The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “I’ll scratch a lot more than that if you don’t lay off,” Clyde said, brandishing the chain. “I don’t want to use this, because it’s a very bad, dangerous kind of weapon. But I’m off duty and I don’t have my baton, so I got to improvise.”

  Clyde whirled the chain around a couple of times, just as a visual aid. It was so heavy that it almost pulled his arm out of the socket and caused nauseating pains in his sternum. He had to plant his feet wide apart to prevent it from pulling him over.

  The Heavyweight observed this demonstration calmly and then shrugged. He was giving up. “You gonna arrest me?”

  “Nope. Like I said, I’m off duty.”

  “Got any jobs you need done?”

  Clyde thought this one over. “Keep people from breaking into this place and partying, and I’ll give you some more of those McDonald’s gift certificates.” They didn’t serve booze at McDonald’s.

  “Okay,” The Heavyweight said.

  “And haul all of this debris and stuff out of the yard and stack it up in back by the alley, and I’ll give you a bonus.”

  “Okay.”

  six

  APRIL

  KEVIN VANDEVENTER parked his rusty Corolla in the faculty lot just after five-thirty P.M., when the campus cops gave up on doing parking checks. As he walked toward the grand entrance of the Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center—a brand-new I. M. Pei knockoff planted on the former site of the vet-med barns—he smelled the aroma every farm boy knows. After they had torn down the barns to make room for this new structure, they had hauled in new topsoil and capped it with fresh sod. But when the spring thaws came, you could still smell the underlying stratum of old, fermented manure, down deep in the soil. The smell of planting season.

  As he approached the building and stepped through the enormous plate-glass doors, another set of odors took over. He paused in the main entrance hall to take in the splendor of the permanent multimedia display that had been set up there to wow visiting congressmen and agriculture ministers. He inhaled a deep draft of the building’s filtered and purified air, ripe with laboratory solvents and chemical fertilizer. It smelled like Science. Totally unlike the gymnasiums, which smelled like the fierce balm that wrestlers slathered on their torn muscles, or the Fine Arts Pavilion, which smelled like the microwave-popcorn fumes that constantly escaped the maintenance engineer’s room in the basement.

  The Scheidelmann was named after a late and beloved dean of the EIU College of Agriculture, who rated a small plaque by the door. In the center of the entrance hall was a rotating ten-foot globe, studded with tiny, electrified EIU pennants marking the locations of the myriad research and extension projects that were being run out of this complex. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling photographs depicting Twisters in action, planting rice seedlings in the paddies of Burma and giving gaunt, buck-toothed Africans practical tips on soil erosion. More than a few of these photos featured Dr. Arthur Larsen, the Rainmaker.

  Five years ago National Geographic had published an article about Larsen in which they had estimated that his discoveries and his outreach programs had saved upward of a hundred million people from starvation, all around the globe. The regents had paid for this page of the magazine to be blown up to the size of a sheet of plywood and then engraved on a slab of solid bronze, which was now embedded in the wall of the entrance hall.

  Kevin Vandeventer was entering the Rainmaker’s kingdom at five-forty on a Friday night, a TV dinner from the local Quik Trip in hand, because he had experiments that needed tending every few hours, around the clock, for months at a time. Whenever he came in to tend them, he found that there was a great deal of other work that needed doing—writing and editing reports, coding computer programs, and simply straightening up around the lab.

  He had to smile when he thought that he was basically there because he hated physical labor. Dad had given up on him at the age of twelve and accepted that he just wasn’t cut out for the farming business. Big sister Betsy was clearly destined for higher things, and so the title of heir apparent to the Vandeventer family potato empire had fallen onto the shoulders of Bob, the youngest, who was perfectly happy with it.

  Kevin did have one feature useful on a farm: he liked animals. He was always tending to them, even learning how to shoe their three horses. So when Kevin began pulling down straight A’s in science courses, his dad was pretty proud. Perhaps he’d amount to something, after all. Kevin had 4.0’d himself through Boise State University, and then, after maxing the GREs, had received a full-ride research fellowship to work with Dr. Larsen—which, as he soon learned, meant working several layers beneath Larsen in the research hierarchy. But he didn’t really care; he had continued to shine in the laboratory as he had in the classroom and was now rounding the turn for the home stretch on his dissertation.

  He followed a maze of ground-level corridors into the Sinzheimer Biochemistry Wing and then took the elevator up to the third floor. He went to his lab in 302, put his supper in the fridge, and sat down on a high stool for a minute, collecting his thoughts, getting organized. Kevin had the gift of concentration, but it took a conscious effort to turn it on sometimes. He ate a candy bar, knowing that if he didn’t, his stomach would soon begin to distract him from his work.

  Then, suddenly, it was nine-thirty. Four hours had gone by as he had concentrated on pipettes and the digital readouts of his machines. His stomach had digested the candy bar and was requesting further input. He got his El Toro Beef and Beans Tostada Supper out of the fridge and headed for the microwave, four doors down the hall.

  This place had been his home for four years—he kept a sleeping bag and foam pad rolled up in a cabinet and frequently slept on the floor. As one of the oldest veterans of the Sinzheimer Wing, and the only resident American citizen on the floor, he had become its unofficial mayor.

  He liked the wing and its inhabitants. There were no undergrads—no female bow-heads, no young men who believed that Bud Light advertisements were cinema verité. There were none of the social-sciences professors whose development had been arrested around the time of Woodstock. This place worked twenty-four hours a day. The professors looked rumpled and tired, as if they really labored and were thinking about things. Mostly, Kevin knew, they were thinking about how to replace all of the DARPA soft money now that the Cold War was over. They drove themselves and their graduate students hard, because eighty percent of their salaries came from grants. The grad students came from other countries where leisure time was scarce and not yet considered an inalienable right. They rarely complained.

  Even now, late on a Friday night, the place was alive. Most of the professors were gone, and the boom boxes in various labs were cranked up, filling the corridor with a cacophony of sound—mostly American pop music, but also multiethnic stuff in a variety of languages.

  The door to 304 was wide-open, which was unusual; the grad students there were Arabs who usually kept to themselves. Even more unusual, an oom thumpy oom thumpy bass beat was blaring out of the open door. Kevin looked into the lab as he passed by. The windows were open to let in the fresh spring air, and at least half a dozen people were in there, all men, all Arabs, all holding paper cups filled with something bright purple. Kevin recognized it instantly: grape Kool-Aid, almost certainly mixed with pure-grain alcohol from the laboratory stocks.

  The men noticed him peering in and smiled sheepishly. Kevin smiled back. One of them was sprawled out on a ratty old Goodwill sofa under the window, sound asleep. It was Marwan Habibi. He frequently slept in his lab, just as Kevin frequently slept in his. But this evening he appeared to be passed out rather than merely asleep.

  It was easy enough to figure this out: the end of the academic year was not far away, some of these guys were hoping to get their hoods and tassels come May, they had been working themselves like slaves in Lab 304 for years, and they must have just passed some milestone in their research. Kevin threw them a thumbs-up and kept on going without breaking stride; he had mile
s to go before he slept and didn’t want to be invited in for Kool-Aid. He proceeded to the little kitchen in the center of the wing and threw his dinner into the microwave.

  The only one of those guys he really knew was Marwan Habibi, and Marwan was already unconscious, so there didn’t seem much point in trying to join the party. The Arabs here tended to be pretty secular. Many of them enjoyed the occasional shot of whiskey. But even a heavy drinker—which Marwan certainly was not—couldn’t stand up to pure-grain alcohol for very long. Kevin was impressed with how smart and how professional Marwan was. He was working on a project to control the gas-producing tendencies of the bacteria that lived in the guts of cows, which caused them to fart a lot, which in turn exacerbated the greenhouse effect. Arthur Larsen, the Rainmaker, was hardly known as an environmentalist, but he had squeezed a cool half million out of the EPA for this and packed Marwan’s lab with the latest and best equipment for culturing and studying the habits of bacteria. Marwan kept door 304 closed, but from time to time Kevin invited him into 302 as he walked past, and chatted with him for a while. It was all part of his self-imposed responsibilities as mayor of the third floor.

  He attacked his dinner with the flimsy plastic fork provided, finding the utensil highly unsatisfying. But the beans were great. He scraped every gram of sauce from the plastic tray and then threw the remains into the garbage can. He bought a Coke from the vending machine and headed back toward his lab. The door to 304 was closed now, but the party was still going on.

  It was about half an hour later when he heard the honking of a car horn below in the parking lot. The music from 304 abruptly stopped. This was typical; the Arabs had a heavy hand on the horn button, which locals found startling and even frightening.

  Kevin had his door open, so he could hear the voices of the Arabs as they departed 304. They were rowdy and happy. “Take care you don’t bang Marwan’s head on the door frame!” one of them said in perfect British-accented English. Kevin looked up to see them moving down the hall, carrying the dozing Marwan Habibi on their shoulders. One of them smiled sheepishly at Kevin as he went by. “A little too much!” he said, sticking out his thumb and pinkie and wiggling them.

  “Tell him congratulations from Kevin when he wakes up,” Kevin said.

  “Oh, yes,” the Arab said, “we will certainly tell him.”

  seven

  AS BETSY Vandeventer came stomping and sneezing up Clarendon early in the morning, she could see parallel strata of light shining from the windows of the several newish office buildings that surrounded the Courthouse metro in downtown Arlington. One of them was the Castleman Suites, which she supposed had been chosen by the CIA as overflow space precisely because it looked so utterly normal. An observer familiar with the Agency might have noticed a few clues: the odd construction of the windows, which were supposedly proof against microwave and laser surveillance; the Blue Bird bus that pulled through its horseshoe drive several times a day, ferrying employees out to the main campus at Langley; the fact that the second floor, above the First American Bank branch on the ground floor, was an empty buffer zone. In most ways, Betsy reflected, it really was just another normal office building; people sat in cubicles in front of computer screens, wrote memos, jockeyed for promotions, and played politics.

  The main entrance of the Castleman would get you only to the bank. Betsy entered via the parking ramp instead, walked through an unmarked, windowless steel door, and showed her credentials to a guard, who allowed her into the elevator lobby. She got off at the seventh floor, displayed her ID to another guard, and walked halfway down a corridor punctuated at wide intervals by heavy doors with electronic locks. Each door gave access to a vault of offices, each vault hermetically sealed from the next. Betsy punched the code de semaine into one such lock and pushed the door open. A few greeting cards, and notes of congratulations, had been slipped under her door by colleagues who worked in other vaults and who hadn’t been able to make it to yesterday’s celebratory lunch at the Pawnbroker.

  Betsy had passed her five-year polygraph test brilliantly. Perhaps, she mused, the same low basal metabolism that made her prone to gaining weight also produced the steady traces on the polygraph that were so reassuring to her employers. The examiner had been so impressed—her responses so perfectly matched the baseline established five years earlier on her entry poly—that he had set Betsy’s test aside as an example for others to aspire to.

  The vault consisted mostly of open cubicles—eight in all, each equipped with a Sun workstation. These were mostly in the back, near windows. In the front were two desks for the secretarial staff. In the back corner was an office enclosed by glass walls, the domain of the branch chief, Howard King. Betsy’s cubicle was gaudy with Mylar balloons and congratulatory bouquets. From her armless swivel chair she had a view over I-66, and if she put her face close to the mysterious surveillance-proof window, she could make out one tower of the National Cathedral. She took a moment to enjoy this panorama before sitting down to work.

  All the way to work Betsy had been rehearsing in her head the agenda for today’s Interagency Study Group over at Ag.

  Betsy’s mental prep for the meeting at Ag was important—she never did anything until she had run through it in her head several hundred times. Frequently she would get so muddled that, in an effort to clarify things in her own mind, she would resort to having imaginary conversations with her mother, pretending that she was at home having a cup of coffee on the breakfast table in the kitchen. “The government has been sending a lot of money to Iraq—mostly, but not exclusively, from the Agriculture Department. We do this with the understanding that the Iraqis will use the money to buy agricultural products from the U.S. So it’s actually a subsidy for American farmers as much as it is a foreign-aid program. Four times a year all of the departments that are sending money to Iraq, as well as some other agencies, have a meeting to evaluate this program and to set policy objectives for the next quarter.”

  Simple and logical it was—a model of rational government procedure. But there was always more to it than that. If it had really been possible for her to talk about such things to her mother, and if she’d wanted to level with her, she would have had to do a lot more talking. The talk would have sounded less like a civics textbook and more like vicious gossip. Betsy had learned that these meetings usually turned out to be a chance for the various division chiefs to strut their stuff, score cheap points on crosstown competitors, and defend, or enlarge, their turf.

  And when Betsy logged onto her workstation and began scanning through her waiting mail, she realized that today there was even more to it than that. One piece of mail was a list of participants in today’s meeting. It had been suddenly and drastically revised. Today it wouldn’t be just the usual division chiefs and their analyst minions. Today it went much higher. It was going to be controlled straight from the White House, and it wasn’t going to be a meeting so much as a damage-control session.

  The New York Times bureau chief in Cairo, acting on a leak by the Egyptians, had blown the whistle on the Iraqis. Saddam Hussein was being a very bad boy. He was using U.S. dollars not to buy food from American farmers but for other things. It did not take a huge exercise in forward-leaning analysis to know that he was stocking up on weapons again.

  What to do about that was a policy question, and it was not for people at her level to discuss policy. It was for her and her colleagues at similar-level desks around town only to monitor cash and weapons flows, and she expected that those would be the marching orders today.

  Her workstation gave her the ability to pull up vast amounts of information, so long as she had the appropriate clearances. For example, she knew that yesterday a congressional delegation, or codel, headed by Bob Dole, had met with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Whenever such a meeting took place, someone at the local embassy—usually a State Department employee—would write up a codel memo and cable it to D.C., where it would become available to anyone in government who had a need to know
about it. Betsy typed in a short command telling the system to bring up all recent items, including the keywords “Dole” and “Iraq” and “codel,” and within a few moments the document was there on her screen.

  Senator Dole was quoted as having said, “I kept thinking that I was watching Peter Sellers imitating a dictator.” Saddam had denied any knowledge of the Supergun project, recently very much in the news, and had said that his recent statement about binary nerve weapons had been meant merely to intimidate the Israelis. Dole was quoted again: “To see that guy talk about being a humanitarian is about as convincing as hearing Mother Teresa claiming to be a hit man.” Dole had been shown official Iraqi documents “proving” that the Ag subsidies had been spent only on food supplies from the U.S. or U.S. subsidiaries.

  From there Betsy could have typed in more commands and brought up more documents, following one reference to the next, tracking down leads to her heart’s content.

  But her heart’s content wasn’t part of her job description. She was only supposed to access information on a “need to know” basis.

  She had learned this the hard way a month ago, when she had let her curiosity get the better of her and gone snooping in places where she didn’t have any real need to know. The CIA kept careful track of who had accessed which documents. It didn’t take long for word to reach her boss. His reaction had been vicious: he had waited until they were alone together in the vault, then hauled her up out of her chair and slammed her against a filing cabinet.

  Someone else entered the vault. She saw him reflected in the curved screen of her workstation: a compact, trim man with a short and simple military-style haircut that looked out of place above the starched white collar of his tailored shirt. It was Richard Spector, the division chief, her boss’s boss. He ran half a dozen or more vaults there at the Castleman.

  He didn’t bother with greetings or small talk. “Today be a good listener,” he said. Even when he was saying momentous things, he always spoke in a quiet voice, as if he were only musing to himself. But it made him seem formidable, rather than mousy. “Answer direct questions directly, but try to figure out who’s got what agenda vis-à-vis Iraq.”