"I'll be right back," Shaftoe says.

"Where are you going, Shaftoe?"

"Got some other people who need to forgive me first."

He heads in the direction of Fort Santiago with a reconstituted, re-armed and beefed-up squad of Huks. The old Spanish fort has been liberated, within the last couple of hours, by the Americans. They have thrown open the doors to the dungeons and the subterranean caverns along the Pasig River. Finding eleven-year-old Carlos Altamira is, then, a problem of sorting through several thousand corpses. Almost all of the Filipinos who were herded into this place by the Nips died, either through out-and-out execution, or by suffocating in the dungeons, or by drowning when the tide came up the river and flooded the cells. Bobby Shaftoe doesn't really know what Carlos looked like, and so the best he can do is cull out the young-looking corpses and present them to members of the Altamira family for inspection. The benzedrine he took a couple of days ago has worn off, and he feels half dead himself. He trudges through the Spanish dungeon with a kerosene lantern, shining the dim yellow light on the faces of the dead, muttering the words to himself like a prayer.

"Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?"

Chapter 86 WISDOM

A few years ago, when Randy became tired of the ceaseless pressure in his lower jaw, he went out onto the north-central Californian oral-surgery market looking for someone to extract his wisdom teeth. His health plan covered this, so price was not an obstacle. His dentist took one of those big cinemascopic wraparound X rays of his entire lower head, the kind where they pack your mouth with half a roll of high-speed film and then clamp your head in a jig and the X-ray machine revolves around you spraying radiation through a slit, as the entire staff of the dentist's office hits the deck behind a lead wall, resulting in a printed image that is a none-too-appetizing distortion of his jaw into a single flat plane. Looking at it, Randy eschewed cruder analogies like "head of a man run over several times by steamroller while lying flat on his back" and tried to think of it as a mapping transformation-just one more in mankind's long history of ill-advisedly trying to represent three-D stuff on a flat plane. The corners of this coordinate plane were anchored by the wisdom teeth themselves, which even to the dentally unsophisticated Randy looked just a little disturbing in that each one was about the size of his thumb (though maybe this was just a distortion in the coordinate transform-like the famously swollen Greenland of Mercator) and they were pretty far away from any other teeth, which (logically) would seem to put them in parts of his body not normally considered to be within a dentist's purview, and they were at the wrong angle-not just a little crooked, but verging on upside down and backwards. At first he just chalked all of this up to the Greenland phenomenon. With his Jaw-map in hand, he hit the streets of Three Siblings-land looking for an oral surgeon. It was already beginning to work on him psychologically. Those were some big-ass teeth! Brought into being by the workings of relict DNA strands from the hunter-gatherer epoch. Designed for reducing tree bark and mammoth gristle to easily digestible paste. Now these boulders of living enamel were horrifyingly adrift in a gracile cro-magnon head that simply did not have room for them. Think of the sheer extra weight he had been carrying around. Think of the use that priceless head-real-estate could have been put to. When they were gone, what would fill up the four giant molar-shaped voids in his melon? It was moot until he could find someone to get rid of them. But one oral surgeon after another turned him down. They would put the X-ray up on their light boxes, stare into it and blanch. Maybe it was just the pale light coming out of the light-boxes but Randy could have sworn they were blanching. Disingenuously-as if wisdom teeth normally grew someplace completely different-they all pointed out that the wisdom teeth were buried deep, deep, deep in Randy's head. The lowers were so far back in his jaw that removing them would practically break the jawbone in twain structurally; from there, one false move would send a surgical-steel demolition pick into his middle ear. The uppers were so deep in his skull that the roots were twined around the parts of his brain responsible for perceiving the color blue (on one side) and being able to suspend one's disbelief in bad movies (on the other) and between these teeth and actual air, light and saliva lay many strata of skin, meat, cartilage, major nerve-cables, brain-feeding arteries, bulging caches of lymph nodes, girders and trusses of bone, rich marrow that was working just fine thank you, a few glands whose functions were unsettlingly poorly understood, and many of the other things that made Randy Randy, all of them definitely falling into the category of sleeping dogs.

Oral surgeons, it seemed, were not comfortable delving more than elbow-deep into a patient's head. They had been living in big houses and driving to work in Mercedes-Benz sedans long before Randy had dragged his sorry ass into their offices with his horrifying X-ray and they had absolutely nothing to gain by even attempting to remove these-not so much wisdom teeth in the normal sense as apocalyptic portents from the Book of Revelations. The best way to remove these teeth was with a guillotine. None of these oral surgeons would even consider undertaking the extraction until Randy had signed a legal disclaimer too thick to staple, something that almost had to come in a three-ring binder, the general import of which was that one of the normal consequences of the procedure was for the patient's head to end up floating in a jug of formaldehyde in a tourist trap just over the Mexican border. In this manner Randy wandered from one oral surgeon's office to another for a few weeks, like a teratomic outcast roving across a post-nuclear waste land being driven out of one village after another by the brickbats of wretched, terrified peasants. Until one day when he walked into an office and the nurse at the front desk almost seemed to expect him, and led him back into an exam room for a private consult with the oral surgeon, who was busy doing something in one of his little rooms that involved putting a lot of bone dust into the air. The nurse bade him sit down, proffered coffee, then turned on the light box and took Randy's X-rays and stuck them up there. She took a step back, crossed her arms, and gazed at the pictures in wonder. "So," she murmured, "these are the famouswisdom teeth!"

That was the last oral surgeon Randy visited for a couple of years. He still had that relentless 24-Jam pressure in his head, but now his attitude had changed; instead of thinking of it as an anomalous condition easily remedied, it became his personal cross to bear, and really not all that bad compared to what some people had to suffer with. There, as in many other unexpected situations, his extensive fantasy-role-playing-game experience came in handy, as while spinning out various epic scenarios he had inhabited the minds, if not the bodies, of many characters who were missing limbs or had been burned over some algorithmically determined percentages of their bodies by dragon's breath or wizard's fireball, and it was part of the ethics of the game that you had to think pretty hard about what it would actually be like to live with such injuries and to play your character accordingly. By those standards, feeling all the time like you had an automotive jack embedded in your skull, ratcheting up the pressure one click every few months, was not even worth mentioning. It was lost in the somatic noise.

So Randy lived that way for several years, as he and Charlene insensibly crept upwards on the socioeconomic scale and began finding themselves at parties with people who had arrived in Mercedes-Benzes. It was at one of these parties where Randy overheard a dentist extolling some brilliant young oral surgeon who had just moved to the area. Randy had to bite his tongue not to start asking all kinds of questions about just what "brilliant" meant in an oral-surgery context-questions that were motivated solely by curiosity but that the dentist would be likely to take the wrong way. Among coders it was pretty obvious who was brilliant and who wasn't, but how could you tell a brilliant oral surgeon apart from a merely excellent one? It gets you into deep epistemological shit. Each set of wisdom teeth could only be extracted once. You couldn't have a hundred oral surgeons extract the same set of wisdom teeth and then compare the results scientifically. And yet it was obvious from watching the look on this dentist's face that this one particular oral surgeon, this new guy, was brilliant. So later Randy sidled up to this dentist and allowed as how he might have a challenge-he might personally embodya challenge-that would put this ineffable quality of oral-surgery brilliance to some good use, and could he have the guy's name please.

A few days later he was talking to this oral surgeon, who was indeed young and conspicuously bright and had more in common with other brilliant people Randy had known-mostly hackers-than he did with other oral surgeons. He drove a pickup truck and kept fresh copies of TURING MAGAZINEin his waiting room. He had a beard, and a staff of nurses and other female acolytes who were all permanently aflutter over his brilliantness and followed him around steering him away from large obstacles and reminding him to eat lunch. This guy did not blanch when he saw Randy's Mercato-roentgeno-gram on his light box. He actually lifted his chin up off his hand and stood a little straighter and spake not for several minutes. His head moved minutely every so often as he animadverted on a different corner of the coordinate plane, and admired the exquisitely grotesque situation of each tooth-its paleolithic heft and its long gnarled roots trailing off into parts of his head never charted by anatomists.

When he finally turned to face Randy, he had this priestlike aura about him, a kind of holy ecstasy, a feeling of cosmic symmetry revealed, as if Randy's jaw, and his brilliant oral-surgery brain, had been carved out by the architect of the Universe fifteen billion years ago specifically so that they could run into each other, here and now, in front of this light box. He did not say anything like, "Randy let me just show you how close the roots of this one tooth are to the bundle of nerves that distinguishes you from a marmoset," or "My schedule is incredibly full and I was thinking of going into the real estate business anyway," or "Just a second while I call my lawyer." He didn't even say anything like, "Wow, those suckers are really in deep." The young brilliant oral surgeon just said, "Okay," stood there awkwardly for a few moments, and then walked out of the room in a display of social ineptness that totally cemented Randy's faith in him. One of his minions eventually had Randy sign a legal disclaimer stipulating that it was perfectly all right if the oral surgeon decided to feed Randy's entire body into a log chipper, but this, for once, seemed like just a formality and not the opening round in an inevitable Bleak House-like litigational saga.

And so finally the big day came, and Randy took care to enjoy his breakfast because he knew that, considering the nerve damage he was about to incur, this might be the last time in his life that he would be able to taste food, or even chew it. The oral surgeon's minions all looked at Randy in awe when he actually walked in the door of their office, like My god he actually showed up!then flew reassuringly into action. Randy sat down in the chair and they gave him an injection and then the oral surgeon came in and asked him what, if anything, was the difference between Windows 95 and Windows NT. "This is one of these conversations the sole purpose of which is to make it obvious when I have lost consciousness, isn't it?" Randy said. "Actually, there is a secondary purpose, which is that I am considering making the jump and wanted to get some of your thoughts about that," the oral surgeon said.

"Well," said Randy, "I have a lot more experience with UNIX than with NT, but from what I've seen, it appears that NT is really a decent enough operating system, and certainly more of a serious effort than Windows." He paused to draw breath and then noticed that suddenly everything was different. The oral surgeon and his minions were still there and occupying roughly the same positions in his field of vision as they had been when he started to utter this sentence, but now the oral surgeon's glasses were askew and the lenses misted with blood, and his face was all sweaty, and his mask flecked with tiny bits of stuff that very much looked like it had come from pretty far down in Randy's body, and the air in the room was murky with aerosolized bone, and his nurses were limp and haggard and looked like they could use makeovers, face-lifts, and weeks at the beach. Randy's chest and lap, and the floor, were littered with bloody wads and hastily torn-open medical supply wrappers. The back of his head was sore from being battered against the head-rest by the recoil of the young brilliant oral surgeon's cranial jack-hammer. When he tried to finish his sentence ("so if you're willing to pay the premium I think the switch to NT would be very well advised") he noticed that his mouth was jammed full of something that prevented speech. The oral surgeon pulled his mask down off his face and scratched his sweat-soaked beard. He was staring not at Randy but at a point very far away. He heaved a big, slow sigh. His hands were shaking.

"What day is it?" Randy mumbled through cotton.

"As I told you before," the brilliant young oral surgeon said, "we charge for wisdom tooth extractions on a sliding scale, depending on the degree of difficulty." He paused for a moment, groping for words. "In your case I'm afraid that we will be charging you the maximum on all four." Then he got up and shambled out of the room, weighed down, Randy thought, not so much by the stress of his job as by the knowledge that no one was ever going to give him a Nobel prize for what he had just accomplished.

Randy went home and spent, about a week lying on his couch in front of the TV eating oral narcotics like jellybeans and moaning with pain, and then he got better. The pressure in his skull was gone. Just totally gone. He cannot even remember now what it used to feel like.

Now as he rides in the police car to his new private jail cell, he remembers the whole wisdom-tooth-extraction saga because of its many points in common with what he just went through emotionally with young America Shaftoe. Randy's had a few girlfriends in his life-not many-but all of them were like oral surgeons who just couldn't cut the mustard. Amy's the only one who had the skill and the sheer balls to just look at him and say "okay" and then tunnel into his skull and come back with the goods. It was probably exhausting for her. She will extract a high price from him in exchange. And it will leave Randy lying around moaning with pain for a good long while. But he can tell already that the internal pressure has been relieved and he is glad, so glad, that she came into his life, and that he finally had the good sense and, arguably, guts to do this. He completely forgets, for a few hours, that he has been marked for death by the Philippine government.

From the fact that he's in a car, he infers that his new, private cell is in a different building. No one explains anything to him because he is, after all, a prisoner. Since the bust at NAIA he's been in a jail down south, a newish concrete-block number on the edge of Makati, but now they are taking him north into older parts of Manila, probably into some more stylish and gothic prewar facility. Fort Santiago, on the banks of the Pasig, had cells that were in the intertidal zone, so that prisoners locked into them at low tide would be dead by high. Now it's a historical site, so he knows they're not headed there.

The new jail cell is indeed in a big scary old building somewhere in the torus of major governmental institutions that surrounds the dead hole of Intramuros. It is not in, but it is right next to, a major court building. They drive through alleys among these big old stone buildings for a while and then present credentials at a guardhouse and wait for a big iron gate to be rolled aside, and then they drive across a paved courtyard that hasn't been swept out in a while and present more credentials and wait for an actual portcullis to be winched up, clearing an orifice that ramps them down beneath the building itself. Then the car stops and they are abruptly surrounded by men in uniforms.

The process is uncannily like pulling up to the main entrance of an Asian business hotel, except that the men in the uniforms carry guns and don't offer to tote Randy's laptop. He has a chain around his waist and manacles attached to that chain in front, and leg chains that shorten his stride. The chain between his ankles is supported in the middle by another chain that goes up to his waist so that it will not scrape the ground as he walks. He has just enough manual dexterity to grip the laptop and keep it pressed up against his lower abdomen. He's not just any chained wretch, he is a digital chained wretch, Marley's Ghost on the Information Superhighway. That a man in his situation is being allowed to have the laptop is so grotesquely implausible that it causes him to doubt even his own supremely cynical assessment of it, namely that Someone-presumably the same Someone who is Sending Him a Message-has already discovered that everything on the hard drive is encrypted, and is now trying to gull him into firing the machine up and using it so that-so that what? Maybe they've rigged up a camera in his cell and will be peering over his shoulder. But that would be easy for him to defeat; he just has to not be completely stupid.

The guards lead Randy down a corridor and through some prisoner check-in stuff that doesn't really apply to him since he has already filled out the forms and turned over his personal effects at another jail. Then the great big scary metal doors commence, and corridors that don't smell so good, and he hears the generalized hubbub of a jail. But they take him past the hubbub and into other corridors that seem to be older and less used, and finally through an old-fashioned jailhouse door of iron bars and into a long vaulted stone room containing a single row of maybe half a dozen cells, with a guard's passageway running along past the doors of the iron cages. Like a theme-park simulacrum of a jail. They take him all the way down to the last cell and put him there. A single iron bedstead awaits him, a thin cotton mattress with stained but clean sheets and an army blanket folded and stacked on top of it. An old wooden filing cabinet and folding chair have been moved into the cell and placed in one corner, right against the stone wall that is the terminus of this long room. The filing cabinet is evidently meant to serve as Randy's work table. The drawers are locked shut. This cabinet has actually been locked into place with a few turns of heavy chain and a padlock, so it's very clear that he is expected to use the computer there, in that corner of the cell, and nowhere else. As Attorney Alejandro promised, an extension cord has been plugged into a wall outlet near the cellblock entrance and run down the passageway and securely knotted around a pipe out of Randy's reach and the tail end of it allowed to trail across in the direction of the filing cabinet. But it does not quite reach into Randy's cell, so the only way to plug the computer in is to set it up on that cabinet and stick the power cord into the back and then toss the other end out through the iron bars to a guard, who can mate it with the extension cord.

At first this appears to be just one of these maddening control-freak things, an exercise of power for the pure sadistic pleasure of it. But after Randy's been unchained, and locked in his cell, and left alone for a few minutes to run through it in his head, he thinks otherwise. Of course normally Randy could leave the computer on the card table while the batteries charged and then carry it over to his bed and use it there until the batteries ran down. But the batteries were removed from the machine before Attorney Alejandro gave it to him, and there don't seem to be any ThinkPad battery packs lying around his cell. So he will have to keep it plugged in all the time, and because of the way they have set up the filing cabinet and the extension cord, he is forced by certain immutable properties of three-dimensional Euclidean spacetime to use the machine in one and only one place: right there on top of that damn filing cabinet. He does not think this is an accident.

He sits down on that filing cabinet and scans the wall and ceiling for over-the-shoulder video cameras, but he doesn't look very hard and he doesn't really expect to see one. To make out text on a screen they would have to be very high-resolution cameras, which would imply big and obvious; subtle pinhole cameras wouldn't do it. There aren't any big cameras around here.

Randy becomes almost certain that if he could unlock that filing cabinet, he would find some electronic gear inside it. Directly underneath his laptop there is probably an antenna to pick up Van Eck signals emanating from the screen. Below that, there is some gear to translate those signals into a digital form and transmit the results to a listening station nearby, probably right on the other side of one of these walls. Down in the bottom are probably some batteries to make it all run. He rocks the cabinet back and forth as much as the chains will allow, and finds that it is indeed rather bottom-heavy, as if there's a car battery sitting in the bottom drawer. Or maybe it's just his imagination. Maybe they are letting him have his laptop just because they are nice guys.

So this is it then. This is the setup. This is the deal. It is all very clean and simple. Randy fires up the laptop just to prove that it still works. Then he makes his bed and goes and lies down on it, just because it feels really good to lie down. It is the first time he's had anything like privacy in at least a week. Notwithstanding Avi's bizarre admonition against self-abuse on the beach in Pacifica, it is high time that Randy took care of something. He needs to concentrate really hard now, and a certain distraction must be done away with. Replaying his last conversation with Amy is enough to give him a good erection. He reaches down into his pants and then abruptly falls asleep.

He wakes up to the sound of the cellblock door clanging open. A new prisoner is being led in. Randy tries to sit up and finds that his hand is still in his pants, having failed to accomplish its mission. He pulls it out of there reluctantly and sits up. He swings his feet down off the bed and onto the stone floor. Now he's got his back to the adjacent cell, which is a mirror image of his; i.e., the beds and the toilets of the two cells are right next to each other along their shared partition. He stands up and turns around and watches this other prisoner being led into the cell next to his. The new guy is a white man, probably in his sixties, maybe even seventies, though you could make a case for fifties or eighties. Quite vigorous, anyway. He's wearing a prison coverall just like Randy's, but accessorized differently: instead of a laptop, he's got a crucifix dangling from a rosary with great big fat amber beads, and some sort of medallion on a silver chain, and he's clutching several books to his belly: a Bible, and something big and in German, and a current bestselling novel.

The guards are treating him with extreme reverence; Randy assumes the guy is a priest. They are talking to him in Tagalog, asking him questions-being, Randy thinks, solicitous to his needs and desires-and the white man answers them in reassuring tones and even tells a joke. He makes a polite request; a guard scurries out and returns moments later with a deck of cards. Finally the guards back out of the cell, practically bowing and scraping, and lock him in with apologies that start to get a little monotonous. The white man says something, forgiving them wittily. They laugh nervously and leave. The white man stands there in the middle of his cell for a minute, staring at the floor contemplatively, maybe praying or something. Then he snaps out of it and starts looking around. Randy leans into the partition and sticks his hand through the bars. "Randy Waterhouse," he says.

The white man frisbees his books onto the bed, glides towards him, and shakes his hand. "Enoch Root," he says. "It's a pleasure to meet you in person, Randy." His voice is unmistakably that of Pontifex-root@eruditorum.org.

Randy freezes up for a long time, like a man who has just realized that a colossal practical joke is being played on him, but doesn't know just howcolossal it is, or what to do about it. Enoch Root sees that Randy is paralyzed, and steps smoothly into the gap. He flexes the deck of cards in one hand and shoots them across to the other; the queue of airborne cards just hangs there between his hands for a moment, like an accordion. "Not as versatile as ETC cards, but surprisingly useful," he muses. "With any luck, Randy, you and I can makea bridge-aslong as you are just standing there pontificatinganyway."

"Make a bridge?" Randy echoes, feeling and probably sounding rather stupid.

"I'm sorry, my English is a bit rusty-I meant bridgeas in a card game. Are you familiar with it?"

"Bridge? No. But I thought it took four people."

"I have come up with a version that is played by two.I only hope this deck is complete-the game requires fifty-four cards."

"Fifty-four," Randy muses. "Is your game anything like Pontifex?"

"One and the same."

"I think I have the rules for Pontifex squirreled away on my hard drive somewhere," Randy says.

"Then let's play," says Enoch Root.

Chapter 87 FALL

Shaftoe jumps out of the airplane. The air is bracingly cold up here, and the wind chill factor is something else. It is the first time in a year that he has not been loathsomely hot and sweaty.

Something jerks mightily on his back: the static line, still attached to the airplane-God forbid that American fighting men should be entrusted to pull their own ripcords. He can just imagine the staff meeting where they dreamed up the concept of the static line: "For God's sake, General, they're just enlisted men! As soon as they jump out of the airplane they'll probably start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket flasks, catch forty winks, and before you know it they'll all pile into the ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!"

The drogue chute flutters out, catches air, and then eviscerates his main pack in one jerk. There's a bit of flopping and buffeting as Bobby Shaftoe's body pulls the disorganized cloud of silk downwards, then it thunks open and he is left hanging in space, his dark body forming a small perfect bullseye in the center of the off-white canopy for any Nipponese riflemen down below.

No wonder those paratroopers think they are gods among men: they get such a nice view of things, so much better than a poor Marine grunt stuck down on the beach, who is always looking uphill into courses of pillboxes. All of Luzon stretches out before him. He can see one or two hundred miles north, across a mat of vegetation as dense as felt, to the mountains in the far north where General Yamashita, the Lion of Malaya, is holed up with a hundred thousand troops, each of whom would like nothing better than to strap lots of explosives to his body, sneak through the lines at night, run into the middle of a large concentration of American soldiers, and blow himself up for his emperor. To Shaftoe's starboard is Manila Bay, and even from this distance, some thirty miles, he can see the jungle suddenly turn thin and brown as it nears the shore, like a severed leaf that is dying from the edge inwards-that would be what's left of the city of Manila. The fat twenty-mile-long tongue of land protruding towards him is Bata'an. Just off the tip of it is a rocky island shaped like a tadpole with a green head and a bony brown tail: Corregidor. Smoke jets from many vents on the island, which has been mostly reconquered by the Americans. Quite a few Nipponese blew themselves up in their underground bunkers rather than surrender. This heroic act has given someone in The General's chain of command a nifty idea.

A couple of miles from Corregidor, motionless on the water, is something that looks like an absurdly squat, asymmetrical battleship, except much bigger. It is encircled by American gunboats and amphibious landing forces. From a source on its lid, a long wisp of red smoke trickles downwind: a smoke bomb dropped out of Shaftoe's plane a few minutes ago, on a parachute. As Shaftoe descends, and the wind blows him directly towards it, he can see the grain of the reinforced concrete of which this prodigy is made. It used to be a dry rock in Manila Bay. The Spanish built a fort there, the Americans built a chain of gun emplacements on top of that, and when the Nips showed up they turned the entire thing into a solid reinforced-concrete fortress with walls thirty feet thick, and a couple of double-barreled fourteen-inch gun turrets on the top. Those guns have long since been silenced; Shaftoe can see long cracks in their barrels, and craters, like frozen splashes in the steel. Even though he is parachuting onto the roof of an impregnable Nipponese fortress chock-full of heavily armed men who are desperately looking for a picturesque way to die, Shaftoe is perfectly safe; every time a Nip pokes a rifle barrel or a pair of binoculars out of a gun slit, half a dozen American antiaircraft gunners open up on him at point-blank range from the nearby ships.

A tremendous racket ensues as a small power boat pops out of a little cave along the waterline of the island and heads directly towards an American landing craft. A hundred guns open fire on it simultaneously. Supersonic bits of metal crash into the water all around the little boat, ton after ton of them. Each bit makes a splash. All of the splashes combine into a jagged, volcanic eruption of white water centered on the little boat. Bobby Shaftoe puts his fingers in his ears. Two thousand pounds of high explosive packed into the little boat's nose detonate. The shock wave flashes across the surface of the water, a powdery white ring expanding with supernatural velocity. It hits Bobby Shaftoe like a baseball to the bridge of the nose. He neglects to steer his chute for a while, and trusts the winds to carry him to the right place.

The smoke bomb was dropped as proof of the concept that a man on a parachute might actually be able to land on the roof of this fortress. Bobby Shaftoe is, of course, the final and irrefutable test of this proposition. As he gets closer, and his head clears from the explosion, Shaftoe sees that the smoke bomb never actually reached the roof: its little chute got tangled up in the briar patch of antennas growing out of the top of the thing.

All kinds of fucking antennas! Even during his days in Shanghai, Shaftoe had a weird feeling around antennas. Those Station Alpha pencil-necks, in their little wooden roof-shack with all the antennas sprouting from it-those were not soldiers, sailors, or Marines in the normal sense. Corregidor was covered with antennas before the Nips came and took it. And everywhere that Shaftoe went during his Detachment 2702 stint, there were antennas.

He is going to spend the next few moments concentrating very hard on those antennas, and so he turns his head for a moment to get a bearing on the American LCM-the landing craft that the Nip suicide boat was hoping to destroy. It is exactly where it is supposed to be-halfway between the encircling force of naval ships and the sheer, forty-foot-high wall of the fortress. Even if Shaftoe didn't already know the plan, he would, at a glance, identify this vessel as a Landing Craft, Mechanized (Mark 3), a fifty-foot-long steel shoebox designed to cough a medium-sized tank up onto a beach. It has a couple of fifty-caliber machine guns on it which are pounding away dutifully at various targets on the wall of the fortress which Shaftoe cannot see. But from his vantage point On High he can see something that the Nipponese can't: the LCM is not carrying a tank, in the sense of a vehicle on caterpillar treads with a gun turret. It is carrying, rather, a tank in the sense of a large steel container with pipes and hoses and stuff attached to it.

The Nips in the fortress are taking potshots at the approaching LCM, but the only target at which they have to aim is its front door, a piece of metal that can flop down to become a ramp, and which was designed, incredibly enough, on the assumption that doomed Nips would spend a lot of time trying to blow holes in it with various projectile weapons. So the defenders are not getting anywhere. Antiaircraft gunners on other ships have begun raking the walls of the fortress insanely, making it hard for the Nipponese to poke their heads and their gun barrels out. Shaftoe notes fragments of antennas skittering and bouncing across the roof of the fortress, and occasional streaks of tracers, and hopes that the men on those ships have the presence of mind to hold their fire before he lands on the fucking thing, which will be in a few seconds.

Shaftoe realizes that his mental concept of what this mission was going to be like, as he reviewed it with the officers in the LCM, bears no relationship to the reality. This is only about the five thousandth time Shaftoe has experienced this phenomenon in the course of the Second World War; you'd think he would no longer be surprised by it. The antennas, which looked wispy and inconsequential on the reconnaissance photos, are in fact sizable engineering works. Or they were until they got de-engineered by the naval gunfire that silenced those big guns. Now they are just wreckage of a sort that is going to be peculiarly nasty to parachute down on top of. The antennas were, and the wreckage is, made of all kinds of different shit: spars of Philippine mahogany, sturdy columns of bamboo, welded steel trusses. The most common bits are the ones that catch a parachutist's eye: long metal poky things, and miles and miles of guy wire, snarled into a briarpatch, some of it taut enough to cut a plummeting Marine's head off and some of it all loose and tangly with sharp hovering ends.

It dawns on Shaftoe that this pile isn't just a gun emplacement; it's a Nip intelligence headquarters. "Waterhouse, you fucking son of a bitch!" Shaftoe hollers. As far as he knows, Waterhouse is still in Europe. But he realizes, as he's clapping his hands protectively over his eyes and falling into the nightmare, that Waterhouse must have something to do with this.

Bobby Shaftoe has landed. He tries to move and the wreckage moves with him; he is one with it.

He opens his eyes carefully. His head is wrapped up in a snarl of heavy wire-a guy wire that broke under tension and whipped around him. Peering between loops of wire, he sees three lengths of quarter-inch metal tubing projecting out of his torso. Another one has gone through his thigh, and yet another through his upper arm. He's pretty sure he has a broken leg too.

He lies there for a while, listening to the sound of the guns all around him.

There is work that needs to be done. All he can think of is the boy. He gropes for the wire cutter with his free hand and begins to cut himself loose from the snarl.

The jaws of the wire cutter just barely fit over the metal tubing of the antenna. He reaches behind himself finds the places where the tubes poke into his back, and cuts them off, snip, snip, snip. He cuts the tube that has impaled his arm. He leans forward and cuts the one that goes through his leg. Then he pulls the tubes out of his flesh and drops them on the concrete, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink. Lots of blood follows.

He doesn't even try to walk. He just begins to drag himself across the concrete roof of the fortress. The sun has warmed the concrete and it feels good. He cannot see the LCM, but he can see the few antennas that stick out of its top, and he knows it is in position now.

The rope should be there. Shaftoe props himself up on his elbows and looks. Sure enough, there it is, a manila rope (natch!) tied to a grapnel, one point of the grapnel lodged in a shell crater near the edge of the roof.

He gets to it eventually, and begins to pull on the rope. He closes his eyes, but tries not to fall asleep. He keeps pulling, and eventually feels something big and thick between his hands: the hose.

Almost finished. Lying on his back, hugging the end of the hose to his chest, he rolls his head from side to side until he can see the air vent that they picked out on the reconnaissance photos. It used to have a sheet-metal hood on the top of it, but that's long gone now, it's just a hole in the roof with a few jagged bits of metal at its edges. He crawls over to it and feeds in the end of the hose.

Someone must be watching him on one of the ships, because the hose stiffens, like a serpent coming alive, and between his hands Bobby Shaftoe can feel the fuel oil streaming through it. Ten thousand gallons of the stuff. Straight down into the fortress. He can hear the Nips down there, singing hoarse songs. By now they will have figured out what is about to happen. General MacArthur is giving them exactly what they've been praying for.

At this point, Bobby Shaftoe is supposed to abseil down a rope into the LCM, but he knows it isn't going to happen. No one can reach him now, no one can help him. When the fuel oil stops streaming through the hose, he summons all the concentration he has left. Pretends, one last time, that he actually gives a damn. Jerks the safety pin from a white phosphorus grenade, lets the handle fly off and tinkle merrily across the roof. He can feel it come alive in his hand, the thrumming animal fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it into the air shaft: a circular pipe straight down, a black disk centered on a field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.

Then, on an impulse, he dives in there after it.

Semper Fidelis Dawn star flares on disk of night I fall, sun rises

Chapter 88 METIS

The appearance of root@eruditorum.org in the cell right next to Randy's is like the crowning plot twist in this Punch-and-Judy show that has been performed for his benefit ever since his plane landed at NAIA. As with any puppet show, he knows that there must be a lot of people hidden just outside the range of his senses, in furious motion, trying to make it all happen. For all he knows, some significant fraction of the Philippine gross national product is being devoted to keeping up these pretenses for his benefit.

There is a meal waiting on the floor of Randy's cell, and a rat on top of the meal. Randy usually reacts pretty badly to the sight of rats; they rupture the containment system that his upbringing and his education built around the part of his mind where the collective-unconscious stuff dwells, and send him straight into Hieronymus Bosch territory. But in these circumstances it doesn't bother him any more than seeing one at the zoo would. The rat has a surprisingly attractive buckskin-colored pelt and a tail about as thick as a pencil that has evidently run afoul of a farmer's wife with a carving knife, and woggles stiffly in the air like the blunt antenna of a cellphone. Randy is hungry, but he doesn't want to eat anything that a rat has left footprints on, so he just watches it.

His body feels like it slept for a long time. He turns on his computer and types in a command called "date." The nails of his left hand look funny, as if they all got bruised. Focusing on them he sees a club drawn in blue ballpoint pen ink on the nail of the index finger, a diamond on the forefinger, a heart on the ring finger, a spade on the pinky. Enoch Root told him that in Pontifex, as in bridge, each card in the deck has a numerical value: clubs 1-13, diamonds 14-26, hearts 27-39, spades 40-52. Randy drew the symbols on his nails so he wouldn't forget.

Anyway, "date" tells him that he apparently slept all of yesterday afternoon and evening, all night, and about half of today. So this rat is actually eating his lunch.

Randy's computer runs Finux, so when it boots up it gives him a black screen with big fat white letters scrolling up it one line at a time, a real circa-1975 type of user interface. Also presumably the easiest possible thing to read through Van Eck phreaking. Randy types in "startx" and the screen goes black for a moment and then turns a particular shade of indigo that Randy happens to like, and beige windows appear on it with much smaller and crisper black letters. So now he is running the X Windows System, or X as people like Randy call it, which provides all of the graphical junk that people expect in a user interface: menus, buttons, scroll bars, and so on. As with anything else under UNIX (of which Finux is a variant), there are a million options that only young, lonely, or obsessed people have the time and patience to explore. Randy has been all three at various times of his life and knows a lot about these options. For example, the background of his screen happens to be a uniform indigo at the moment, but it could be an image. Theoretically you could use a movie, so that all of your windows and menus and so on would float around on top of, say, Citizen Kanerunning in an endless loop. You can, in fact, take any piece of software and make it into your screen background, and it will purr along happily, doing whatever it does, and not even known that it's being used as window-dressing. This has given Randy some ideas on how to approach the Van Eck thing.

In its current state, this computer is just as vulnerable to Van Eck phreaking as it was before Randy started up X. Before it was white letters on a black background. Now it's black on beige. The letters are a little smaller and they live in windows, but it makes no difference: the electronics inside his computer still have to make these transitions between zero and one, i.e. between high intensity (white or beige) and minimal (black) as they trace out these patterns of dots on the screen.

Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life right now, and probably hasn't for a long time, even back in the days when he thought that he didknow. But his working hypothesis is that the people who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex-the Wizard-Enoch Root-whatever the fuck he's called-when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted in a state-of-the-art modern system that no one can break. If they know what's good for them, they won't even try to break it. The only way for them to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or by typing in a pass-phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the game is over. The Dentist's (or whoever's) surveillance guys can feed the intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break them open in no time.

That doesn't mean that Randy dare not open those files-just that he daren't display them on the screen. This distinction is crucial. Ordo can read the encrypted files from the hard drive. It can write them into the computer's memory. It can decrypt them, and write the results into another region of the computer's memory, and leave that data there indefinitely, and the Van Eck phreakers will never be the wiser. But as soon as Randy tells the computer to show him that information in a window on the screen, the Arethusa intercepts will belong to the Van Eck phreakers; and whoever they are, they can probably break them faster than Randy can.