"SPOT? Oh. Rings a bell. French photo-imaging satellite?"
"Yeah. You can buy time on SPOT for a very reasonable fee. And it's got enough resolution to distinguish Glory IVfrom, say, a container-ship or an oil tanker. So all they had to do was wait until their spies on the waterfront told them that Glorywas out to sea, outfitted for salvage work, and then use SPOT to locate them."
"What kind of precision can SPOT provide in terms of latitude and longitude?" Randy asks.
"That's a very good question. I'll have someone look into it," Avi says.
"If it's to within a hundred meters, then Andrew can find the wreck by just sending some people there. If it's much more than that, he'll have to go out and do a survey of his own."
"Unless he subpoenas the information from us," Avi says.
"I'd like to see Andrew Loeb go up against the Philippine legal system."
"You aren't in the Philippines-remember?"
Randy swallows and it comes out sounding like gollumagain.
"Do you have any information about that wreck on your laptop?"
"If I do, it's encrypted."
"So he'll just subpoena your encryption key."
"What if I forget my encryption key?"
"Then it's further evidence of how incompetent you are as a manager."
"Still, it's better than-"
"What about e-mail?" Avi asks. "Have you ever sent the location of the wreck in an e-mail message? Have you ever put it into a file?"
"Probably. But it's all encrypted."
This doesn't seem to ease the sudden tension on Avi's face.
"Why do you ask?" Randy says.
"Because," Avi says, pivoting to face in the general direction of downtown Los Altos. "All of a sudden I am thinking about Tombstone."
"Through which passeth all of our e-mail," Randy says.
"On whose hard drives all of our files are stored," Avi says.
"Which is located in the State of California, within easy subpoena range."
"Suppose you cc'd all of us on the same e-mail message," Avi says. "Cantrell's software, running on Tombstone, would have made multiple copies of that message and encrypted each one separately using the recipient's public key. These would have been mailed out to the recipients. Most of whom keep copies of their old e-mail messages on Tombstone."
Randy's nodding. "So if Andrew could subpoena Tombstone, he could find all of those copies and insist that you, Beryl, Tom, John, and Eb supply your decryption keys. And if all of you claimed you had forgotten your keys, then you are obviously lying through your teeth."
"Contempt of court for the whole gang," Avi says.
"The most cigarettes," Randy says. This is a contraction of the phrase, "We could end up in prison married to the guy with the most cigarettes," which Avi coined during their earlier Andrew-related legal troubles and had so many occasions to repeat that it was eventually reduced to this vestigial three words. Hearing it come out of his own mouth takes Randy back a few years, and fills him with a spirit of defiant nostalgia. Although he would feel considerably more defiant if they had actually won that case.
"I am just trying to figure out whether Andrew would know of Tombstone's existence," Avi says.
He and Randy begin following their own footprints back towards Avi's house. Randy notices that his stride is longer now. "Why not? The Dentist's due diligence people have been lodged in our butt-cracks ever since we gave them those shares."
"I detect some resentment in your voice, Randy."
"Not at all."
"Perhaps you disagree with my decision to settle the earlier breach-of-contract lawsuit by giving the Dentist some Epiphyte shares."
"It was a sad day. But there was no other way out of the situation."
"Okay."
"If I'm going to resent you for that, Avi, then you should resent me for not having made a better contract with Semper Marine."
"Ah, but you did! Handshake deal. Ten percent. Right?"
"Right. Let's talk about Tombstone."
"Tombstone's in a closet that we are subletting from Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems," Avi says. "I can tell you the due diligence boys have never been to Ordo."
"We must be paying rent to Ordo, then. They'd see the rent checks."
"A trivial amount of money. For storage space."
"The computer's a Finux box. A donated piece of junk running free software. No paper trail there," Randy says. "What about the T1 line?"
"They would have to be aware of the T1 line," Avi says. "That is both more expensive and more interesting than renting some storage space. And it generates a paper trail a mile wide."
"But do they know where it goes?"
"They would only need to go to the telephone company and ask them where the line is terminated."
"Which would give them what? The street address of an office building in Los Altos," Randy says. "There are, what, five office suites in that building."
"But if they were smart-and I'm afraid that Andrew does have this particular kind of intelligence-they would notice that one of those suites is leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc.-a highly distinctive name that also appears on those rent checks."
"And a subpoena against Ordo would follow immediately," Randy says. "When did you first hear about this lawsuit, by the way?"
"I got the call first thing this morning. You were still sleeping. I can't believe you drove down from Seattle in one push. It's like a thousand miles."
"I was trying to emulate Amy's cousins."
"You described them as teenagers."
"But I don't think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives."
"And that's kind of where you are right now?"
"It's exactly where I am."
"Horniness too."
"Yeah. But there are ways to deal with that."
"Don't look at me that way," Avi says. "I don't masturbate."
"Never?"
"Never. Formally gave it up. Swore off it."
"Even when you're on the road for a month?"
"Even then."
"Why on earth would you do such a thing, Avi?"
"Enhances my devotion to Devorah. Makes our sex better. Gives me an incentive to get back home."
"Well, that's very touching," Randy says, "and it might even be a good idea."
"I'm quite certain that it is."
"But it's more masochism than I'm really willing to shoulder at this point in my life."
"Why? Are you afraid that it would push you into-"
"Irrational behavior? Definitely."
"And by that," Avi says, "you mean, actually committing to Amy in some way.
"I know you thinkthat you just kicked me in the nuts rhetorically," Randy says, "but your premise is totally wrong. I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions."
"If she were a lesbian-exclusively-she'd have had the basic decency to tell you by now," Avi says. "My feeling about Amy is that she steers by her gut feelings, and her gut feeling is that you just don't have the level of passion that a woman like her probably would like to see as a prerequisite for getting involved."
"Whereas, if I stopped masturbating, I would become such a deranged maniac that she could trust me."
"Exactly. That's exactly how women think," Avi says.
"Don't you have some kind of rule against mixing business and personal conversations?"
"This is essentially a business conversation in that it is about your state of mind, and your current level of personal desperation, and what new options it may have opened up for you," Avi says.
They walk for five minutes without saying anything.
Randy says, "I have a feeling that we are about to get into a conversation about tampering with evidence."
"How interesting that you should bring that up. What's your feeling about it?"
"I'm against it," Randy says. "But to beat Andrew Loeb, I would do anything."
"The most cigarettes," Avi points out.
"First, we have to establish that it's necessary," Randy says. "If Andrew already knows where the wreck is, why bother?"
"Agreed. But if he has only a vague idea," Avi says, "then Tombstone becomes perhaps very important-if the information is stored on Tombstone."
"It almost certainly is," Randy says. "Because of my GPS signature. I know I sent at least one e-mail message from Glorywhile we were anchored directly over the wreck. The latitude and longitude will be right there."
"Well, if that's the case, then this could actually be kind of significant," Avi says. "Because if Andrew gets the exact coordinates of the wreck, he can send divers down and do an inventory and come up with some actual figures to use in the lawsuit. He can do this all very quickly. And if those figures exceed about half the value of Epiphyte, which frankly wouldn't be very difficult, then we become indentured servants of the Dentist."
"Avi, it's full of fucking gold bars," Randy says.
"It is?"
"Yes. Amy told me."
It is Avi's turn to come to a stop for a while and make swallowing noises.
"Sorry, I would have mentioned it earlier," Randy says, "but I didn't know it was relevant until now.
"How did Amy become aware of this?"
"Night before last, before she climbed on the plane at SeaTac, I helped her check her e-mail. Her father sent her a message saying that a certain number of intact Kriegsmarine dinner plates had been found on the submarine. This was a prearranged code for gold bars."
"You said 'full of fucking gold bars.' Could you translate that into an actual number, like in terms of dollars?"
"Avi, who gives a shit? I think we can agree that if the same thing is discovered by Andrew Loeb, we're finished."
"Wow!" Avi says. "So, in this, a hypothetical person who was not above tampering with evidence would certainly have a strong motive."
"It is make-or-break," Randy agrees.
They stop conversing for a while because they now have to dodge cars across the Pacific Coast Highway, and there is this unspoken agreement between them that not getting hit by speeding vehicles merits one's full attention. They end up running across the last couple of lanes in order to exploit a fortuitous break in the northbound traffic. Then neither of them especially feels like dropping back to a walk, so they run all the way across the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store and into the wooded creek-valley where Avi has his house. They are back at the house directly, and then Avi points significantly at the ceiling, which is his way of saying that they had better assume the house is bugged now. Avi walks over to his answering machine, which is blinking, and ejects the incoming-message tape. He shoves it in his pocket and strides across the house's living room, ignoring frosty glares from one of his Israeli nannies, who doesn't like him to wear shoes inside the house. Avi scoops a brightly colored plastic box off the floor. It has a handle, and rounded corners, and big bright buttons, and a microphone trailing behind it on a coiled yellow cord. Avi continues through the patio doors without breaking stride, the microphone bouncing up and down behind him on its helical cord. Randy follows him outside, across a strip of dead grass, and into a grove of cypress trees. They keep walking until they have dropped into a little dell that shields them from view of the street. Then Avi squats down and ejects a Raffi tape from the little-kid tape recorder and shoves in his incoming-message tape, rewinds it, and plays it.
"Hi, Avi? This is Dave? Calling from Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems? I'm the, uh, president here, you might remember? You have this computer in our wiring closet? Well, we just, like, got some visitors here? Like, guys in suits? And they said that they wanted to see that computer? And, like, if we handed it over to them right away they would be totally cool about it? But if we didn't, they'd come back with a subpoena and with cops and turn the place inside-out and just take it? So, now we're playing stupid? Please call me."
"The machine said there were two messages," Avi says.
"Hi, Avi? This is Dave again? Playing stupid didn't work, and so now we told them to fuck off. The head suit is very mad at us. He called me out. We had a really tense discussion in the McDonald's across the street. He says that I am being stupid. That when they come and turn the place upside-down looking for Tombstone, that it will totally fuck up Ordo's corporate operations and inflict major losses on our shareholders. He said that this would probably be grounds for a minority-shareholder lawsuit against me and that he'd be happy to file that lawsuit. I haven't told him yet that Ordo has only five shareholders and that all of us work here. The manager of the McDonald's asked us to leave because we were disrupting some children's Happy Meals. I acted scared and told him that I would go in and look at Tombstone and see what would be involved in removing it. Instead, I am calling you. Hal and Rick and Carrie are uploading the entire contents of our own system to a remote location so that when these cops come and rip everything out nothing will be lost. Please call me. Good-bye."
"Gosh," Randy says, "I feel like shit for having inflicted all of this on Dave and his crew.
"It'll be great publicity for them," Avi says. "I'm sure Dave has half a dozen television crews poised in the McDonald's at this moment, stoking themselves to the rim of insanity on thirty-two-ounce coffees."
"Well . . . what do you think we should do?"
"It is only fitting and proper that I should go there," Avi says.
"You know, we could just 'fess up. Tell the Dentist about the ten-percent handshake deal."
"Randy, get this through your head. The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine. The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine."
"The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine," Randy says.
"So, I am going to replace this cassette," Avi says, popping the tape out of the machine, "and start driving really really fast."
"Well, I'm going to do what my conscience tells me to do," Randy says.
"The most cigarettes," Avi says.
"I'm not going to do it from here," Randy says, "I'm going to do it from the Sultanate of Kinakuta."
Chapter 75 CHRISTMAS 1944
Goto Dengo has pointed wing out to Lieutenant Mori, and Mori's guard troops, and made it clear that they are not to run their bayonets through Wing's torso and wiggle the blades around in his vitals unless there is some exceptionally good reason, such as suppressing all-out rebellion. The same qualities that make Wing valuable to Goto Dengo make him the most likely leader of any organized breakout attempt.
As soon as the general and his aide have departed from Bundok, Goto Dengo goes and finds Wing, who is supervising the boring of the diagonal shaft towards Lake Yamamoto. He is one of those lead-by-example types and so he is way up at the rock face, working a drill, at the end of a few hundred meters of tunnel so narrow that it has to be negotiated on hands and knees. Goto Dengo has to present himself at the Golgotha end of the tunnel and send a messenger crawling up into it, wearing a rusty helmet to protect himself from the shattered stone that drizzles down from the rock face.
Wing appears fifteen minutes later, black from the rock dust that has condensed onto his sweaty skin, red where the skin has been abraded or slashed by stone. He devotes a few minutes to methodically hawking dust up out of his lungs. Every so often he rolls his tongue like a peashooter and fires a jet of phlegm against the wall and clinically observes it run down the stone. Goto Dengo stands by politely. These Chinese have an entire medical belief system centering on phlegm, and working in the mines gives them a lot to talk about.
"Ventilation not good?" Goto Dengo says. Whorehouse Shanghainese has not equipped him with certain technical terms like "ventilation," so Wing has taught him the vocabulary.
Wing grimaces. "I want to finish tunnel. I do not want to sink more ventilation shaft. Waste of time!"
The only way to keep the workers at the rock face from suffocating is by sinking vertical air shafts from the surface down to the diagonal shaft at intervals. They have devoted as much effort to these as they have to the diagonal itself, and were hoping they'd never have to dig another.
"How much farther?" Goto Dengo asks, as Wing finishes another paroxysm. Wing looks thoughtfully at the ceiling. He has Golgotha mapped out in his head better than its designer does. "Fifty meter."
The designer cannot help grinning. "Is that all? Excellent."
"We go fast now," Wing says proudly, his teeth gleaming for a moment in the lamplight. Then he seems to remember that he is a slave laborer in a death camp and the teeth disappear. "We can go faster if we dig in straight line."
Wing is alluding to the fact that the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto:
is laid out in the blueprints like this. But Goto Dengo, without changing the blueprints, has ordered that it actually be dug like this:
These bends increase the length of the tunnel by quite a bit. Furthermore the rubble tends to pile up in the flatter western section and must be raked along by hand. The only people who know about the existence of these bends are him, Wing, and Wing's crew. The only person who understands the true reason for their existence is Goto Dengo.
"Do not dig in a straight line. Keep digging as I said."
"Yes."
"Also, you will need a new ventilation shaft."
"Moreventilation shaft! No . . ." Wing protests.
The ventilation shafts shown on the plans, awkward zig-zags and all, are bad enough.
But Goto Dengo has several times told Wing and his crew to begin work on some additional "ventilation shafts," before changing his mind and telling them to abandon the work-with this result:
"These new ventilation shafts will be dug from the top down," says Goto Dengo.
"No!" says Wing, still completely flabbergasted. This is utter madness in that if you dig a vertical shaft from the top downwards, you have to haul the rubble up out of the hole. If you do it the other way, the rubble falls down and can be easily disposed of.
"You will get new helpers. Filipino workers."
Wing looks stunned. He is even more cut off from the world than Goto Dengo. He must infer the progress of the war from maddeningly oblique hints. He and his workers fit the crazily scattered evidence at their disposal into elaborate theories. These theories are all so wildly wrong that Goto Dengo would laugh out loud at them, if not for the fact that he is sympathetic. Neither he nor Captain Noda knew that MacArthur had landed on Leyte, or that the Imperial Navy had been crushed, until the general told them.
One thing that Wing and his men have got right is that Bundok employs imported labor in order to ensure secrecy. If any of the Chinese workers do manage to escape, they will find themselves on an island, far from home, among people who do not speak their language, and who do not especially like them. The fact that Filipino workers will soon be arriving gives them a lot to think about. They will be up all night whispering to each other, trying to reconstruct their theories.
"We don't need new workers. We are almost done," Wing says, his pride hurt again.
Goto Dengo taps himself on both shoulders with both index fingers, suggesting epaulets. It takes Wing only an instant to realize that he's talking about the general, and then a profoundly conspiratorial look comes over his face and he takes half a step closer. "Orders," Goto Dengo says. "We dig lots of ventilation shafts now."
Wing was not a miner when he arrived at Bundok, but he is now. He is baffled. As he should be. "Ventilation shafts? To where?"
"To nowhere," Goto Dengo says.
Wing's face is still blank. He thinks Goto Dengo's bad Shanghainese is preventing understanding. But Goto Dengo knows that Wing will figure it out soon, some night during the bad fretful moments that always come just before sleep.
And then he will lead the rebellion, and Lieutenant Mori's men will be ready for it; they will open fire with their mortars, they will detonate the mines, use the machine guns, sweeping across their carefully plotted interlocking fields of fire. None of them will survive.
Goto Dengo doesn't want that. So he reaches out and slaps Wing on the shoulder. "I will give you instructions. We will make a special shaft." Then he turns around and leaves; he has surveying to do. He knows that Wing will put it all together in time to save himself.
Filipino prisoners arrive, in columns that have degenerated into ragged skeins, shuffling on bare feet, leaving a wet red trail up the road. They are prodded onwards by the boots and bayonets of Nipponese Army troops, who look almost as wretched. When Goto Dengo sees them staggering into the camp, he realizes that they must have been on their feet continuously since the order was given by the general, two days ago. The general promised five hundred new workers; slightly fewer than three hundred actually arrive, and from the fact that none of them is being carried on stretchers-a statistical impossibility, given their average physical condition-Goto Dengo assumes that the other two hundred must have stumbled or passed out en route, and been executed where they hit the ground.
Bundok is eerily well stocked with fuel and rations, and he sees to it that the prisoners and the Army troops alike are well fed, and given a day of rest.
Then he puts them to work. Goto Dengo has been commanding men long enough, now, that he picks out the good ones right away. There is a toothless, pop-eyed character named Rodolfo with iron-grey hair and a big cyst on his cheek, arms that are too long, hands like grappling hooks, and splay-toed feet that remind him of the natives he lived with on New Guinea. His eyes are no particular color-they seem to have been put together from shards of other people's eyes, scintillas of grey, blue, hazel, and black all sintered together. Rodolfo is self-conscious about his lack of teeth and always holds one of his sprawling, prehensile paws over his mouth when he speaks. Whenever Goto Dengo or another authority figure comes nearby, all of the young Filipino men avert their gaze and look significantly at Rodolfo, who steps forward, covers his mouth, and fixes his weird, alarming stare upon the visitor.
"Form your men into half a dozen squads and give each squad a name and a leader. Make sure each man knows the name of his squad and of his leader," Goto Dengo says rather loudly. At least some of the other Filipinos must speak English. Then he bends closer and says quietly, "Keep a few of the best and strongest men for yourself."
Rodolfo blinks, stiffens, steps back, removes his hand from his mouth and uses it to snap out a salute. His hand is like an awning that throws a shadow over his entire face and chest. It is obvious that he learned to salute from Americans. He turns on his heel.
"Rodolfo."
Rodolfo turns around again, looking so irritated that Goto Dengo must stifle a laugh.
"MacArthur is on Leyte."
Rodolfo's chest inflates like a weather balloon and he gains about three inches in height, but the expression on his face does not change.
The news ramifies through the Filipino camp like lightning seeking the ground. The tactic has the desired effect of giving the Filipinos a reason to live again; they suddenly display great energy and verve. A supply of badly worn drills and air compressors has arrived on carabao drawn carts, evidently brought in from one of the other Bundok-like sites around Luzon. The Filipinos, experts at internal combustion, cannibalize some compressors to fix others. Meanwhile the drills are passed around to Rodolfo's squads, who drag them up onto the top of the ridge between the rivers and begin sinking the new "ventilation shafts" while Wing's Chinese men put the last touches on the Golgotha complex below.
The carts that brought in the equipment were simply grabbed off the roads by the Nipponese Army, along with their drivers-mostly farm-boys-and pressed into service on the spot. The farmboys can never leave Bundok, of course. The weaker carabaos are slaughtered for meat, the stronger ones put to work on Golgotha, and the drivers are assimilated into the workforce. One of these is a boy named Juan with a big round head and a distinctly Chinese cast to his features. He turns out to be trilingual in English, Tagalog, and Cantonese. He can communicate in a sort of pidgin with Wing and the other Chinese, frequently by using a finger to draw Chinese characters on the palm of his hand. Juan is small, healthy, and has a kind of wary agility that Goto Dengo thinks may be useful in what is to come, and so he becomes one of the special crew.
The submerged plumbing in Lake Yamamoto needs to be inspected. Goto Dengo has Rodolfo ask around and see if there are any men among them who have worked as pearl divers. He quickly finds one, a lithe, frail-looking fellow from Palawan, named Agustin. Agustin is weak from dysentery, but he seems to perk up around water, and after a couple of days' rest is diving down to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto with no trouble. He becomes another one of Rodolfo's picked men.
There are really too many Filipinos for the number of tools and holes that they have available, and so the work goes quickly at first as fresh men are quickly rotated through by the squad leaders. Then, one night at about two in the morning, an unfamiliar sound reverberates through the jungle, filtering up from the lowlands where the Tojo River meanders through cane fields and rice paddies.
It is the sound of vehicles. Masses of them. Since the Nipponese have been out of fuel for months, Goto Dengo's first thought is that it must be MacArthur.
He throws on a uniform and runs down to Bundok's main gate along with the other officers. Dozens of trucks, and a few automobiles, are queued up there, engines running, headlights off. When he hears a Nipponese voice coming from the lead car, his heart sinks. He long ago stopped feeling bad about wanting to be rescued by General Douglas MacArthur.
Many soldiers ride atop the trucks. When the sun rises, Goto Dengo savors the novel and curious sight of fresh, healthy, well-fed Nipponese men. They are armed with light and heavy machine guns. They look like Nipponese soldiers did way back in 1937, when they were rolling across northern China. It gives Goto Dengo a strange feeling of nostalgia to remember a day when a terrible defeat was not imminent, when they were not going to lose everything horribly. A lump actually gathers in his throat, and his nose begins to run.
Then he snaps out of it, realizing that the big day has finally arrived. The part of him that is still a loyal soldier of the emperor has a duty to see that the vital war materiel, which has just arrived, is stored away in the big vault of Golgotha. The part of him that isn't a loyal soldier anymore still has a lot to accomplish.
In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can't find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people learn their roles. The heavier trucks cannot make it up the rough road that Goto Dengo has had built up the streambed of the Tojo River, but a couple of the small ones can, and these become the shuttles. So the big trucks pull, one by one, into a heavily fenced and guarded area-well sheltered from MacArthur's observation planes-that was built months ago. Filipinos swarm into these trucks and unload crates, which are small, but evidently quite heavy. Meanwhile the smaller trucks shuttle the crates up the Tojo River Road to the entrance of Golgotha, where they are unloaded onto hand cars and rolled into the tunnel to the main vault. As per the instructions handed down from on high, Goto Dengo sees to it that every twentieth crate is diverted to the fool's chamber.
The unloading proceeds automatically from there, and Goto Dengo devotes most of these days to supervising the final stages of the digging. The new ventilation shafts are proceeding on schedule, and he only needs to check them once a day. The diagonal is now only a few meters away from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. Groundwater has begun to seep through small cracks in the bedrock and trickle down the diagonal into Golgotha, where it collects in a sump that drains into the Tojo. Another few meters of cutting and they will break through into the short stub tunnel that Wing and his men created many months ago, digging downwards from what later became the bottom of the lake.
Wing himself is otherwise engaged these days. He and Rodolfo and their special crew are completing final preparations. Rodolfo and company are digging down from the top of the ridge, cutting what looks like just another vertical ventilation shaft. Wing and company are directly below, engaged in a complicated subterranean plumbing project.
Goto Dengo has entirely lost track of what day it is. About four days after the trucks come, though, he gets a clue. The Filipinos spontaneously break into song over their evening rice bowls. Goto Dengo recognizes the tune vaguely; he occasionally heard the American Marines singing it in Shanghai.
What child is this, Who laid to rest, On Mary's lap is sleeping?
The Filipinos sing that and other songs, in English and Spanish and Latin, all evening long. After they get their lungs unlimbered they sing astonishingly well, occasionally breaking into two— and three-part harmony. At first, Lieutenant Mori's guards get itchy trigger fingers, thinking it's some kind of a signal for a mass breakout. Goto Dengo doesn't want to see his work cut short by a massacre, and so he explains to them that it is a religious thing, a peaceful celebration.
That night, another midnight truck convoy arrives and the workers are rousted to unload it. They work cheerfully, singing Christmas carols and making jokes about Santa Claus.
The whole camp stays up well past sunrise unloading trucks. Bundok has gradually become a nocturnal place anyway, to avoid the gaze of observation planes. Goto Dengo is just thinking of hitting the sack when a fusillade of sharp crackling noises breaks out up above the camp on the Tojo River. Ammunition being in short supply, hardly anyone actually fires guns anymore, and he almost doesn't recognize the sound of the Nambu.
Then he jumps onto the running board of a truck and tells the driver to head upstream. The shooting has died down as suddenly as it started. Beneath the bald tires of the truck, the river has turned opaque and bright red.
About two dozen corpses lie in the water before the entrance to Golgotha. Nipponese soldiers stand around them, up to their calves in the red water, their weapons slung from their shoulders. A sergeant is going around with a bayonet, stirring the guts of the Filipinos who are still moving.
"What is going on?" Goto Dengo says. No one answers. But no one shoots him, either; he will be allowed to figure it out himself.
The workers had clearly been unloading another small truck, which is still parked there at the head of the road. Resting beneath its tailgate is a wooden crate that was apparently dropped. Its heavy contents have exploded the crate and spilled across the uneven conglomerate of river rocks, poured concrete and mine tailings that make up the riverbed here.
Goto Dengo sloshes up to it and looks. He sees it clearly enough, but he can't somehow absorb the knowledge until he feels it in his hands. He bends down, wraps his fingers around a cold brick on the bottom of the river, and heaves it up out of the water. It is a glossy ingot of yellow metal, incredibly heavy, stamped with words in English: BANK OF SINGAPORE.
There is a scuffle behind him. The sergeant stands at the ready as two of his men jerk the Filipino driver out of the cab of his truck that Goto Dengo rode in on. Calmly-looking almost bored-the sergeant bayonets the driver. The men drop him in the red water and he disappears. "Merry Christmas" one of the soldiers cracks. Everyone laughs, except for Goto Dengo.
Chapter 76 PULSE
As Avi walks back through his house, he utters something biblical-sounding in Hebrew that causes his kids to burst into tears, and his nannies to rise from the kid-mat and begin shoving stuff into bags. Devorah emerges from a back room where she's been sleeping off some morning sickness. She and Avi embrace tenderly in the hallway and Randy begins to feel like a fleck of debris lodged in someone's eye. So he heads straight for an exit, goes out to his car and starts driving. He winds through the hills over the San Andreas Fault to Skyline and then heads south. Ten minutes later, Avi's car howls past him in the left lane, doing ninety or a hundred. Randy barely has time to read the bumper sticker: MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.
Randy's looking for a totally anonymous location where he can patch into the Internet. A hotel doesn't work because a hotel keeps good records of outgoing telephone calls. What he should really do is use this packet radio interface he has for his laptop, but even that requires a place to sit down and work undisturbed for a while. Which gets him thinking in terms of a fast food joint, not to be found in the mid-peninsular wasteland. By the time he has reached the northern skirts of the Valley-Menlo Park and Palo Alto-he has decided fuck it, he'll just go to the scene of the action. Maybe he could be of some use there. So he gets off at the El Monte exit and heads into the business district of Los Altos, a pretty typical mid-twentieth-century American downtown gradually being metabolized by franchises.
A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety-degree angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute-angle lots and two (larger) obtuse-angle lots. On one side of the major street, the obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a two-storey office building, home of Ordo's offices and Tombstone. The acute-angle lot is occupied by the McDonald's. On the opposite side of the major street, the acute-angle lot is occupied by, weirdly enough, a 24 Jam, the only one Randy has ever seen in the Western Hemisphere. The obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a Park 'n' Lock, where you can park for the old-fashioned purpose of wandering around the business district from store to store.
The parking lot of the McDonald's is full, and so Randy pulls through its drive-through window, chooses n,where nis a random number between one and six, and asks for Value Meal nwith super-size fries. This having been secured, he guns the Acura directly across the big street into the Park 'n' Lock just in time to see its last available space being seized by a minivan bearing the logo of a San Jose television station. Randy is not planning to stray far from his car, so he just blocks in another car. But as he is setting the parking brake, he notices movement inside it, and with a bit of further attention realizes he is watching a man with long hair and a beard methodically ramming shells into a pump shotgun. The man catches sight of Randy in his rearview mirror and turns around with a scrupulously polite pardon-me-sir-but-you-seem-to-have-blocked-me-in look. Randy recognizes him as Mike or Mark, a graphics card hacker who farms ostriches in Gilroy (quirky hobbies being de rigueur in the high-tech world). He moves the Acura, blocking in what looks like an abandoned van from the Starsky and Hutchepoch.
Randy climbs up on the roof of his car with his laptop and his Value Meal n.Until recently he would never have sat on top of his Acura because his considerable mass would dimple the sheet metal. But after Amy rammed it with the truck, Randy became much less anal, and now sees it as a tool to be used until it is just a moraine of rusted shards. He happens to have a twelve-volt adapter for the laptop, so he runs that down into his cigarette lighter socket. Finally, he's settled, and gets a chance to take a good look around.
The parking lot of Novus Ordo Seclorum's office building is filled with cop cars, and BMWs and Mercedes Benzes that Randy assumes belong to lawyers. Avi's Range Rover is parked jauntily on top of some landscaping, and a few TV camera crews have set up, as well. In front of the building's main entrance a lot of people are jammed into the smallest possible space screaming at each other. They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring of cops, media, and law-firm minions-collectively, what Tolkien would call Men-and a few non— or post-human creatures imbued with peculiar physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive, surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole thing, presumably, is Gollum.
There is a little window on the screen of Randy's laptop showing a cheesy 1940s-newsreel-style animation of a radio tower, with zigzaggy conceptual radio waves radiating outwards from it over the whole earth, which is shown ludicrously not to scale in this rendering-the diameter of the earth is about equal to the height of the radio tower. That these Jovian info-bolts are visible and moving is a visual cue that his radio adapter has managed to patch itself into the packet radio network. Randy opens a terminal window and types
telnet laundry.org
and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info-bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine-running the Secure Wide Area Network protocol-which means that every packet going back and forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.
Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long black Western-style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t-shirt he's got on underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a question-mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so that just an eye-slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be really alarmed if it weren't for the fact that several of his friends, such as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs across the street to the 24 Jam.
Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh-"secure shell"-a way of further encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated. Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types
telnet crypt.kk
and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).
In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other elvishlooking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards. There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi's HEAP project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of years ago and goes helicopter-skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows everything there is to know about encrypted credit-card transactions on the Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys are wearing long coats and some aren't. There is a lot of Secret Admirers iconography: t-shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto, or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are having an energetic and very happy conversation-though it looks a bit forced-because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary-looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.
This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police, who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one-shot .22 derringer requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers-who tend to be gun nuts-have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really big.
A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy's screen. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, it begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what a great idea the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command
telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com
and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets
tombstone login:
which means that he is now free to log on to the machine right across the street from him. And now Mr. Randy has a little decision to make.
So far, he's clean. The bits coming out of his laptop are encrypted; so even if someone is monitoring the local packet radio net, all they know is that some encrypted bits are flying around. They cannot trace any of those bits to Randy's machine without bringing in an elaborate radio direction-finding rig and zeroing in on him most conspicuously. Those encrypted bits are eventually finding their way to laundry.org up in Oakland, which is a big Internet host that probably has thousands of packets rushing in and out of it every second. If someone were tapping laundry.org's T3 line, which would require an enormous investment in computers and communications gear, they would detect a very small number of encrypted packets going out to crypt.kk in Kinakuta. But these packets would have been stripped of any identifying information before leaving laundry.org and so there would be no way to tell where they originated. Now, crypt.kk is also an anonymizer, and so an entity tapping its staggeringly enormous T5 line (a job on the order of eavesdropping on a small country's telecommunications system) might theoretically be able to detect a few packets going back and forth between crypt.kk and Tombstone. But again, these would be stripped of identifying information, and so it would be impossible to trace them even as far back as laundry.org, to say nothing of tracing them all the way back to Randy's laptop.
But in order for Randy to get into Tombstone and begin actually tampering with the evidence, he must now log on. If it were a poorly secured host of the type that used to be legion on the Internet, he could just exploit one of its numerous security holes and crack his way into it, so that if his activities on the machine were discovered, he could claim that it wasn't him-just some cracker who happened to break into the machine at the very moment it was being seized by the cops. But Randy has spent the last several years of his life making machines such as this one impregnable to crackers, and he knows it's impossible.