The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  Clyde continued. “I have this crazy idea that no one except me is ever going to believe. No one except me, and maybe you, because I just have the feeling you might be crazy enough.”

  “What is your idea?” Fazoul said, slightly provoked by Clyde’s sudden reticence.

  “That Saddam has a biological-weapons production facility under construction—maybe even up and running—right here in good old Forks County.”

  Fazoul did something surprising: he smiled. He tried not to, but he could not keep the smile from spreading onto his devastated face. “May I hear your thinking?”

  “I don’t have this one nailed down as well as the first part,” Clyde said. “But, to begin with, it just makes sense. He’s got his rocket scientists here. Why not make the stuff here? It’s easy to get hardware in Iowa, and he doesn’t have to worry about satellite photos, or getting bombed by the Israelis. Dr. Folkes says that the stuff is so potent, if you had, say, a truckload of it, you could change the direction of the war. And moving a truckload of stuff from Iowa to the Middle East isn’t very difficult for a guy like Saddam.”

  “I agree with you that the idea is plausible,” Fazoul said in a soft, reassuring tone. Then, more urgently: “What is your evidence?”

  “The bacteria have to be fed certain things: brewer’s yeast, sugar, and a protein solution,” Clyde said. “Well, I heard from Jack Carlson that Tab Templeton bought a load of brewer’s yeast around the first week of October and drove it away in a van matching the description of the van used by the supposed satanist cattle mutilators. And we know that in his final week or two Tab was living out of a closet at Byproducts, where they’ve got sacks of protein just sitting out on the warehouse floor for the taking. I went by Nishnabotna Corn Processors and talked to the fellows at the shipping department there and learned that Tab had purchased some drums of corn syrup just a week before his death. And I personally saw him down at Hardware Hank with a load of PVC pipe. In the last week I’ve been out at the Co-op and the other farm supply places around here, and I’ve learned that Tab also purchased a number of large fiberglass storage tanks of the type farmers use to store pesticides and other bulk liquids.

  “I figure that if I was a pencil-neck Iraqi graduate student trying to build a botulin-toxin factory in an old barn or garage in the middle of Iowa, I’d have a couple of problems. For one thing, there’d be lots of heavy physical labor—moving drums and such. For another, I’d be certain to attract attention standing in the checkout line of Hardware Hank with a load of sewer pipe. So the smart thing would be to hire someone like Tab Templeton to do all that for me.”

  Fazoul said, “Do you really believe that someone as security conscious as Saddam would place a secret of such importance in the hands of an American drunk?”

  This one stopped Clyde in his tracks, because it was an objection he had made to himself many times. He faltered, broke eye contact with Fazoul, stared out the window.

  “You’re right. It’s impossible,” Clyde said. “I’m just being paranoid.” Then he remembered something. “The only thing is that Tab is dead. Which doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, because we’ve all been waiting for him to die for a long time. But it’s hard to believe that even someone as drunk and stupid as Tab would have just fallen into that hopper by accident. And it doesn’t explain how he got access to that van, or why he shoved it off the pier into Lake Pla-Mor.”

  “It is a very interesting piece of thinking,” Fazoul said after a lengthy silence. “With your permission I may take it up with some friends of mine who have some familiarity with the current state of affairs in the Gulf. Perhaps they might be able to supply some small additional clue that would prove or disprove your hypothesis.”

  “Well, that’d be real nice,” blurted the astonished Clyde. He had merely wanted to use Fazoul as a sounding board and had hoped only that he wouldn’t laugh in Clyde’s face. He was startled and somewhat embarrassed to learn that Fazoul might actually repeat his wild-ass theories to personages even more exotic and sophisticated than himself.

  Down below, a red Corvette backed out of a parking space on the sodden lawn, peeled out, shot halfway around the circular driveway, and screeched to a halt in front of the front door. The horn began honking. Voices drifted up the spiral stair from below, calling Clyde’s name.

  “I guess that’s my ride. Hope I don’t have to arrest him for DWI,” Clyde said. “Stay in touch.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Fazoul said.

  Clyde made his way down to the first floor and out to the foyer, where he nodded good-bye to several guests. He exchanged an air kiss with Anita and walked out the door toward the Corvette, which was revving its big motor impatiently. Clyde opened the passenger door and leaned way down to look inside the low-slung vehicle. Behind the wheel, reeking of European cologne, was Buck Chandler.

  “Let’s blow this pop stand, Clyde boy!” he hollered, slapping the wheel.

  “How drunk are you?” Clyde said.

  “Hey!” Buck said, as if he were glad Clyde had been rude enough to ask. He shoved the ’vette into Park, threw the door open, and hopped out as lightly as a man his age could on football-battered knees. “Check this out,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders and shot his cuffs theatrically, held his hands out to his sides, then closed his eyes and picked one foot off the ground. Standing on one leg like a flamingo, he began touching the tip of his nose with his index fingers, alternating between the two hands. “One hundred . . . ninety-three . . . eighty-six . . . seventy-nine . . . seventy-two . . . and so on and so forth,” he said, finally opening his eyes and putting his foot down. He raised his eyebrows expectantly.

  “Spent all your booze money on your car, huh?” Clyde said, climbing into the passenger seat. Buck laughed heartily and climbed in behind the wheel. Clyde fastened his belt and cracked the window a bit, hoping to get some fresh air.

  “Been on the wagon for a couple of months, Clyde. Never felt better.” Buck punched the gas, and the Corvette spun around the drive with shocking acceleration.

  “Well, that’s a good thing, because when I get elected, I’m going to be hell on drunk drivers.”

  Buck laughed again. “That’s why I stopped boozing,” he said. “I knew old Clyde wouldn’t cut me any slack. That, and I knew I had to tend to my business if I was going to pay all the goddamn divorce lawyers.”

  “Well, normally I think it’s a real tragedy when a divorce happens,” Clyde said, “but it looks like it kind of suits you.”

  “Couldn’t have said it better, Clyde,” Buck said. The Corvette veered from Stonefield Drive out onto the River Road and screamed in toward the heart of Wapsipinicon like a descending Scud.

  thirty-eight

  COMPASSIONATE LEAVE lasted for a week, which didn’t seem very generous to Betsy until she realized that, in those circumstances, a week lasts a year. Paul Moses came out to help with the details of transferring the body and dealing with the funeral directors. It did not occur to Betsy to wonder why an NSA cryptographer should pull that particular duty. Or, rather, it occurred to her and she decided not to think about it.

  She didn’t begin thinking about those things until her compassionate leave was all used up, Paul had gone back to Washington, and she had chewed through a few weeks of her vacation leave. She knew that Cassie would have some pungent observations to make about this: a woman who would use her vacation days only when an immediate family member had died, so that she could spend those days in abject misery.

  She spent many days sitting at the kitchen table in the farmhouse in Nampa. Long breakfasts with Mom stretched into long lunches. They read every word of the local newspaper, watched a fair amount of daytime TV. It wasn’t very productive, but that was okay.

  She knew she’d gone a long way in her own recovery when she began to think about everything that had happened. And then she realized that she had figured out a lot of things subconsciously in the last few weeks.

  For example, the mugging
in Adams-Morgan hadn’t been a mugging, it had been an attempt on Kevin’s life concealed as a mugging. Margaret Park-O’Neil wasn’t just a neighbor who happened to become Kevin’s love interest; she had been planted in his path by someone who knew Kevin well enough to know that he had a weakness for Asian women. She was working for someone, for one of the “good” guys, and her job was, among other things, to act as Kevin’s bodyguard. She had died in the line of duty.

  What followed was a little more difficult to swallow.

  If Margaret—Kevin’s perfect love interest—had been planted in his path, what did that tell Betsy about her own perfect love interest, Paul Moses? What on earth was Paul doing in Nampa handling the funeral arrangements if he really worked for NSA?

  How about Marcus Berry—Cassie’s supposed love interest, who spent all his time in the Midwest? The President himself had told Betsy that Edward Seamus Hennessey had a man on the ground in Wapsipinicon, Iowa, looking after the Iraqis there.

  Which meant that Cassie herself was part of the game. Betsy ran over the chronology in her mind: she had given the fateful briefing to the Ag attaché early in March. Two days later her previous roommate had suddenly been sent off to another post. Two days after that Cassie had shown up, the ideal roommate, and moved into the apartment.

  She and Kevin were pawns, that was obvious. Like many pawns, Kevin had already been sacrificed. Cassie, Paul Moses, Marcus Berry, and Margaret were rooks and bishops and knights. Who was the king? Almost certainly Hennessey. But this wasn’t a chess game with only two armies and two kings. The board stretched off in all directions, its boundaries lost in darkness and distance, and she sensed that other parts of it were crowded, and furiously active.

  On Halloween evening Betsy was driving her mother back home from a trip to the Nampa shopping center, and as they passed through the streets of the town, they saw the trick-or-treaters making their way down the sidewalks in their flimsy store-bought disguises, carrying their bags of loot.

  “Look at all the children in their costumes,” Mrs. Vandeventer exclaimed. “Isn’t that adorable?”

  For the first time in about a month Betsy smiled. “We have the same thing in Washington, D.C., Mother.”

  Mom got a vaguely distressed look on her face. “Isn’t it dangerous out there?”

  “Yeah,” Betsy said, “but some people like it that way.”

  thirty-nine

  STANTON COURT had been a cornfield on the edge of Wapsipinicon until sometime during the War, when the university had annexed it and thrown up row after row of long, low, jerry-built barracks, sheathed in tar paper and roofed with corrugated metal. It was supposed to be a temporary measure, but the additional housing space had become indispensable, and the city had grown up around it in the years since then. Sometime during the sixties the barracks had been re-covered in aluminum siding, as a tacit admission that they were probably going to stand there as long as the university did. A few months later an enormous hailstorm had come through, pelting the south and west sides of the buildings with knobby fists of ice moving horizontally at sixty miles an hour.

  The marks were still clearly visible a quarter of a century later as the high beams of the Murder Car swept across them. Clyde was using the country brights because it was Halloween night, and Stanton Court probably had the highest density of small children of any location in the state of Iowa. The university used these barracks as cut-rate married-student housing, and they were populated by members of ethnic groups who, unlike their American counterparts, had no hang-ups about having children.

  By the standards of the average Iowan, it always looked like Halloween on these narrow streets, where saris and turbans were more common than T-shirts. But however determinedly the parents might cling to their cultures, their children were growing up American and were aware of the fact that on this one night of the year they could obtain virtually unlimited amounts of candy simply by knocking on doors and demanding it. They were all out in their Batman and Ninja Turtles gear, much of which was larded down with reflective tape that glared acid colors in Clyde’s headlights. But some of the parents had ginned up homemade costumes that were invisible at night, so Clyde used the high beams.

  He stopped in front of a barracks and put the station wagon in park. The tiny front yard lacked the usual assortment of plastic tricycles and sword-fighting equipment, but looking through the tiny kitchen window, which was wreathed in steam, Clyde could see baby bottles drying on a rack, and he could see the back of Farida’s head as she labored over the stove.

  Maggie was still asleep in the backseat, and Clyde knew she’d wake up if he tried to move her. Clyde got out of the car, pushed the door shut without latching it, and tripped down a short front walk that had been plowed up from underneath by the roots of a scrawny crabapple tree.

  He was hoping they wouldn’t make a big fuss over him, but they did; Farida had tea going and had baked some kind of little pastry, extremely sweet, and flavored like Earl Grey tea. When they realized that Clyde was reluctant to leave Maggie alone in the car, Farida made a brief phone call. Something like fifteen seconds later a teenaged Vakhan Turk girl arrived, a calculus textbook under her arm, and cheerfully agreed to sit in the car and look after Maggie for as long as might be necessary.

  Clyde was directed to the best piece of furniture in the house, an overstuffed chair that had been draped with a heavy, colorful woolen fabric to hide the fact that all the stuffing was falling out of it. The fabric was rough and nubbly, with little designs woven into it, and Clyde figured that it was probably homemade. If this tapestry was replaced with a tatty afghan knitted of garish polyester yarn, the chair would be just like all the furniture that Clyde had grown up on, so he immediately felt right at home. A cup of tea and plate of pastries were set before him, Fazoul took a seat on an equally devastated hide-a-bed sofa, and they munched and sipped and discussed weather and football and infant rearing for some half an hour.

  After Clyde had eaten enough of the pastry to satisfy Farida’s ferocious and implacable hostessing instincts, he allowed himself to relax and sit back in the chair. He could see more of the tapestry when he did this, and as he listened to Fazoul going on about his son’s latest round of ear infections, his eyes began to focus on it.

  He slowly realized that it was not an abstract geometric design. The border of the fabric was a long train of green boxes on wheels with curlicues on them that Clyde took to be some kind of letters. The wheeled boxes had mustachioed heads popping out of the tops. The heads had green helmets on them. Others had black sticks poking out of them in various directions, and some of the black sticks had red dotted lines coming out of them. The red dotted lines converged on little brown huts that reminded Clyde of the tent that Fazoul and his cohorts had erected in Albertson Park. There were small human figures around these tents. Some were lying on the ground with red stuff coming out of them. Others were carrying little black sticks of their own. Spreading his legs apart and shifting back into the sunken recesses of the chair, Clyde could see that he had been sitting on top of an elaborate rendition of a helicopter with red lines radiating from it in all directions. Headed directly for Clyde’s crotch, and for the helicopter’s tailpipe, sitting on a rooster tail of yellow-and-orange flame, was a surface-to-air missile.

  If Fazoul noticed that Clyde was noticing all these things, he didn’t show any sign of it, just kept talking about normal parent things—now it was the relative merits of cloth versus disposable diapers. Farida kept jumping up to get candy for trick-or-treating children.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” Fazoul said suddenly when the conversation had arrived at a natural stopping place.

  “Mind if I use your washroom?” Clyde said. Here, if he’d been among fellow Americans, he would have made a lame crack about how the tea was getting to him.

  “Not at all,” Fazoul said.

  On his way to the toilet Clyde happened to pass by the open door of the unit’s single bedroom. He glimpsed a picture on t
he bedside table: a family portrait of a handsome young man, a beautiful young woman, and four children. While he was peeing, his mind was working on this image, and when he finished, he walked past the bedroom more slowly and took along, hard look at the photograph. The handsome young man, he realized, was Fazoul before whatever terrible thing had happened to him. The young woman was not Farida, however.

  He was startled by a noise within the room. Fazoul emerged from the closet carrying a plastic grocery sack with something heavy in it and saw Clyde.

  “My first wife,” he explained, “and our children.”

  Clyde looked at Fazoul. He could not bear to ask the question.

  “All dead,” Fazoul said gently. “Saddam came to our village with gas.”

  Clyde’s head swam and tears welled up in his eyes. He turned around in the doorway and staggered down the narrow hall and out into the cold night air, terrifying a solitary trick-or-treater dressed up as a commando. Fazoul gave him a few moments alone out there, then came out of the house quietly and clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Khalid,” he said. “We will see to it that Desiree has nothing to fear from that man. I am personally committed to it.”

  Not until Fazoul spoke these words did Clyde understand that he was in the grip of two emotions: not just shock over what had happened to Fazoul, but fear for what might happen to himself and his family.

  The teenaged girl jumped out of the car, exchanged pleasantries with Fazoul, and skipped off into the night.

  “She watched her mother getting gang-raped by the Iranians when she was five years old,” Fazoul said.

  “Nice girl,” Clyde said. It was all he could think of.

  They climbed into the Murder Car and sat there for a few minutes while Clyde collected his wits. Then he started the engine, shifted it into drive, and let the idle pull them forward. Maggie stirred in her seat and said “bvab bvab bvab.”