The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

  “Unfortunately, you couldn’t be more correct, Jim,” Aziz responded.

  “A toast,” Millikan said when the shot glasses were filled with the now syrupy Stoli. “To diplomacy, when you and I will work to bring Iraq back into the community of nations after Saddam’s inevitable defeat.”

  “I’m afraid that I will not be able to drink to that,” Aziz responded, setting his glass on the table untouched. “I do not share your opinion of the military situation in Kuwait, mon vieux. Before your leader launches a foolhardy assault on the new Iraqi province of Kuwait, he should understand that we have developed a new weapon. If we are forced to use this weapon by the aggressive behavior of other nations, it will cause such terrible casualties in the heart of the illegal Zionist entity that the Jews will have no choice but to enter the war—which will destroy your coalition and bring the Arabs into a unified front led by my nation. And it will cause such terrible casualties among your forces that Americans, who do not have the stomach for brave enterprises, will demand an end to this stupid and thoughtless aggression.”

  Millikan, holding his shot glass full of icy, syrupy Stoli, listened calmly to his peroration, thought for a moment, and then downed it anyway—a breach of etiquette that startled Aziz. “Mr. Dellinger?”

  Dellinger stepped forward and pulled a piece of fax paper from his pocket. It was a brief typewritten document written on the stationery of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

  “Would you care to share the latest intelligence with His Excellency?” Millikan continued.

  Richard Dellinger read the document, refolded the paper, and put it back in his pocket. Aziz slumped against the back of his Louis XV chair. He looked first at Dellinger and then at Millikan.

  “Hennessey?”

  “Please, Tariq. You offend me.”

  “Then who? You blocked any action in Washington with your task force. You caused the analyst who understood what was happening to be isolated. Who?”

  Dellinger stepped forward and said, “We are not at liberty to divulge that. You understand—sources and methods.”

  Aziz sat there with hands folded for a moment and blinked. Then he stood, filled the four glasses, and said, “A toast—to my colleague Jim Millikan, who proved to be more resourceful than I had thought.”

  Millikan did not raise his glass. He considered this for a moment.

  What the hell. In the past he had not received due credit for some of his finer accomplishments. And in the game that he and Aziz were playing, it was useful for Aziz to think that this was all Millikan’s doing. He raised his glass and drained it.

  They carefully prepared and savored their slices of black bread with butter, onions, pieces of egg, and caviar. Millikan proposed a toast. “To our continued association, Tariq, despite this unfortunate problem between our two countries.”

  A half hour later the caviar was gone, the vodka drained, and lunch well under way. Millikan had ordered the same menu as he had in March, as an unspoken symbol of the underlying continuity in the relationship between him and Aziz. He could not help noticing that Aziz ate quickly and seemed impatient for each course to arrive. In light of the new information, he had much work ahead of him.

  “Something has come up,” Millikan announced, “and I am afraid that I must rudely cut this meeting short.”

  Aziz was visibly relieved and wasted no time getting up. In almost no time they were standing by the side entrance waiting for the Iraqi limousine to pull up.

  “There is truly nothing we can do, is there?” Millikan asked, looking at Aziz.

  “No, my friend, and I do regard you as my friend. As we have both discovered in the past year, we diplomats really have little control over events.” He paused and mused, “You know, when I was young I always thought that being able to define events meant that you had gained partial control. But I think that maybe Tolstoy had it right. That the Napoleons and great men are no more important in determining history than the most humble soldier in the front lines.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” Millikan shot back.

  “Yes, mon vieux, I know. And that is why I’m going home to put on a military uniform and you are going—as I hear it—back to the university.”

  “You and I both know that we will be back. We will have another day.”

  Tariq Aziz leaned back, looked at Millikan, and chuckled. “Of course we will.”

  Within moments he was gone, talking on his cell phone. Dellinger fell in beside Millikan as he strolled out into the Place de la Concorde.

  “She was right,” Millikan said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Betsy Vandeventer. She had it exactly right: the Iraqi strategy was to use biological weapons to force Israel into the war, thus destroying the coalition. Very clever strategy. Very nice analysis on Ms. Vandeventer’s part.”

  Dellinger seemed stunned and confused. “Would you like me to put a commendation in her file?”

  “I’d like you to hire her,” Millikan said.

  “Hire her?”

  “Yes. Now that she has a clearer understanding of how the chain of command works, she’ll be an excellent addition to my staff.”

  Dellinger grinned. “I’ll get right on it, sir.”

  “She despises me,” Millikan said, “but she’s human. So figure out what she wants, and make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

  fifty-five

  JANUARY 1991

  JUST GETTING on I-66 and heading west seemed too easy, and Betsy had forgotten how to do anything easy and straightforward. So she took to smaller streets and wandered, keeping the sun generally on her left. She drove through Arlington National Cemetery, got caught in the swirl of traffic around the Pentagon, and ended up blundering southward into the city of Alexandria: first a dangerous-looking border neighborhood, but then into Alexandria proper, with its beautiful curving streets of lovely southern mansions, well-endowed churches, and private schools, all surrounded by nicely tended azaleas and dogwoods that would explode into bloom sometime later, after she had left the city behind.

  “You want me to get out the map?” said the man in the passenger seat, a big man in jeans and a flannel shirt, who had been shifting uncomfortably and biting his tongue as Betsy wandered aimlessly around northern Virginia. “We’re never going to see Steptoe Butte at this rate.”

  “What’s your hurry?” she said. Both of them had two months’ severance pay coming in, and Betsy had just got her security deposit back in full.

  Paul Moses leaned his seat back in resignation, reached out with one long arm, and turned on the radio. He began punching the scan button and soon found a news station, which was doing a live phone interview with a reporter in Baghdad. The bombing was going to start any day now.

  “What do you think?” he said. “Where should we stay tonight? I was thinking maybe Colonial Williamsburg.”

  “There’s only one landmark I want to reach today,” Betsy said, “and there it is.”

  They were headed west on Duke Street, which turned into the Little River Turnpike. Up ahead of them a tangle of ramps surrounded the approaches to a massive, ten-lane overpass, the beltway that ringed the city and marked—in some sense—the town limits of Washington, D.C. All ten lanes, in both directions, were filled with traffic, and traffic was stalled. Betsy accelerated above twenty miles an hour for the first time all day—although the rented car, burdened with much luggage and pulling a U-Haul trailer, didn’t have much zip. As they passed through the shadow of the overpass, she suddenly let out a most un-Betsy-like Indian war whoop. And then they emerged into the bleak January sunlight again.

  Stalled motorists on the outer ring of the beltway had the monotony of their morning commute broken by an unusual sight: a westbound car and trailer pulling onto the shoulder of Little River Turnpike just below them, and a couple of heavyset people in comfortable, rumpled clothing jumping out, throwing their arms around each other, and exchanging a long kiss. After a few moments the novelty of this sight wore off
, and they turned up their radios to hear the latest report from the Gulf.

  fifty-six

  FEBRUARY

  IT WAS three thirty-seven A.M., and for once Maggie was asleep. She had got to be a pretty good sleeper in the last few months. Clyde was prouder of this fact than anything. Out of all the hundreds of baby books, Clyde, through lengthy reading and scrutiny, had picked out the one that worked.

  Clyde was not sleeping. He had hardly slept in three days, since the ground war had been launched and Desiree’s unit had gone thundering forward into Iraq. Casualties were light. But earlier today he had seen a report that several members of Desiree’s division had been killed when they had hit a mine in their Humvee. They were medics who had been coming to the aid of an armored personnel carrier that had been struck by friendly fire. At least two of the dead medics were female.

  As soon as Clyde had heard this report, he had known in his heart that Desiree had been in that Humvee—probably driving it. That would be just like her. He had called the Pentagon hot line for families of servicepeople over and over, but it was always busy. Right now at least a couple of dozen Dhonts were awake around Forks County, hitting the auto redial buttons on their telephones, trying to get through. Clyde had given up and settled into his La-Z-Boy in front of the television, waiting for details to come through on CNN.

  So far the Iraqis had not used any nonconventional weapons. Though that shouldn’t have surprised Clyde, of all people. They’d been raining Scuds on Israel, but it seemed that Scuds weren’t accurate enough to do much damage unless they had chemical or biological warheads. The Israelis were controlling themselves, just barely.

  His nose had been itching for two days, and he had just become conscious of it. One of those big baling-wire nose hairs had made contact with the opposite side of his nostril. He went to the bathroom, groping his way in the dim light scattered off the TV tube, and got his rotary nose-hair clipper, then settled down in front of the TV again, turned it on, and began to nuzzle the clipper around, waiting for the satisfying click that it would make when it severed the offending hair.

  The buzzing of the trimmer almost drowned out the sound of the telephone. He snatched it up, afraid that it might have been ringing for some time as he’d sat there grinding away. “Hello?”

  There was a long pause, during which he could hear only static. Then some sound broke through: a deep, rhythmic whumping that got suddenly loud and then quickly died away. The sound, Clyde realized, of a helicopter passing by at high speed.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  “Hi, it’s me,” Desiree said. “Talk loud, baby. My Humvee hit a mine. My ears are still ringing.”

  “Where are you, honey?” Clyde blurted out before he had time to get choked up.

  “Phone booth,” Desiree said. “Oh, wow!”

  A loud whining and roaring sound came through for a few moments, then died away. Clyde could hear a lot of people whooping and cheering at the other end. “That was an M-one tank going by!” Desiree said.

  “Where’s that phone booth, sweetie?”

  “Some little crossroads in Iraq.”

  “You’re in Iraq?”

  “Yeah. But I gotta go—lots of people are waiting. I just wanted to remind you to take the meat out of the freezer—some of it’s about to expire.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Clyde said. “You hurry home now, okay?”

  “That’s the plan, Clyde,” she said. “That’s the whole idea.”

  about the authors

  Neal Stephenson is the author of THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD, THE CONFUSION, QUICKSILVER, CRYPTONOMICON, THE DIAMOND AGE, SNOW CRASH, and other books and articles.

  J. Frederick George is a historian and writer living in Paris.

  Also by Neal Stephenson and

  J. Frederick George

  INTERFACE

  Praise for

  Interface

  also by Neal Stephenson and

  J. Frederick George

  “A Manchurian Candidate for the computer age.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “Qualifies as the sleeper of the year, the rare kind of science-fiction thriller that evokes genuine laughter while simultaneously keeping the level of suspense cranked to the max.”

  —San Diego Tribune

  “Complex, entertaining, frequently funny.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Now available wherever Bantam Books are sold.

  Read on for a preview of

  Interface

  by

  Neal Stephenson

  and

  J. Frederick George

  Available now from

  Bantam Spectra

  INTERFACE

  On sale now

  Springfield Central had started out as your basic Big Old Brick Hospital with a central tower flanked symmetrically by two slightly shorter wings. Half a dozen newer wings, pavilions, sky bridges, and parking ramps had been plugged into it since then, so that looking at it from the window of the chopper, Mary Catherine could see it was the kind of hospital where you spent all your time wandering around lost. The roofs were mostly flat tar and pea-gravel, totally dark at this time of night, though in areas that were perpetually shaded, patches of snow glowed faintly blue under the starlight. But the roof of one of the old, original wings was a patch of high noon in the sea of midnight. It bore a red square with a white Swiss cross, a red letter H in the center of the cross, and some white block numerals up in one corner. Well off to the side, new doors—electrically powered slabs of glass—had been cut into the side of the old building’s central tower.

  It made her uneasy. This wasn’t Dad’s style. As the governor of one of the biggest states in the union, William A. Cozzano could have lived like a sultan. But he didn’t. He drove his own car and he did his own oil changes, lying flat on his back in the driveway of their house in Tuscola in the middle of the winter while frostbitten media crews photographed him in the act.

  Zooming around in choppers gave him no thrill. It just reminded him of Vietnam.

  He took this to the point where he probably wouldn’t have known how to get a chopper if he had needed one. Which is why he had to have people like Mel, people who knew the extent of his power and how to use it.

  “We have limited information,” Mel said, on the way down. “He suffered an episode of some kind in his office, shortly after eight o’clock. He is fine and his vital signs are totally stable. They managed to extract him from the statehouse without drawing a whole lot of attention, so if we play this thing right we may be able to get through it without any leaks to the media.”

  In other circumstances, Mary Catherine might have resented Mel’s talk of media leaks at a time like this. But that was his job. And this kind of thing was important to Dad. It was probably the same thing that Dad was worrying about, right now.

  If he was awake. If he was still capable of worrying.

  “I can’t figure out what the problem would be,” Mary Catherine said.

  “They’re thinking stroke,” Mel said.

  “He’s not old enough. He’s not fat. Not diabetic. Doesn’t smoke. His cholesterol level is through the floor. There’s no reason he should have a stroke.” Just when she had herself reassured, she remembered the tail end of the message she’d heard on her answering machine, the one that mentioned Sipes. The neurologist. For the first time it occurred to her that the message might have been about her father. She felt a sick panicky impulse, a claustrophobic urge to throw the helicopter door open and jump out.

  Mel shrugged. “We could burn up the phone lines getting more info. But it wouldn’t help him. And it would just create more potential leaks. So just try to take it easy, because in a few minutes we’ll know for sure.”

  The chopper made an annoyingly gradual soft descent onto the hospital roof. Mary Catherine had a nice view of the capitol dome out her window, but tonight it just looked malevolent, like a sinister antenna rising out of the prairie to pick up emanat
ions from distant sources of power. It was a tall capitol but not a big one. Its smallness always emphasized, to Mary Catherine, its unnatural concentration of influence.

  Springfield liked to bill itself as “The City Lincoln Loved.” Mel always referred to it as “The City Lincoln Left.”

  Mel and Mary Catherine had to sit inside for a moment and let the momentum of the rotor spin down a little. When she got the thumbs-up from the pilot, Mary Catherine put her hand on her hair and rolled out onto the white cross in her running shoes. She had thrown a trench coat on over her sweatshirt and jeans, and the buckle whipped back and forth on the end of its belt; the wintry air, traveling at hurricane speed under the rotor blades, had a windchill factor somewhere down around absolute zero. She didn’t stop running until she had passed through the wide automatic glass doors and into the quiet warmth of the corridor that led to the central elevator shafts.

  Mel was right behind her. An elevator was already up and waiting for them, doors open. It was a wide-mouth, industrial-strength lift big enough to take a gurney and a whole posse of medical personnel. A man was waiting inside, middle-aged, dressed in a white coat thrown over a Bears sweatshirt. This implied that he had been called into the hospital on short notice. It was Dr. Sipes, the neurologist.

  She was used to being in hospitals. But suddenly the reality hit her. “Oh, god,” she said, and slumped against the elevator’s pitiless stainless steel wall.

  “What’s going on?” Mel said, watching Mary Catherine’s reaction, looking at Dr. Sipes through slitted eyes.

  “Dr. Sipes,” Sipes said.

  “Mel Meyer. What’s going on?”

  “I’m a neurologist,” Sipes explained.