The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  The rent-a-cop dropped Clyde’s flashlight while trying to light another cigarette, his hands gone clumsy with the October chill. He cursed, picked it up, apologized. Clyde said nothing, just moved on to the next pallet and scanned each sack in turn with the big disk of the metal detector.

  The rent-a-cop had reason to be jumpy. His company had been hired on short notice a few days ago, when Byproducts found evidence of a break-in at one of their back doors. It seemed that these break-ins might actually have been going on for as long as a few weeks. Nothing important had been stolen, though, despite the fact that tools and VCRs and TV sets were lying out in plain sight in the company’s workshops and offices. Tire tracks were noted in the dirt behind the building.

  In a seemingly unrelated development, early-morning fishermen noticed a large, persistent gasoline slick near the end of a public pier up at Lake Pla-Mor. A diver was sent down and came up with the news that a black van rested on the bottom, fifty feet beneath the surface. The van was hauled out and examined, not only by local detectives but by some FBI people who drove out from Chicago. It was suspiciously free of useful evidence. Some prints were lifted from the driver’s-side door, which had been found hanging open; they matched the prints of the oft-arrested, oft-fingerprinted Tab Templeton, who was still missing.

  The tires of the van were examined and found to match the tracks behind Byproducts Unlimited. They also matched the tracks that Clyde had discovered at the site of the mutilation of Sweet Corn, the government horse. Sheriff Mullowney was photographed and videotaped standing proudly by the dripping, sludge-filled hulk of the Satan Van. He had wasted no time declaring that the War on Satan was over and won.

  Clyde had examined the van himself. He had opened the driver’s-side door and put his hands in the places where Tab’s handprints were found. He had leaned against it, as if trying to push it forward, and satisfied himself that Tab had made those prints while shoving the van down the pier. This all made sense to a point; if Clyde wanted a large vehicle moved without using its engine, Tab would be the first and last candidate for the job. Rumors continued to circulate that Tab’s skeleton had been found near the scuttled van, picked to the bone by the walleyed pike with which Lake Pla-Mor was stocked. But Clyde knew that Tab had been hired to sink that van, and that, if he was dead, he was dead for some other reason.

  A handyman had discovered a nest of empty Night Train Express bottles and Twinkies wrappers in an unused janitor’s closet at Byproducts Unlimited. Tab’s fingerprints were all over the place. Sheriff Mullowney, eager to wrap up this case with a ribbon and a bow before Election Day, had set up a crisis headquarters on the riverbank out back—a borrowed RV with a large coffeemaker and donated pastries, patched into Byproducts by long, thick extension cords—and begun dragging the river day and night, hoping to find Tab’s corpse.

  It was three-thirty in the morning before Clyde found anything. Chris the rent-a-cop, asleep on his feet, was startled once more by the squeal of the metal detector and swung the light around to see that Clyde had it pressed up against one of the MegaPro sacks.

  “Just hold the light right where it is,” Clyde whispered, too scared and excited to speak out loud. He shut off the metal detector and laid it gently on the floor. He took an old Boy Scout knife out of his pocket, opened up the long blade, and slit the bag from top to bottom. Reddish-brown powder hissed onto the floor, smelling like dog food.

  Something glinted yellow in the midst of it. Clyde thrust his hand into the pile of MegaPro, groped around, and withdrew a long colored ribbon. Something heavy followed and swung back and forth in the light of the flashlight, glinting a rich yellow. Clyde held the mangled treasure up in the light and gazed at it for a long time, and it suddenly dawned on Chris that, like an archaeologist in a pharaoh’s tomb, he was looking at the glint of gold. But this was less well preserved; it had been hacked and twisted almost to shreds by some kind of swinging industrial chopper.

  “What is it?” Chris finally blurted.

  “Olympic gold medal,” Clyde said. “Montreal, 1976. Wrestling. Heavyweight.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” the rent-a-cop cried. He looked down at the pile of red powder in which Clyde stood ankle-deep. “Oh, holy Jesus!” Then he dropped the flashlight and ran for the open loading-dock door. He almost made it out to the back lot before losing his doughnuts.

  “God have mercy on your soul, Tab,” Clyde said. He laid the medal down where he’d found it, picked up the flashlight, shook the red dust from his feet, and struck out in search of a telephone.

  thirty-seven

  AS THEY stepped out of the station wagon onto the circular driveway of the big house, she came out to greet them, a rolling thunderhead of white satin preceded by a wall of dense, sweet perfume. Anita Stonefield was clutching a stick with a glittery five-pointed star on the end of it, both thickly coated with something like ground glass in an epoxy substrate, and as she threw her arms around Desiree and Maggie, the star sizzled through the air in a wide, cometlike arc, catching Clyde under the nose and leaving him incapacitated with pain.

  Another car pulled into the drive and Anita broke away and wafted toward the new arrivals with the same level of intense niceness that always made the candidate for sheriff break into a cold sweat and want to run away. Desiree had surprised Clyde by showing up for the weekend; she’d wangled a couple of days’ leave out of her commanding officer and hitched a ride home with two Chicago-bound nurses. Clyde took the commander’s generosity as a sign that grim tidings were in store for everyone at Fort Riley. Desiree was certain that he was just doing it “to be nice.”

  But Desiree didn’t watch CNN the way Clyde did. Just the day before, Clyde had seen Dick Cheney on the tube, announcing that many, many more troops were going to be needed in the Gulf. Clyde had already accepted an invitation to Anita Stonefield’s annual UN Day picnic. He could not imagine a politic way to cancel, and Desiree seemed to like the idea of getting out and socializing. So here they were, making their way around the side of the Stonefield mansion, following the shrill sound of excited children’s voices toward the vast backyard.

  It had been a damp, gray autumn afternoon, and dusk seemed to be falling a few hours earlier than it had the day before. The Stonefields had set up a yellow-and-white tent and brought in some heavy barbecue capability. As Clyde surveyed the diverse cuts of meat sizzling on the massive grills, taken from several animal species, he found that he could not keep inappropriate memories of Byproducts out of his mind.

  Anita threw one of these picnics every year, just prior to the UNICEF trick-or-treat night, of which she was the regional organizer. It was an afternoon affair—all the kids came in their costumes, were issued their little orange trick-or-treating boxes, and got the opportunity to gawk at actual foreign people brought in as part of the party’s theme. With the assistance of Dean Knightly, Anita was able to pick out a guest list that covered as many as sixty different nations. Iraq had been dropped from the list this year; in its stead was a Kurdish family studying on a Syrian passport.

  Clyde had been getting a lot of invitations lately to events where he was completely out of place, or at least irrelevant, probably out of sympathy. Dean Knightly called every so often to check in on him. And the Stonefields invited him to every social function they mounted. As the result of this series of engagements, Clyde had cemented his vote among the Republican upper crust even more firmly than ever; Dr. Jerry Tompkins said that in recent weeks his share of this sector of the vote had skyrocketed from ninety-six to ninety-nine percent, with an error margin of six percent.

  Clyde was given the job of handing out the little orange boxes to the children and acquitted himself well enough that he probably raised his standings in the crucial too-young-to-vote segment of the electorate. Then he prowled around the Stonefields’ one-acre yard with one of Jack Carlson’s fancy beers in his hand, trying to settle his mind, and happened across several foreign students working around a portable gas grill. One of them was buil
t asymmetrically and moved with a characteristic limp.

  “Is this the halal section?” he inquired from a distance. He was afraid that he might defile something by coming too close with alcohol in his hand.

  Fazoul was delighted and insisted he come closer. It had been much too long, they both agreed. Fazoul had been busy with his research, and because the absent Desiree handled all of the Bankses’ social contacts, Clyde hadn’t seen many of his friends, new or old.

  Fazoul heaped a plate with kabobs and thrust it upon Clyde. Seeing that Clyde could not talk with his mouth full, Fazoul shouldered the burden of conversation. He always seemed to wander back to the subject of the Middle East, and the extreme perfidy and demonism of Saddam Hussein and, by extension, most Iraqis, and, to a lesser extent, a great many Arabs. It was clear that this subject obsessed him; when he really got rolling, he would become spitting mad, waving his hands around and quoting verses from the Koran in Arabic and then translating them into English in order to bolster his points; as if he feared Clyde might be a secret admirer of Saddam. Clyde chewed and nodded, thinking that a show of agreement might calm Fazoul down; but it only seemed to egg him on.

  One of Anita’s operatives soon drew Clyde away to shake hands and eat dinner. Much later Clyde realized he had lost track of his wife and daughter and learned thirdhand that they had gone home so that Maggie could get to bed. Anita Stonefield had arranged a ride home for Clyde so that he might stay late at the grown-up phase of the party.

  John Stonefield had bought all of the land there, and built the country club and the neighborhoods surrounding it, during the fifties, handing over the choicest lots to his sons. Terry’s interest in houses was limited to the purely financial dimension, and he did not care about their architectural style or interior decoration any more than he cared about what kind of paper his blue-chip stock certificates had been printed on. He ceded all control to Anita, who had designed, and caused to be built, an immense structure directly across the fairway from the clubhouse. She had been aiming for something out of Gone with the Wind but was forced to make some concessions to the Iowa weather: the spacious veranda was walled in behind thermal glass, and the widow’s walk had been enclosed in an odd hybrid of gun turret and cupola. Banks of powerful searchlights had been planted around the place, set in massive subterranean footings, all aimed upward at the house and bouncing off its white aluminum siding so brightly that, according to local legend, it was used as a traffic cone by jumbo jets stuck in holding patterns for O’Hare.

  That was the setting in which Clyde and various other Republican candidates, Fazoul and various other foreign students, and a couple of dozen local country-club members and other movers and shakers were now trapped for the next few hours.

  At some point in the evening Clyde found himself wandering through the place with Fazoul in tow, trying to get away from the sound of Anita’s stereo, which was piped into every room through speakers hidden in the ceilings. She had put on a two-CD set of recycled sock-hop favorites performed by an ersatz group called the Original Artists, and the place was jumping with drunken Republicans performing archaic dance steps.

  They wandered, squinting, through an arctic brightness of snowy rugs and glass objets d’art pierced by powerful halogen spotlights, and into a simulation of a library. The walls were hung with paintings and photographs of scary Germans with giant mustaches, looking as if they were about to pop an aneurysm because of the music.

  From this room a spiral staircase ascended to the second floor and from there continued up to the cupola, which, to judge from the drifts of cigar ashes in the giant ashtrays and the beer-bottle caps in the wastebaskets, Terry had installed as a refuge. It worked in that role for Clyde and Fazoul insofar as there were no speakers there, and no dancers either. A ring of windows provided a 360-degree view of Forks County: the golf course to the north, and, to the south, gently rolling farmland, with woods down in the folds of the earth, sloping imperceptibly toward the city of Wapsipinicon and the confluence of the rivers.

  Close to the house they could clearly see Professor Arthur Larsen taking Anita behind the imported Irish gazebo and groping her ample breasts while she grabbed his head and pulled his lips down to hers. Clyde turned his back on this scene, worse than anything he had seen at Byproducts. Fazoul saw it but did not react visibly; for him it was apparently just part of the normal scenery of the modern United States. Clyde found this embarrassing, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  “How may I help you, Clyde?” Fazoul said.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said you wanted to pick my brain. If I understand that idiom, then for you my brain is always ready to be picked.”

  “Well.” Clyde thrust his hands into the pockets of his uniform’s trousers and balled them into fists, then stared fixedly at Terry Stonefield’s telescope for a good minute or so. “Been noticing a few things, is all.”

  Fazoul raised an eyebrow. He had sized Clyde up in the months since they had met and had apparently realized that when Clyde took to noticing things, and bothered to mention those things to someone, a lengthy conversation might be in store. So he backed up a couple of paces and lowered himself gingerly to a window seat, made himself comfortable, and waited for Clyde to continue.

  “I think something funny is going on in Forks County. I think it’s serious. I think it has something to do with foreign students—probably ones from Iraq. And it has to do with botulin toxin.”

  Fazoul nodded at him reassuringly until Clyde spoke the final words. Then he did a double take, as if he could not believe Clyde had said what he’d said. He heaved a deep sigh and ran one hand across his gnarled scalp, pulling what was left of his hair back from his forehead. He shook his head and closed his eyes in deep thought. “Please continue,” he said quietly.

  “Well, a little earlier you were voicing some opinions about Saddam. And it so happens that I’ve been studying up on old Saddam ever since he started threatening to kill my wife. And I can’t claim to be a big Saddam expert by any means, but I do know he’s been working like mad on nukes and Superguns and missiles and biological and chemical warfare. To hear all the things he’s been working on, you’d think Iraq must be just one big laboratory, and all the Iraqis must have Ph.D.’s. But I’ve seen Iraq on TV, and I know it’s not a big laboratory. So where does he keep all his scientists? Well, when Dean Knightly told me that there were fifty-three Iraqis right here in Wapsipinicon, I started to put it together. EIU isn’t even that big of a university. There are dozens like it. If Saddam has fifty-three propellerheads here . . . well, you can work out the math. I cruise through the university a couple times a night, because the campus cops are short-staffed and they’ve asked us to pick up some slack for them. And I’ve seen the foreign students through the windows of the academic computing center at three, four in the morning. I’ve heard they can use computers to exchange information with friends in other states or countries.

  “So I got to thinking, just to be paranoid for a minute, what if all these Iraqi grad students were actually part of Saddam’s big plan to kill my wife? When I started thinking of it in those terms, it got me kind of worked up emotionally.”

  “Of course it did,” Fazoul said. Clyde thought Fazoul’s eyes were glistening just a bit.

  “So let’s think it through. What would the Iraqis be up to here in Forks County? EIU’s got a decent engineering school, or so they claim, but what it does better than anyone is veterinary medicine. Now, if I was Saddam, why would I send my propellerheads to vet-med school? Well, the first thing that popped into my head was anthrax. That’s a veterinary disease, but ever since August the media can’t stop talking about how Saddam is going to use it as a biological weapon.

  “You might have heard that at the beginning of August, almost on the same day as the invasion of Kuwait, we lost a deputy. He was running down a runaway horse from the vet-path lab that had been cut up by cattle mutilators. He died of a coronary. I tried giving him CPR b
ut it didn’t work. For some reason the FBI was real interested in this case.

  “Then I heard through my in-laws that the government was recruiting old horses to bleed for their country at the vet-path lab. And I heard from Desiree that the Army had plenty of anthrax vaccine but was short on botulin antitoxin. And I talked to an old fellow who’s a botulin expert, and he explained that the way they made that antitoxin was by injecting horses with botulin so that they built up a powerful immunity to it, then drawing their blood. I looked it up in the library and learned that botulin toxin kills by paralyzing muscles—especially the heart and breathing muscles.

  “So putting two and two together, I figured that my friend the deputy didn’t die of a coronary like we thought. That horse he was chasing was one of the Army’s four-legged antitoxin factories, and its veins were full of enough toxin to kill a thousand men, and that toxic blood was streaming out of it because it had been mutilated. When Hal was chasing it around, he got some small cuts on his hands from vaulting over barbed-wire fences, and when he finally got that horse calmed down and was stroking its neck or whatever, he got some of the horse’s blood into those cuts, and suddenly his heart and lungs became paralyzed. The coroner didn’t think to do a test for botulin toxin and naturally assumed that it was a heart attack. When the government heard that one of its two botulin horses had been assaulted, it sent out the FBI to investigate. They must have known that Hal didn’t really die of a coronary, but they aren’t talking about it because it’s a national-security thing.