Cryptonomicon (99 page)

Noda beckons him over to an outcropping from which they can see down into the valley of the Tojo River. Goto Dengo, unsteady for any number of reasons, suffers a spell of dizziness and nearly falls off. The problem is disorientation: he does not recognize the river. Until now, it has always been a few trickles of water braided down a rocky bed. Even before they ran a road up it, you could get up almost as far as the waterfall by hopping from one dry rock to the next.

Now, all of a sudden, the river is wide, deep, and murky. The tips of a few big rocks protrude from the surface here and there.

He remembers something he saw a hundred years ago, in a previous incarnation, on another planet: a bedsheet from the Manila Hotel with a crude map sketched on it. The Tojo River drawn in with a fat trail of blue fountain-pen ink.

“We dynamited the rockfall,” Noda says, “according to the plan.”

Long ago, they had poised rocks above a bottleneck in the river, ready to create a little dam. But setting off that dynamite was supposed to be almost the last thing they did before sealing themselves up inside.

“But we are not ready,” Goto Dengo says.

Noda laughs. He seems quite high-spirited. “You have been telling me for a month that you are ready.”

“Yes,” Lieutenant Goto says, slowly and thickly, “you are right. We are ready.”

Noda slaps him on the back. “You must get to the main entrance before it floods.”

“My crew?”

“Your crew is waiting for you there.”

Goto Dengo begins walking towards the trail that will take him down to the main entrance. Along the way, he passes the top of another ventilation shaft, Several dozen workers are queued up there, thumbs lashed together behind their backs with piano wire, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. One by one, prisoners kneel at the lip of the shaft. Lieutenant Mori whips his officer’s sword into the nape of each neck with a terrific grunt. Head and body tumble forward into the ventilation shaft and thud meatily into other bodies, far below, a couple of seconds later. Every leaf and pebble within a three-meter radius of the shaft opening is saturated with bright red blood, and so is Lieutenant Mori.

“Don’t worry about that,” Captain Noda says. “I will see to it that the tops of the shafts are backfilled with rubble, as we discussed. The jungle will grow over them long before the Americans ever find this place.”

Goto Dengo averts his eyes and turns to leave.

“Lieutenant Goto!” says a voice. He turns around. It is Lieutenant Mori, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. A Filipino kneels before him, mumbling a prayer in Latin, fumbling with a rosary that dangles from his bound hands.

“Yes, Lieutenant Mori.”

“According to my roster, six prisoners are signed out to you. I will need them.”

“Those six prisoners are down below, helping to load in the last shipment.”

“But all of the shipment is inside the tunnels now.”

“Yes, but not well placed. The entire purpose of the fool’s vault is ruined if we strew gold and diamonds around the place in such a way as to lead thieves deeper into the caverns. I need these men to continue that work.”

“You take full responsibility for them?”

“I do,” Goto Dengo says.

“If there are only six,” Captain Noda says, “then your crew should be able to keep them under control.”

“I will see you at Yasukuni, Goto Dengo,” says Lieutenant Mori.

“I will look forward to it,” Goto Dengo says. He does not add that Yasukuni must be a very crowded place by now, and they will probably have a terrible time finding each other.

“I envy you. The end will be longer and harder for those of us on the outside.” Lieutenant Mori snaps his blade into the back of the Filipino’s head, cutting him off between an Ave and a Maria.

“Your heroism will not go unrewarded,” Goto Dengo says.

Lieutenant Mori’s crew awaits him down below, in front of the mouse-hole that leads into Golgotha: four hand-picked soldiers. Each wears a thousand-stitch headband, and so each has an orange ball centered on his forehead, reminding Goto Dengo not of the Rising Sun but of an exit wound. The water is up to mid-thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer him politely.

Goto Dengo squats in the opening. Only his head and shoulders are above the water. Before him the tunnel is black. It takes a powerful effort of will for him to enter. But
it is no worse than what he used to do in the abandoned mines, back in Hokkaido.

Of course, the abandoned mines weren’t going to be dynamited shut behind him.

Going forward is his chance to survive. If he hesitates, Noda will kill him on the spot, and all his crew, and others will be sent in to finish the job. Noda made sure that others were trained to do it.

“See you at Yasukuni,” he says to Captain Noda, and without waiting for a response he sloshes forward into blackness.

B
Y THE TIME
R
ANDY REACHES THE
A
IR
K
INAKUTA
boarding lounge, he has already forgotten how he reached the airport. He honestly can’t remember. Did he hail a taxi? Not likely in downtown Los Altos. Did he get a ride from some hacker? He couldn’t have driven the Acura, because the Acura’s electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun. He had pulled the title out of the glove compartment and signed it over to a Ford dealer three blocks away, in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash.

Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.

He has always wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of an exotic foreign airline and saying, “Get me on the next plane to X.” But now he’s just done it and it wasn’t cool and romantic as he had hoped. It was sort of bleak and stressful and expensive. He had to buy a first-class ticket, which consumed most of the five thousand dollars. But he doesn’t feel like beating himself to death over how he is managing his assets just now, i.e., at a time when his net worth is a negative number that can only be expressed using scientific notation. The probability is high that he failed to wipe Tombstone’s hard drive before the cops seized it, and that the Dentist’s lawsuit will consequently succeed.

On his way down the concourse he stands and stares at a
bank of telephones for a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent events. It would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub clean of treasure as fast as possible, reducing its value and hence the damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.

The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist has a way to claim damages from Epiphyte. The amount of those damages is
x,
where
x
is what the Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper Marine. If such a contract had specified a fifty-fifty split, then
x
would be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other frictional effects of the real world. So if there’s ten million dollars in the wreck, then
x
works out to around half a million bucks.

In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire an additional forty percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it
y
.

If
x
>
y,
the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say, “You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $
x
. But as I look at the parlous state of the corporation’s finances I see that there’s no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is really, really close to being zero, you’re going to have to give him almost all of it.”

So how to make
x
<
y
? Either reduce the value of the wreck, by stripping it of its gold, or else increase the value of Epiphyte, by—what, exactly?

In better times they could maybe take the company public. But setting up an IPO takes months. And no investor’s going to touch it when it’s encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.

Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end-loader and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte’s account. That’d do it. The whole
concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of the international concourse.

Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold-in-the-jungle concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi’s family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the group’s movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink into the men’s room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus complete asthma-attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.

“So. Uh, going to Israel?”

“El Al doesn’t fly to Acapulco.” Pow! Devorah is in peak form.

“Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?”

“You’re asking me? I kind of assumed you would know,” Devorah says.

“Well, things have been, certainly, volatile,” Randy says. “I don’t know if fleeing the country is warranted.”

“Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking out of your pocket?”

“Oh, you know… some business issues need resolving.”

“You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?” Devorah asks.

Randy sighs. “That depends. Do you?”

“Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?”

“Because you’ve
been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes’ notice.”

“We’re going to Israel, Randy. That’s not being uprooted. That’s being rerooted.” Or perhaps she is saying “rerouted.” Without a transcript, there is no way for Randy to tell.

“Yeah, but it’s still kind of a hassle—”

“Compared to what?”

“Compared to staying at home and living your life.”

“This is my life, Randy.” Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I’ll-do-my-job, you-do-yours, why-are-you-in-my-face attitude. Randy feels like an idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah’s bag. She is clearly just this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why doesn’t he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the Dentist a big hug?

Randy says, “I assume you’ll be in touch with Avi before you take off. Would you give him a message?”

“What’s the message?”

“Zero.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Randy says.

Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi’s practice of conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a time, à la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, “zero” means that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone’s hard drive.

Air Kinakuta’s first-class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un-American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he will sink straight into a coma
if he goes there, and they would have to load him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport, clutching his hip spastically every time he re-realizes that his laptop isn’t dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop’s hard drive, and then threw away the rest.

Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news-bits even more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely surprised, to see footage of black-hatted Secret Admirers exercising their Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo’s barricade avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons drawn. Paul Comstock is shown—pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and Epiphyte and now it’s become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and this makes Randy irritated and confused.

He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he doesn’t partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling-while-Rome-burns thing going for it that works for him just now.

As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards that are stuffed in among the in-flight magazines and vomit-sacs. One of these extols the fact that Sultan-Class passengers (as first-class passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe’s GSM telephone. It’s an
Australian phone number, but it’ll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it’s something like six
A.M
. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a taxi.

“It’s Randy. On a plane,” says Randy. “An Air Kinakuta plane.”

“Randy! Well I’ve just been watching you on television,” Doug says.

It takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to cleanse his palate of the caviar.

“Yeah,” Doug continues, “I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed you sitting on top of a car typing. What’s going on?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all,” Randy says. He figures that this is a big stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he’ll be more likely to effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka and says, “Wow, this Sultan-Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web search on Ordo, you’ll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with us. Nothing.”

“That’s funny, because Comstock is denying that it’s a crackdown on Ordo,” Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy’s nose before he controls it. “They say that it’s just a little old civil suit,” Doug says, now using a petal-soft, wounded-innocent tone.

“Ordo’s status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears is just coincidental,” Randy guesses.

“That’s right.”

“Well then, I’m sure there’s nothing to it other than our troubles with the Dentist,” Randy says.

“What troubles are those, Randy?”

“Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I’m sure you will have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning.”

“Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then,” Doug Shaftoe says.

“Maybe I’ll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta,” Randy says.

“You have a good flight, Randall.”

“Have a nice day, Douglas.”

Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink into a well-deserved plane-coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It is so disorienting to have one’s phone ring on an airplane that he doesn’t know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what’s going on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.

When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, “You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan-Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?” Randy is certain he’s never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that’s been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.

“Um, who’s this?”

“Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay telephone somewhere and then call you back?”

“Who is this, please?”

“You think that’s more secure than his GSM phone? It’s not really.” The speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he’s been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his conversational stride.

“Okay,” Randy says, “you know who I am and whom I was calling. So obviously you are surveilling me. You’re not working for the Dentist, I take it. That leaves—what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?”