The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “All the time. They work on these research projects in the labs and have to be there at odd hours.”

  “Okay,” Berry said, seemingly satisfied. He flipped forward a couple of pages in the report. “Let’s turn to the actual scene of the mutilation, along the railroad tracks. I know you’ve already covered this in your report. But I’d like you to go back and search your memory one more time, trying to recall if you saw any sort of debris or litter or any other man-made junk lying around on the ground there.”

  “Well, as I said in the report, that area is used by a lot of kids who go there to drink beer and smoke pot,” Clyde said. “So there’s always a lot of litter strewn around the area. It’s very difficult sometimes to tell ten-minute-old litter apart from the litter that’s been there a few days.”

  “You know that the horse was hobbled?”

  “Hobbled?”

  “Yes. The veterinarians found marks around its legs.”

  “I didn’t examine the horse that carefully. But now that you mention it, it stands to reason.”

  “Did you see any straps on the ground?” Berry said. Then he added, “Or anything else that might have been used to hobble a horse?”

  “Well,” Clyde said, “which is it?”

  “Say again?”

  “Was it straps, or something else?”

  “I’m asking you,” Berry said.

  “You said that there were marks on the legs of the horse. Were they strap marks, or some other kinds of marks?”

  Berry shifted uncomfortably. Clyde had trapped him without really meaning to. Berry had given away information that was supposed to remain secret.

  “I didn’t see any straps on the ground,” Clyde finally said, “or anything else that might have been used to hobble a horse.”

  twenty-eight

  FAMILIES LIKE the Bankses passed objects like ropes and tarps down through the generations the way other families did houses or silver. Clyde knew that the Big Black Tarp had been acquired by Ebenezer around the time of the War and that it had originally been used to cover Manhattan Project machinery that had rolled into town on a flatbed truck in the middle of the night in 1944. He knew that the Little Brown Tarp had been purchased by his father from a surplus store around the time of the Korean War and used to cover the family’s possessions when they’d moved to Illinois and back. In the oral tradition of male Bankses, each of the tarps was as storied as a tapestry or handmade quilt, and when Clyde noticed a bent grommet or a patched tear or an oil stain, he needed only think about it for a few moments to remember which camping trip, move, natural disaster, or construction project had occasioned it.

  To Desiree they were just dark, dirty things that lurked in the garage reeking with an ominous, gunlike odor, and so as Clyde used the Big Black Tarp to cover up Desiree’s possessions in the back of the pickup truck, he found himself worrying about what would become of the tarp when she reached her new home in Fort Riley, Kansas. It would be like her to drag the tarp over to a Dumpster and leave it there as if it were nothing more than a sheet of plastic from the hardware store. Fort Riley must be crawling with new arrivals now, most of whom had a more practical bent than Desiree, and some sharp-eyed master sergeant would surely snap it up within minutes, dry it out in his driveway, and store it lovingly in his garage.

  Clyde worked late into the night, worrying about his tarp. Desiree kept bringing more things out; she brought out her sewing machine so that she could sew things for Maggie. She had insisted, quite rightly, that she drive the truck and not the station wagon; the wagon was the family car, a much safer and cleaner vehicle for Maggie to be squired around in, and the truck was the right vehicle to take to war.

  Clyde was worried about the truck, so he changed the oil and checked all the other fluids and rehearsed Desiree on how to change a flat tire. He was worried that rain would get in and destroy her things, so he laid the Big Black Tarp out on the empty bed of the truck, loaded her things on top of it, then folded the tarp over the top when she had promised—insisted—that she had brought out the last of her things. Shiny luggage, clothes in white garbage bags, shoe boxes filled with family photographs, framed photographs stashed in glossy department-store bags, the sewing machine, a couple of spare pillows in bright flowered pillowcases, a disconnected telephone with its cord wound around it, the garment bag containing Desiree’s full-dress uniform, a stack of novels and magazines, all vanished beneath the oily shroud of the Big Black Tarp.

  It started to move, seemingly of its own accord. Clyde looked up, startled, and saw Dick Dhont. Dick had pulled up and parked on the street, come up the driveway without saying a word, and grabbed an errant corner of the tarp. It was about a quarter to one in the morning.

  The tarp was more than large enough to cover Desiree’s things and to wrap generously around the sides, but both men knew that Desiree liked to limit her speed to between eighty-five and ninety miles per hour, unless she was in the city, where she would hold it to under thirty. Without having to discuss it, they set to work tying down the tarp so that it wouldn’t flap loose as Desiree barreled down the interstate.

  They walked several more times around the truck and each man concluded with some reluctance that the job was finished, Desiree’s things were immobilized as securely as a freshly pinned Dhont wrestling opponent, and there was nothing more to worry about. Dick Dhont rummaged under the seat of the truck, found Clyde’s five-year-old Rand McNally Road Atlas, opened it up to the map of Kansas, and carefully arranged it there on the seat next to where Desiree would sit tomorrow. Clyde was ashamed that he had not thought of this.

  Dick went inside to check on Desiree; he had to work in the morning and would not be able to see her off. Clyde sat down in the grass in the front yard and waited. A batch of plastic went bad out at Nishnabotna Plastics and erupted from the tower like a detonating oil well, filling the neighborhood with faint, ghostly light. Dick came out of the front door after a few minutes, closed it gently, then turned and ran to his car. He sat behind the wheel for a few minutes, his shoulders hunched and heaving, then started the engine and drove away, forgetting to turn on his headlights.

  Clyde turned off the garage light and went inside. He found Desiree lying on the couch in the living room with Maggie nestled up against her. Her nightgown was unbuttoned and one breast was peeking out. The sleeping Maggie nuzzled at it. Her lips began to suck on air, and a little smile came onto her face.

  Clyde had been working the night shift so frequently of late that he did not imagine he would have much luck getting to sleep; the adjustment was just too difficult to make. So he made himself comfortable in the living room, turned the TV around toward his chair so that its flickering light would not disturb the girls, and watched TV for a while, mostly CNN. It all had to do with Desert Shield. President Bush was buzzing around Maine in his boat, and convoys of heavy military vehicles were converging on air bases around the country, mostly in the Southeast. There was a little feature story about a schoolteacher in Ohio who had been called up, and who had appeared before his class in his Army uniform to give a last lecture, explaining to the kids where he was going and why. The kids looked stunned, much the way Dick Dhont had.

  Then the doorbell had rung and its sound was dying away and the front door had been flung open. It was Mrs. Dhont and two of the Dhont wives. It was morning. Clyde tried to sit up in the La-Z-Boy but found Maggie had been deposited on his chest all wrapped in pink blankets. Desiree was not in the room anymore. She was taking a shower. He heard the whine of the house’s plumbing and could smell her shampoo.

  Becky, the eldest Dhont wife, came and plucked Maggie off Clyde’s chest and cuddled her, leaving Clyde there alone, as if he had some preordained role in the upcoming ceremony that had nothing to do with looking after Maggie. Mrs. Dhont and the other Dhont wife busied themselves in the kitchen making a hearty Dhont breakfast. Knowing that Desiree had strayed from the family dietary traditions, they had brought the necessary staples with them:
two-inch-thick patties of homemade pork sausage, eggs still warm from the chickens, bottles of raw milk with cream still making its way to the top.

  Clyde found himself with nothing to do. He went out and walked around the truck a couple of more times.

  When he came back inside, Desiree was out of the shower, her hair wet and smelling of peaches. She had changed into jeans and a T-shirt for the drive. They spent a few minutes smooching and flirting in the bedroom as if this were any other day, then went down, hand in hand, to breakfast. The Dhont females had prepared a meal adequate to feed the entire Seventh Army Corps. Clyde expressed rote amazement but was hurt on the inside; it reminded him too much of what was to come.

  Still, he thought as he chewed his sausage, it wouldn’t have been any better if Desiree had pulled into the drive-up window on the way out of town for an Egg McMuffin. There was nothing wrong with marking the occasion, with bringing all of the heavy emotions straight to the forefront, as women in general and the Dhont women in particular tended to. It just wasn’t a Banks way of doing things, and he would never adjust to it.

  After breakfast Desiree drank a whole big tumbler of water, the way she always did when she was about to breast-feed, and took Maggie into the den for a quarter of an hour. When the two emerged, Maggie was gurgling and happy, and Desiree had tears running down her face, knowing that she would never breast-feed her daughter again—now that she was going away, her milk supply would soon dry up. She hugged and kissed her mother and sisters-in-law very hard, then handed the baby over to Clyde, who handed her over to Becky. Clyde followed Desiree out to the garage, feeling light-headed.

  “’Bye,” she said. “I’ll call you from the road somewhere.” She hit the starter and the engine whined for a long time and Clyde’s heart jumped as he hoped it might not start; then the engine caught, and he felt himself go limp and helpless. Desiree gunned it a few times, the way Clyde had always told her not to, then backed it slowly out of the garage.

  All of the neighbors had come out onto their front porches and were waving American flags and handkerchiefs and yellow ribbons at her. She honked the horn, shifted it into first gear, and drove away, holding down the horn button intermittently as she moved down the block, occasionally turning around to wave at Clyde, her little fingers fluttering in the truck’s rear window above the shadow of the Big Black Tarp all crisscrossed with ropes.

  Then she was gone. Gone to war. Everyone in the neighborhood looked at Clyde, standing there in the middle of the garage door. He turned his back on them and, finding himself trapped with nowhere to go, climbed into the station wagon and punched the opener. The garage door closed behind him. He closed the station wagon’s door and found himself alone in a dark, quiet place. He leaned forward until his brow was resting on the wagon’s maroon dashboard. Finally his body began to heave and shudder, and he cried for the first time since he was fourteen years old.

  twenty-nine

  SEPTEMBER

  “THIS YOUR first one of these?”

  Dean Kenneth Knightly, piloting his rust-ravaged ZX across the Mississippi River bridge on I-80, glanced over at Kevin Vandeventer, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat with the window rolled halfway down, trying to fight back Knightly’s cigarette smoke. Though the wind blowing in through the rust holes in the floor did that better than any window.

  “These what?” Kevin responded with a bit of an offended edge in his voice. He didn’t like the dean, his scuffed cowboy boots, his unfiltered Camels, his Texas accent, his blue blazer from Kmart. In short, he did not like the fact that the dean, despite his high position, made no effort to disguise his agro-American roots. “I’ve gone back to the beltway a number of times for Dr. Larsen, but I believe this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to attend this particular meeting.”

  Knightly was tickled. He didn’t like this mousse-haired tadpole anymore than Kevin liked him. Partly, he didn’t like him for the simple and obvious reason that he was an arrogant little shit with a freshly minted Ph.D. and a closet full of suits with the outlet-mall price tags still on them. But that all came with the territory. He really didn’t like him because he worked for Larsen, and Larsen was crooked.

  “Well, then, let me tell you a bit about where we’re going today, representing the Eastern Iowa University. We’ll be attending the thirty-eighth—I believe the program has it in Roman numerals, I believe that is ea-ecks, ea-ecks, ea-ecks, vee, eye, eye, eye. It is among the oldest postwar white-slave exchanges in the world, although most of the people we move now are brown, black, and yellow.”

  He was just trying to provoke Kevin, and Kevin was too provoked to figure it out. “It’s fine for you to be cynical, but our job, in our shop, is saving lives and making the world a better place.”

  The dean began to laugh. “What’s the Rainmaker up to now? A quarter of a billion lives?” He finished a cigarette and poked the butt through a rust hole in the floor of the car. “Look. Don’t get me wrong. There are some good things that come out of your shop, as you call it—people get fed, students get trained. But there are some wonderful babies born out of whorehouses, too. And you, Dr. Vandeventer, are working in the intellectual, multinational equivalent of a whorehouse in which, in the pursuit of legitimate goals, your pimpo magnifico, the fucking son of a bootlegger, provides services for a massive profit, breaking laws, treaties, moral and ethical guidelines—and working against his own country’s national interest.”

  “Jesus!” Kevin exclaimed. He’d always been trained to be nice, polite, and not bring disagreements out into the open—especially with someone he was about to spend the whole day with, cooped up in cars and airplanes. He was knocked off balance by Knightly’s sudden double-barreled attack.

  “Oh, he does have the best accountants between Chicago and Denver working for him. Just don’t give me that ‘making the world a better place’ jive. What about all those fake Jordanians you’ve brought in?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “Hell, Dr. Vandeventer, I know the region. I’ve fucking been there. I know the accents. I know the way those people talk, walk, dress, and think. And if those people are Jordanians, then you’re Kim Basinger.”

  “They are all legally cleared international students, certified by the Jordanian government and confirmed by our embassy in Amman. They are legally in this country and have the proper visas.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Well, I’ve got my own network and my own experience, and I can tell you that most of those people are Iraqis. And you know what? I suspect that deep down under all of this making-the-world-a-better-place crap, you know that they’re Iraqis.”

  Kevin’s face reddened, and he clenched his teeth and was shocked to realize that tears had begun to form. This was a little too much like the old days on the potato farm, being tongue-lashed by his father.

  Knightly was right. Kevin didn’t know it totally—it wasn’t a conscious realization yet—but he had begun to piece things together in the back of his mind.

  Along with the incipient tears his nose had begun to run. He cried too easily, goddamn it. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and blinked back the tears. He thought he’d done a good job of controlling himself without Knightly noticing. But when Knightly resumed his rant, his voice was much gentler, as if he’d noticed it and felt bad. Kevin was indescribably humiliated by this.

  “Look, Kevin. Maybe I’m just jealous. I’m in the same game—though at a different level, and I’m legal. But it’s the same game. That’s what this meeting is about.”

  Oddly, Kevin felt himself starting to relax. Ever since the magic with his W-2 forms, he’d had questions, but he’d never let himself ask.

  Knightly continued. “Let me tell you about the National Association of International Science Students, NAISS—we pronounce it ‘nice.’ Larsen’s PR department must have thought that one up. You’ll see people from virtually every school in the United States and officials from virtually every country in the world. It�
��s a market. The foreigners—especially the really poor countries—will let us take their smartest people for a few years and use them—kind of like an indenture—but we make money out of it. Then we send them back with some initials after their names, and funny hats that they can’t wear, eternally alienated from their cultures and their identities. We take these talented people and the money they bring with them, we use them to run our labs and teach our classes and do our research for four or five years, and then we send them back to become our satellites. Sort of like the athletic department and their wonderful student-athletes off whom they make millions of dollars, wrecking their bodies in the process, and then ejecting them into the world. Anyway, NAISS is the market in which the bureaucrats and the universities piece together agreements that guarantee the supply of gray matter from Timbuktu.” Knightly shook his head wryly. “And we say we’re doing them a favor. You have any idea what would happen to our system if the flow of these foreign kids stopped?”

  They didn’t talk much more as Knightly slammed his ZX across the rolling territory of northern Illinois, through the outskirts of Chicago, and into Midway Airport. Kevin tried to put all this out of his mind by running through his mental checklist for the dozenth time. He’d turned off the air conditioner in his apartment, the oven and burners were off, the iron unplugged. He’d left forwarding addresses and numbers. Larsen’s full-time, in-house travel specialist had reserved him a room at the Rosslyn Holiday Inn, right across the Key Bridge from Georgetown where the meeting would take place, and only four blocks from Betsy’s apartment building—and Margaret’s.

  Once he had cleared his mental desk of all the reassuring normality, reality came back, and the fear and anxiety with it. For the last several months he had been constantly worrying that the IRS would audit him. The Habibi case, and Clyde Banks’s ongoing interest in the subject, also bothered him. Now to these nagging low-level anxieties was added a much more profound fear of this business with the new Jordanian students. Prior to the arrival of these new people in Wapsipinicon in mid-July, he had been on the phone with his friends at the Jordanian Embassy every day—sometimes several times a day. Since then they hadn’t called him once, and when he called them, they were always in meetings, or out of town.