The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  Cassie interrupted whoever was on the other end of the line. “Can I call you back?” she asked in a hoarse voice, and then hung up without waiting for an answer. She turned and leveled her gaze at Betsy. Her eyes were red. “Found him passed out in front of our door with a bottle of gin in his lap,” she said. “There was quite a mess.”

  “I’m so sorry, Cassie. You shouldn’t have to put up with his behavior.”

  “Skip it. You want to know why he was there, in that condition?”

  “Because he’s an alcoholic?”

  “He and a friend got mugged.”

  “Mugged! Where?”

  “Adams-Morgan. Two young Hispanic males approached them while they were sitting in their car. Pulled guns. Demanded their money. Something went wrong. Or maybe they just got jumpy. Shots were fired. Couple of them went right by your brother’s head. Few more went into his friend’s body.”

  “He’s hurt?”

  “She.”

  “Who was he with?”

  “Our neighbor.”

  “Margaret’s hurt?”

  “Margaret,” Cassie said, “is dead.”

  Kevin had got up the next morning, declined to talk about anything, declined to eat, refused to accept a ride to the airport. Had told a vague rendition of the story more or less like Cassie’s. He had flown back to Wapsipinicon and stopped answering his telephone. But he continued to change the message on his answering machine several times a day, just to let people know he was still there.

  So if someone had been trying to shut Kevin up, they had succeeded.

  Margaret’s body had been flown back to Oakland, California, her parents’ hometown, for a closed-casket funeral.

  The Post and the Times had run their boilerplate, fill-in-the-blank crime stories about the assault, which had competed for space against stories of the five other murders that had taken place in D.C. and Prince George’s County on the same night. These had been followed the next day by boilerplate analysis of how the incredibly high murder rate on the east side of the District rarely leaked over into the west side, and when it did, people were always more shocked than they should be. Police were still on the lookout for a pair of Hispanic males who had been seen tampering with a nearby streetlight shortly before the attack.

  After that the assault on Betsy’s brother’s life, and the death of Margaret Park-O’Neil, had been forgotten entirely by the news media, which seemed to be preoccupied with events in Kuwait, and with newer and fresher murders.

  The executive summary of Betsy’s fifty-page report was clear and to the point, and even Hennessey read it:

  —Baghdad has for years been coordinating a high-tech, high-science effort among like-minded Arab states using the resources and expertise of the American academic community.

  —During the last two years major land-grant universities across the United States have been targeted by Baghdad for major research efforts to perfect a bacteriological-warfare agent that is simple, effective, and transportable.

  —There have been substantial movements within the scientific faculties of Iraq, the gaps filled by adjunct professors brought in at short notice, and high pay, from across the Arab world.

  —USIA student/research visas show a three-hundred-percent increase in the number of students coming from the region to study at eight major land-grant universities in the United States. We have reason to believe that many of these students are traveling under cover.

  —The Iraqis are carrying out substantial bacteriological-warfare investigation using U.S. facilities and personnel in order to assure that even if there were preemptive strikes on their known installations, their efforts could continue.

  In comparison with the other reports, the thoroughness of Betsy’s report was overwhelming, so much so that there was a respectful silence across the room. As had become the norm, everyone turned to look at Hennessey, who made an “I’m impressed” face and paged slowly through the document.

  Dellinger didn’t even read it. He closed the meeting by saying, “The National Security Council has seen all of these reports and recommends going full speed ahead on all inquiries, except Ms. Vandeventer’s.” With quiet scorn in his voice he said, “You evidently did not see the special-committee report—the Universities’ Report of March 1988—that concluded that there was absolutely no threat to the national security of the United States in the full and open exchange of scientific and technical work.”

  Hennessey caught Betsy’s eye and shook his head, telling her to keep quiet. But she did not. The thought of bullets whizzing past her brother’s head had made her feel somehow reckless. “Yes, I know that report. It was written by a bunch of self-interested university presidents who needed foreign-student funding and brains to keep their own research efforts going. It was supported by a number of international research organizations that needed USG funds to carry their work now that their capital has dwindled. It was written by a bunch of ivory-tower researchers to whom the entire world is as interchangeable as airports. I know that report.”

  Dellinger listened to this with a brittle and condescending smile, then turned to Spector and said, “I’m sure that Mr. Spector can continue to supply Agency input into this process. Ms. Vandeventer’s contributions have been duly noted, and her participation will no longer be needed. This meeting is concluded. I’ll see the rest of you next week, same time, same place.”

  After the meeting in March with the agricultural attaché, in which Betsy had spilled the beans about her extracurricular research, Howard King had grabbed Betsy’s breast and then shoved her into a filing cabinet. She had, by dint of a tremendous effort of will, made it through that entire experience without crying.

  Now it was Millikan’s turn to punish her for the same infraction. He had tried to do it in the meeting at Langley back in April and been stymied by the tactic that Spector had suggested. But he hadn’t forgotten. He’d been watching and waiting for the opportunity to shove in the knife. And now he had done it.

  A year ago she might have burst out crying on the spot. A week ago she would have gone home and done her crying in her bedroom, which was private except insofar as it was bugged.

  She walked calmly to the elevator and checked out at the security post downstairs. Spector left her alone. She caught the tube, got off at Rosslyn. Walked up the hill. Got to the apartment. Closed and locked the door behind her. Put her stuff down and took a seat on the living-room sofa.

  But she didn’t even think about crying. A strange kind of anesthetic calm had settled over her. She picked up the remote control, turned on CNN to watch the latest news from the Gulf, and wondered, idly, whether this was the last phase in her slow metamorphosis into an iguana.

  thirty-two

  WHILE THE disassembled corpses of ten or a dozen chickens wrestled in a turbulent pot of boiling lard on Mrs. Dhont’s smelter-grade stove, Clyde and the Dhonts and various shirttail relatives and neighbors played football in the recently harvested cornfield. The corn stubble had mostly been plowed under, but much of it still projected from the ground at crazy angles like pungi stakes. Despite these and other hazards, Clyde acquitted himself honorably, considering that several members of the opposing team had won Olympic wrestling medals. Clyde had developed survival strategies over the years: for example, rather than trying to block a Dhont, he would simply dive to the ground in the youth’s path, like an exposed farmer crouching down before the onslaught of a funnel cloud, and often as not the attacker would crash into him, jackknife forward, and plant his face securely in the earth.

  Mrs. Dhont rang the dinner bell, which according to Dhont rules meant that the game had entered its last series of downs. Clyde was beginning to entertain the notion that he might escape from this game with no broken bones, just a few lacerations and widespread bruising. Then, while out on the left wing trying to block one of the older and smaller Dhonts, he heard Dan, Jr., the quarterback of his team, yelling at him, and turned around. There was the ball, no more than a yard
away from him, boring in like a dirty artillery shell. He caught it on impulse. Given more time to think about the implications, he might have dropped it. A general cry of approval and bloodlust rose from the defense, which was now scattered over approximately a square mile of churned black ground. The barbed-wire fence that marked the goal line was at the other end of this expanse, though Clyde’s view of it was partly obscured by the curvature of the earth. He tucked the ball into the pit of his stomach and crossed both arms over it, which was an ungainly way to run, but de rigueur when playing against massed Dhonts. Then he began to run. One side of his pelvis had been staved in by the knee of Dylan Dhont when he’d blocked him on the previous play, and so he moved in a nearly sideways, crablike stutter.

  A bulky mass materialized in his peripheral vision: Hal Dhont, one of the cousins, a three-hundred-pounder who was on Clyde’s team. Hal churned forward, tearing across the soil like a rogue combine, and they gained a quarter mile of yardage before encountering any organized opposition. Hal converged on DeWayne Dhont, who tried to evade him; but at the last moment Hal stuck one arm out sideways and clotheslined DeWayne. Hal then slammed his body into another Dhont and came almost to a stop. Clyde rear-ended him, spun around his back, and broke into the open. He was unsure of his bearings; the size of the playing field almost forced the players to carry compasses and sextants. When he finally identified the goal line, he was dismayed to see that no fewer than three Dhonts were guarding it. One of them was Desmond—currently a first-string Twisters wrestler, who, as all local police officers knew, went out with his teammates and hunted football players for sport.

  It would be several minutes before he reached them, and there was no point in trying his courage with it just yet. He jogged for a while, attempting to catch his breath and to get his mind on other things. He put some more thought into the recent murder of Dr. Kevin Vandeventer.

  Clyde came into the sheriff’s department at four in the afternoon and saw the report coming in on the wire. He tore it off and read through it three times carefully. It had originated from a South Dakota Highway Patrol base in the western part of that state. Last night a trooper, westbound on I-90, had pulled through a rest area at four in the morning and noticed a car with Idaho plates stopped in the parking lot, one occupant asleep in the passenger seat, which had been reclined. This was technically illegal, but the highway patrol was in the habit of looking the other way; in that part of the country, where towns and motels were few and far between, it was a common practice for long-haul truckers to park their rigs in the rest areas of the interstate at night and to sleep there.

  Several hours later another trooper had noticed the same car in the same place with the same person in it. It was midmorning, the outside temperature was already eighty-five, the sun was blasting in through the windows of the car, yet this motorist was still sound asleep with a blanket over him. He did not respond to knocking on the window. The trooper Slim Jimmed the door open. Although this was not explicitly stated in the report, Clyde knew that when the trooper had opened the door of that car, he had taken a deep breath and held it, and perhaps stepped back away from the vehicle for a few moments to let the first roiling wave of stench dissipate. If Clyde had been there, he would have opened both doors of Kevin Vandeventer’s car so that the South Dakota wind could blow through it.

  Vandeventer had been dead since about three in the morning. The local coroner’s report stated that his neck had been broken by someone who had done a very neat job of it. There was no physical evidence anywhere—and if it had been done in the men’s room, there never would be, because it had been thoroughly scrubbed and sterilized by the custodial service at eight in the morning.

  The state patrol kept records of which trucks passed through its weigh stations at which times. From these it was possible to draw some inferences about which trucks had been in the vicinity of that rest area at the time of the murder. They were still trying to track down the truckers in question by telephone and radio, interviewing them when they stopped at other weigh stations along I-90 in Wyoming and Montana. So far none of them had seen anything, except for one insomniac who had seen headlight beams sweep across the walls of his sleeper cab at about three in the morning. He had looked out the window to see a car in the final stages of making an illegal U-turn in the median strip of the interstate. He could not remember any details about the car, which had taken off eastbound. Headed for Iowa.

  The troopers had found tracks in the grass of the median strip that corresponded to this report. But the ground was hard and dry, and no useful impressions had been made in the dirt. A couple of speeding tickets had been issued to eastbound vehicles on I-90 during the wee hours of the morning, and these drivers were being interviewed. But Clyde knew that these leads would not amount to anything. If he were an Iraqi secret agent on hostile territory during wartime, and he had just broken a man’s neck with his bare hands out in the middle of nowhere and was driving back to his safe house 650 miles away, he would be sure to observe posted speed limits.

  It was a thirteen-hour drive from there to Wapsipinicon if you drove at exactly the speed limit and never stopped at all, which was impossible. Clyde figured that fifteen or sixteen hours was more realistic. They would come east on I-80 from Des Moines, head northeast on I-45 for a short distance, and then, most likely, take the University Avenue exit, which would bring them due north into the center of Wapsipinicon.

  At six o’clock in the evening Clyde drove into Wapsipinicon and headed south of town on University Avenue, then took that several miles down to the cloverleaf where it intersected I-45. The geometry of the intersection was such that northbound traffic on I-45 had to make a 315-degree right turn, nearly a complete circle, in order to head north on University. People ran off the road there all the time, especially during the winter; before Twisters games a few RVs always rolled over into the ditch as they tried to negotiate the turn in too much of a hurry. It was posted at twenty miles per hour and festooned with signs prophesying doom to speeders.

  Clyde knew it well. He parked his unit where he would have a clear view of all traffic on the ramp. Then he made himself comfortable and waited. A car or truck swung round the ramp every few minutes and headed north into town.

  At 6:47 by his dashboard clock one such car happened to catch his eye. It was a maroon Bronco, a couple of years old. It had dark-tinted windows, which was a bit out of the ordinary, but still common around the university, being apparently some kind of status symbol among hot-rodders and party animals. But what really caught Clyde’s eye was that the front of the Bronco—its bumper, grille, hood, and windshield—were encrusted with the smashed and dried remains of insects. This was obvious and incontrovertible proof that this vehicle had just been driven for several hundreds of miles at high speed across the plains.

  Clyde zapped it with his radar gun and noted that it was taking the ramp at an even nineteen miles an hour. He waited for another car to go by him, then pulled onto University and discreetly followed the Bronco north into the city of Wapsipinicon. It was the sort of vehicle that rode high on its suspension, which made it easy to track from a distance.

  A few blocks short of Lincoln Way, the Bronco turned right onto a gravel alleyway that ran along the backs of several commercial buildings that were part of the old business district. Clyde gunned his unit forward, fearing that the vehicle might lose him back there. He turned into the alley and did not see it anywhere ahead of him. He ran the unit forward to the end of the block, pulled out across the sidewalk, and looked both directions up and down the street but did not see the Bronco in either direction. He threw the unit into reverse and backed down the way he had just come, looking for possible turns that his quarry might have taken.

  He found the Bronco parked in the lot behind Stohlman’s Stationers, next to a steel door in the back of the building, which had been propped open. The rear doors of the Bronco were likewise open, and Roger Ossian, three-time winner of the North Central Regional Stationer
y and Office Supply Retailers Association Salesman of the Year Award, was unloading some boxed photocopying machines that he had apparently just picked up from a distributor in Des Moines or Omaha. Seeing Clyde Banks staring at him glumly through the window of a sheriff’s car, he set his load down on the rear shelf of the Bronco and threw Clyde a friendly wave. He was a thoroughgoing Republican.

  Clyde gave him a friendly tap on the horn, shifted the unit into drive, and idled up the alley to the street. Three right turns in a row got him northbound on University once again. Three blocks later he pulled in at McDonald’s for some drive-through. But the lane was filled with waiting students as usual, so he parked in the parking lot and went inside to place his order.

  As he emerged from the McDonald’s with his Quarter-Pounder and fries, he heard a wet hissing sound from the next lot and glanced over to see a car emerging from Nor-Kay’s Car Wash.

  He plucked out three french fries to tide him over, then set his dinner on the hood of his unit, which would act as a hot plate, walked across the lot, and onto the property of Norman and Kay Duvall, monarchs of the Forks County car-washing industry. A solitary employee was holding down the fort this evening—an earnest fellow of maybe sixteen years.

  “Hullo, Deputy Banks. Come campaigning?”

  “Nope. Not on company time,” Clyde said. “I was just wondering if you’d washed any cars in the last couple of hours that had a lot of bugs on ’em. I mean a lot of bugs.” But the boy was already nodding vigorously.

  “You wouldn’t believe this car I did just a little while ago,” he blurted, as if the mess had left him so traumatized he couldn’t wait to share his feelings. “It was covered with an encrustation,” he said. “Came in from out west.”

  “How do you know that?”