The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  Clyde parked his unit on the turnout of the dirt road, behind Hal Karst’s, then reached in the open window of Hal’s car, grabbed the handle on the spotlight, and swung the light slowly back and forth across the bean field. As the beam came round nearly parallel to the dirt road, two closely spaced red sparks suddenly jumped out of the darkness, so far off in the distance that he could barely resolve them. They blinked out, then on again. Either the Dhonts’ bean field had been invaded by a large and exceptionally calm buck, or else this was the horse. It was near the fence, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Maybe Hal had succeeded in tying it to a fence post. Clyde aimed the spotlight directly down the center of the road, expecting to pick out the burly form of Hal walking back toward his unit, sweaty and out of breath from chasing the horse around the field. But that was not exactly what he saw. He did see Hal Karst, only a stone’s throw away—clearly recognizable by the light-tan color of his sheriff’s uniform. But Hal was not walking up the road. He was lying down in the dirt and he was not moving.

  The nature of police work in Forks County was such that when a deputy saw a colleague down on the ground and not moving, he did not immediately think about death and violence, as a big-city policeman would. It seemed much more likely that Deputy Karst might have tripped and fallen on his face. But though he was moving around weakly, he made no real effort to get up.

  Clyde lunged in through the window of Hal Karst’s unit, grabbed the mike from his dashboard radio, and said in a tight voice, “Hal is down. Hal is down. Send an ambulance.” Then he dropped the mike onto the seat and took off running.

  Hal Karst was thrashing weakly from side to side. He had fallen first on his face but had rolled over several times since then and was now coated with dust from the road. He had crossed his arms over his body and was clutching his ribs and gasping for air. “What’s wrong, Hal?” Clyde said, but whatever was wrong with Hal seemed to concern his heart and lungs and rendered him incapable of speech.

  Clyde yanked the big black cop flashlight from his belt and shone it over Hal’s face and body, looking for a clue. He was startled to see blood smeared on the hands and uniform shirt, and for a moment his heart jumped as he thought that perhaps the bad guys were still out there and had done something to Hal. Controlling the panicky urge to shine the light around him in a search for perpetrators, Clyde took stock of Hal’s situation as calmly as he could. He did not see any wounds, and the blood was thinly smeared around, not coursing out the way it would if Hal had been knifed or shot.

  Hal’s motions were getting steadily weaker. Clyde shone the light on his face, which had gone all pale. Hal’s lips were violet. His eyelids were drooping. Clyde dropped the flashlight, put one hand under Hal’s neck and lifted it up so that his chin tilted back. He reached a couple of fingers down into Hal’s mouth and made sure he hadn’t swallowed his tongue. Then he clamped Hal’s nose shut, bent down, pressed his lips over Hal’s, and forced air into his lungs.

  Clyde spent a long time there giving Hal Karst mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a minute or two he reached down with his free hand and groped his way around Hal’s chest until he could find a pulse. It felt weak and fluttery, as though the heart of a hummingbird were beating in there, and so Clyde started alternating CPR with the mouth-to-mouth, ramming the heel of his hand into Hal’s sternum very hard so that the rib cage bulged with each thrust.

  The amount of blood did not increase, and Clyde finally figured out that it was just a red herring. This wasn’t Hal’s blood, it was the horse’s. Hal had got it smeared on him when he had been getting the horse calmed down.

  Then he had started walking back down the road to his unit, still breathing hard, his heart pounding away violently, and finally the old ticker had given out on him. Hal was not just the oldest deputy on the force but also the heaviest, forever coming in last on the physical-fitness tests. He had been eating the farm diet ever since he was born: real cream in his coffee, straight from the cow, and planks of home-cured bacon for breakfast, tenderloin sandwiches for lunch, doughnuts for snacks, steak for dinner. Everyone had been waiting for this.

  Finally the ambulance came; it parked out on Boundary, and the crew came sprinting up the road carrying their big fiberglass gear boxes. They hooked him up to a number of tubes and machines right on the spot, getting a read on his vital signs and radioing the information back to the trauma center at Methodist Hospital. Clyde listened to this traffic and knew that the news was bad. They tore the uniform shirt off Hal’s body right there in the dirt, a gesture that somehow offended Clyde even though he understood it. They took out the paddles and they shocked him once, twice, three times, each time shooting a different combination of substances into his heart with a giant horse needle. After the third time Clyde suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to start crying. He turned his back on the scene and walked up the road until he reached the horse, whose eyes were still glowing in the beam from Hal Karst’s spotlight. Great patches of coagulated blood had thickened on its flanks and on the side of its neck, obscuring whatever marks had been carved into it by the mutilators. But whatever Hal had done and said to it seemed to have calmed it down, and it was patiently snuffling through the line of grass and weeds along the fence wire, looking for something worth eating. Clyde stood there and talked to it for a while about nothing in particular, until the tears had drained away from his eyes and he no longer had the tightness in his chest. He unwrapped the reins from the fence post where Hal had placed them and led the horse up along the fencerow toward Boundary. By this time they had taken Hal away, and nothing was left at the place where he had died except for a great deal of colorful litter: the torn-open wrappings of various medical supplies scattered all over the road like a bouquet that had been dropped from a procession. The wind was picking up as dawn approached, and the litter was already starting to stir and to tumble back up the road.

  Clyde picked up his flashlight and a few other items he had dropped, then continued leading the horse up the road. Just as he was reaching Boundary, a pickup truck happened along, a white one with black letters on the door identifying it as a U.S.-government vehicle. It was towing an empty horse trailer, which almost jackknifed around into the ditch as the truck stopped abruptly, right in the middle of the lane. Two men jumped out, not bothering to close the doors: a white man and a black man, young and trim, with neat, short haircuts and in good shape, to judge from the way they sprinted toward him. “Thank you, Deputy,” one of them said as he was still several paces away; then he reached out with one gloved hand and took the reins from Clyde’s hand. “Come on, Sweet Corn,” he said to the horse, leading it forward with a firm tug. Sweet Corn roused itself to a faster gait, and the man jogged alongside it back toward the trailer.

  The other man from the truck stayed where he was, looking at Clyde. But he wasn’t looking at Clyde’s face as if he were interested in conversation. His eyes were traveling up and down Clyde’s body, inspecting him. Finally he focused on Clyde’s name tag.

  “Deputy Banks,” he said distinctly, as though committing it to memory, “thank you for your assistance.”

  “Hope Sweet Corn’s okay,” Clyde said.

  “She’s a lot tougher than you’d imagine,” the man said.

  Clyde stopped, faced the man, straightened to attention, and snapped out a salute. Uncertainly, the man returned it. As he did, Clyde could not help noticing that he was wearing latex surgical gloves.

  “Thanks again,” he said weakly, turned away, and jogged toward Boundary. The other military man—for they were definitely military—had already got Sweet Corn loaded into the trailer. They took off as quickly as they had arrived, leaving Clyde alone with two units to look after. The sight of Hal Karst’s abandoned vehicle made him depressed, so he busied himself stringing crime-scene tape around the place until reinforcements began to show.

  twenty-six

  BETSY HAD worked with Spector enough to know when things were really bizarre. Usually Spector had the t
aciturn, understated approach to life, death, joy, and tragedy that American men had all picked up watching TV and movies during the Peter Gunn and Dragnet era. He could even handle the possibility of his ship going down if Betsy screwed up in a big way. But today, as he walked into her office, he was visibly shook up.

  He shut the door, sat down, ran his hands over his translucent buzz cut, and silently passed a sheet of paper across the desk to Betsy. It was an “Eyes Only” memo. Betsy focused in on the letterhead: the National Security Council. The memo didn’t take long to read.

  “Goodness!” she exclaimed.

  Spector was staring at her in astonishment. “Goodness?”

  Betsy started sorting through the documents on her workstation, trying to figure out what tasks she could delegate to her staff to keep them out of trouble, and to keep the flow of words up during the next three days. “See you at National, then?” she asked.

  Spector said nothing, just stared at her coolly.

  “Or should we drive down together?” Betsy continued.

  “You’ve got a real talent for denial, or something,” Spector finally said. “This hasn’t sunk in yet at all, has it?”

  “I don’t think I’m in denial,” she said. “I’m just trying to concentrate on the here and now.”

  Spector grinned. “That,” he said, “is definitely a form of denial. See you there.” He stood up, took a couple of deep breaths, grabbed his military-issue aluminum briefcase, and departed.

  She spent another hour delegating three days’ worth of tasks and planting emergency contact numbers. She said good-bye to Thelma the secretary, walked down to the apartment, left a note for Cassie, packed, and lugged her briefcase and garment bag down to the Rosslyn Metro Station.

  Ten minutes later she was at National, wishing she hadn’t packed so much.

  If she’d been hopping a Delta or USAir flight, she’d have known exactly where to go. As it was, she blundered around the place for a while. They had signs up for people who wanted to find a rest room or a baggage claim. They didn’t have any signs for people like her. It was fortunate that her good-girl instincts had prompted her to arrive almost an hour early.

  Eventually, by process of elimination, she found herself at the civil-aviation wing. She trudged through a couple of commercial maintenance operations, now cursing herself for every extra blouse and pair of shoes she had stuffed into her bag. Some kind soul directed her through a door marked Staff Only, and she found herself in a waiting room manned by the same kind of Agency security personnel who sat by the elevators at the Castleman Building. Betsy was the only person there. A couple of dark-tinted windows looked out toward the apron, where a government Gulfstream jet was being worked over by its crew. Betsy recognized the construction of these windows: the same beefed-up, surveillance-proof numbers that always implied the presence of Agency people.

  Half an hour later Spector came. He was followed by some hassled types from the NSA who had been helicoptered down from Fort Meade; an Army and a Marine colonel who had taken the metro down from the Pentagon, and—at the last possible minute, bringing up the rear, wiping sweat from his balding head with a dirty handkerchief and puffing on his asthma inhalers—Ed Hennessey.

  A woman in a blue uniform entered through a different door, bringing an exhalation of muggy, diesel-scented air with her. Her uniform was almost calculated to be nondescript and bore no discernible insignia or name tag. “Welcome to the Kennebunkport Express. I’m your pilot. My name is Commander Robin Hughes. Please follow me to the plane. Please stay as far away as possible from the open hangar doors.” Robin Hughes had the enviable poise and self-possession that Betsy had learned to associate with women who had graduated from one of the three service academies.

  They had all been chatting and even joking until this moment; suddenly, now, they became hushed and reverent. Robin Hughes turned and led them out the door and into the hangar where the Gulfstream was sitting, ready to go. The hangar’s doors were wide-open, and Betsy understood why they had been told to stay back from them; if they got any closer, a tourist or reporter standing in one of the concourses would be able to pick their faces out with a telephoto lens.

  The little jet had two rows of seats. They had barely settled into them when Commander Robin Hughes began to taxi out onto the apron. This was air travel with an unfamiliar twist: no waiting. No one came back to demonstrate how to fasten their seat belts, no one hassled them about their seat backs or tray tables. Robin Hughes blithely cut in front of an outraged Trump shuttle and a slightly mystified American Airlines 757, swung the plane around to its takeoff vector, and pinned the throttles. The plane ripped down the runway and jumped into the air like a bat out of hell, and they were a thousand feet above the Potomac no more than sixty seconds after they’d chosen their seats. It was, in other words, not like flying commercial.

  It was not a talkative bunch. Everyone had a window seat. Some took advantage of it, gazing and pondering, others snapped open briefcases as soon as the plane was airborne and hunched over documents and laptop computers. Betsy saw the wide mouth of the Delaware below and even caught sight of the vee-shaped wake of the Lewes–Cape May ferry, giving her fond memories of the weekend when she had met Paul Moses.

  Ed Hennessey was sitting across the aisle from her; he jammed his seat back into the face of one of the NSA people and fell asleep, wheezing and snoring loudly enough to be heard over the engine noise. By sitting up straight and craning her neck, Betsy was able to see a glimpse of Manhattan through his window.

  She sensed someone was looking at her. It was Spector. He was sweating and chewing gum obsessively. He shook his head in amazement. He was permanently dumbfounded by his Idaho girl. Looking out the window at the pretty view!

  They were already descending toward Kennebunkport. Cape Cod was on the right, the sandbars around Provincetown perfectly resolved. Hughes came on the intercom, telling them they were about to land, and jokingly apologizing for the quality of the cabin service. “I request that nobody leave until the buses have pulled into position and we’ve been given the go-ahead. It’s important, for national-security reasons, that you not be seen together.”

  Something about this statement tore a large rent in the curtain of denial that had been hanging before Betsy’s eyes.

  National-security reasons.

  Saddam was in Kuwait. The United States was, for all practical purposes, in a state of war.

  For the people in this airplane to be spotted in this place, in this combination, could, in some as-yet-unimagined way, cause people to die.

  She turned back and looked at Spector. He was eyeing her now with a hint of a grin. The growing shock must have been obvious on Betsy’s face.

  The plane taxied way, way back to the far end of a runway. Betsy didn’t even know what airport they had landed at; somewhere with lots of trees. Robin Hughes swung it around so that the door faced toward the trees, away from any buildings. Very shortly a couple of school buses and a blue government van arrived—ten times the seating capacity they needed. The buses, empty except for their drivers, maneuvered back and forth on the apron, forming an L-shaped barrier that would block the view of anyone spying on them back in the trees. The van pulled up very close to the Gulfstream. Doors were flung open, a signal was given, and everyone hustled up the aisle, down the steps, and into the van.

  Except for Hennessey, who was still sound asleep, and Betsy, who stayed behind trying to wake him up. No one else on this plane, with the possible exception of Robin Hughes, had any stomach for the job of trying to wake up this leprous pariah. Devil take the person who was seen being nice to him; God help the person who incurred his resentment. The combined efforts of Betsy Vandeventer and Robin Hughes were needed to get him on his feet and down the steps without breaking his neck.

  The buses peeled away and parked themselves somewhere. The van was a tinted-window special with two security men on board, not making any effort to hide their Heckler & Koch submachine guns. As
they pulled out of the airport, another vehicle fell in behind them—a massive Suburban with government plates.

  The sight of the weapons, and of what was obviously a government war wagon behind them, tore down most of what remained of Betsy’s curtain of denial. She began rubbing her palms against her skirt; they were sweating even though the air-conditioning in the van was turned up high. Her heart was pounding and she had a lump of apprehension in her throat.

  The van took them several miles through rocky country with occasional, surprising views of the ocean. They turned into progressively narrower and windier roads, edging closer and closer to the sea, glimpsing large waterfront homes from time to time. They turned onto a drive and passed through a security checkpoint. A few hundred yards later they pulled up before a barnlike structure, a sort of utility and machine shed, surrounded on all sides by trees. It looked simple and bucolic except for the forest of antennae sprouting from its roof.

  A large roll-up door opened. Standing in the center of the dark aperture was a man in an impeccable dark-charcoal pinstripe suit: James Gabor Millikan.

  Spector leaned over to Betsy and whispered, “Watch this.”

  Hennessey had boarded the van last and had the front passenger seat. He shoved his door open and climbed stiffly out of the vehicle, ignoring a Marine who held out one hand to help him down. He walked toward Millikan, and Millikan walked toward him. Everyone on the van had his face pressed to a window; those who were unfortunate enough to be on the wrong side stood up to peer over the others’ shoulders.

  Millikan extended his hand to Hennessey, grinning broadly. Hennessey looked taut and grim and tired, like a man walking into a hospital for prostate surgery. But he shook Millikan’s hand firmly and, as an afterthought, patted Millikan on the back, as if to say, “You got me this time.” Inside the van everyone exhaled.