Furthermore, there's no point in logging on as just any old user-like using a guest account. Guests are not allowed to tamper with system files. In order to do any meaningful evidence-tampering here, Randy has to log on as the superuser. The name of the superuser account is, inconveniently, "randy" and you can't actually log in as "randy" without entering a password that only Randy would know. So after using the very latest in cryptographic technology and trans-oceanic packet-switching communications to conceal his identity, Randy now finds himself faced with the necessity of typing his name into the fucking machine.
A little scenario flashes up in his head in which he sends an anonymous broadcast message to all laundry.org users telling them that the password for the "randy" account on "tombstone.epiphyte.com" is such and such and urging them to spread this information all over the Internet as fast as possible. This might have been a decent idea if he had thought of it an hour ago. Now it is too late; any sentient prosecutor tracing the time stamps on the messages would be able to prove that it was just a blind.
Besides, time is running low. The discussion across the street, which is just a shrill hubbub at this distance, is rising to some sort of climax.
Randy has meanwhile booted up his browser and gone to the ordo.net home page. Usually it's a pretty dull corporate home page, but today all of the blurbs and quotidian press releases have been obliterated by a window showing live color video of what is going on in front of the building (or rather, what was going on a couple of seconds ago; coming over his miserable low-bandwidth radio link, the video changes frames about once every three seconds). The video is originating from Ordo itself, where they've evidently aimed a camera out the window and are slamming the images straight out over their very own T3 line.
Randy glances up just in time to see the guy who invented the term "virtual reality" walking across the lot, deep in conversation with the executive editor of TURING Magazine.Not far behind them is Bruce, an operating systems engineer who, in his spare time, records Tierra del Fuegan folk music and makes it available for free over the Internet.
"Bruce!" Randy shouts.
Bruce falters and looks over in Randy's direction. "Randy," he says.
"Why are you here?"
"Word on the street is that the Feds were raiding Ordo," Bruce says.
"Interesting. . . . any particular Feds?"
"Comstock," Bruce says. Meaning Paul Comstock, who, by virtue of being Attorney General of the United States, runs the FBI. Randy does not believe this rumor, but in spite of himself he scans the area for people fitting the general profile of FBI agents. The FBI hates and fears strong crypto. Meanwhile another Secret Admirer type shouts, "I heard Secret Service!" Which is even creepier, in a way, because the Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department, and is charged with combating wire fraud and protecting the nation's currency.
Randy says, "Would you be open to the possibility that it's all a Net rumor? That what's really going on is that a piece of equipment inside Ordo's offices is being seized as part of a legal squabble?"
"Then why are all these cops here?" Bruce says.
"Maybe the masked men with assault rifles drew them."
"Well, why did the Secret Admirers show up in the first place if it wasn't a government raid?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's just some kind of spontaneous self-organizing phenomenon-like the origin of life in the primordial soup."
Bruce says, "Isn't it just as possible that the legal squabble is a pretext?"
"In other words that the squabble is sort of like a Trojan horse put together by Comstock?"
"Yeah."
"Knowing all of the parties involved, I'd rate it as unlikely," Randy says, "but let me think about it."
The noise and intensity of the argument in the Ordo parking lot spike upwards. Randy looks at the video window, which unfortunately has no sound track. The transactions between frames come as isolated blocks of new pixels slapped up one at a time over the old, like a large billboard being posted sections. High-definition TV it ain't. But Randy definitely recognizes Avi, standing there tall, pale, and calm, flanked by one guy who's probably Dave the Ordo president, and another guy who's obviously a lawyer. They are literally standing in the doorway of the building and facing off against two cops and none other than Andrew Loeb, who is in rapid motion and hence poses an insurmountable bandwidth problem. The Internet video gear is smart enough not to mess with parts of an image that aren't changing very much, and so the planted cops get refreshed maybe a couple of times a minute, and then just in a few rectangular image-shards. But Andrew Loeb is waving his arms around, hopping up and down, lunging towards Avi from time to time, pulling back and taking calls on his cellphone, and waving documents in the air. The computers have identified him as a bunch of pixels that require a great deal of attention and bandwidth, and so somewhere some poor algorithm is churning through the high-pressure slurry of compressed pixels that is the image of Andrew Loeb, and doing its level best to freeze the most rapidly-moving parts into discrete frames and chop them up into checkerboard-squares that can be broadcast as packets over the Net. These packets arrive in Randy's computer as the radio network passes them along, i.e., sporadically and in the wrong order. So Andrew Loeb appears as a cubist digital-video artifact, a rectilinear amoeba of mostly trench-coat-beige pixels. From time to time his eyes or his mouth will suddenly appear, disembodied, in the center of an image-block, and remain frozen there for a few seconds, crystallized in a moment of howling rage.
This is weirdly mesmerizing until Randy's startled out of his reverie by a clunk. He looks over to see that the van he's blocked in wasn't abandoned after all; it was full of Dwarves, who have now thrown the back doors open to reveal a nest of cables and wires. A couple of the Dwarves are heaving a boxy apparatus up onto the roof of the van. Cables run out of it to another boxy apparatus down below. The apparatus is electrical in nature-and doesn't appear capable of firing projectiles-so Randy decides not to pay it much attention for the moment.
Voices well up across the street. Randy sees some cops climbing out of a cop-van carrying a battering ram.
Randy types:
randy
and hits the return key. Tombstone answers:
password:
and Randy types it in. Tombstone informs him that he's logged on, and that he has mail.
The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.
Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1)it would take several minutes to execute and (2) it would not thoroughly erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log-on, he executes a command that finds those files on the hard drive. Then he types another command that causes random numbers to be written over those areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.
The cops are slamming the battering ram against the side door of the office building when Randy's right pinky slams the Enter key and executes that command. He is almost certainly safe from the tampering-with-evidence charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of this exercise. He needs to find all the copies of the e-mail message that specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same multiple-erase trick on them. If the damn things were not encrypted, he could search for the critical strings of digits. As it is, he will have to search for files that were created during a certain time period, around the time that Randy was out on Glory,anchored over the wreck. Randy knows roughly what day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him any files created five days either side of that, just to be safe, and limits it to only those directories used for e-mail.
The search takes forever, or maybe it just seems that way because the cops have smashed the side door off its hinges now and are inside the building. The video window catches Randy's eye as it changes dramatically; he gets a veering montage of grainy frozen images of a room; a doorway; a hallway; a reception area; and finally a barricade. The Ordo guys have yanked their video camera out of the window and restationed it at their front desk, recording a barrier built of cheap modular office furniture piled against the glass entrance to the reception. The camera tilts up to show that one of the four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by (one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.
Randy's "find" command finally returns with a list of about a hundred files. The half-dozen or so critical ones are on the list somewhere, but Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring out which is which. He has the system generate a list of the disk blocks occupied by those files, so that he can go back later and do a super-erase. Once he's got that information, he does a "rm" or "remove" command on all of them. This is a paltry and miserable way to expunge secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's afraid he may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The "rm" only takes a few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By this time the barricade has been scattered all over Ordo's lobby and the cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they don't look very happy.
There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e-mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive, then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever-or until the cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window, frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.
Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high-fiving each other.
There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low-speed collision, out on the street. About a dozen cars have rolled quietly to a stop, and some have been rear-ended by others that are still functioning. The McDonald's has gone dark. Television technicians are cursing inside their mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding their walkie-talkies and cellphones against their hands.
"Pardon me," Randy says to the Dwarves, "but would you gentlemen like to share anything with me?"
"We just took out the whole building," says one of the Dwarves.
"Took it out, in what sense?"
"Nailed it with a big electromagnetic pulse. Fried every chip within range.
"So it's a scorched-earth kind of deal? Go ahead and confiscate that gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?"
"Yeah."
"Well, it certainly worked on those cars," Randy says, "and it definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer."
"Don't worry-it has no effect on hard drives," the Dwarf says, "so all of your files are intact."
"I know you are expecting me to take that as good news," Randy says.
Chapter 77 BUDDHA
A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds like a diesel. Goto Dengo is awake, waiting for it, and so is the rest of the camp. No one stirs at Bundok during the day anymore, except for the radio men and those manning the anti aircraft guns. They have not been told that MacArthur is on Luzon, but they all sense The General's presence. The American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering and proud, like starships from a distant future that none of them will ever see, and the earth rings like a bell from the impacts of distant naval guns. The shipments have become smaller but more frequent: one or two broken-down lorries every night, their rear bumpers practically scraping the road under crippling burdens of gold.
Lieutenant Mori has placed anther machine gun at the front gate, concealed in the foliage, just in case some Americans happen to blunder up this road in a jeep. Somewhere out there in the dark, the barrel of that weapon is tracking this car as it jounces up the road. The men know every dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are by listening for the scrape of their undercarriages against the hardpan, a signature pattern of metallic dots and dashes.
The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare not shine bright lights around. One of them risks opening up a kerosene lantern, and aims its beam at the visitor. A silver Mercedes-Benz hood ornament springs forth from the blackness, supported by a chrome-plated radiator grille. The beam of the lantern fondles the car's black fenders, its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat of young coconuts-it must have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the driver's side window is the face of a Nipponese man in his forties, so haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he is just a driver. Next to him is a sergeant with a sawed-off shotgun, Nipponese rifles being generally too long to wield in the front seat of a luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals whatever, or whoever, is in the backseat.
"Open!" demands the guard, and the driver reaches up behind his head and parts the curtain. The lantern beam falls through the opening and bounces back sharply from a pale face in the back seat. Several of the soldiers shout. Goto Dengo steps back, rattled, then moves in for a better look.
The man in the backseat has a very large head. But the strange thing about him is that his skin is a rich yellow color-not the normal Asian yellow-and it glitters. He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a calm smile on his face-an expression the likes of which Goto Dengo has not seen since the war began.
More lantern beams come on, the ring of soldiers and officers closes in on the Mercedes. Someone pulls the rear door open and then jumps back as if he has burned his hand on it.
The passenger is sitting crosslegged on the backseat, which has been crushed into a broad V beneath his weight.
It is a solid gold Buddha, looted from somewhere else in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, coming to meditate in serene darkness atop the hoard of Golgotha.
It turns out to be small enough to fit through the entrance, but too big to go in one of the little railway cars, and so the strongest Filipino men must spend the next hours shoving it down the tunnel one inch at a tame.
The early shipments were neatly crated, and the crates were stenciled with labels identifying the contents as machine gun ammunition or mortar rounds or the like. The crates that come later don't have the stencils. At a certain point, the gold begins to arrive in cardboard boxes and rotten steamer trunks. They fall open all the time, and the workers patiently gather the gold up and carry it to the tunnel entrance in their arms and throw it into the hand cars. The bars tumble end over end and smash into the sheet-metal with a din that scares clouds of birds out of the overhanging trees. Goto Dengo cannot help looking at the bars. They come in different sizes, some of them so large that it takes two men to carry one. They are stamped with the names of central banks from a few places Goto Dengo has been and many he's only heard of: Singapore, Saigon, Batavia, Manila, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Canton. There is French gold that was apparently shipped to Cambodia, and Dutch gold shipped to Jakarta, and British gold shipped to Singapore-all to keep it out of the hands of the Germans.
But some shipments consist entirely of gold from the Bank of Tokyo. They get five convoys in a row of the stuff. According to the tally that Goto Dengo is keeping in his head, two-thirds of the tonnage stored in Golgotha ends up coming straight from Nippon's central reserves. All of it is cold to the touch, and stored in good but old crates. He concludes that it was shipped to the Philippines a long time ago and has been sitting in a cellar in Manila ever since, waiting for this moment. They must have shipped it here at about the same time that Goto Dengo was plucked off the beach in New Guinea, way back in late 1943.
They have known. They have known for that long that they were going to lose the war.
By the middle of January, Goto Dengo has begun to look back on the Christmas Day massacre with something almost like nostalgia, missing the atmosphere of naive innocence that made the killings necessary. Until that morning, even he had managed to convince himself that Golgotha was an arms cache that the emperor's soldiers would someday use to stage a glorious reconquest of Luzon. He knows that the workers believed it too. Now everyone knows about the gold, and the camp has changed. Everyone understands that there will be no exit.
At the beginning of January, the workers are made up of two types: those who are resigned to die here, and those who aren't. The latter group make various escape attempts of a desultory and hopeless nature and are shot by the guards. The era of hoarding ammunition seems to be over, or perhaps the guards are just too sick and hungry to climb down out of the watch towers and personally bayonet all of the people who present themselves to be killed. So it is all done with bullets, and the bodies left to balloon and blacken. Bundok is immanent with their stench.
Goto Dengo hardly notices, though, because the camp is suffused with the crazy, sick tension that always precedes a battle. Or so he supposes; he has seen a lot of excitement in this war, but he has never been in a proper battle. The same is automatically true of most of the Nipponese here, because essentially all of the Nipponese who go into battles wind up dead. In this army you are either a greenhorn or a corpse.
Sometimes, a briefcase arrives along with the gold shipment. The briefcase is always handcuffed to the wrist of a soldier who has grenades dangling all over his body so that he can blow himself and it to powder if the convoy should be assaulted by Huks. The briefcases go straight to the Bundok radio station and their contents are placed in a safe. Goto Dengo knows that they must contain codes-not the usual books, but some kind of special codes that are changed every day-because every morning, after the sun has come up, the radio officer performs a ceremony of burning a single sheet of paper in front of the transmitter shack, and then rubbing the withered leaf of ash between his hands.
It is through that radio station that they will receive the final order. All is in readiness, and Goto Dengo goes through the complex once a day checking everything.
The diagonal tunnel finally reached the stub tunnel at the bottom of Lake Yamamoto a couple of weeks ago. The stub was filled with water that had seeped past the concrete plug during the months since it had been put into place, and so when the two tunnels were finally joined, several tons of water ran down the diagonal into Golgotha. This was expected and planned for; all of it went into a sump and drained from there into the Tojo River. Now it is possible to go all the way up the diagonal and look at the concrete plug from the underside. Lake Yamamoto is on the other side. Goto Dengo goes up there every couple of days, ostensibly to check the plug and its demolition charges, but really to check on the progress being made, unbeknownst to Captain Noda, by Wing's and Rodolfo's crews. They are mostly drilling upwards, making more of those short, vertical, dead-end shafts, and enlarging the chambers at their tops. The system (including the new "ventilation shafts" ordered by The General, and dug from the top down just to the east of the ridgeline) looks like this now:
Inside the primary storage complex is a small room that Captain Noda has dubbed the Hall of Glory. It does not look very glorious right now. Most of it is filled with a snarl of wires which have been run into it from all parts of the Golgotha complex, and which dangle from the ceiling or trail on the floor with hand-lettered paper tags dangling from them, saying things like MAIN ENTRANCE DEMOLITION CHARGES. There are several crates of lead-acid batteries to supply power for the detonations, and to give Goto Dengo a few minutes of electric light by which to read those paper tags. Extra boxes of dynamite and blasting caps are stacked at one end of the Hall of Glory in case some tunnels need a little extra destruction, and coils of red fuse cord in case the electrical system fails completely.
But the demolition order hasn't yet come, so Goto Dengo does the things soldiers do while waiting to die. He writes letters to his family that will never be delivered or even mailed. He smokes. He plays cards. He goes and checks his equipment another time, and then another. A week goes by without any gold deliveries. Twenty prisoners try to escape together. The ones who don't get sprayed across the killing ground by mines get tangled in barbed wire and are each shot by a team of two guards, one aiming a flashlight and the other aiming a rifle. Captain Noda spends all night, every night, pacing back and forth in front of the main gate and smoking cigarettes, then drinks himself to sleep at dawn. The radio men sit in front of their rig watching the tubes glow, jerking like electrified frog legs whenever a feeble string of beeps comes in on their frequency. But the order does not come.
One night, then, the trucks come again, just as they did the first time. The convoy must contain all that's left of the Nipponese motor pool on Luzon. They all come together, making a rumble that can be heard half an hour before they actually reach the gate. When their cargo has been taken out and stacked on the ground, the soldiers guarding this convoy remain behind at Bundok. The only people who leave are the drivers.
It takes two days to move this last hoard into the tunnels. One of their shuttle trucks has broken down for good and been cannibalized to keep the other one going. It is running on half of its cylinders and is so feeble that it has to be pushed up the riverbed road by teams of workers and hauled over the rough patches on ropes. It has finally begun to rain, and the Tojo River is rising.
The main vault is nearly full of treasure, and so is the fool's vault. The new shipment has to be packed in wherever it will fit; they break it out of its crates and jam it into crannies. The crates are stenciled with double-headed eagles and swastikas, and the gold bars inside come from Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Riga, Copenhagen, Budapest, Bucharest, Milan. There are also cardboard boxes filled with diamonds. Some of the crates are still damp, and smell of the sea. Seeing this, Goto Dengo knows that a big submarine must have arrived from Germany, filled with Nazi treasure. So that explains the two-week lull: they've been awaiting the arrival of this U-boat.
He works in the tunnels for two days, wearing a miner's headlamp, shoving jewels and gold bars into crevices. He goes into a sort of trance that is finally interrupted by a heavy thud reverberating through the rock.
Artillery, he thinks. Or a bomb from one of MacArthur's planes.
He comes up the main ventilation shaft to the top of the ridge, where it's broad daylight. He is crushed to discover that there is no battle underway. MacArthur isn't going to rescue him. Lieutenant Mori has brought almost all of the workers up here, and they are hauling on ropes, dragging Bundok's heavy equipment up and throwing it down into the recently dug "ventilation shafts." Both of the trucks are up here, and men with torches and sledgehammers are breaking them up into pieces small enough to drop down the shafts. Goto Dengo arrives just in time to see the engine block of the radio station's generator tumbling down a shaft into blackness. The rest of the radio gear follows it directly.
Somewhere nearby, concealed in the trees, someone is grunting heavily, doing some kind of hard physical labor. It is a practiced martial-arts type of grunt, from way down in the diaphragm.
"Lieutenant Goto!" says Captain Noda. He is daft with alcohol. "Your duties are below."
"What was that loud noise?"
Noda beckons him over to an outcropping from which they can see down into the valley of the Tojo River. Goto Dengo, unsteady for any number of reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness and nearly falls off. The problem is disorientation: he does not recognize the river. Until now, it has always been a few trickles of water braided down a rocky bed. Even before they ran a road up it, you could get up almost as far as the waterfall by hopping from one dry rock to the next.
Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.
He remembers something he saw a hundred years ago, in a previous incarnation, on another planet: a bedsheet from the Manila Hotel with a crude map sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of blue fountain-pen ink.
"We dynamited the rockfall," Noda says, "according to the plan."
Long ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready to create a little dam. But setting off that dynamite was supposed to be almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.
"But we are not ready," Goto Dengo says.
Noda laughs. He seems quite high-spirited. "You have been telling me for a month that you are ready."
"Yes," Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, "you are right. We are ready."
Noda slaps him on the back. "You must get to the main entrance before it floods."
"My crew?"
"Your crew is waiting for you there."
Goto Dengo begins walking towards the trail that will take him down to the main entrance. Along the way, he passes the top of another ventilation shaft, Several dozen workers are queued up there, thumbs lashed together behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the shaft. Lieutenant Mori whips his officer's sword into the nape of each neck with a terrific grunt. Head and body tumble forward into the ventilation shaft and thud meatily into other bodies, far below, a couple of seconds later. Every leaf and pebble within a three-meter radius of the shaft opening is saturated with bright red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.
"Don't worry about that," Captain Noda says. "I will see to it that the tops of the shafts are backfilled with rubble, as we discussed. The jungle will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place."
Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.
"Lieutenant Goto!" says a voice. He turns around. It is Lieutenant Mori, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. A Filipino kneels before him, mumbling a prayer in Latin, fumbling with a rosary that dangles from his bound hands.
"Yes, Lieutenant Mori."
"According to my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you. I will need them."
"Those six prisoners are down below, helping to load in the last shipment."
"But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now."
"Yes, but not well placed. The entire purpose of the fool's vault is ruined if we strew gold and diamonds around the place in such a way as to lead thieves deeper into the caverns. I need these men to continue that work."
"You take full responsibility for them?"
"I do," Goto Dengo says.
"If there are only six," Captain Noda says, "then your crew should be able to keep them under control."
"I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo," says Lieutenant Mori.
"I will look forward to it," Goto Dengo says. He does not add that Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now, and they will probably have a terrible time finding each other.
"I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for those of us on the outside." Lieutenant Mori snaps his blade into the back of the Filipino's head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.
"Your heroism will not go unrewarded," Goto Dengo says.
Lieutenant Mori's crew awaits him down below, in front of the mouse-hole that leads into Golgotha: four hand-picked soldiers. Each wears a thousand-stitch headband, and so each has an orange ball centered on his forehead, reminding Goto Dengo not of the Rising Sun but of an exit wound. The water is up to mid-thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer him politely.
Goto Dengo squats in the opening. Only his head and shoulders are above the water. Before him the tunnel is black. It takes a powerful effort of will for him to enter. But it is no worse than what he used to do in the abandoned mines, back in Hokkaido.
Of course, the abandoned mines weren't going to be dynamited shut behind him.
Going forward is his chance to survive. If he hesitates, Noda will kill him on the spot, and all his crew, and others will be sent in to finish the job. Noda made sure that others were trained to do it.
"See you at Yasukuni," he says to Captain Noda, and without waiting for a response he sloshes forward into blackness.
Chapter 78 PONTIFEX
By the time Randy reaches the Air Kinakuta boarding lounge, he has already forgotten how he reached the airport. He honestly can't remember. Did he hail a taxi? Not likely in down town Los Altos. Did he get a ride from some hacker? He couldn't have driven the Acura, because the Acura's electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun. He had pulled the title out of the glove compartment and signed it over to a Ford dealer three blocks away, in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash.
Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.
He has always wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of an exotic foreign airline and saying, "Get me on the next plane to X." But now he's just done it and it wasn't cool and romantic as he had hoped. It was sort of bleak and stressful and expensive. He had to buy a first-class ticket, which consumed most of the five thousand dollars. But he doesn't feel like beating himself to death over how he is managing his assets just now, i.e., at a time when his net worth is a negative number that can only be expressed using scientific notation. The probability is high that he failed to wipe Tombstone's hard drive before the cops seized it, and that the Dentist's lawsuit will consequently succeed.
On his way down the concourse he stands and stares at a bank of telephones for a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent events. It would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub clean of treasure as fast as possible, reducing its value and hence the damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.
The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist has a way to claim damages from Epiphyte. The amount of those damages is x, where x is what the Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper Marine. If such a contract had specified a fifty-fifty split, then x would be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other frictional effects of the real world. So if there's ten million dollars in the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.
In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire an additional forty percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.
If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say, "You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $x. But as I look at the parlous state of the corporation's finances I see that there's no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is really, really close to being zero, you're going to have to give him almost all of it."
So how to make x < y? Either reduce the value of the wreck, by stripping it of its gold, or else increase the value of Epiphyte, by-what, exactly?
In better times they could maybe take the company public. But setting up an IPO takes months. And no investor's going to touch it when it's encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.
Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end-loader and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte's account. That'd do it. The whole concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of the international concourse.
Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold-in-the-jungle concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi's family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the group's movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink into the men's room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus complete asthma-attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.
"So. Uh, going to Israel?"
"El Al doesn't fly to Acapulco." Pow! Devorah is in peak form.
"Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?"
"You're asking me? I kind of assumed you would know," Devorah says.
"Well, things have been, certainly, volatile," Randy says. "I don't know if fleeing the country is warranted."
"Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking out of your pocket?"
"Oh, you know ... some business issues need resolving."
"You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?" Devorah asks.
Randy sighs. "That depends. Do you?"
"Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?"
"Because you've been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes' notice."
"We're going to Israel, Randy. That's not being uprooted. That's being rerooted." Or perhaps she is saying "rerouted." Without a transcript, there is no way for Randy to tell.
"Yeah, but it's still kind of a hassle-"
"Compared to what?"
"Compared to staying at home and living your life."
"This is my life, Randy." Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I'll-do-my job, you-do-yours, why-are-you-in-my-face attitude. Randy feels like an idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah's bag. She is clearly just this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why doesn't he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the Dentist a big hug?
Randy says, "I assume you'll be in touch with Avi before you take off. Would you give him a message?"
"What's the message?"
"Zero."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Randy says.
Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi's practice of conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a time, la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, "zero" means that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone's hard drive.
Air Kinakuta's first-class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un-American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport, clutching his hip spastically every time he re-realizes that his laptop isn't dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop's hard drive, and then threw away the rest.
Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news-bits even more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely surprised, to see footage of black-hatted Secret Admirers exercising their Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo's barricade avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons drawn. Paul Comstock is shown-pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and Epiphyte and now it's become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and this makes Randy irritated and confused.
He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he doesn't partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling-while-Rome-burns thing going for it that works for him just now.
As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards that are stuffed in among the in-flight magazines and vomit-sacs. One of these extols the fact that Sultan-Class passengers (as first-class passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe's GSM telephone. It's an Australian phone number, but it'll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it's something like six A.M. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a taxi.
"It's Randy. On a plane," says Randy. "An Air Kinakuta plane."
"Randy! Well I've just been watching you on television," Doug says. It takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to cleanse his palate of the caviar.
"Yeah," Doug continues, "I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed you sitting on top of a car typing. What's going on?"
"Nothing! Nothing at all," Randy says. He figures that this is a big stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he'll be more likely to effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka and says, "Wow, this Sultan-Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web search on Ordo, you'll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with us. Nothing."
"That's funny, because Comstock is denying that it's a crackdown on Ordo," Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy's nose before he controls it. "They say that it's just a little old civil suit," Doug says, now using a petal-soft, wounded innocent tone.
"Ordo's status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears is just coincidental," Randy guesses.
"That's right."
"Well then, I'm sure there's nothing to it other than our troubles with the Dentist," Randy says.
"What troubles are those, Randy?"
"Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I'm sure you will have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning."
"Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Maybe I'll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta," Randy says.
"You have a good flight, Randall."
"Have a nice day, Douglas."
Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink into a well-deserved plane-coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that he doesn't know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what's going on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.
When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, "You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan-Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.
"Um, who's this?"
"Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay telephone somewhere and then call you back?"
"Who is this, please?"
"You think that's more secure than his GSM phone? It's not really." The speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he's been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his conversational stride.
"Okay," Randy says, "you know who I am and whom I was calling. So obviously you are surveilling me. You're not working for the Dentist, I take it. That leaves-what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?"
The man laughs. "As a rule the Fort Meade boys don't bother to check in with the people whose lines they are tapping." The caller has an un-American crispness in his voice, vaguely Northern European. "In your case the NSA might make an exception, it's true-when I was there, they were all great admirers of your grandfather's work. In fact, they liked it so much they stole it."