiliar language outside the car. They seemed startled and upset. But Kevin’s eyes were fixed on the gun in front of his face. He actually saw the hammer spring forward.

  For a long time, then, he didn’t hear anything except explosions.

  The windshield shattered immediately. It held its shape but turned into a web of finely spaced hairline cracks, so that it was nearly opaque. The figures outside were vague shadows, desperately out of focus. Kevin had noticed another one in the street, on Margaret’s side of the car.

  The cracks in the glass all flashed brightly when flames erupted from the barrel of Margaret’s gun or the guns outside the car, and at these times the entire windshield seemed to become a sheet of fire. From place to place the glass had a large circular hole in it. The number of holes increased as the explosions continued.

  After a while he realized that he hadn’t heard any explosions in a long time. They were still sitting there, he and Margaret, just as they had been a few moments ago, when she’d been about to start the car, about to drive back to Kevin’s hotel room for some to-be-specified additional socializing. Except that now most of the windshield was gone and the car was full of smoke. The key chain still dangled from the ignition, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.

  He remembered, then, the thing Margaret had shouted after she had pulled out her gun, and just before the explosions had started. She had been shouting, “FBI! FBI!”

  “What was all that about?” he said.

  Margaret didn’t answer.

  thirty

  OTHER THAN the sporadic visitations of the mighty Antonov transport ship, the twelve-thousand-foot runway at the Forks County Regional Airport was used only for a couple of weeks each year, when the Guard unit would perform its annual maneuvers. Boys would converge on the airport, leaning their bicycles against the fence, watching the C-141’s and occasional C-5A’s stain the runway with long streaks of molten rubber.

  The Guard unit had been mobilized immediately after the invasion, and the runway had begun to see more use. Doug Parsons, the shop teacher at Nishnabotna High School, was pulled away from his classes and put back in uniform and back in the cockpit, flying C-141’s hither and thither, first on short hauls within the continental United States and then on epic journeys to Saudi Arabia.

  A good deal of traffic was going to and from Fort Riley, where Desiree had been stationed, and so she was able to make it back to Forks County three different times during the month of September—easing her concern that her fast-growing baby daughter might forget her face and voice. When a week and a half went by, and Desiree was unable to find a flight back, Clyde bought a plane ticket and took Maggie on a stress-ridden three-leg flight down to Fort Riley. They stayed illegally in the officers’ quarters for a couple of nights and then flew home.

  Each individual moment of September seemed to last forever. When Clyde was at work, he worried about Maggie, who was usually in the care of one of the Dhont wives. There was nothing really to worry about, but he worried anyway and could not wait for his shift to be over. When he was out campaigning, going door-to-door with Maggie strapped to his back,
he checked his wristwatch between houses and was always crestfallen to see how little time had gone by. And the time spent taking care of Maggie was worst of all. He loved the little critter, but he just couldn’t concentrate on her the way Desiree could. The baby was the center of Desiree’s attention; she could concentrate on Maggie and Maggie alone for hours at a time; the baby chased all other thoughts from her mind.

  It wasn’t like that for Clyde. He and his wife had worked out an arrangement whereby she handled the tactics of child rearing and he handled the strategy, always walking a couple of paces ahead of them, club in hand, looking out for tar pits and saber-toothed tigers. He was always thinking about how to rewire the ceiling fixtures in the apartment building so that he could get some tenants in there next month and get some cash flow to divert into Maggie’s college account, keeping track of the oil-change schedule for the station wagon. He tried to retool his brain for Desiree’s role and just couldn’t do it. He’d sit there spooning mush into the child’s mouth, and instead of making each spoonful into a little event unto itself, and lavishing praise on Maggie for her advanced mush-slurping capabilities, he would just move that little spoon back and forth like an industrial robot, staring at a squirrel out in the yard or some other irrelevant focus point, saying nothing whatsoever.

  Desiree wrote letters, even though they talked on the phone every night and saw each other almost every week, so that Clyde ended up getting each individual piece of news three times. Even though the Army appeared to be gearing up for war, the nurses were not unusually busy. She had been posted not at the main base hospital, but at an outlying clinic, filling in for other nurses who had been sent off to California for desert exercises. She was much more apt to see the spouses and children of soldiers, and retirees, than soldiers themselves. After a couple of weeks, though, her role changed.

  First big batch of reservists hits town next week. We are gearing up to in-process them. Translation: your wife will spend the next couple weeks sticking needles into butts. So I’ll pack up my stuff again and move to new quarters nearer the main hospital. No more private rooms, I’m afraid. Army called up a batch of cardiovascular surgeons and put them in barracks with no blankets. They flew off the handle, but Army doesn’t care because Army has them and there’s nothing they can do about it. Making some friends with the other nurses now. Found out I was wearing my rank in the wrong place. But everyone’s a little rusty, and things are always looser in the Medical Corps, so they didn’t make me peel potatoes or anything. But I was warned that things will get stricter if/when I get closer to the action.