The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “As you know,” Millikan continued, “the making of middle-eastern policy is a difficult task. We count heavily on you to help us. We know of your difficulty because of the devastation of our HUMINT resources after the Iranian Embassy takeover and the death of Colonel Buckley.

  “The goal of our policy is simple. It is to keep Iran in check. Their brand of Islamic fundamentalism, their population and resource base, and their terrorist network around the world constitute a clear and continuous threat to us and to our new Soviet colleagues in Central Asia. As unpleasant as it may be, we have only one counterweight to Iran, and that is Iraq and the theatrical Saddam Hussein.”

  His face began to redden. “It’s tough enough to handle the Israeli lobby and their pressures, and the liberals and their bitching about George’s lack of vision, and the press with their sniping attacks. But when we get sandbagged by bottom-fish analysts, this is too much. We have to be on the same page! Is that clear?”

  The exalted directors around the table were taking a tongue-lashing from the White House. Betsy watched this passively, much as she might be watching C-Span at home. She knew that she was the object of this attack, but she didn’t feel as if she were in the same room. Millikan talked more and more and began to turn red and pound the table as he lashed out at incompetent underlings, disloyal subordinates, and the helplessness of government to clean out bad employees. He then stood up and pointed directly at Betsy, who imagined herself as Joan of Arc, tied to the stake, smoke curling up into her inflamed nasal passages—

  She sneezed. It was a good one. It came out when Millikan, like Pavarotti going for a high C, was ready to drive his point home. A long thread of mucus flew out over her upper and lower lip, and everyone in the room looked away from her. She fumbled for a Kleenex.

  The room was paralyzed. The deputy director of Operations blurted, “Gesundheit.”

  Betsy said, “Sorry.”

  Millikan had lost his train of thought. He could not sustain his anger at anyone this pathetic. He could only shake his head in disbelief and look helplessly at the DCI.

  “I’d like to thank Dr. Millikan for his insights and for his typically acute analysis of a serious problem in policy formation. Ms. Vandeventer. You have been our guest here for the past week. I’m sorry you’re feeling poorly—as soon as you’ve got yourself together, could we see your report?”

  “Of course. Maggie, would you pass these out?” Betsy said, dumping the heap of binders in front of the crippled dragon lady. Hume had fully recovered her composure, and she hobbled around the table cheerfully dispensing the copies.

  Betsy began. “The level of classification for this briefing is FOUO—for official use only.”

  “What? Nothing important is FOUO,” said one of the suits.

  “If I may continue,” Betsy appealed to the DCI.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I will welcome questions or requests for elucidation at the end of my presentation.”

  She then read her paper on soybean markets, present and future, in Southwest Asia. As she patiently explained that there was a healthy market for American soybeans, if the U.S. could keep the Indians from entering the market, the men around the table began to mutter and look across at each other. Their staffers in chairs around the edge of the room began to growl in sympathetic response.

  Millikan finally broke in. “You know goddamned well that this is not what you’re here for. You’re here to expand on the line you gave the attaché about Saddam using our Ag funds for improper purposes.”

  “Oh, sir, that’s not what I was tasked for. I was dealt with harshly by my branch chief, Mr. Howard King, who has since received a promotion for his good work. He told me forcefully never to exceed my task again, never again to mention anything outside my job of tracing commodities flow. I’m doing some interesting work on the lentil market now. Would you like to hear something about lentils?”

  “You mean that you won’t discuss your notions of improper Iraqi use of USG funds?”

  “With all due respect, sir, I cannot exceed my task. Now, if you gentlemen would like to contact my branch and task me to pursue Iraqi use of USG funds, I would be glad to. But I’m sure that you all are considering that.”

  Millikan interrupted, softly and slowly. “Then why did you tell the attaché that Mr. Hussein was misusing USG funds? Don’t play stupid with me.”

  “I told him that he had misused funds because part of the allocation was to be a direct cash transfer, after Baghdad initialed the agreement, to Soo Empire Grain in exchange for eight hundred thousand tons of soybeans. Mr. Hussein bought coffee from Brazil instead. At that point it ceased to be part of my task.”

  Millikan sensed there was no reason to continue the discussion, turned to Gates, and said, “I’m pleased that the branch chief instructed Ms. Vandeventer on proper procedure. Please send my commendation to his file.” He sent one long, chilly glare in Betsy’s direction until she broke eye contact in favor of staring down at the podium.

  The DCI looked around the room and asked, “Are there any other questions to be asked of Ms. Vandeventer before she goes back to the Castleman Building?”

  There were none. The NSC had been bought off. They put their knives away. There would be no ritualistic blood sacrifices. The DCI motioned Margaret Hume over and asked, “Would you show Ms. Vandeventer to my office? I’d like to talk with her after this is over.”

  “Thank you for your report,” said the Operations head with barely concealed amusement. He knew a fog job when he saw one.

  “You’re dead in this business,” Mrs. Hume said, leading her down the corridor. “You might as well outprocess right now while you’ve still got a breath in your body. You also owe me a pair of shoes.”

  Betsy took a seat in the DCI’s office, looking out over the trees of McLean down toward the Potomac. Off to the south she thought she could see the top of the Washington Monument.

  “Did you hear me?” asked Mrs. Hume.

  “Sorry about the shoe,” Betsy said absentmindedly, “but I am a clumsy person. Could you get me a cup of coffee? Black, please.”

  Hume hissed in a deep breath, as if preparing to shoot flames from her mouth, and then almost whiplashed when she heard her boss’s voice right behind her: “That sounds good. Get one for me, too, Maggie. Thanks so much.”

  The DCI came over and sat behind his desk. He did not seem angry, just professionally neutral. “Quite a performance. You had at least six long knives coming after you, and if Millikan had drawn blood, you would have been slaughtered.”

  “Why didn’t you do something? Why put me through this?”

  “There is an inherent and unstoppable bureaucratic dynamic. It’s almost visceral. Your one simple comment to the attaché had an impact like a hand grenade. If one GS-eleven can figure things out, then how do you explain the need for all this?” With his left hand he indicated the central compound. “I know that I can count on your discretion, but we’re going to take a pounding on our misread of the Sovs over the past ten years. I came on the watch fairly late in the game, and there are bureaucratic and political momenta that I can’t even begin to touch.”

  “I don’t mean to be naive, but isn’t this a stupid way to get things done?”

  “Yes, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  His secretary came in with the coffee, and he launched into a totally disconnected discussion of the need to maintain order among the ranks, the importance of the hierarchy, and so on. She left, and he busied himself for a moment with the cream pitcher.

  “So everyone says I’m finished. Am I finished?”

  “In the long run, yes,” he said. “In the short run you still have an assigned role. It’s all part of that momentum thing. Go back to the Castleman after lunch—you’re acting branch chief now.”

  They exchanged some completely inconsequential small talk about Idaho geography. Before she had lingered long enough to become unwelcome, Betsy excused herself, shook the DCI’s hand, walked
out past Hume, past the offices on the seventh floor, wondering if she’d ever be there again. She took the lift down to the first floor, walked out past security, and went to the waiting area to wait for the Blue Bird.

  A familiar voice came from a bench near Nathan Hale. “Good morning, madam. How is your day? Do you need a ride?”

  twelve

  MAY

  HAVING GROWN up in the explosively fecund Dhont household, Desiree already knew more about parenting than Clyde ever would. Intimidatingly enough, she had launched into a concerted research program, buying or borrowing dozens of advanced baby-management books, surging out way beyond her former level until she vanished over Clyde’s horizon.

  Some of the baby books were well-worn standards from the Nishnabotna Public Library, and some were slick new handouts obtained from the Child Development Department. Clyde had once, furtively, picked up a document while sitting on the pot and begun to peruse it. The language was clear enough (especially to one accustomed to the Victorian complexities of Sherlock), and you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to get the basic ideas. He scanned through to the end of the book with renewed confidence. By spending a little bit more time than usual sitting on the pot and reading these books, he might, in the fullness of time, surprise and delight his spouse by suddenly displaying a hitherto unsuspected grasp of parentology.

  Then he picked up another one and discovered that it contradicted the first one directly. He understood why Desiree spent so much time on this: you had to get a few hundred of these things under your belt so that you could sort out the nonsense from the wisdom.

  When the little one took to waking up in the middle of the night and crying, he found that many wee hours that normally would have been lost to wasteful sleep could now be spent improving his mind, reading the works of several august Ph.D.’s in Baby Science. All of them held diametrically opposed opinions about how to get your baby to sleep at night, and all of them had blindingly impressive academic credentials, so sorting out truth from fiction was not a simple task.

  He had one small advantage: namely, that in the course of his work he routinely came into contact with Ph.D.’s from the university. Ph.D.’s, he had found, did not seem so intimidating after you had jump-started their cars, got their cats out of trees, and arrested a few of them for beating up their Ph.D. wives. So he went directly to the content.

  It seemed like a good bet that if the writer of such a book was a fool, this fact would be bound to come out somewhere in its several hundred pages. Like a feckless student shoplifting his way through an academic year at EIU, a fool writing a book would be bound to screw up somewhere along the line. Clyde read the books with the relentless penetrating scrutiny of a detective, not looking for information so much as evidence. The presence of a screaming baby in his near vicinity concentrated his mind and gave him a kind of judicial clarity of thought; finding an internal contradiction or even a badly written sentence, he would snap it shut, with a popping noise like the bang of a gavel, and Frisbee it across the carpet into the reject pile. Finally he was beginning to find his niche in this parenting thing. Desiree was too soft and accepting; she read all of this contradicting stuff and tried to give all of it a fair hearing. But he had more of an unyielding Old Testament approach and did not hesitate to cast suspect materials into the Lake of Fire.

  Over the course of many such nocturnal research sessions he was able to narrow the field of baby-sleep experts down to one guy, a Ph.D. from back East. Clyde liked this guy because he seemed clearheaded and was not overly sentimental. He got the sense that this guy was giving it to him straight. What the guy said was that babies had to learn how to go to sleep on their own, and that if you rocked them or bottled them to sleep, they’d never learn how. In other words: let the baby cry. Sooner or later it’ll figure out how to go to sleep on its own.

  This was a good theory. There was only one problem: the guy said you weren’t supposed to let them cry until they were four months old. Maggie had been born in March.

  That was why Clyde spent a lot of April and May driving around with Maggie in the Murder Car at three and four o’clock in the morning. Driving in the car was the only way he had yet found to calm the kid down; and if it didn’t work, at least his neighbors wouldn’t know about it.

  It was useful in another way, too: it gave him plenty of time to think about the last hours of Marwan Habibi’s life.

  The Rotary had finally spat Habibi’s body out last week, badly decomposed and half-eaten by fish. He was still wearing a leather jacket, whose pockets had been filled with gravel from the boat ramp, but his body had bloated to the point where it floated in spite of this improvised attempt to weigh it down. Clyde had, naturally, been given the job of hauling the remains out of the spillway box while Kevin Mullowney stood on top of the dam in a nimbus of TV light, looking tough but concerned. Clyde had accompanied the body bag down to the office of the Forks County coroner, Barnabas Klopf, M.D., who had stirred through the remains while Clyde loitered in the background, trying to find something else to look at. Clyde had seen a few bodies but never anything like what was left of Marwan Habibi.

  “Aw, damn,” Clyde said, reading a label on a drawer. “What’s Kathy Jacobson doing here?”

  “She’s dead,” Barney Klopf said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Mrs. Jacobson had been a fixture at the Lutheran church that Clyde had attended until his marriage to Desiree had forced him to become a papist. “When did she pass away?”

  “Just yesterday. Had a heart attack in the kitchen while she was making lutefisk.”

  Clyde didn’t say anything, but he felt some satisfaction at this; if Kathy Jacobson could have picked a time and a place to die, it would certainly be in her kitchen making lutefisk.

  “Mallory Brown,” Clyde said, continuing to browse the drawers. Mallory was a black Korean War vet who always carried the flag in the Veteran’s Day parade.

  “Two days ago. Stasis Asthmaticus.”

  “Who’s Rod Weller?” Clyde asked, coming to another drawer.

  “Lawyer from Davenport. Yesterday. Heart attack while bow-hunting for carp.”

  Barney was running for reelection, also on the GOP slate, and so when he finished the autopsy, for the first time in his career Clyde actually gained some benefit from being affiliated with the Republican party: he was the first person to know about the coroner’s report, which stated that Marwan Habibi had probably died as the result of having his head staved in by several blows from a heavy bladelike implement, not unlike an oar. Clyde announced this fact to a waiting camera crew when he exited the building. But it probably did him as much harm as good; it just reminded everyone about the rowboat.

  Clyde drove to Lincoln Way, headed east through the industrial flatlands of east Nishnabotna and through the strip malls on the periphery of town. The colored lights seemed to hold Maggie’s attention and stun her into momentary silence, or maybe she was simply looking straight out the windshield at the galactic magnificence of the Star-Spangled Truck Stop, whose giant electronic signboards could be seen for miles away; they had been specifically engineered to wake up even deeply slumbering truckers on I-45 and give them ample time to decelerate and take the Nishnabotna exit.

  Once past the Star-Spangled Truck Stop, they were plunged instantly into total darkness. The boundary between city and farm was abrupt in this part of the world, and strip-mall parking lots typically ended in cornfields.

  Heading south on I-45, they clipped through the southern extremity of Nishnabotna before crossing the Iowa River. Almost immediately, Clyde took the exit for New 30, which took off west-northwest across empty cornfields and the occasional tiny cluster of houses until it joined up again with Old 30, aka Lincoln Way. At this point Clyde would veer off onto a ramp, slow the Murder Car way down, and hang a hard right, bringing it all the way around to an easterly heading on Lincoln Way. This intersection was shared by a used-car dealership, a Casey’s minimart, and a down-at-the-heels roadhous
e that seemed to change ownership every few months. Or at least that had been the pattern until last year, when a couple of women had bought it and turned it into a cowgirl bar—the sort of cowgirl bar where cowboys were about as welcome as diamondback rattlesnakes. The place was popular among women affiliated with the university. But Nishnabotnans had heard about it and liked to titillate themselves by gossiping about who had been sighted there.

  One night, finding that the gas needle was on empty and that Maggie was not sleeping anyway, Clyde stopped at the Casey’s for a fill-up and a cup of coffee. As he topped off the tank, squeezing the trigger to fire additional quart or half-gallon bursts of gasohol down the pipe, he heard loud Patsy Cline music spilling out of an open door on the side of the cowgirl bar. Looking up at the sound, he saw a couple of cowgirls sharing an amorous moment against the side wall of the building. One of them had her back to Clyde; she had long blond hair and looked like a college student. Her friend was leaning back against the wall of the bar and had grown-up hair, frosted and set. It was Grace Chandler, who, along with her husband—local sports legend and defrocked broadcaster Buck Chandler—had sold Clyde his apartment building. She was a vivacious and pleasant woman, smarter than her husband. She had always seemed sad to Clyde, until now.

  From the Casey’s, Clyde could drive all the way through the middle of Wapsipinicon and Nishnabotna on Lincoln Way, a stretch of road lousy with stoplights. At this time of night no cars were active to trip the sensors buried in the road, and so the lights were running on automatic program. As long as he hewed to the speed limit, Clyde could drive all the way through those thirty-two stoplights without stopping or even slowing down. When he sensed that he was riding a wave, he would simply set the vehicle’s cruise control at thirty-five and keep the station wagon aimed straight down the center of the road.