The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  After Clyde had set out a few road flares, he went and found the driver, who was holed up at a farmhouse half a mile away on the far side of the bridge over the creek. She was a nurse at the hospital, a colleague of Desiree’s, on her way into town to do some night work, and the buck had simply come out too fast for her to avoid it. She had a stiff neck, which the farmer’s wife was treating with ice.

  Towing the car out of the ditch would be the responsibility of the owners, which they would see to in a few hours when the garages opened up. Getting the debris off the road was Clyde’s problem.

  Clyde grabbed the animal’s legs and rolled its body this way and that, verifying his impression that there had been almost no bleeding. Most of the points had been sheared off the buck’s antlers, but the armatures still remained more or less intact.

  Clyde backed his unit up to the animal. There was some cop baggage in the trunk, which he moved to the backseat. He hoisted the buck’s head so that it rested on the rear bumper, one antler now scraping on the pavement while the other stuck out into space. He raised one foot and stomped hard on the antler. It snapped off near the base and clattered into the trunk. Clyde flung it into the ditch. Then he repeated the process with the other antler.

  Clyde was able to heave the buck’s center of mass over the lip of the trunk with a couple of great leg thrusts. After that it was just a question of arranging its extremities in such a way that he could get the lid closed.

  The sun was just coming up when he backed into the driveway. He sneaked into the garage through the side door and hit the button for the opener, praying it wouldn’t wake up Desiree and the baby. He backed the unit into the garage and closed the door, then turned on all the lights.

  He had a dirty old nylon rope among his tools, which he threw over one of the bare joists of the garage. He popped the trunk of the unit and tied a noose around the neck of the dead buck. He put on some leatherwork gloves to protect his hands, then took up the loose end of the rope and put a couple of turns around the trailer hitch on his pickup truck, which was parked parallel with the unit. With the nylon rope wrapped around his leather gloves he pulled and pulled until the entire body of the buck lifted free of the unit’s trunk and swung out across the garage like a venison pendulum, knocking over several bicycles like dominoes. The joists creaked. The buck swung back and thudded into the back of the unit.

  He went out into the backyard and got Maggie’s wading pool, which was made of stiff pink plastic decorated with off-brand cartoon characters. He rolled the pool in through the side door and centered it beneath the dangling hooves of the buck. Then he stole into the kitchen, selected the longest knife in Desiree’s set, and ran it through the electric sharpener on the back of the can opener once or twice.

  Clyde gutted the buck as Ebenezer had taught him, letting the blood gush into the wading pool and the guts tumble in after it. Some blood splashed onto his uniform, but this was hardly out of the ordinary; truly violent crime was rare hereabouts, but large dead animals on the highways were ubiquitous.

  He placed a phone call to Ebenezer, who was already up preparing for his daily auroral golfing trip with John Stonefield. Clyde knew that his grandfather would not be happy to have his golf trip preempted by this job; but he knew just as well that Ebenezer would not utter a word of complaint nor hold it against him. Within fifteen minutes Ebenezer pulled into Clyde’s driveway and entered the garage carrying an old toolbox where he stored all of his butchering knives, and under the other arm a long white roll of butcher paper. He set about dismembering the buck and cutting the flesh from its bones while Clyde began to clean the hair, and traces of blood, from the trunk of the unit. The two men worked for an hour and a half on their respective jobs, standing some eight feet apart in the quiet of the garage, and exchanged very few words during that time. Ebenezer was occupied with whatever dark thoughts occupied Ebenezer. Clyde was thinking about Marwan Habibi and his apparent murderer, Sayed Ashrawi.

  The business in Lab 304 stank to high heaven. Clyde simply could not bring himself to believe that Marwan Habibi had really passed out from alcohol and been carried out of that laboratory alive, come awake at someone else’s house for some more partying, and then been murdered in the boat by an oar-wielding Sayed Ashrawi.

  Vandeventer insisted that Marwan’s skull had been intact when he had been carried out of the lab. And Vandeventer was a scientist who had seen Marwan from a few feet away, in good light. There could be no doubt of this.

  There were no gaping holes in the story as Mullowney and the Wapsipinicon detectives had pieced it together. But there were oddities. Why had the students left door 304 open that night? If you’re drinking grape-flavored grain alcohol in the lab and one of your buddies has passed out from it, don’t you want to hide that?

  Why had one of them spoken in English as they’d carried Marwan out of the lab?

  But the big question, which came close to being a smoking gun as far as Clyde was concerned, was, Why had Sayed Ashrawi, after committing the murder, gone to an Exxon station at five in the morning and used his credit card to buy $6.20 worth of gas?

  If you’ve just committed a murder and the tank of your getaway car is empty, then you have no choice but to buy gasoline—but you pay for it with cash so it can’t be traced.

  Ashrawi had bought only 5.2 gallons—not enough to fill the tank of his car. Why had he bothered to get gas if his tank wasn’t empty? Pretty stupid behavior for a graduate student.

  Maybe he couldn’t afford to fill it up. But if he was using a credit card, did it really matter? The next day he had gone out and charged a new VCR at Wal-Mart, so it wasn’t as if he were bumping up against his credit limit. This was another noteworthy detail—usually foreign students began buying VCRs and other major appliances just before they graduated and headed for home.

  Clyde had another theory: Marwan had died right there in his own laboratory. The other students wanted to conceal that fact, for some motive that Clyde hadn’t worked out yet. They needed to carry Marwan’s body out of the place somehow, which was impossible without attracting suspicion—the place had security guards and cameras by all the doors. So they had convened at the lab and thrown a fake party, leaving the door open so that their neighbor, Kevin Vandeventer, would know about it. They had carried out the corpse, throwing in some patter in English, again for Vandeventer’s consumption. They had brought a supply of latex surgical gloves with them. They had gone to the lake and stolen the boat, making sure that only Ashrawi’s fingerprints showed up on it. They had crushed the dead man’s skull with the oar, put the rocks in his pockets, thrown him out of the boat, and then bought gasoline with Ashrawi’s credit card just to leave a neon-lit trail straight to him and him alone.

  In other words, they were sacrificing Ashrawi to keep the rest of the group out of trouble, so that they could stay in Forks County and keep doing whatever the hell they were doing.

  The big hole in Clyde’s theory, which Mullowney would not hesitate to point out should Clyde be rash enough to speak it aloud, was that it was impossible unless Sayed Ashrawi had agreed to the whole plan and served as an accomplice in his own framing. And what kind of a person would do that?

  Desiree came down, her white flannel nightie looking out of place in the garage and even more so in the presence of the butchering operation. She noticed, but did not bat an eye at, the wading pool. Clyde was watching her face at this moment because he feared that by using the pool he might have crossed one of the mysterious boundaries separating proper from improper behavior, so invisible to him and so obvious to her. But she wandered up, sweetly unsteady from just having awakened, leaned against him and gave him a kiss, came away with buck hair on her nightie and a glow in her eyes, and Clyde’s heart swelled and ached with maniac love. She brought them coffee and promised them breakfast. Ebenezer, weighing the cut and wrapped cuts of venison in heaps on their bathroom scale, announced that he had removed 180 pounds of meat from the animal and selected perhaps a qu
arter of it for his own Deepfreeze. He declined breakfast, perhaps having absorbed enough of the buck’s substance through his own pores to give him a morning’s nourishment, then took off for the golf course in hopes of catching up with John Stonefield on the back nine.

  Clyde got the unit back to the sheriff’s department in time for the end of his shift, filed his report on the accident, then drove home and began to work on the problem of the wading pool. Maggie was awake now, and he was very glad to see her.

  seventeen

  “WE’RE GOING to the Jersey shore!” Cassie said one Wednesday in mid-June. “Clear your calendar for the weekend, lady.”

  Betsy had to admit that, even with her constitution, the fourteen-hour days were catching up with her. “Why not the Eastern Shore? Why go all the way to Jersey?” she said.

  “Because one of the people we’re going with has a family place there—in Wildwood. And I’ve got four other people coming. Nobody with less than Top Secret Code Word clearance, all of them able to have a good time without talking about their work—or our work. You’ve got no option. We’re getting up at six Saturday morning and heading up to Jersey.”

  Betsy was impressed—her roommate was going to get up at six in the morning. She had a very good rest of the week—not only did she have the beach weekend to look forward to, but things were actually beginning to change at work, too. The oil tanker of policy had begun a slow change of course, and Betsy, keeping watch on its decks, could sense it from subtle shifts in the wind. On Thursday morning word spread through the intel community that next week State would block five hundred million dollars in loan guarantees because Ag had been forced to admit that irregularities—including kickbacks to USG personnel—had occurred, and that previous grants had not gone to sugar, rice, and corn. Betsy got to savor that for a few minutes, imagining what kind of a mood Millikan must be in this morning. But the rest of Thursday was consumed by meetings, and one sensitizing session on understanding women employees.

  On Friday, Spector stuck his head in her office door—she hadn’t seen him in a month—gave her a wink and a thumbs-up, and disappeared. Toward the end of the day a courier arrived with an “Eyes Only” envelope from headquarters. One of these “burn before reading” jobs, Betsy thought. She opened it—it was a handwritten note from the DCI. Stamped above the message was the warning, SHRED AFTER READING. NOT FOR CIRCULATION. NOT FOR DUPLICATION.

  This is a heads up. Lie low. Somebody has been monitoring your activities and knows every request you’ve made. Break contact with your project for at least a month.

  Very interesting, she thought, as she headed to Thelma the secretary’s desk to make use of the shredder. “Love letters?” Thelma teased.

  “Kind of. I’m outta here. Have a good weekend.”

  She walked out of the Castleman Building. It was the first hot day of the season, and the sky had that yellowish haze it had when the ozone soup cooked up. She took the long way home, detouring past the Iwo Jima memorial, putting things together in her head.

  The White House still wasn’t acting on her findings. Anything she had put through the system had been beaten back. She had to figure out some way to go outside the system, because if she did not, a lot of people might die.

  At one meeting she had been talking with a branch chief from Science and Technology who had been paying her more attention than was strictly professional. The conversation had got around to bacteriological warfare. She played dumb and talked about how one of their cows had been killed by anthrax back on the ranch. The S-and-T guy had snorted. Anthrax was not what they were worrying about; it was genetic markers—germs or toxins that could kill members of one ethnic group, but not another. “That’s what Saddam’s after.”

  “Then why is the Army developing all of that anthrax vaccine?”

  “Those people, they’re still fighting the last war. The future is genetics. Why don’t we go out to dinner tonight and talk some more about this?”

  “Sorry, I’ve got Bible study tonight. Want to come?”

  She had looked into the genetic-markers thing and found that it was a real threat, but at least ten years in the future even for the Americans. The S-and-T guy was just trying to impress her. But one of his comments stuck with her: “They’re still fighting the last war.” The Soviets had done a lot of anthrax work, NATO had stockpiled a lot of vaccine—were Saddam’s people smart enough and good enough to see that some alternative bug might be more effective? Saddam’s nuclear people had been remarkably creative in coming up with unexpected ways of enriching uranium.

  She was close. But there were just no connects.

  Cassie was definitely in a party mood when Betsy got home, dancing around the room to a Janet Jackson CD turned up loud. When Betsy came in, she turned the volume down a couple of notches and set them up with a couple of Stoli straight shots. “We’re gettin’ outta this bureaucratic ghetto! We’re gonna see salt water.”

  Betsy turned on the Weather Channel, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, and sipped her vodka.

  The phone rang. Cassie hit the mute button on the stereo and picked it up. She listened for a moment, then covered the mouthpiece and looked quizzically at Betsy. “Did you call Acme Wildlife Management?”

  “Wildlife Management?”

  “Yeah. It’s a pest-control company.”

  “No. Are they here?”

  “Yeah. Downstairs. I didn’t call them.” Into the phone Cassie said, “There’s gotta be a mistake.” Cassie paused, then turned to Betsy and said, “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Ms. Vandeventer? Jack Jenkins of Acme Wildlife Management Services, Inc. Your parents read in the paper about the forecasted infestation of roaches this year in the District and they gave you a free treatment.”

  Betsy blushed. Mom’s ability to embarrass her was undiminished by time and distance. “Okay, come on up.”

  “What’s that all about?” Cassie asked.

  The vodka and the long week and the fatigue all came on Betsy at once, and she broke out in giggles. She couldn’t stop once she got started. She blurted out, “My folks read that there’s an infestation of bugs in—”

  Then it hit her, and she wasn’t laughing anymore.

  “Come on, love, what’s this all about?”

  “It’s very simple, they’re coming up to remove bugs. But I don’t think my parents called them.”

  Jack Jenkins the Acme man showed up, complete with two assistants, all of them dressed in Acme Wildlife Management coveralls and caps. But they didn’t bring the usual array of chemicals and sprayers. All of their equipment was electronic.

  “Nasty spring for roaches, Ms. Vandeventer. Your parents were right to be concerned about you. You know, if you find one, there are fifty thousand of them behind it. Would you mind if we close the shades?” He went ahead and closed them without waiting for an answer, and closed the balcony doors and windows, too. “Some of our sprayers will interfere with your television set,” he said, scooping the remote control off the coffee table and terminating the Weather Channel. In the meantime his assistants were moving furniture away from the walls.

  They began to walk around the apartment carrying wands with small LED screens built into the handles. They found a lot of “roaches.” Betsy and Cassie just sat close to each other on the living-room sofa and watched.

  Jack Jenkins gave them a sheet of paper with the usual “burn and flush the ashes down the toilet” warning.

  We think that you have listening devices from at least four different sources here. We know that all of your balcony conversations are monitored from the eighth floor of the Belvedere, and we’re reasonably sure that you’re being targeted by mobile microwave surveillance systems.

  Betsy showed Cassie the note and then wrote, “Who’s doing it?” Jack Jenkins shrugged and threw up his hands, a predictable response even if he knew the answer. Betsy went into the kitchen and burned the note under the vent fan of the range hood, then washed the ashes down the garbage
disposal. She returned to the sofa, sat with Cassie, and watched the men at work.

  All outlet covers and switch plates were taken off, with interesting results. One device was found in the base of a lamp, another on the TV cable connection. All of this seemed utterly routine and everyday to the Acme men.

  Then one of the guys hissed, “Shit. . . .” He grabbed a chair, pulled down a smoke detector from the wall above the front door, and pried it open. “Video,” he said. He mouthed to his chief, “This ain’t ours.”

  Jack Jenkins prepared another note.

  We hadn’t expected this. Some Bureau stuff here, and some foreign goods of unknown provenance.

  Betsy looked up at him sharply. “Good stuff,” Jenkins mouthed, and gave her a sardonic thumbs-up.

  One of the men was unscrewing the mouthpiece of the phone Cassie had brought up from Atlanta. He took from it a ceramic pyramid about a centimeter on a side and showed it to the chief. Jenkins wrote another note.

  Israeli. Makes your phone a continual transmitter—there’s probably a master unit a hundred feet away.

  A half hour later and they were done. “You shouldn’t have any more bug problems, ladies. Glad to have helped.”

  Betsy saw them out and turned around to find Cassie weeping silently on the couch. Betsy sat down next to her and started crying, too. She had never been so humiliated. Three months of private life had been entertainment for a bunch of shitheads. All of their private conversations were on tape. This just wasn’t worth it.