The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  On the other hand, if he had made one very large sale, he could have got the whole bundle at once. But sales that large were unusual in this area.

  “You got into a business deal with some Arabs?” Clyde said.

  Buck scoffed and shook his head in disgust. “Deal? Swindle is more like it.”

  “How much do you figure you got swindled out of?”

  Buck lowered his head and stared into his food again. The look on his face told Clyde that Buck Chandler hadn’t been swindled out of anything. “They just pulled out on me, that’s all. Cut and run.”

  “I never heard about this deal of yours, Buck.”

  “Well, course not! That’s ’cause it was a secret deal from the word go.”

  “Is it still secret?”

  “Hell no. Fuck no,” Buck said. He took a big breath and his eyes blazed up as he realized something: “I don’t have to keep any secrets no more! To hell with ’em! What’re they gonna do, sue me?”

  “I’d like to see ’em try,” Clyde scoffed, getting into the spirit of the thing. “What kind of a deal did you put together, Buck?”

  “With the Kuwaitis,” Buck said.

  “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “As God is my witness,” Buck said. “Round the middle of August, a couple weeks after that invasion of Kuwait, this fella comes to my office. Arab fella. Spoke real good English. Told me that he was representing a sheikh from Kuwait. Said they’d just got out of Kuwait City by the skin of their teeth. Brought a bunch of their money out with ’em.”

  “And came out here to Forks County, Iowa?”

  “That’s what I asked him!” Buck said, a little too insistently. “Why the hell would they come here? Well, turns out that the nephew of this sheikh was a student here at EIU and had a nice big house rented for himself—you know how these Arabs throw money around—and so when they escaped from the Iraqis, this was as good a place as any for them to go to ground.”

  “Did you meet these people?”

  “I wouldn’t believe a word of it until I saw the sheikh personally,” Buck insisted. “So this fella took me to the house and I met the guy. He was the real thing, boy, all dressed up in the robes, with the towel on his head and the whole bit, sitting there watching CNN twenty-four hours a day. He shows me a carry-on bag full of cash—must have been hundreds of thousands of bucks in it.

  “Well,” Buck continued, fortifying himself with a swig of coffee that had a strong odor of schnapps rising from it, “this sheikh is a real operator. He was looking for someplace to put his money. And I’m sure he put a lot of it into stocks and other investments, like any sane person would. But he wanted to launch a little venture right here in Forks, too, and that’s why they needed yours truly.”

  “What kind of venture?” Clyde asked.

  Buck frowned and leaned his head toward Clyde’s, still reluctant to blurt out the secret he had held for the remarkable span of three months. “A high-tech thing. I told you his nephew was at EIU, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Guess what he’s studying there.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Chemical engineering. And what’s the most important chemical in the world, Clyde?”

  Looking at Buck, Clyde was tempted to answer that it was ethanol. But he shook his head and shrugged in mystification.

  “Water. They don’t have enough fresh water in that part of the world. So this nephew was working on desalination technology. And he came up with an invention, Clyde. A new technology that could take the salt out of seawater much cheaper than the way they do it now. He made it work at the test-tube level, but in order to test whether it would work commercially, they had to build a pilot facility. I’m just telling you what they told me, Clyde.”

  “So the sheikh needed you to sell him a building that was suitable for housing a small chemical plant.”

  “Just for starters, Clyde. Any real-estate agent could do that. But they needed more. They needed a full-fledged partner. That’s why they came to me.”

  “You lost me there, Buck,” Clyde confessed. “Why didn’t they just buy the building and send you on your way?”

  “Because of the need for absolute secrecy and discretion. If word got out about this invention, the big boys would be all over them in no time—Du Pont, Monsanto, all those guys. They’d reverse-engineer the process and steal it.”

  Clyde said, “I still don’t follow.”

  “Aw, come on, Clyde. You know what kind of town this is. If some raghead with a twenty-thousand-dollar Rolex comes waltzing in and plunks down a sack of C-notes to buy an abandoned building, you don’t think word’s gonna get out? Hell, they might as well just broadcast it over the tornado sirens.”

  “I see,” Clyde said. “They needed you to front for them.”

  Buck was offended. “Well, there’s a little more to it than that, Clyde, or else they wouldn’t have cut me in for such a nice chunk of the deal. I was the local partner, the man on the ground, on the scene. You know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” Clyde said.

  “So I was the one who bought the building, and I was the one who hired the laborers and so on and so forth.”

  “Laborers?”

  “Yeah. The building was a disaster area, so I hired Tab to clean it out. And when they started building the pilot plant, I made the arrangements with Tab to go out and pick up the materials and deliver them. The grad students took care of actually putting it together.”

  “But they never showed their faces outside.”

  “Now you’re getting it, Clyde. We had to arrange this whole thing so that not a single raghead face ever showed itself to the outside world, not a single raghead voice was ever heard on the phone. Instead, it was yours truly who handled all interface functions.”

  “Did they get their equipment all put together, Buck?”

  Buck shrugged and copped a “Who, me?” look. “I don’t know, Clyde, I guess so. They wouldn’t let me inside the place—didn’t want me to see any of their trade secrets.”

  “You got orders on the phone from the sheikh,” Clyde said, “and you went out and spent money and gave orders to Tab, but you never saw anything.”

  “Right. Except it wasn’t on the phone, it was on this radio thing that they gave me. These guys were so paranoid, they wouldn’t even use the phone.”

  “Did Tab see anything?”

  Buck looked nonplussed. “I don’t know. I guess if he was helping them put the rig together, he must have got inside and seen something, at least, before he went off and killed himself.” Buck’s voice trailed off uncertainly as he spoke this last sentence, and he suddenly got a woozy look about him.

  “What happened yesterday?” Clyde asked. He had dropped the conversational front now and was interrogating Buck Chandler like a suspect.

  “They pulled out,” Buck said. “I went by their house. But they’re gone. And then I went by the barn, too, and they’re not there either.”

  “Barn?”

  “Yeah.”

  Clyde’s heart started to beat a little faster. He carefully sipped some ice water. “This place that you bought for them. The place where they built their pilot plant. For some reason I was picturing it in one of the old buildings on the grounds of the Matheson Works. That’s where I figured it would be. It’d be perfect—it’s empty, the whole thing is surrounded by a high wall. But you say it was a barn?”

  “They also leased a space at the Matheson Works,” Buck admitted. “They stored some shipping containers there. But the facility itself was at a barn.”

  “Buck,” Clyde said, “where is that barn?”

  The silverware began to hum, then to buzz, then to rattle. A deep rumbling noise came down from the sky, up through the ground, in through the walls. The gadgets hanging from the doorknob began to play their tinny Christmas carols.

  “It’s out by the airport,” Buck said. “It’s that old dairy farm that went out of business a couple of years back. Just a s
tone’s throw from the runway.”

  Clyde slapped his napkin down on the table and ran out into the middle of River Street and looked up into the sky, which had gone solid gray. Half of the firmament was blotted out by an immense shape passing low overhead, in the direction of the Forks County Regional Airport. Rows and rows of massive wheels trundled out of giant bomb-bay openings in the underside of the Antonov freighter, so close, Clyde could see that the tires were bald and threadbare. Then it was gone, and a fine mist of kerosene descended on the street, and the rumbling gradually died away to be replaced by the sound of distant tornado sirens and car alarms that had been set off by the disturbance. Finally there was nothing left except a fine rain that was beginning to fall out of the clouds, coating Clyde and everything in the street with a thin lacquer of ice.

  fifty-two

  CLYDE RAN toward his unit, tried to stop too late, and found no traction. He skated the last few feet, slamming heavily into the side of the car. For a moment he thought that he was glad his career was over so that he wouldn’t have to go out and haul people out of ditches during what promised to be a day of nasty weather. Then he remembered that what he would actually be doing would probably be much worse than that.

  He got in his car and drove the half mile to Knightly’s place, ignoring the radio calls coming in from the dispatcher: a car in the ditch here, a Mexican in need of a jump start there. He was tempted just to switch the radio off but left it running in case something of interest came in.

  Fazoul had heard him pulling into the Knightlys’ side yard and was already on his way down the ladder, wearing his Twisters sweatsuit with its hooded sweatshirt pursed tightly around his face. “The airplane,” he said.

  “I know where they did it,” Clyde said. “Right next to the airport.”

  Fazoul rolled his eyes and shook his head. He led Clyde across the yard to the Knightlys’ back door, no longer caring whether the neighbors noticed, retrieved a hidden key, and opened up the house.

  For the dozenth time in the last couple of days, Clyde fished a scrap of paper out of his pocket bearing ten or eleven different Hennessey-related phone numbers and started dialing them. At some length he got through to someone who was actually working on Christmas Day, and who forwarded his call to what sounded like a skyphone on an airplane somewhere. “Yello!” Hennessey barked over the engine noise.

  “Merry Christmas,” Clyde said.

  “Yes, Clyde. Merry Christmas! We just flew over you about half an hour ago.”

  “Got to talk to you about those Iraqis.”

  “Did they build a pipeline?”

  Hennessey sounded ebullient, almost giddy. Clyde wondered if he himself had been so overconfident an hour ago when he’d walked into Metzger’s.

  “Nope. They landed an Antonov.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Hennessey said. Then he said it a couple of more times, his voice trailing off with each repetition.

  “What do we do?” Clyde asked. On the other end he could hear Hennessey yelling to someone: “Get me all the statistics on the Antonov transport ship and have them ready. It’s a big Soviet plane.” Then: “Clyde, I’m still here. I’m thinking.” Then he said nothing for thirty seconds. Then he said to someone else, “Tell the pilot to plot a hypothetical great circle route from Nishnabotna to Baghdad. It’s got to refuel somewhere. Move!”

  “Could you shoot them down over the ocean somewhere?” Clyde asked. Then he bit his tongue, remembering the Russian crew he had helped out of the cornfield last spring.

  “If the President ordered it,” Hennessey said. “But I don’t imagine our Soviet allies would be too keen.”

  Clyde said, “Don’t you need some sort of passport check and export permit on international flights?”

  “I’ll check on that.” Hennessey shouted more orders at someone; Clyde got the impression that there was an endless queue of FBI agents in the aisle of the plane, standing there waiting for their turn to be barked at. Hennessey continued: “I’m looking out the window at your weather, or rather the weather that’s going to be hitting you in a few hours, and looks to me like it sucks. Am I right?”

  “It’s been icing down for about an hour. Temperature is dropping like a stone. Now it’s turning to snow.”

  “So if they were stalled long enough by the local red tape, they might get snowed in.”

  “If it comes down to that,” Clyde said, “I can just pull my car across the runway and stop them from taking off.”

  Hennessey pondered that one for a while. Fazoul didn’t have to ponder it for very long; he was already shaking his head no.

  “Clyde,” Hennessey said, “I think that making these guys feel trapped is not what we want to do. See, something kind of funny has happened in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Funny?”

  “Yeah, if you like sick humor. Suddenly everyone woke up. People in D.C. are actually taking this botulin thing seriously all of a sudden. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to requisition this damn plane. But now it’s too late.”

  “What do you mean, too late?”

  “Clyde, they already made the damn toxin. And it’s sitting there on the edge of fucking Iowa, practically in the suburbs of Chicago, directly upwind of the Loop, if you know what I mean. Let me put it this way: if they had made the stuff in Iraq and were trying to ship it into the U.S., we would do anything to stop them, right?”

  “Yeah, I suppose we would.”

  “Well, it’s already here. We would like nothing better than to get the shit out of our country. And that’s what they want, too. My girl Betsy figured it all out.”

  “Betsy?”

  “One of my people here. She finally put it all together. The Iraqis want to lob this shit into Israel.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If they use it on us, Bush will go nuts and just kick the shit out of them. On the other hand, if they use it on the Israelis, then the Israelis go nuts and bomb Baghdad and bring down our whole coalition—the Arab countries pull out and line up on Baghdad’s side. So your Iraqis, as it turns out, are currently engaged in trying to do exactly what most people in our government would like them to do.”

  “You want to let them go?” Clyde exclaimed. Fazoul stiffened and went into the next room to listen in on another extension.

  “As far as I personally am concerned,” Hennessey said. “If they get snowed in by natural causes, we can get some G-men on the ground there and deal with the situation in a calm and controlled fashion. That might work. But kamikaze sheriffs pulling station wagons across runways is bad. It’ll get them excited, and for all we know, they’ve got that container packed in a blanket of high explosive that’ll send it right up into the prevailing winds of this big goddamn storm, which is headed straight for Chicago.

  “But that’s just my opinion,” Hennessey continued after pausing for a moment to let Clyde savor that last image. “As far as a lot of other people are concerned, it would be a fine thing if those Iraqis got out of Dodge with their Antonov and relieved us of a great threat—and a greater embarrassment.” Hennessey’s voice became muffled for a few minutes as he conferred with one of his agents. Clyde thought about what Hennessey had just said and realized for the first time that this entire situation might never be brought to light—that Jonathan Town might never get to write his scoop for the Des Moines Register, and that the people responsible for this mess in Washington might get out of it with absolutely no damage to their careers.

  “Good news, Clyde, and whoever’s listening on the other extension,” Hennessey finally said. “The pilot worked out some course calculations for that Antonov. We know the approximate range of the plane. So we can say with certainty that if he’s going to get that sucker to Baghdad by the great circle route, he’s got to refuel somewhere in the North Atlantic, most likely in Iceland. So there’s a solution that works for everyone. They fly the shit out of the country. They run low on fuel, and we wait for them to land in some godforsaken pl
ace rather than shooting them down, which would blow our alliance with the Soviets to little bits. And we nail them there.”

  “So you want me to do nothing,” Clyde said.

  “Hell, Clyde, you’ve already done a hell of a lot. You broke the goddamn case. It’s just that Washington took too long to wake up. If you do anything now, you’re putting half the Midwest at risk.”

  “I understand.”

  “Over and out, Clyde. I’ll talk to you later.” And the connection went dead.

  Fazoul came in from the other room. “I would like to be on that airplane,” he said, “so that I can personally ensure that I do not lose another family in the way I lost my first one. Will you give me a ride to the airport?”

  “Hell,” Clyde said, “if all Saddam wanted to do was rile up the Israelis, he wouldn’t have had to make such a large amount of the stuff. So I was just thinking I owe it to my wife to go to the airport myself and see what’s what.”

  The ice was now covered with a thin but growing layer of dry, floury snow that made it even slicker, like dancing powder on a polished ballroom floor. Clyde put the chains on the unit’s rear tires and set out for the airport with Fazoul riding shotgun.

  Conditions were terrible, and Clyde spent most of the time steering into whatever direction he happened to be skidding. He hit two different parked cars in the space of as many blocks but kept going, reasoning that if he was still alive tomorrow, filling out the accident reports would be a pleasure to be savored.

  Interstate 45 had been closed. Semitrailer rigs had begun to stack up in the vast parking lots of the Star-Spangled Truck Stop, engines idling, lights and TV sets glowing inside their cabs. The enterprise was made up of several modules: a motel, a restaurant, a filling station, a truck wash, a convenience store. Clyde pulled up in front of the convenience store, set the parking brake, and went inside.