The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  At midnight on the fifteenth, the night before she was supposed to appear before the Deputies Committee meeting, she was still thrashing around. She’d accumulated a huge dossier of hints and dead-end leads, but nothing that led to any firm conclusions. Any idiot could plainly see that the Iraqis were up to something. If she’d been an elected official, that would have been enough to go on. But she was just a lowly analyst, she had to be objective and scientific, and she couldn’t get by with hints and suppositions.

  She logged off her computer, dragged her weary body over to the elevator just in time to see the next shift come on board at the situation room down the hall. Langley never slept, reflecting Dean Rusk’s observation that when we were asleep, two thirds of the globe was awake and raising hell.

  A Red Top cab swung by to pick her up at the front entrance. She stood there by the statue of Nathan Hale, smelling the forsythia and honeysuckle in bloom, trying to figure out what she’d say tomorrow. Figuring out Saddam’s game was the easy part; making the big shots believe her was a different matter.

  The cab took her home down the G.W. Parkway. She was so tired that she closed her eyes and fell asleep. In what seemed like hours she was awakened by the Bangladeshi cabbie.

  “Madam, pardon me, please wake up. Madam, please wake up. Oh, good, that will be seven-fifty.”

  Betsy was embarrassed and gave the cabbie a ten, partially because she felt stupid for having fallen asleep and partially out of gratitude for the driver’s gentlemanly behavior.

  As usual Betsy woke up at six the next morning. She felt splendidly rested. As she was climbing out of the shower, she heard a dim mechanical purring noise through the wall. It took her several moments to realize what it was: a phone ringing. Not a modern digital chirp but a throaty “drring, drring, drring,” loud enough to shake plaster off the walls.

  But they didn’t have any old-fashioned telephones in the apartment, just cheap boxy Radio Shack models.

  Then she remembered. When she’d moved into this place, she’d been poking around in the broom closet, looking for a place to cram her winter clothes, when she’d stumbled across an old black telephone. It sat on top of a flat black box, which was hooked up to a narrow orange cable, which ran out of a hole in the wall.

  Her former roommate—also CIA—had been living in the place for a year and was holding the lease. “That was here when I moved in,” she said. “I guess it must have been installed for the previous tenants and the Agency never got around to removing it. There are probably phones like that stashed away in apartments all over northern Virginia.”

  When Betsy had taken over the lease, she had mentioned the phone to Security, and they’d said they would send someone out to pick it up, but they never had. Every new roommate who passed through the place discovered the phone, picked it up, found that the line was dead, and never touched it again. She and Cassie stacked their hats on it.

  Betsy tripped over some towels, stumbled into the closet, swept the hats off the receiver, and picked up the black phone. “Hullo?”

  Spector’s strangely distorted voice came over the earpiece. “I’ll meet you down at level three of your parking garage at six forty-five. I’ll be driving a tan Ford Fairlane.” Then he hung up.

  Betsy had been maintaining a fragile calm in the face of her upcoming deputies meeting; now even this facade was completely shattered. Something must really be up. Her whole day was off balance. Her twenty-minute routine took thirty-five. She had forgotten to get her clothes ready the night before. The iron was broken, so she couldn’t press her blouse. She broke into her summer clothes to get a lightweight number to wear under her no-nonsense blazer. She finally got herself put together and went to the elevator with her Post in hand.

  Parking-level three was the last stop on the elevator ride, and when she arrived, exactly at six forty-five, Spector wasn’t there. The exhaust fans throbbed and hummed, drowning out even her own thoughts, and she waited for five minutes, getting more and more nervous. Finally the government-issue Ford rounded the curve and pulled up beside her.

  Spector leaned across, opened the passenger’s-side door, and said casually, “Get in. Have you had any breakfast?”

  They drove down to Nineteenth Street and over to McDonald’s. The drive-through was choked with cars, so Spector handed Betsy a ten-dollar bill and said, “Egg McMuffin, orange juice, cinnamon roll, and large black coffee.” The only people she saw at McDonald’s were some cops, and two street people sharing a meal, drinking dozens of artificial creamers, and eating the contents of what appeared to be twenty packets of sugar. Soon she was back in the car.

  They drove up the parkway to the first pull-off overlooking the Potomac. They got out, looked down at the rowers in their shells below and the golden sun, already high in the sky, casting a haze over the District.

  “Enjoy,” Spector said. “You’re going to have an interesting day.”

  “Interesting in the Chinese-curse sense?”

  “Absolutely. You are now a target—from at least three places. One, the career bureaucracy. King has spread the word about what a disloyal, insubordinate bitch you are. Two, Department of Agriculture. Glaspie took your words to heart and told the President. He is pissed off—not at you, but at Saddam. The Vice President has been all over the Foreign Assistance Office and Aid for International Development. They have contacted their buddies in Policies and Programs, who are pissed off—not at Saddam, but at you. Three, senior analysts. They were so busy trying to intuit the White House line—Millikan’s line—and fit their analysis to that procrustean bed, that they totally missed all that you noticed. The question is not whether you are or are not right. The problem is that you scooped them. And they are pissed.”

  “But what about Millikan—why does he hate me so much?”

  “Because Ronald Reagan was a big supporter of Saddam Hussein.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Someone had to get the goods—the weapons, the money, the matériel, the intelligence—into Saddam’s hands. Not as a one-off, you understand—the Iran-Iraq war dragged on forever, and the sheer quantity of stuff we handed over to the Iraqis during those years beggars the imagination. Handing it over was the job given to our friend James Gabor Millikan. Not that he didn’t want the job, of course. He was glad to do it. But it’s safe to say that it turned into a much bigger deal than he was anticipating when it all started—and then he had no choice but to see it through to the bloody end. It’s in the nature of Washington, Betsy, that these things get structured in such a way that there is one, and only one, designated fall guy. One sacrificial lamb who will take full blame if the policy ever goes sour. In the case of our policy of shipping guns and money and highly classified intelligence to Iraq, the fall guy was Millikan. And ever since he’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “And he’s afraid that I’m going to drop it.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Okay,” Betsy said, “that explains Millikan. In a weird way it almost makes me feel sorry for him. But what about the DCI—where does he stand in all this?”

  “He’s a weenie. He cut his teeth under Casey. His understanding of the role of the Agency is to prove whatever it is that downtown wants proved. Anything that does not fit is either ‘forward-leaning analysis’ or else wrong. But since CIA doesn’t do wrong things, it will probably be forward-leaning analysis.”

  “So what’s going to happen to me?”

  “You’ll be sacrificed. For the good of the Agency, don’t you know. But each of them will want their piece of you.”

  Betsy felt light-headed and tried to swallow a big lump in her throat, the same lump she used to get when Mom took her to the dentist to get her cavities drilled out.

  “Look, I’ve been watching your work, and I know where you’re going with it,” Spector said. “And you’re right. But that’s not germane. Tell me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you going to come up with the notion that there is a massive Iraqi research effort in
nonconventional warfare under way? And that not only is it funded with our agricultural credits, but it’s being carried out largely on our soil, in our academic institutions?”

  “God, you’re good.”

  “No, you’re good. But in the immortal words of the new chief of collections in Mobile, Alabama, ‘You’ve exceeded your task.’ So say nothing. When they ask you for your report, say that you have not got all the results you need. They will proceed to stomp all over you. The Director of Central Intelligence will be pissed off because you did not fall for the trap of being brought out to headquarters to release your findings prematurely. The Office of Science and Technologies head will be pissed off at you because you have found something that his shop should have found, but because you’ll say nothing, he won’t even have the pleasure of venting his wrath. The Policy staff will be pissed off at you because you have scooped them. And on and on. You will take some shit for not exposing your body to their poisoned arrows, but if you say nothing, you will be alive to fight again another day.”

  Betsy had not touched her McMuffin. She was sick. For the moment Nampa, Idaho, seemed like an awfully nice place to her. Spector finished his meal and was sipping at his coffee. “I’ve saved the worst for last. Our friend Ed Hennessey has come up with the same conclusions you have. He needs our foreign information, and you need his help on the domestic front. Hennessey may be the Agency’s most hated man in Washington—he’s let it be known that he’s found a lot of bad actors among our ranks, but he’s playing his cards close, so everyone’s afraid of him. Millikan hates him, too, for reasons that would take all morning to enumerate. You were seen talking to him the other day. My dear, you are in deep shit. You’ve got only one friend in town, and it’s not me.”

  “Then why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I ultimately work not for the Director of Central Intelligence or for Millikan, but for the President, and the President knows how these things work. He knows how totally irrational this system is and how much there is a need to change things. But this is the only system there is. He wants you to hang in there. I’m instructed to cover for you insofar as possible.”

  Betsy began to shiver; chills ran up and down her body, and she didn’t know if it was from the damp April morning or sheer terror. She had never been this afraid before.

  “I’m not real good at pep talks. I got out of Operations because I wasn’t comfortable with sending people to virtually certain deaths. You are not going to be physically murdered—if you were, you’d get a star on the wall. You are going to be career-murdered. You will probably not get another promotion, and you will spend the rest of your life doing soybean studies. But you are in a situation that comes to few of us. You can, honest to God, make a difference.”

  “Why . . .”

  “Yeah, I know, why if it is so dangerous doesn’t the system take care of the problem? Don’t forget, during the Cuban missile crisis John Scali of the American Broadcasting Company, meeting a Soviet diplomat at a restaurant, probably saved the world from nuclear destruction. This is not quite so dramatic. But it is important. And the system simply can’t handle it. We have to do everything back-channel, both because of the peculiar chain of command and because we think there’s a mole somewhere in the system. Eat your breakfast.”

  They sat there for fifteen minutes, watching the sun coming up over the city, listening to the increasing rumble of the incoming traffic. Finally Spector went to his car phone. Moments later a Red Top cab pulled up.

  Betsy was shaking. Nothing in her life had prepared her for what was to come. Spector squeezed her elbow, gave her the most earnest, serious, eye-to-eye-contact look she had ever received from a Washington person. “Do good, kid. My ass is on the line, too. Unlike you, who stumbled into this, I’m a volunteer. See you next week.”

  Betsy walked over to the cab. It was the same cabbie from last night. “Good morning, madam,” he said brightly. “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  “Not good enough. And you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Giggling. “Oh, yes, a very nice night’s sleep.”

  ten

  AFTER HIS big encounter with The Heavyweight, which put kind of an ominous spin on the overall decision to launch his campaign, Clyde decided he had had a little bit too much of the Big City for the time being and that he would begin out in the hinterlands of Forks County. Somehow he reasoned that it would be easier there. He could go way out past Palisades State Park to the northwest corner of the county and start visiting farmhouses one at a time, out there in that flat territory on the west side of the Wapsipinicon, where two thousand acres was considered to be a small farm.

  Another advantage: this would put him as far as possible from Lake Pla-Mor. Recent events there had given Clyde’s opponent, Kevin Mullowney, some ammunition. Mullowney had been bruiting it about Forks County that Clyde’s recent three A.M. rowboat recovery had been botched so miserably as to suggest that Clyde might be UNFIT TO BE SHERIFF.

  The rowboat had been collected from the beach where Clyde had left it by the manager of the university boathouse, who towed it back, hauled it up on the ramp, and, with the help of a couple of strong rowers, turned it over to dump out all the rainwater that had collected in the bottom. Other debris had tumbled out, too: a few handfuls of gravel and some shards of a broken bottle. Fearing that barefoot boaters might cut their feet, the manager had swept all of it up and dumped it into the garbage can.

  Two days later the missing oar had been noticed floating along with the great spinning whorl of flotsam and jetsam that always formed at the spillway. From time to time the Corps of Engineers would come along and rake all this unsightly debris away and haul it to the dump. The oar, clearly stenciled as EIU property, was plucked out by a diligent employee and eventually found its way back to the boathouse. It was an old splintered wooden oar, rough and creviced at the tip. Someone at the boathouse noticed that clumps of black hair were wedged into the cracks. Upon further analysis some shreds of human scalp were found in there, too.

  Everyone knew instinctively where the body was. It was in the Rotary—the horizontal vortex that formed where the Nishnabotna River struck the face of the dam and curled under. The Rotary was marked with red buoys and lurid danger signs for half a mile upstream, but every year it seemed to claim another clueless high-school student or drunken frat boy. Once a body got into the Rotary, it could spin round and round for weeks before it was spat out, all decomposed and bloated and chewed up by the gar and carp and pike that lived in the lake.

  The garbage can at the boathouse was emptied out and its contents personally inspected by Sheriff Mullowney himself, who worked best under the clinical illumination of television lights. The gravel from the bottom of the rowboat looked as if it had come from a public boat ramp way up at the northern end of the lake. The shards of glass did not come from a liquor bottle; they were quartz laboratory glassware. And there was a key chain in there, too, consisting of a car key, a house key, and an office-door key from the university, on a simple split ring. The office key was found to fit a laboratory door in the Sinzheimer Biochemistry Wing of the Scheidelmann AgriScience Research Center. The office was that of one Marwan Habibi, who had not been seen for two weeks.

  Clyde Banks knew perfectly well that he hadn’t done anything wrong—even if he had noticed the key chain in the boat, it wouldn’t have given him reason to suspect a murder had happened. But Sheriff Mullowney seemed to have convinced every working journalist in eastern Iowa that Deputy Clyde Banks had blown an opportunity to break a probable murder case.

  This, more than anything, had given Clyde the impetus to get started on his campaign. And for some reason it felt less embarrassing to do it out here, in the rural northwest corner of the county. If he started in some built-up area where the houses were close together, he would be seen making his way down the block. People sitting out on their front porches enjoying the spring breezes, people out mowing their lawns or playing basketball in the drivewa
ys, would watch him coming their way, hitting one house after another, and wonder what on earth he was doing. Word would get around.

  Of course he had to remind himself that this was the whole idea of a political campaign. Word was supposed to get around. But Clyde had never been the type to draw attention to himself. In high school he had hung around a little bit with attention-getting people who acted in plays and played musical instruments, almost all of whom had now moved to distant places where that kind of thing was not considered outlandish. The only people left behind at home were the ones who did not act that way. So for a man to go around knocking on every door in the county and putting his name and even his face up on signs in people’s yards seemed very peculiar—not a good way to earn the respect of the citizenry.

  The northwesternmost house in Forks County was pretty easy to find. He just drove west on 30, the Lincoln Highway, until he reached the border between Forks and Oakes counties, which was marked out by a straight gravel road running north-south, then took a right on that road and drove north until he saw a sign saying Maquoketa County. Then he shifted the wagon into reverse and backed up about a hundred feet. A farmhouse was on the right side of the road. Clyde backed directly into its driveway, leaving the Murder Car pointed outward so that he could escape rapidly if the place turned out to be occupied by one of the roughly eight thousand Mullowneys who lived in Forks County. But when he climbed out, he could see that the name Frost was on the mailbox. He went up and knocked on the door.