"No higher flattery, I guess."
"You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices-who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron."
"Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?"
"He wasn't interested. Said he had a higher calling. So while he made better and better computers to solve the Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned."
"And you did too."
"I? Oh, no, I have only modest skills with a soldering iron. I was there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather."
"On behalf of-whom? Don't tell me-eruditorum.org?"
"Well done, Randy."
"What should I call you-Root? Pontifex?"
"Pontifex is a nice word."
"It's true," Randy says. "I checked it out, looking for clues in the etymology-it's an old Latin word meaning 'priest.' "
"Catholics call the Pope 'Pontifex Maximus,' or pontiff for short," says Pontifex agreeably, "but the word was also used by pagans to denote their priests, and Jews their rabbis-it is ever so ecumenical."
"But the literal meaning of the word is 'bridge builder,' and so it's a good name for a cryptosystem," Randy says.
"Or, I hope, for me," Pontifex says drily. "I am glad you feel that way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than a bridge."
"Well, gosh. It's nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex."
"The pleasure is mutual."
"You've been so quiet on the e-mail front recently."
"Didn't want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any more, you'd think I was proselytizing."
"Not at all. By the way-people in the know think your cryptosystem is weird, but good."
"It's not weird at all, once you understand it," Pontifex says politely.
"Well, uh, what occasions this phone call? Obviously your friendsare still surveilling me on behalf of-whom, exactly?"
"I don't even know," Pontifex says. "But I do know that you're trying to crack Arethusa."
Randy cannot even remember ever uttering the word "Arethusa." It was printed on the wrappers on the bricks of ETC cards that he ran through Chester's card reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside Grandpa's old trunk labeled Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challengeand dated in the early 1950s. So that at least gives him a date to peg on Pontifex. "You were at NSA during the late forties and early fifties," Randy says. "You must have worked on Harvest." Harvest was a legendary code-breaking supercomputer, three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA contract.
"I told you," Pontifex says, "your grandfather's work came in handy."
"Chester's got this retired ETC engineer working on his card machinery," Randy says. "He helped me read the Arethusa cards. Saw the wrappers. He's a friend of yours. He called you."
Pontifex chuckles. "Among our little band there is hardly a word with more memories attached to it than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy."
"Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?"
"Because we spent ten years of our lives trying to break the damned code! And we failed!"
"It must have been really frustrating," Randy says, "you still sound angry."
"I'm angry at Comstock."
"Not the-"
"Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock."
"What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the ski lift? The Vietnam guy?"
"No, no! I mean, yes. Earl Comstock waslargely responsible for our Vietnam policy. And Doug Shaftoe did get his fifteen minutes of fame by throwing him off a ski lift in, I believe, 1979. But all of that Vietnam nonsense was just a coda to his real career."
"Which was?"
"Earl Comstock, to whom your grandfather reported in Brisbane during World War II, was one of the founders of the NSA. And he was my boss from 1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa."
"Why?"
"He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it, we could then exploit that break to get into some later Soviet codes that were giving us difficulty. Which was ridiculous. But he believed it-or claimed to-and so we battered our heads against Arethusa for years. Strong men had nervous breakdowns. Brilliant men concluded that they were stupid. In the end it turned out to be a joke."
"A joke? What do you mean by that?"
"We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it-wrote new volumes of the Cryptonomicon.The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got anything that was worth a damn.
"After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who was especially cocky we'd put him on the Arethusa project just to give him the message that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in-the smartest kid we had seen yet-and he broke it."
"Well, I assume you didn't place this phone call just to keep me in suspense," Randy says. "What did he find?"
"He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a Riemann zeta function, which has many uses-one being that it is used in some cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock's career."
"Why?"
"Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string-the seed for the random number generator-was the boss's name.
C-O-M-S-T-O-C-K."
"You're kidding."
"We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed-and believe me, he really was that kind of guy-or else someone had played an enormous practical joke on him."
"Which do you think it was?"
"Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end it didn't matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty-six. A classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance and any number of high-powered connections. He went more or less straight to Kennedy's National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history."
"Wow!" Randy says, kind of awed. "What a jerk!"
"No kidding," says Pontifex. "And now, his son-well, don't get me started on his son."
As Pontifex's voice trails off, Randy asks, "So, you are calling me now for what purpose?"
Pontifex doesn't answer for a few moments, as if he's wrestling with the question himself. But Randy doubts that's the case. Someone is trying to send you a message."I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and buried."
"But why should you care?"
"You've already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents," Pontifex says. "It wouldn't be fair."
"So, it's pity, then."
"Furthermore-as I said-it is my friend's job to keep you under surveillance. He's going to hear almost every word you say for the next few months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just let it go."
"Well, thanks for the tip."
"You're welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?"
"That's what Pontifex is supposed to do."
"First a disclaimer: I've been out of circulation for a while. Have not picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments."
"Okay, I am bracing myself."
"My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your clients-some of them, anyway-are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote."
"So you're talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?"
"Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery."
"Well, we provide state-of-the-art cryptographic services to all of our clients-even the ones with bones in their noses."
"Excellent! And now-as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note-I must say good-bye."
Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.
"Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal."
"I have a funny story to tell you," Randy says, "about a guy you ran into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait."
Chapter 79 GLORY
Bare-chested, camouflage-painted, trench knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck in the waistband of his khaki trousers, Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of mist through the jungle. He stops when he can get a clear view of the Nip Army truck, framed between the hairy, cluttered trunks of a couple of date palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He ignores them.
It has all the earmarks of a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb out of the truck and confer for a few moments. One of them wades into the jungle. The other leans against the truck's fender and lights up a cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the light of the sunset behind him. The one in the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to take a shit.
At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast between the brightness of the sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them nearly blind. The shitter is helpless, and the smoker looks exhausted. Bobby Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the jungle onto the road behind the truck, strides forward on ant-bitten feet, crouches behind the truck's bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without taking his eyes off the smoker's feet-visible beneath the truck's chassis-he peels away the backing and slaps the payload onto the truck's tailgate. Then, just to rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!
Moments later, he's back in the jungle, watching as the Nip truck drives away, now sporting two red, white, and blue stickers reading: I SHALL RETURN! Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.
Long after dark, he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up on the volcano. He works his way in through the booby-trapped perimeter and makes plenty of noise as he approaches, so that the Huk sentries won't shoot at him in the darkness. But he needn't have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio: MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.
Bobby Shaftoe's response is to boil up some powerful coffee and begin pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic, Shaftoe grabs a message pad and the stub of a pencil, and writes out his idea for the seventh time: OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO CONTACT AND SUPPLY FILAMERICAN ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION STOP I VOLUNTEER FOR SAME STOP AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE.
He gets Pedro to encrypt it and send it off. After that, all he can do is wait and pray. This shit with the stickers has to stop.
He has been tempted, a thousand times, to desert, and to go into Concepcion himself. But just because he's out in the boondocks with a band of Huk irregulars doesn't mean he's beyond the reach of military discipline. Deserters can still get shot or hanged, and despite the fact that he was one in Sweden, Bobby Shaftoe believes that they deserve to be.
Concepcion is down in the lowlands north of Manila. From the high places of the Zambales Mountains you can actually see the town lying amid the green rice paddies. Those lowlands are still totally Nip-controlled. But when the General lands, he's probably going to land north of here at Lingayen Gulf, just like the Nips did when they invaded in '41, and then Concepcion is going to lie right in the middle of his route to Manila. He's going to need eyes there.
Sure enough, the order comes through a couple of days later: RENDEZVOUS TARPON POINT GREEN 5 NOVEMBER STOP CONVEY TRANSMITTER CONCEPCION STOP AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS STOP.
Tarpon is the submarine that has been bringing them ammunition, medical supplies, I SHALL RETURN stickers, cartons of American cigarettes with I SHALL RETURN inserts in each pack, I SHALL RETURN matchbooks, I SHALL RETURN coasters, and I SHALL RETURN condoms. Shaftoe has been stockpiling the condoms because he knows they won't go over well in a Catholic country. He figures that when he finds Glory he'll go through a long ton of condoms in about a week.
Three days later, he and a squad of Huks are on hand to meet Tarpon at "Point Green," which is their code name for a tiny cove on the west coast of Luzon, down beneath Mount Pinatubo, not all that far north of Subic Bay. The submarine glides in at around midnight, running on its electric motors so it won't make any sound, and the Huks pull up alongside in rubber boats and outrigger canoes and unload the cargo. Sure enough, the transmitter's there. And this time there's none of those goddamn stickers or matchbooks. The cargo is ammunition and a few fighting men: some Filamerican commandoes fresh from a debriefing with MacArthur's intelligence chief, and a couple of Americans-MacArthur's advance scouts.
Over the next several days, Shaftoe and a few hand-picked Huks carry the transmitter up one slope of the Zambales Mountains and down the other. They stop when the foothills finally give way to low-lying paddy land. The main north-south road, from Manila up towards Lingayen Gulf, lies directly across their path.
After a few days of scrambling and scrounging, they are able to load the transmitter on board a farm cart and bury it in manure. They harness the cart to a pathetic carabao, loaned by a loyal but poor farmer, and set out across Nip country, headed for Concepcion.
At this point they have to split up, though, because there's no way that blue-eyed Shaftoe can travel in the open. Two Huks, pretending to be farmboys, take the manure cart while Shaftoe begins making his way cross-country, traveling at night, sleeping in ditches or in the homes of trusted American sympathizers.
It takes him a week and a half to cover the fifty kilometers, but in time, with patience and perseverance, he reaches the town of Concepcion, and knocks on the door of their local contact around midnight. The contact is a prominent local citizen-the manager of the town's only bank. Mr. Calagua is astonished to see an American standing at his back door. This tells Shaftoe that something must have gone wrong-the boys with the transmitter should have arrived a week ago. But the manager tells him that no one has shown up-though rumor has it that the Nips recently caught some boys trying to smuggle contraband in a farm cart and executed them on the spot.
So Shaftoe is marooned in Concepcion with no way to get orders or to send messages. He feels bad for the boys who died, but in a way, this isn't such a bad situation for him. The only reason he wanted to be in Concepcion is that the Altamira family comes from here. Half of the local farmers are related to Glory in some way.
Shaftoe breaks into the Calaguas' stables and improvises a bed. They would put him up in a spare bedroom if he asked, but he tells them that the stables are safer-if he gets caught, the Calaguas can at least claim ignorance. He recuperates on a pile of straw for a day or two, then starts trying to learn something about the Altamiras. He can't go out nosing around by himself, but the Calaguas know everyone in town, and they have a good sense of who can be trusted. So inquiries go out, and within a couple of days, information has come back in.
Mr. Calagua explains it to him over glasses of bourbon in his study. Wracked by guilt over the fact that his honored guest is sleeping on a pile of hay in an outbuilding, he pushes bourbon at him all the time, which is fine with Bobby Shaftoe.
"Some of the information is reliable, some is-er-farfetched," Mr. Calagua says. "Here is the reliable part. First of all, your guess was correct. When the Japanese took over Manila, many members of the Altamira family came back to this area to stay with relatives. They believed it would be safer."
"Are you telling me Glory is up here?"
"No," Mr. Calagua says sadly, "she is not up here. But she was definitely here on September 13th, 1942."
"How do you know?"
"Because she gave birth to a baby boy on that day-the birth certificate is on file at the town hall. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe."
"Well, I'll be fucked sideways," Shaftoe says. He starts calculating dates in his head.
"Many of the Altamiras who fled here have since gone back to the city-supposedly to obtain work. But some of them are also serving as eyes and ears for the resistance."
"I knew they would do the right thing," Shaftoe says.
Mr. Calagua smiles cautiously. "Manila is full of people who claim to be the eyes and ears of the resistance. It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet. But some of the Altamiras are fighting, too-they have gone into the mountains to join the Huks."
"Which mountains? I didn't run across any of them up in the Zambales."
"South of Manila and Laguna de Bay are many volcanoes and heavy jungle. This is where some of Glory's family are fighting."
"Is that where Glory is? And the baby? Or are they in the city?"
Mr. Calagua is nervous. "This is the part that may be far-fetched. It is said that Glory is a famous heroine of the fight against the Nips."
"Are you telling me she's dead? If she's dead, just tell me."
"No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This is for certain."
The next day, Bobby Shaftoe's malaria comes back and keeps him laid up for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house and bring in the town doctor to look after him. It's the same doctor who delivered Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.
When he's feeling a little stronger, he lights out for the south. It takes him three weeks to reach the northern outskirts of Manila, hitching rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers stealthily, and three of them in a firefight at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to ground for a few days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.
He can't go into the heart of the city-in addition to being really stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking advantage of the thriving resistance network. He is passed from one barangay to the next, all the way around the outskirts of Manila, until he has reached the coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is left to the south except for a few miles of rice paddies and then the volcanic mountains where Altamiras are making names for themselves as guerilla fighters. During his trip he has heard a thousand rumors about them. Most of them are patently false-people telling him what he obviously wants to hear. But several times he has heard what sounds like a genuine scrap of information about Glory.
They say that she has a healthy young son, living in the apartment in the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared for by the extended family while his mother serves in the war.
They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.
They say that she is a messenger for the Fil-American forces, that no one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying secret messages and other contraband.
The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe she's both-maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.
The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.
He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman's hut on the shores of the big lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria strikes him then; he spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams, having bizarre nightmares about Glory.
Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way-away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.
But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time, and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.
The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil-American lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the Huks only a few miles away.
"Help me get out of this town," Shaftoe pleads. "Take me out in a boat on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move."
"Move where?" says the lieutenant, playing stupid.
"To the high ground! To join those Huks!"
"You would be killed. The ground is booby-trapped. The Huks are extremely vigilant."
"But-"
"Why don't you go the other way?" the lieutenant asks. "Go to Manila."
"Why would I want to go there?"
"Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big battle will be in Manila."
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "I'll go to Manila. But first I want to see Glory."
"Ah," the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. "You say you want to see Glory."
"I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory."
The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head. "No you don't," he says flatly.
"What?"
"You don't want to see Glory."
"How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?"
The lieutenant's face goes stony. "Very well," he says, "I will make inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you."
"That's crazy. It's much too dangerous."
The lieutenant laughs. "No, youdon't understand," he says. "You are a white man in a provincial city in the Philippines occupied by starving, berserk Nips. It is impossible for you to show your face outside. Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move."
"You said they're inspecting people almost every block."
"They will not bother Glory."
"Do the Nips ever-you know. Molest women?"
"Ah. You are worried about Glory being raped." The lieutenant takes another long draw on his cigarette. "I can assure you that this will not happen." He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. "Wait here," he says. "Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila."
He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.
Two days later, the owner of the boathouse, who speaks very little English, shakes Shaftoe awake before sunrise. He beckons Shaftoe into a small boat and rows him out into the lake, then half a mile up the shore toward a sandbar. The dawn is just breaking over the other side of the big lake, illuminating planet-sized cumulus clouds. It's as if the biggest fuel dump in the whole world is being blown up in a sky diced into vast trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.
Glory is strolling out on the sandbar. He can't see her face because she is wrapped in a silk scarf, but he would know the shape of her body anywhere. She walks back and forth along the shore, letting the warm water of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise-she keeps her back turned to Shaftoe so that she can enjoy it. What a flirt. Shaftoe gets as hard as an oar. He pats his back pocket, making sure he's well stocked with I SHALL RETURN condoms. It will be tricky, bedding down with Glory on a sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.
The guy keeps looking over his shoulder to judge the distance to the sandbar. When they are about a stone's throw away, he sits up and ships the oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.
"What are you doing?" Shaftoe asks. Then he heaves a sigh. "You want money?" He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. "Huh? Like that?"
But the guy is just staring into his face, with an expression as tough and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it back in the direction of Glory.
Shaftoe looks up at Glory, just as she's turning around to face him. She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth like a mummy's, and paws the scarf away from her face.
Or what used to be a face. Now it's just the front of her skull.
Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably be heard in downtown Manila.
The boatman casts an anxious look toward the town, then stands up, blocking Shaftoe's view as he's drawing in another breath. One of the oars is in his hands. Shaftoe is just cutting loose with another scream when the oar clocks him in the side of the head.
Chapter 80 THE PRIMARY
The sun has made a long, skidding crash-landing along the Malay Peninsula a few hundred kilometers west, breaking open and spilling its thermonuclear fuel over about half of the horizon, trailing out a wall of salmon and magenta clouds that have blown a gash all the way through the shell of the atmosphere and erupted into space. The mountain containing the Crypt is just a charcoal shard against that backdrop. Randy is annoyed with the sunset for making it difficult to see the construction site. By now the scar in the cloud forest has mostly healed over, or, at least, some kind of green stuff has taken over the bare, lipstick-colored mud. A few GOTO ENGINEERING containers still glower in the color-distorting light of the mercury-vapor lamps around the entrance, but most of them have either moved inside the Crypt or gone back to Nippon. Randy can make out the headlights of one house-sized Goto truck winding down the road, probably filled with debris for another one of the sultan's land reclamation projects.
Seated up in the plane's nose, Randy can actually look forward out his window and see that they are landing on the new runway, built partly on such fill. The buildings of downtown are streaks of blue-green light on either side of the plane, tiny black human figures frozen in them: a man with a phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, a woman in a skirt hugging a pile of books to her chest but thinking about something far away. The view turns empty and indigo as the plane's nose tilts up for the landing, and then Randy's looking out over the Sulu Sea at dusk, where the badjaos'kite-sailed boats are scuttling into port from a day's fishing, hung all about with gutted stingrays, flying fresh sharks' tails like flags. Not long ago it was ridiculously exotic to him, but now he feels more at home here then he did in California.
For Sultan-Class passengers, everything happens with cinematic, quick-cut speed. The plane lands, a beautiful woman hands you your jacket, and you get off. The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their twenty-eighth birthdays.
Usually there's someone waiting for a Sultan-Class passenger. This evening it's John Cantrell, still ponytailed but now clean-shaven; eventually the heat has its way with everyone. He's even taken to shaving the back of his neck, a good trick for shedding a couple of extra BTUs. Cantrell greets Randy with an awkward simultaneous handshake and one-armed hug/body check maneuver.
"Good to see you, John," Randy says.
"You too, Randy," John says, and each man averts his eyes shyly.
"Who's where?"
"You and I are here in the airport. Avi checked into a hotel in downtown San Francisco for the duration."
"Good. I didn't think he was safe in that house by himself."
Cantrell looks provoked. "Any particular reason? Have there been threats?"
"None that I know of. But it's hard to ignore the high number of vaguely terrifying people wrapped up in this."
"No victim Avi. Beryl's flying back to S.F. from Amsterdam-actually she's probably there by now."
"I heard she was in Europe. Why?"
"Strange government shit is going on there. I'll tell you later."
"Where's Eb?"
"Eb has been holed up in the Crypt for a week with his team, doing this kind of incredible D-Day-like push to finalize the biometric identification system. We won't bother him. Tom's been drifting back and forth between his house and the Crypt, running various kinds of torture tests on the internal Crypt network systems. Probing the inner trust boundaries. That's where we're going now."
"To the inner trust boundaries?"
"No! Sorry. His house." Cantrell shakes his head. "It's ... well. It's not the house I would build."
"I want to see it."
"His paranoia is getting just a little out of hand."
"Hey speaking of that.. ." Randy stops. He was about to tell Cantrell about Pontifex, but they are very close to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, and people are looking at them. There's no way of telling who might be listening. "I'll tell you later."
Cantrell looks momentarily baffled and then grins wickedly. "Good one."
"We have a car?"
"I borrowed Tom's car. His Humvee. Not one of those cushy civilian models. A real military one."
"Oh, that's great," Randy says. "Does it come complete with big machine gun on the back?"
"He looked into it-he could certainly get a license to own one in Kinakuta-but his wife drew the line at having an actual heavy machine gun in their domicile."
"How about you? Where do you stand on this gun stuff?"
"I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware," Cantrell says.
They are winding their way down a gauntlet of duty-free shops, really more of a duty-free shopping mall. Randy cannot figure out who actually buys all of these large bottles of liquor and expensive belts. What kind of blandly orgiastic lifestyle demands this particular selection of goods?
In the time that's thus passed Cantrell has evidently decided that a more thorough answer to Randy's gun question is merited. "But the more I practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed."
"What do you mean?" This is Randy in unaccustomed sounding-board mode, psychotherapeutically prompting Cantrell for his feelings. It must have been a weird day for John Cantrell, and no doubt there are some feelings that need to be addressed.
"Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them."
"And hence the Crypt?" Randy asks.
"My involvement in the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very bad dreams that I had about guns."
It is wonderfully healthy to be talking like this, but it is a portentous departure from their usual hard-core technical mode. They are wondering about whether it is even worth it for them to be mixed up in this stuff. Heedless certainty sure is easier.
"Well, what about those Secret Admirers who were hanging around outside Ordo?" Randy asks.
"What about them? You're asking me about their state of mind?"
"Yeah. That is what we are talking about. States of mind."
Cantrell shrugs. "I don't know specifically who they were. I'd guess there are one or two honest-to-god scary fanatics. Setting them aside, maybe a third of them are just too young and immature to understand what's going on. It was just a lark for them. The other two-thirds probably had very sweaty palms."
"They looked like they were trying awfully hard to keep up a cheerful front."
"They were probably happy to get out of there, and to go sit in a dark cool room and drink beer afterwards. Certainly a lot of them have been sending me e-mail about the Crypt since then."
"As an alternative to violent resistance to the United States Government, I assume and hope you mean."
"Exactly. Sure. I mean, that's what the Crypt is becoming. Right?"
The question sounds a little querulous to Randy. "Right," he says. He wonders why he feels so much more settled about this stuff than John Cantrell does, and then recalls, that he has nothing left to lose.
Randy takes one last breath of dry, machine-cooled air and holds it refreshingly in his lungs as they step out into the heat of the evening. He has learned to relax into the climate; you can't fight it. There is a humming logjam of black Mercedes-Benzes waiting to pick up the Sultan— and Vizier-Class passengers. Very few Wallah-Class passengers get off at Kinakuta; most of them are in transit to India. Because this is the kind of place where everything works just perfectly, Randy and John are in the Humvee about twenty seconds later, and twenty seconds after that driving at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour down a long horizontal shaft of ghastly blue-green freeway-light.
"We have been assuming that this Humvee is not bugged," Cantrell says, "so, if you were holding back on something, you can speak freely now."
Randy writes, Let's stop assuming anything of the kindon a notepad and holds it up. Cantrell raises his eyebrows one notch but of course does not seem especially surprised-he spends all of his time around people trying to outdo each other in paranoia. Randy writes We have been under srv'nce by a former NSA hondo gone private.Then he adds, Prob. Working for 1 or more Crypt clients.
How do you know?Cantrell mouths.
Randy sighs, then writes: I was contacted by a Wizard.
Then, as long as John's preoccupied with working his way around a left-lane fender bender, he adds, Think of it as due diligence, underworld style.
Cantrell says out loud, "Tom has been pretty scrupulous about making sure his house is bug-free. I mean, he built the thing, or had it built, from the ground up." He veers off onto an exit ramp and plunges into the jungle.
"Good. We can talk there," Randy says, then writes, Remember the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow-bugs mixed into the concrete by KGB-had to be torn down.
Cantrell grabs the pad and scribbles blind on the dashboard while maneuvering the Humvee up a curving mountain road into the cloud forest. What do you want to talk about that is so secret? Arethusa? Give me agenda pls.
Randy: (1) Lawsuit & whether Epiphyte can continue to exist. (2) That NSA tapper, and Wizard, exist. (3) Maybe Arethusa.
Cantrell grins and writes, I have good news re: Tombstone's /.
"/"in this context is UNIX for the root of the file system, which in the case of Tombstone is synonymous with the hard drive that Randy tried to wipe. Randy raises his eyebrows skeptically and Cantrell grins, nods, and draws his thumb across his throat.
Chez Howard is a flat-roofed concrete structure that from certain angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of grout on the top of a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles about ten minutes before they actually arrive, because the road must make several switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it's not raining here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South Seas breezes gathers on leaves and rains from their drip-tips all the time. Between the rain and the plant life, erosion must be a violent and ravenous force here, which makes Randy a little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains could only exist in such an environment if the underlying tectonic forces were thrusting rock into the air at a rate that would make your ears pop standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is naturally inclined to a conservative view.
Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down, almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle. Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy realizes he's looking at a perspective view of a door-frame with its door hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob. STEEL FRAME,Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels.Quick meandering scribbles suggest the matrix of wall surrounding it, and the floor underneath. Where the uprights of the doorframe are planted in the floor, Cantrell draws small, carefully foreshortened circles. Holes in the floor.Then he encircles the doorframe in a continuous hoop, beginning at one of those circles and climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top, down the other side, through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door, then up through the first hole again, completing the loop. He draws one or two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado. Many turns of fine wire.Finally he draws two leads away from this huge door-sized coil and connects them to a sandwich of alternating long and short horizontal lines, which Randy recognizes as the symbol for a battery. The diagram is completed with a huge arrow drawn vigorously through the center of the doorway, like an airborne battering ram, labeled B which means a magnetic field. Ordo computer room door.
"Wow," Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary-school electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The read/write heads of Tombstone's hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a lot smaller. If they are fine-pointed draftsman's pens, then what Cantrell's drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the pulse-gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo raid must have been purely a scrap-hauling run for whoever organized it-Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General Comstock's sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat's paw. The only thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been information stored on CD-ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had none of that.
Finally they have made it up to the top of the hill, which Tom Howard has shaved to the bedrock in a kind of monk's tonsure. Not because he hates living things, though he probably has no particular affection for them, but to hold at bay the forces of erosion and to create a defensive glacis across which the movements of incredibly poisonous snakes, squirrel-sized insects, opportunistic lower primates, and villainous upper primates will be visible on the array of video cameras he has built into fairly subtle recesses and crevices up on the walls. Seen up close, the house is surprisingly not as dour and fortresslike as it looked at first. It is not just a single large culvert but a bundle of them in different diameters and lengths, like a faggot of bamboo. There is a decent number of windows, particularly on the north side where there's a view, down the slope that John and Randy have just climbed, to a crescent-shaped beach. The windows are set deeply into the walls, partly to back them out of the nearly vertical rays of the sun and partly because each one has a retractable steel shutter, hidden in the wall, that can be dropped down in front of it. It is an okay house, and Randy wonders if Tom Howard would be willing to deed it over to the Dentist and hock his colossal suite of Gomer Bolstrood furniture and move his family into a crowded apartment building just in order to retain control of Epiphyte Corporation. But maybe that won't even be necessary.
John and Randy climb out of the Humvee to the sound of gunfire. Artificial light radiates upwards from a slot neatly dissected out of the jungle nearby. Humidity and clouds of insects make light a nearly solid and palpable thing here. John Cantrell leads Randy across the perfectly sterile parking-slab and into a screened and fenced tunnel that has been stabbed into the black vegetation. Underfoot is some kind of black plastic grid that keeps the nude soil from becoming a glue-trap. They walk down the tunnel, until twenty or thirty paces later it opens up into an extremely long, narrow clearing: the source of the light. At the far end of it, the ground rises abruptly in a sort of berm, partly natural, Randy thinks, and partly enhanced with fill dirt excavated from the house's foundation. Two large paper targets in the shape of human silhouettes are clipped to a rack there. At the near end, two men with ear protectors pulled down around their necks are examining a gun. One of these men is Tom Howard. Randy is struck but not really astonished by the fact that the other one is Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, evidently fresh in from Manila. The gun looks like exactly the same model that some of the black-hatted and bandanna-masked posse were carrying yesterday in Los Altos: a long pipe with a sickle-shaped clip curving away from one side, and a very simple stock made of a few bare metal parts bolted together.
Doug is in the middle of saying something, and is not the type to interrupt his train of thought and fall all over himself being friendly just because Randy has recently traversed the Pacific Ocean. "I never knew my father," he says, "but my Filipino uncles used to tell me stories that he had told. When he was on Guadalcanal, they-the Marines-were still using their Springfields, the ought-three model, so four decades old-when finally the M-1 rifle began to show up. So they took one of each rifle and tossed it into the water and rolled it around in the sand for a while and did God knows what else to it-but nothing that would be unusual in a real combat situation, for a Marine-and then tried to operate them and found that the ought-three still worked and the M-1 didn't. So they stuck to their Springfields. And I would say that some testing along those lines would be in order if you think you are really designing an insurgency weapon, as you say. Good evening, Randy."