“I hope you’re not going to use the power of your office to pursue some kind of personal vendetta,” Ogle said, shouting back over his shoulder as the agents took him across Louisiana Avenue.
“Oh, on the contrary,” Meyer said. “I’ve gone to great trouble to arrange a cell for you that I think will be to your liking.”
“You’re not putting me in with crack dealers, are you?”
“Absolutely not,” Meyer said. “You’ll be with people much like yourself.”
“I thank you for that courtesy,” Ogle said.
They loaded him onto the chopper, strapped him into the seat, and lifted off, cutting forward across Constitution at a low angle. Ogle had a spectacular view of the Capitol dome out his window.
He had gotten damn close. And now, in some way that no one had bothered to explain to him yet, he had lost.
It was okay. He was tied into the Network now. The Network needed him. As long as that was the case, he’d never have to worry about anything.
The chopper headed due south, crossing over the Southeast Freeway and then over Fort McNair, on the point of land where the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers came together. They cut down the center of the Potomac until they were south of National Airport, then banked into a gentle right turn and headed south-southeast, passing near the spire of the Masonic Memorial in Alexandria.
“Where are we going?” he asked twice. But the FBI agents either couldn’t hear him or pretended they couldn’t.
They flew for several miles across the suburban sprawl of northern Virginia, roughly parallelling I-395. The broad grassy lawns of Fort Belvoir were visible on the left. Perhaps they were using Fort Belvoir as a temporary camp for political prisoners. That wouldn’t be so bad; folks in the Army called Belvoir the Country Club.
Instead, they came down in a yard amid enormous, drab buildings, surrounded by tall fences topped with swirls of razor ribbon.
Lorton. They were putting him in Lorton Reformatory. The District of Columbia was so small and so full of criminals that there wasn’t room to build a big enough prison; they had built one out in Virginia instead. And now Ogle was going to be an inmate.
He reckoned they would put him in a minimum-security wing somewhere, maybe out in a nice wooded area. But they took him straight into one of the big prison buildings. Straight to a maximum-security wing, where all of the prisoners were locked in their cells all day long.
The prisoners hung on their bars and watched Ogle hungrily as he was led down the corridor in his nice shirt and his polished shoes. They shouted things to him. Disgusting things.
Ogle was almost paralyzed with fear. Meyer had lied to him.
Finally they reached a cell that was empty. Maybe he’d be put there.
But they passed right on by it and continued to the next cell. This cell had one man in it, curled up on the upper bunk, not moving. Ogle just got a quick glimpse of him before he was shoved in through the door: his new roommate was small, stoop-shouldered, late middle-aged, wearing a dress shirt and slacks just like Ogle.
The massive iron door thudded shut behind him.
Ogle turned to greet his new cellmate. The man had risen up to his hands and knees and was now looking down at Ogle from the upper bunk like a jaguar perched in a tree. He was breathing rapidly and raggedly.
A huge bubble of mucous grew from Jeremiah Freel’s left nostril and popped.
Freel launched himself from the bunk headfirst, trying to sink his teeth into Ogle’s cheek. Ogle instinctively turned his head away and snapped his head back. The impact slammed him back against the bars. Freel tumbled to the floor.
Freel reached for Ogle’s groin. Ogle bent over and shoved his finger into one of Freel’s eyes. Freel moved his head at the last moment and sank his teeth into Ogle’s finger. Ogle stomped on one of Freel’s hands.
And then they started fighting. In cells all around them, the convicts from D.C. flocked to the bars shouting, laughing, and pumping their fists in exultation.
Several hundred feet beneath Cacher, Oklahoma, Otis Simpson was sitting in a swivel chair in the Communications Center, staring at a wall of dead screens. He had been staring at them ever since roughly 19:08 Greenwich Mean Time. At that moment, President Richmond had gone live to the world, flanked by the leaders of the legislative and judicial branches. Then all the screens had gone black. The faxes had gone silent. The computer links had been cut off. He had tried sending messages to the Network, but all the encryption keys had been changed.
Finally he stood up, harvested a few remaining faxes that had come out of the machines earlier that day, and fed them into the shredder. He typed a command into the computer system that would cause it to re-format all of its disks seven times in a row, destroying all of the information in the system.
Otho was lying in his bed. He had been lying there since earlier today and was now beginning to go into rigor mortis. Otis bent over him and closed his eyes and smoothed back what was left of his hair.
Then he climbed on the lift and took it up to the surface. It was a bleak midwinter day, a strong steady wind coming out of the northwest prairie, whistling and gusting between the heaps of lead tailings as it picked up a load of toxic metal dust. Otis put on his warm coat and his mittens and his hat with the earflaps. Then he started to walk down the shoulder of the highway, headed southward, where he thought it might be warmer.
Dr. Radhakrishnan V.R.J.V.V. Gangadhar was poised above his anaesthetized patient, just about to flick the power switch on his bone saw, when the first tendrils of the noise began to infiltrate the reinforced-concrete walls of the Radhakrishnan Institute. It was a noise that was sensed through the soles of the feet—not so much an actual sound as a change in the way the ground felt. Perhaps there had been another earthquake up in Uttar Pradesh. He flicked the switch and pressed the madly vibrating blade of the bone saw against the freshly peeled skull of Sasha Yakutin, a promising young up-and-coming Russian politician who had just been cut down in the prime of his life by a tragic stroke.
When he finished cutting a hatch through Mr. Yakutin’s head and turned off the saw, the room became quiet—but not entirely quiet. A palpable noise was penetrating the walls of the operating room.
A nurse entered the operating theater. “Your brother Arun is on the telephone,” she said.
“Can’t you see I am in the middle of an operation?”
“He says it’s an emergency. He says that you should get out of the country.”
A tremendous impact reverberated through the structure of the building, causing the steel instruments to vibrate against their trays. Down the hallway, someone screamed.
“Continue with the operation,” Dr. Radhakrishnan said to Toyoda, one of his most promising young protégés.
“Doctor?” Toyoda said.
Dr. Radhakrishnan stripped off his gloves and tossed them into a rubbish can.
When he stepped out into the corridor, the noise became louder; but it was still indistinct. He had heard something like this once in Elton. He had been awakened early in the morning by the most frightening noise, a noise that could peel paint from walls, the noise that madmen must hear in their nightmares, and had shivered under the covers for a few moments, thinking it was the end of the world; finally he had peered out under a window shade and discovered that the trees in his front yard had been taken over by a vast flock of starlings, millions of them, all screeching at the tops of their lungs.
Dr. Radhakrishnan was approaching a closed door at the end of a hallway. The noise was coming through that door, seeping around its edges.
He opened the door. The sound was crushing, maddening, a noise that could cave your skull in. This room was a third-story office with a picture window that faced out onto a major street. But the window had been smashed out. Slivers of smoked glass had been strewn explosively all over the room. A few rocks and bricks littered the floor, looking crude and dirty in this clean high-tech space. Hot polluted air streamed in through the window
and blew over Dr. Radhakrishnan’s face. He stepped forward, walking carefully on the broken glass, and looked out the window.
The Radhakrishnan Institute had been surrounded by two million people.
They were all pumping their fists in the air and chanting. Like starlings. They covered the ground for miles in every direction, flowing in a smooth carpet around buildings and vehicles, like the monsoon floods.
The mob seemed to have no particular center. But a few hundred yards away, he could see a kind of vortex, a swirling center of activity, moving slowly through the crowd. Moving toward the institute.
It was an elephant. Unlike the mob, most of whom were poorly, minimally clad, the elephant was stunningly clothed in gold and brightly colored, embroidered silk. A man was sitting on the back of the elephant. Sitting in a chair on the animal’s back. Tied into the chair, actually, so he wouldn’t flop out.
Dr. Radhakrishnan recognized the man. He was an ex-patient. And then, at last, he figured out what the crowd was chanting.
WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA WUBBA.
Zeldo’s telephone rang again in the late afternoon; probably another one of his friends calling to ask him if he had heard about Presidents Cozzano and Richmond. Zeldo didn’t have time for it now. He had been at the California branch of the Radhakrishnan Institute for almost twenty-four hours, going over some data from one of their newest patients—one Aaron Green. Green had been committed here around the time of Election Day, plagued by psychological troubles—post-traumatic stress from the Pentagon Towers bloodbath. Finally, he had volunteered to have several chips implanted in his head.
Zeldo jerked the phone out of its cradle. “What?”
“It’s me.” Zeldo would have known the voice anywhere: it was Mary Catherine Cozzano. “They’re covering their tracks. We’ve been hearing some weird stuff from the Pentagon and we think you’re in trouble. Get on that bike of yours and pedal like your life depends upon it, because it does. See you at dinner.”
Something in Mary Catherine’s voice got Zeldo up out of his chair. He grabbed his backpack, skittered down the stairs, and yanked his mountain bike from the employee bike rack out front. He rode across the small parking lot of the Radhakrishnan Institute and into the entrance of the bicycle path.
He was about half a mile away from the institute when something caught his eye: an airplane. Usually you didn’t notice airplanes, they were part of the scenery. But this one drew his attention because it was flying incredibly low. He thought maybe it was coming in for a landing at the airstrip. But it was going way too fast to make a landing. It was streaking across the landscape, actually kicking up a dust trail from the ground. It was very small, and dark.
Zeldo recognized the shape. He had seen a documentary about these things once, on 60 Minutes, a few years ago. It was a Gale Aerospace Stealth Cruise Missile. It had achieved great notoriety for going way off course during its test flights.
The cruise missile shot over the airstrip, made a minor course correction, and then headed directly toward the Radhakrishnan Institute, making no effort to slow down. Finally, to Zeldo’s relief, it popped up in the air. It was going to miss the building and fly harmlessly out to sea.
But it didn’t. It shot up several hundred feet, then nosed down into a power dive. It covered the last mile of its trajectory in a few seconds and finally entered the Institute through a skylight, which took it straight down a central atrium.
Vast surges of white flame vomited out of every door and window in the Institute. The image was burned onto Zeldo’s retina in an instant and then he was blinded for a moment. The shock wave knocked him off his bicycle and sent him sprawling off the bike path, into the dust.
He didn’t feel a thing. His mind was stuck on the last thing she’d said: See you at dinner.
President Richmond traveled up Pennsylvania Avenue and took possession of the White House at five P.M., bringing the party and congressional leaders with her. The first thing she did was to fire all of the administrative assistants and transition team, who had moved into the place during the change of power. Several of these people were also taken into custody by the formidable FBI contingent that was now following her around, under the direction of the Attorney General, scooping up conspirators and loading them into buses en masse.
There was a lot to do. She ensconced herself in the Oval Office even while the FBI men were scanning it for listening devices. At seven o’clock, all the important people in Washington came into the office: the Congressional leaders, party leaders, several of the Joint Chiefs, all of the acting Cabinet members, heads of various major agencies including the CIA and the NSA. She was not in any mood, or any position, to be ceremonious; these people piled into her office like a tour group from Oskaloosa and stood around the edges of the room, staring at her. She stared back at them over a desk piled with cardboard boxes and loose documents from the black envelope.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “This can’t be happening. This bitch can’t possibly be our president. It won’t last. Well, it is happening. I am the President. And I will continue to be for the next eight years. You’d better get used to it. Thank you for coming in. Now go out there and do your jobs.”
There were boxes all over the place. Cozzano’s boxes had been moved in this morning. Eleanor’s boxes had been moved in at the Naval Observatory. Now Cozzano’s boxes were being taken away and Eleanor’s boxes were being hustled down and brought into the White House.
She had one of the movers keep his eye out for one item in particular: a very long, skinny one. An eight-foot cardboard tube. Eventually he showed up carrying the tube over his shoulder like a spear. He got the tape off the end for her and then she pulled out what was inside: a strip of cheap wooden molding with a few nails sticking out of it. Eleanor borrowed a hammer from the White House maintenance people and put it up herself, nailing it right into the wall of the Oval Office, to the shock and chagrin of the housekeeping staff, who came running when they heard those pounding noises. It looked flimsy and cheap, and it was. But anyone who came closer could see horizontal lines drawn across it in ballpoint pen, with dates and the names of her children written next to them. Eleanor liked it.
It wasn’t until about nine o’clock that she was able to keep her date with Mary Catherine. They met on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, accompanied by the motley assortment of football players and graying Vietnam vets who had been following them around all day.
The area was checked out and cleared. Eleanor and Mary Catherine climbed up the steps of the Memorial, turned around, and looked out across the Tidal Basin toward the White House, a mile and a half away, brilliant under the lights.
Eleanor and Mary Catherine sat together on the top step, huddled together against a chilly wind coming off the Potomac. Mary Catherine put her head on Eleanor’s shoulder and cried for a while. Eleanor held her patiently, stroking her hair in the way of mothers, and waited for her to get it all out.
Then she waved her arm toward the Mall. “Look. It’s beautiful,” she said.
The air-traffic moratorium was still in place over D.C. National Airport, just across the river and it was quiet for the first time in decades. Consequently the Tidal Basin was the way it was supposed to be: placid, undisturbed by the shrieking and thundering of 767s veering in for their slam-dunk landings. The sky was cobalt blue and Venus was out, looking exactly like a diamond over the curved towers of the tall buildings in Rosslyn. The ring of half-staffed American flags around the Washington Monument flickered their silhouettes, lower than usual, against the white limestone.
“It is nice,” Mary Catherine said, feeling better all of a sudden. “But I’m freezing.”
“Me too,” Eleanor confessed. Then she nodded across the Mall toward the White House. “Would you like to come over to my place and help me unpack?”
about the authors
Neal Stephenson is the author of THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD, THE CONFUSION, QUICKSILVER,
CRYPTONOMICON, THE DIAMOND AGE, SNOW CRASH, and other books and articles.
J. Frederick George is a historian and writer living in Paris.
Praise for
The Cobweb
also by Neal Stephenson and
J. Frederick George:
“An elegant, sophisticated portrait of Washington. His capital is not a place of action and suspense so much as a more realistic place of intragovernmental turf wars and bureaucratic stalemate.” —Publishers Weekly
“A charming, uproariously clever thriller, in the tradition of Ross Thomas and Richard Condon, with plenty of wry wit and deftly rendered characters.” —Kirkus Reviews
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The Cobweb
by
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J. Frederick George
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The Cobweb
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MARCH 1990
CLYDE BANKS was standing in line, in the early stages of hypothermia, when he first saw his future wife, Desiree Dhont, wrestle. At the time, both of them were juniors at Wapsipinicon High School. Its Wade Olin gym, home of the Little Twisters, was named after the greatest wrestler in the history of the world—an alumnus. It was connected to the high school proper by a glass-walled breezeway, which enabled students to pass back and forth between academics and PE, even in the middle of winter, without getting lost in whiteouts.
On the night in question the Little Twisters were about to play a basketball game against their archrivals from just across the river: the Nishnabotna Injuns. The ticket line filled the breezeway and extended into the parking lot. The early arrivals’ breath condensed on the insides of the glass walls, which became steamy in the middle and frosty around the edges. The steel framework of the breezeway was growing leaves of frost.