The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  Clyde had never met or even seen the crew before. It was rumored that they slept on the plane.

  “Maybe someone ought to have a look at that before you take off,” Clyde said, nodding at the one with the crooked arm.

  “We must get back to Perestroika,” Vitaly said. “You see, that is the name of our airplane, in honor of Gorbachev. Myi biznesmeny—we are businessmen. We are afraid—your hospital—too expensive.”

  Vitaly was not the only person who was worried about hassles and red tape as the result of this accident. A bunch of Russians—who crashed a rental car and damaged a farmer’s property while driving drunk, in the process of smuggling some cigarettes—the thought of all the reports he would have to fill out made Clyde want to swoon.

  So he led them out of the cornfield, retrieved his daughter from the fence post, flipped down the backseat of the station wagon, and packed the Russians into its spacious cargo hold. He could hear them making humorous comparisons between the Murder Car and Perestroika. They carried as many cigarette cartons as they could and packed them in among their bodies. Vitaly leaned over the seat and made faces at Maggie and marveled at her perfection while his crew ran back into the cornfield and scavenged more cigarettes. Clyde took out the first-aid kit Desiree had packed, which was the size of a suitcase, and found an inflatable arm splint, which he applied to the one crewman’s damaged limb, to the fascination and astonishment of the fliers.

  Finally they were ready. He drove them the last two miles to the airport, pulled onto the runway, and drove up alongside the flank of Perestroika, which loomed as high as the bluffs of Wapsipinicon. Vitaly insisted that he and Maggie come inside for a tour. Clyde went in with some trepidation, worrying that this gang of pirates would close the hatches, take them off to Arabia, and sell them into slavery, perhaps throwing in some Marlboros and steel tubing as freebies. But although Vitaly was manipulative and blatantly untrustworthy, he was not evil, at least in that kind of spectacular way, and the moment Vitaly had seen Maggie, he had obviously decided that he and Clyde were friends for life.

  The interior of the plane was the most sloppy and ramshackle thing Clyde had ever seen; it was a flying fraternity house, with cases of Soviet brandy and various other forms of contraband stashed everywhere. The wiring had been patched with lamp cord and duct tape, and everything was greasy with hydraulic fluid, which had dripped or sprayed from faulty connections and frayed hoses.

  On the other hand, it could carry a locomotive thirty-five hundred miles at almost the speed of sound, so who was he to knock it?

  Just the same, he got well away from the airport before the Antonov took off.

  fifteen

  LARKIN SCHOENDIENST, professor of Ag Econ at the University of Idaho, and Betsy’s mentor, had, in an earlier life, worked abroad for many years as an agricultural attaché in various embassies throughout the Third World.

  Actually, he had been working for the CIA in the Operations Division, and after many adventures, which he frequently alluded to but always declined to talk about, he had suffered a breakdown. The Agency had provided him with a greased path to a nice office in Moscow, Idaho, with a view over the otherworldly landscape of the Palouse Hills, and set him up with 125 percent disability, plus his professor’s salary, plus whatever he could pull down selling information and analysis back to the Agency. He divided his time between a furnished room above someone else’s garage in Moscow, and a condo in Ketchum a stone’s throw from the ski lift.

  Betsy had arrived in Moscow, Idaho, at the age of twenty-one, fresh from Brigham Young, where she’d earned a B.A. in Russian. Larkin Schoendienst had been named as her adviser. He was, by a very wide margin, the most morally ambiguous person Betsy had ever met. Now that she had her M.A. and was in Washington working for the Agency, she understood that nothing was an accident; Schoendienst was a procurer for the CIA, and he had taken Betsy under his wing because she was a Russian-speaking Mormon from a sheltered home, the ideal candidate for Agency grooming.

  So Betsy had a lot of qualms about Larkin Schoendienst and was pretty certain that, when he finished drinking himself to death, he was going straight to hell. But she loved him anyway. He had encouraged her, protected her, and, in one long, boozy session at a campus bar the day after she’d been awarded her degree, he had given her what he called the keys for survival in D.C.

  “If you want to survive there,” he had said, “never suggest solutions, never take credit, and be a bit to the right of the President—whatever President—because they leave and you stay.”

  She had shrugged off his cynical statements at the time. She thought that the CIA, with its unparalleled access to everything, would be a neat place to work. And so it was. For a while. But the more years she spent there, the more of Schoendienst’s little bits of advice came unexpectedly to mind. And after she was named acting branch chief and moved into Howard King’s office, where the telephone still reeked of his aftershave, the relevance of her adviser’s words became clearer every day.

  In her first orientation meetings down at the Farm, she had had the notion beat into her that it was not her job to offer ideas. It was her function to be tasked by “downtown.” It was there in the Constitution: the elected people, not the civil servants, make policy. “It is not ours to ask, it is ours to answer.”

  That was the CIA line, and Betsy came out of the Farm believing it. But as time went on, she remembered Larkin Schoendienst’s take on it: “The people who know the most are not allowed to ask questions—or even to make suggestions. The least common denominator sets the standards. Just wait until you see Washington, Betsy—these goddamn car salesmen and small-town lawyers come into town every two years not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, and this enormously sophisticated and powerful and dangerous system is at their mercy. The Agency distorts information to fit the half-assed policies they scheme up.”

  She called up all the visa records from Immigration, combed through them, picking out the student visas, identified all visas granted to South and Southwest Asian students, and then fed the results into a cartographic system, making a 3-D plot of the information. The result was a picture of the continental United States with the topography exactly reversed: the coasts were low plains, and the Great Plains states were studded with precipitous crags, centered on places like Elton, New Mexico; East Lansing, Michigan; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Wapsipinicon, Iowa.

  She knew most of those universities well; they were the kinds of places where she and her fellow agro-Americans tended to apply for grad school. Narrowing the search to cover Iraqi students only, and running the cartographic program again, she got a similar result, with fewer and starker peaks: Auburn, Colorado State, Texas A&M, Eastern Iowa.

  During numerous blowing-off-steam sessions over cases of bad zinfandel on the balcony of their apartment, Cassie and Betsy had arrived at conclusions similar to Larkin Schoendienst’s. Cassie, from her job at the Hoover Building, and Betsy, at the Agency, each had access to certain information that convinced her that she actually knew what was going on, at least within the confines of her designated compartment. They were sworn not to divulge specifics to each other. But they agreed that at any one time there were in town at least five people, desk officers six levels down from the President, who actually knew what was going on.

  There was no lack of information. The combined forces of the intelligence community—with all its spectacular satellites, sneaky HUMINT heads, NSA intercepts, independent contractors such as Dr. Schoendienst, the never-flagging torrent of governmental studies and statistics from national and international bodies, privileged information from multinational firms, and the best mainframes and libraries in the world—provided all the information that anybody needed.

  There was no lack of smarts among the analysts, either. But the six-level editorial process so distorted what they wrote that several times Betsy could not recognize items that were attributed to her in the President’s Daily Briefing.

  The problem
was the managers. Not for them the open struggle of ideas in the marketplace of policy. It was turf politics, building alliances not to further the general good of the body politic, but to cement advantage to gain entrance to the exalted level of the Senior Executive Service Corps, to use whatever administration that was there to feather their own nests—not to solve problems, but to use problems to strengthen their position.

  “Watch out for the iguanas,” Larkin Schoendienst had told her. Betsy hadn’t understood the reference until recently. But now she saw iguanas all over Washington, people who sat sunning on their rocks, destroying anything or anybody who came within tongue’s reach, but doing nothing.

  So now she was a branch chief (interim), working directly beneath Spector. But her higher status wasn’t helping her catch any bad guys, especially since Millikan had convinced the President that by all means we had to prop up Saddam. To the contrary, she’d spent much of the last month out of town, down at the Farm or out at Airlie House, attending courses on how to be a branch chief.

  Once back in the office, she found that at least half her days were taken up by meetings of one kind or another and the other half by paperwork and editing the work of her subordinates. The message was not lost on her: someone had decided that she couldn’t get into any more trouble as long as she was buried in administrative tedium.

  She got the worst of both worlds—because she was only interim, she received no pay increase. Her only break was that King would not do her yearly evaluation. She encountered unspoken hostility from all of King’s old friends who had learned of her perfidy. Still, she enjoyed the change from soybeans, and a casual observer would conclude that she had adjusted well to the shift from worker bee to manager.

  But casual observers weren’t there at four A.M. when she checked in. She had a standing order with her Bangladeshi cabbie now, who was faithfully at the entrance to the Bellevue Apartments every morning at three fifty-five. He was always cheerful and had taken to bringing her a fresh pastry every day.

  On this, her private graveyard shift, she continued asking the “right question”—trying to find where those millions of dollars of unaccounted-for taxpayers’ money had gone, searching through the noise for patterns. She continued to access the mainframes of the other agencies involved with Iraq and to make as much use of the HUMINT folks in the Middle East as she could get away with. She was especially interested in who was being proposed to come to the United States for study.

  She had clearly established one trend that no one else had noticed: faculty and staff from other Muslim countries were being brought into Iraq on adjunct status to teach courses in biological sciences. The names on the visa applications usually did not match those of the absent academicians, but the physical descriptions did.

  She also gained access to the names of prominent Iraqis in the arms business. These were compiled by making a run of all registrants at arms fairs worldwide for the past ten years and then doing a match on brochures advertising their products. By pulling up IATA passenger lists she could see who was going where.

  She tried to task other directorates and branches within the Agency, but she made the mistake of putting her name on the requests. She was turned down forthwith.

  Despite these and other frustrations, she became increasingly certain that her hypothesis was right. The Iraqis were putting a lot of money—and, perhaps more important, a lot of brainpower—into biological warfare. She asked Spector to get infrared satellite imagery inside Iraq. He was turned down because he didn’t have a sufficient need to know. She went to the Defense intelligence liaison at Langley and asked for clearance to contact people at DIA and was turned down. She asked for clearance to contact people at the National Science Foundation. She was turned down. She back-channeled to the DCI. He did not respond.

  She had one of her subordinates apply for clearance to contact the USIA, without using the poisonous name of Betsy Vandeventer. Clearance was granted.

  Over the weeks she had compiled a Dirty Dozen list—the twelve Iraqis who, based on her intuition, looked most suspicious. She used her USIA access to pull up their J-9 forms, which they had had to fill out in order to apply for their student visas. These had been scanned, digitized, and filed away in the USIA’s archives.

  Each J-9 contained a description of the applicant’s plan of study, including the names of the institution where he would be working and of his faculty adviser.

  Of the Dirty Dozen three were in Elton State University in New Mexico. Two were at Oklahoma State in Stillwater. Three were at Auburn.

  The remaining four were at Eastern Iowa University. All four were studying under Dr. Arthur Larsen. Two were microbiologists. One was in veterinary medicine. One was a chemist. Pulling up one form after another, Betsy saw, on each, the signature of Ken Knightly, EIU’s dean of international programs, and beneath that the distinctive scrawl of Dr. Arthur Larsen, which also graced her brother’s newly minted Ph.D. diploma.

  And that was where she had to stop, because the CIA’s activities were restricted to outside the borders of the United States. It was a rule that was bent from time to time; but given the number of mortal enemies Betsy had in the Agency, some of whom had the power to monitor her activities at the workstation, she knew she couldn’t go any further without ending up in prison. Her research had brought her to the edge of FBI turf, and all she could do now was stand at the border and peer in through the fence.

  She got home late after an obligatory dinner with some Agency people, reached for her FacsCard, and then remembered that she’d given it and her key to Kevin. She went to the phone and dialed. Kevin answered the phone. His voice was slurred but happy. In the background she could hear the theme music of Late Show with David Letterman. “Hi, sis. Which number do I push?”

  Kevin, still in his suit, welcomed her in with great dignity. “How was your day? Besides a very long one, right?”

  “Ah, you know, Kevin, same old same old.”

  “Nah, I know that you spent the day destroying what was left of the USSR’s economic and moral infrastructure.”

  “Guilty as charged. How was your day?”

  “Neat. Scored pretty well over at NSF, lunched and schmoozed”—a word he’d picked up recently—“with some of Larsen’s buddies over at Ag. And then, for something completely different, cocktails over at the Jordanian Embassy.”

  “Really,” Betsy gushed, “you had a wonderful day. What was the most fun?”

  “It was all fun, to be part of this place. I know that I got a good reception only because I represent Larsen in this process. But the embassy reception was special. They really know how to make a person feel important.”

  Betsy began to interrupt him, but Kevin continued.

  “Now, I know that you’re part of this—”

  “Not on your life. I never mix with foreigners of any type, friend or foe,” she said. “But I just wanted to remind you that a diplomat’s job is to be charming.”

  “Well, he was. I met with the embassy’s cultural attaché. Let me get his card.” He fumbled through the handful of cards that marked his progress through town. “Ah, yes, here it is, Hassan Farudi. Nice guy.”

  “What were you talking about? If I may ask.”

  “Sure, I’m not sworn to secrecy like you. Lots of people want to come and study with the Rainmaker. I’m trying to process a new batch. Most of them did their earlier work in European or English—I guess England is part of Europe—universities. I have to check them out with the Jordanians—they act as kind of a clearinghouse for the Arabic countries in international exchanges.”

  “What’d the Jordanians have to say about these guys?”

  “Oh, hell, they’re all fine. Just farmers like you and me, Bets, who want to learn how to build a better cow. That’s all routine stuff. We had a nice dinner together, had a few drinks, bullshitted about politics.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” Kevin laughed. “The Jordanians definitely have a different take
on things. They were talking about how they and all the responsible countries are working against the Iranians, who they say are working with the Israelis.” He gave her a conspiratorial look. “Does that sound right to you?”

  “It could be. But I don’t know much about that stuff.”

  Kevin gave his sister a wink as if to say, I know that you know, and I know that you can’t say what you know. “Anyway, I’ll go over to USIA tomorrow to the office where all the student visas are handled and give them the relevant paperwork. You’d be amazed how much you can speed up the wheels of government just by hand-carrying forms across town. That’s why Larsen’s so good—he understands these things.” Kevin yawned and stretched lazily. “You getting up at four again tomorrow? I heard you go out today.”

  “I’ll try to,” Betsy said. “I have a lot on my mind.”

  sixteen

  JUNE

  THE CALL came in at four-thirty A.M. Clyde had backed his unit into a narrow dirt road between fields, facing east, and so when he opened his eyes and grabbed the microphone, he could look straight down a tunnel of corn into a translucent pink sky. As he was depressing the thumb switch on the microphone, it came into his head, for some reason, that the sky looked the way it must have looked to little Maggie when she had been in the womb and Clyde had taken out his big battered black cop flashlight and played its light against the flawless porcelain dome of Desiree’s belly.

  The call had come in from a farmhouse about five miles away. A motorist had struck a deer and gone into the ditch. Clyde arrived in a few minutes and saw the business laid out very clearly: short skid marks veering right onto the soft shoulder, trenches cut into the deep grass by the tires, the car stopped in the bottom of the ditch, crumpled at the right front corner where it had tried to climb out and instead had dug into the trench’s steep bank. The deer was lying dead across the yellow line. It was huge, probably an eight-point buck, though this detail would have to remain hazy in Clyde’s report, because extensive antler damage made it hard to get a meaningful count. If Clyde were still a bachelor, he would give some thought to having the buck’s mangled head mounted in its current condition as a nice bit of cop humor.