is is not the same kind of tape he saw earlier,
smoking through the big machine. This is narrower, and when it emerges from
the machine, it does not have holes punched through it for a machine to
read. Instead, every time the girl slams down one of the keys on the
keyboard copying the text printed on the slip a new letter is printed on the
tape. But not the same letter that she typed.
It does not take her long to type in all of the letters. Then she tears
the tape from her machine. It has a sticky backing which she uses to paste
it directly onto the original intercept slip. She hands it to Packard,
giving him a demure smile. He responds with something between a nod and a
smart little bow, the kind of thing no American male could ever get away
with. He glances at it and hands it to Waterhouse.
The letters on the tape say
EINUNDZWANZIGSTPANZERDIVISIONBERICHTET
KEINEBESONDEREEREIGNISSE
"In order to obtain those settings, you have to break the code which
changes every day?"
Packard smiles in agreement. "At midnight. If you stay here " he checks
his watch " for another four hours, you will see fresh intercepts coming in
from the Y Service that will produce utter gibberish when we run them
through the Typex, because the Jerries will have changed all their codes on
the stroke of midnight. Rather like Cinderella's magic carriage turning back
into a pumpkin. We must then analyze the new intercepts using the bombes,
and figure out the day's new codes."
"How long does that take?"
"Sometimes we are lucky and have broken the day's codes by two or three
o'clock in the morning. Typically it does not happen until after noon or
evening. Sometimes we do not succeed at all."
"Okay, this is a stupid question, but I want to be clear. These Typex
machines which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation are a completely
different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes."
"The bombes, compared to these, are of a completely different,
enormously higher order of sophistication," Packard agrees. "They are almost
like mechanical thinking machines."
"Where are they located?"
"Hut 11. But they won't be running just now."
"Right," Waterhouse says, "not until after midnight when the carriage
turns back into a pumpkin, and you need to break tomorrow's Enigma
settings."
"Precisely."
Packard steps over to a small wooden hatch set low into one of the
hut's exterior walls. Next to it sits an office tray with a cup hook screwed
into each end, and a string tied to each cup hook. One of the strings is
piled up loose on the floor. The wall hatch has been slid shut on the other
string. Packard puts the message slip on top of a pile of similar ones that
has accumulated in the tray, then slides the hatch open, revealing a narrow
tunnel leading away from the hut.
"Okay, your pull!" he shouts.
"Okay, my pull!" comes an answering voice a moment later. The string
goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.
"On its way to Hut 3," Packard explains.
"Then so am I," Waterhouse says.
***
Hut 3 is only a few yards away, on the other side of the inevitable
blast wall. GERMAN MILITARY SECTION has been scrawled on the door in
cursive; Waterhouse presumes that this is as opposed to "NAVAL" which is in
Hut 4. The ratio of men to women seems higher here. During wartime it is
startling to see so many hale young men in one room together. Some are in
Army or RAF uniforms, some in civvies, and there is even one Naval officer.
A large horseshoe shaped table dominates the center of the building,
with a rectangular table off to the side. Each chair at each table is
occupied by intent workers. The intercept slips are pulled into the hut on
the wooden tray and then move from chair to chair according to some highly
organized scheme that Waterhouse can only vaguely grasp at this point.
Someone explains to him that the bombes just broke the day's codes around
sundown, and so the entire day's load of intercepts has just come down the
tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours.
He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time
being that is, he'll concentrate only on its inputs and outputs of
information and ignore the internal details. Bletchley Park, taken in its
entirety, is a black box of sorts: random letters stream into it, strategic
intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to
most of the people on the Ultra distribution list. The question that
Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of information
coming out of this place, hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and
the behaviors of the Allied commanders? And does it point to Rudolf von
Hacklheber, Ph.D.?
Chapter 20 KINAKUTA
Whoever laid out the flight paths into the sultan's new airport must
have been in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you're lucky
enough to be in a window seat on the left side of the plane, as Randy
Waterhouse is, the view during the final approach looks like a propaganda
flyby.
Kinakuta's matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and
eventually soar high enough to be dusted with snow at the summits, even
though the island is only seven degrees north of the equator. Randy sees
right away what Avi meant when he said that the place was Muslim around the
edges and animist in the middle. The only places you could hope to build
anything like a modern city are along the coast, where there's an
intermittent fringe of nearly flat land a beige rind clinging to a giant
emerald. The biggest and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of
the island, where the main river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a
flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta that reaches out into the
Sulu Sea for a mile or two.
Randy gives up counting the oil rigs ten minutes before Kinakuta City
even comes into sight. From high above they look like flaming tank traps
scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude
they begin to look more like factories on stilts, topped with high stacks
where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more alarming as the
plane gets closer to the water, and it begins to seem as if the pilot is
threading his way between pillars of fire that would roast the 777 like a
pigeon on the wing.
Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States. He has
been trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple
of encyclopedia entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories,
some puckish but basically glowing articles in the Economist. Putting his
rusty interlibrary loan skills to work, he paid the Library of Congress to
make him a photocopy of the one book he could find specifically about
Kinakuta: one of about a million out of print World War II memoirs that must
have been penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties. So far, he
hasn't had time to read it, and so the two inch stack of pages is just dead
weight in his luggage.
In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of
the modem Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been
torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new
channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and
the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real
estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings
were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the
Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down
the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales
in the central Pacific. So Randy expects half of Kinakuta City to be a
smoking crater, but of course it's not. The stump of Eliza Peak has been
neatly paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan's new Technology
City. All of the glass walled skyscrapers there, and in the rest of the
city, have pointy tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has long
since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy
can see that looks to be more than ten years old is the sultan's palace,
which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it's like a
reddish beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.
Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation.
He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out
from under the seat ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir.
One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and
dead center is the Sultan's Palace. Randy rotates it before his face in the
way of a panicky driver with a steering wheel, and gets it to line up with
his view. There's the river. There's Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to
have a signals intelligence detachment and a radar station, all built with
slave labor. There's the former site of the Japanese Naval Air Force field,
which became the Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a
flock of yellow cranes above a blue nebula of rebar, lit from within by a
constellation of flickering white stars arc welders at work.
Next to it is something that doesn't belong: a patch of emerald green,
maybe a couple of city blocks, surrounded by a stone wall. Inside, there's a
placid pond toward one end the 777 is now so low that Randy can count the
lily pads a tiny Shinto temple hewn from black stone, and a little bamboo
teahouse. Randy presses his face to the window and keeps turning his head to
follow it, until suddenly his view is blocked by a high rise apartment
building just off the wingtip. Through an open kitchen window, he gets a
microsecond's glimpse of a slender lady swinging a hatchet towards a
coconut.
That garden looked like it belonged a thousand miles farther north in
Nippon. When Randy finally realizes what it was, the hairs stand up on the
back of his neck.
Randy got on this plane a couple of hours ago at Ninoy Aquino
International Airport in Manila. The flight was delayed and so he had plenty
of time to look at the other passengers: three Westerners including himself,
a couple of dozen Malay types (either Kinakutan or Filipino), and everyone
else Nipponese. Some of the latter looked like businessmen, traveling on
their own or in twos and threes, but most belonged to some kind of an
organized tour group that marched into the boarding lounge precisely forty
five minutes before scheduled takeoff, queued behind a young woman in a navy
blue skirt suit holding up a neat little logo on a stick. Retirees.
Their destination is not the Technology City, or any of the peculiar
pointy topped skyscrapers in the financial district. They are all going to
that walled Nipponese garden, which is built on top of a mass grave
containing the bodies of three and a half thousand Nipponese soldiers, who
all died on August 23, 1945.
Chapter 21 QWGHLM HOUSE
Waterhouse eddies up and down the quiet side street, squinting at brass
plaques on sturdy white row houses:
SOCIETY FOR THE UNIFICATION OF HINDUISM AND ISLAM
ANGLO LAPP SOLIDARITY SOCIETY
FULMINANTS ASSOCIATION
CHIANG TZSE MUTUAL BENEVOLENT SOCIETY
ROYAL COMMITTEE ON MITIGATION OF MARINE CRANKSHAFT WEAR
BOLGER DAMSELFLY PROPAGATION FOUNDATION
ANTI WELCH LEAGUE
COMITY FOR [theta]E REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH OR[theta]OGRAFY
SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO VERMIN
CHURCH OF VEDANTIC ETHICAL QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
IMPERIAL MICA BOARD
At first he mistakes Qwghlm House for the world's tiniest and most
poorly located department store. It has a bow window that looms over the
sidewalk like the thrusting ram of a trireme, embarnacled with Victorian
foofawfery, and housing a humble display: a headless mannequin dressed in
something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps a tribute
to wartime austerity?); a heap of sallow dirt with a shovel in it; and
another mannequin (a recent addition shoehorned into one corner) dressed in
a Royal Navy uniform and holding a wooden cutout of a rifle.
Waterhouse found a worm eaten copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana in a
bookshop near the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around
in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses
of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and
they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the
landscape of Outer Qwghlm. Two of these themes are wool and guano, though
the Qwghlmians have other names for them, in their ancient, sui generis
tongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that
supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the
Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana never uses the English words "wool" and "guano"
except to slander the inferior versions of these products that are exported
by places like Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naive buyers
who apparently dominate the world's commodity markets. Waterhouse had to
read the encyclopedia almost cover to cover and use all his cryptanalytic
skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were.
Having learned so much about them, he is fascinated to find them
proudly displayed in the heart of the cosmopolitan city: a mound of guano
and a woman dressed in wool (1). The woman's outfit is entirely
grey, in keeping with Qwghlmian tradition, which scorns pigmentation as a
loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots. The top part of the ensemble
is a sweater which appears, at a glance, to be made of felt. A closer look
reveals that it is knit like any other sweater. Qwghlmian sheep are the
evolutionary product of thousands of years' massive weather related die off.
Their wool is famous for its density, its corkscrewlike fibers, and its
immunity to all known chemical straightening processes. It creates a matted
effect which the Encyclopedia describes as being supremely desirable and for
which there is an extensive descriptive vocabulary.
The third theme of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana is hinted at by the
mannequin with the gun.
Propped up against the stonework next to the building's entrance is a
gaffer dressed in an antique variant of the Home Guard uniform, involving
knickerbockers. His lower legs are encased in formidable socks made of one
of the variants of Qwghlmian wool, and lashed in place, just below the knee,
with tourniquets fashioned from thick cords woven together in a vaguely
Celtic interlace pattern (on almost every page, the Encyclopedia restates
that the Qwghlmians are not Celts, but that they did invent the best
features of Celtic culture). These garters are the traditional ornament of
true Qwghlmians; gentlemen wear them hidden underneath the trousers of their
suits. They were traditionally made from the long, slender tails of the
Skrrgh, which is the predominant mammal native to the islands, and which the
Encyclopedia defines as "a small mammal of the order Rodentia and the order
Muridae, common in the islands, subsisting primarily on the eggs of sea
birds, capable of multiplying with great rapidity when that or any other
food is made available to it, admired and even emulated by Qwghlmians for
its hardiness and adaptability."
After Waterhouse has been standing there for a few moments, enjoying a
cigarette and examining those garters, this mannequin moves slightly.
Waterhouse thinks that it is falling over in a gust of wind, but then he
realizes that it is alive, and not exactly falling over, but just shifting
its weight from foot to foot.
The gaffer takes note of him, smiles blackly, and utters some word of
greeting in his language, which, as has already become plain, is even less
suited than English to transcription into the Roman alphabet.
"Howdy," Waterhouse says.
The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while,
Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst
apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the
signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English. He
concludes that his interlocutor was saying, "What part of the States are you
from, then?"
"My family's done a lot of traveling around," Waterhouse says. "Let's
say South Dakota."
"Ahh," the gaffer says ambiguously whilst flinging himself against the
slab of door. After a while it begins to move inwards, hand hammered iron
hinges grinding ominously as they pivot round inch thick tholes. Finally the
door collides with some kind of formidable Stop. The gaffer remains leaning
against it, his entire body at a forty five degree angle to prevent its
swinging back and crushing Waterhouse, who scurries past. Inside, a tiny
anteroom is dominated by a sculpture: two nymphets in diaphanous veils
kicking the crap out of a scurrying hag, entitled Fortitude and Adaptability
Driving Out Adversity .
This operation is repeated a few times with doors that are successively
lighter but more richly decorated. The first room, it becomes clear, was
actually a preäntepenultimate room, so it is a while before they can be said
to be definitely inside Qwghlm House. By that time they seem to be deep in
the center of the block, and Waterhouse half expects to see an underground
train screech by. Instead he finds himself in a windowless paneled room with
a crystal chandelier that is painfully bright but does not seem to actually
illuminate anything. His feet sink so deeply into the gaudy carpet that he
nearly blows out a ligament. The far end of the room is guarded by a staunch
Desk with a stout Lady behind it. Here and there are large ebony Windsor
chairs, with the spindly but dangerous look of aboriginal game snares.
On the walls, diverse oil paintings. At a first glance Waterhouse sorts
them into ones that are higher than they are wide, and others. The former
category is portraits of gentlemen, all of whom seem to share a grievous
genetic flaw that informs the geometry of the skull. The latter category is
landscapes or, just as often, seascapes, all in the bleak and rugged
category. These Qwghlmian painters are so fond of the locally produced blue
green grey paint (1) that they apply it as if with the back of a
shovel.
Waterhouse fights through the miring shag of the Carpet until he nears
the Desk, where he is greeted by the Lady, who shakes his hand and pinches
her face together in a sort of allusion to a smile. There is a long exchange
of polite, perfunctory speech of which all Waterhouse remembers is: "Lord
Woadmire will see you shortly," and: "Tea?"
Waterhouse says yes to the tea because he suspects that this lady (he
has forgotten her name) is not really earning her keep. Clearly disgruntled,
she ejects herself from her chair and loses herself in deeper and narrower
parts of the building. The gaffer has already gone back to his post out
front.
A photograph of the king hangs on the wall behind the desk. Waterhouse
hadn't known, until Colonel Chattan discreetly reminded him, that His
Majesty's full title was not simply By the Grace Of God of England King, but
B.T.G.O.G. of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the
Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Outer Qwghlm, and Inner Qwghlm King.
Next to it is a smaller photograph of the man he is about to meet. This
fellow and his family are covered rather sketchily by the Encyclopedia ,
which is decades old, and so Waterhouse has had to do some additional
background research. The man is related to the Windsors in a way so
convoluted that it can only be expressed using advanced genealogical
vocabulary.
He was born Graf Heinrich Karl Wilhelm Otto Friedrich von Überset
Zenseehafenstadt, but changed his name to Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby,
a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, in 1914. In his photograph, he looks every inch a von
Übersetzenseehafenstadt, and he is entirely free of the cranial geometry
problem so evident in the older portraits. Lord Woadmire is not related to
the original ducal line of Qwghlm, the Moore family (Anglicized from the
Qwghlmian clan name Mnyhrrgh) which had been terminated in 1888 by a
spectacularly improbable combination of schistosomiasis, suicide, long
festering Crimean war wounds, ball lightning, flawed cannon, falls from
horses, improperly canned oysters, and rogue waves.
The tea takes some time in coming and Lord Woadmire does not seem to be
in any particular hurry to win the war either, so Waterhouse makes a circuit
of the room, pretending to care about the paintings. The biggest one depicts
a number of bruised and lacerated Romans dragging their sorry asses up onto
a rocky and unwelcoming shore as splinters of their invasion fleet wash up
around them. Front and center is a particular Roman who looks no less noble
for wear and tear. He is seated wearily on a high rock, a broken sword
dangling from one enervated hand, gazing longingly across several miles of
rough water towards a shining, paradisiacal island. This isle is richly
endowed with tall trees and flowering meadows and green pastures, but even
so it can be identified as Outer Qwghlin by the Three Sghrs towering above
it. The isle is guarded by a forbidding castle or two; its pale, almost
Caribbean beaches are lined with the colorful banners of a defending host
which (one can only assume) has just given the Roman invaders a bit of rough
handling which they will not soon forget. Waterhouse does not bother to bend
down and squint at the plaque; he knows that the subject of the painting is
Julius Cæsar's failed and probably apocryphal attempt to add the
Qwghlm Archipelago to the Roman Empire, the farthest from Rome he ever got
and the least good idea he ever had. To say that the Qwghlmians have not
forgotten the event is like saying that Germans can sometimes be a little
prickly.
"Where Caesar failed, what hope has Hitler?"
Waterhouse turns towards the voice and discovers Nigel St. John
Gloamthorpby a.k.a. Lord Woadmire, a.k.a. the Duke of Qwghlm. He is not a
tall man. Waterhouse goose steps through the carpet to shake his hand.
Though Colonel Chattan briefed him on proper forms of address when meeting a
duke, Waterhouse can no more remember this than he can diagram the duke's
family tree, so he decides to structure all of his utterances so as to avoid
referring to the duke by name or pronoun. This will be a fun game and make
the time go faster.
"It is quite a painting," Waterhouse says, "a heck of a deal."
"You will find the islands themselves no less extraordinary, and for
the same reasons," the duke says obliquely.
The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what's going on, he is
sitting in the duke's office. He thinks that there has been some routine
polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually
monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is offered to him, and is accepted, for
the second or third time, but fails to materialize.
"Colonel Chattan is in the Mediterranean, and I have been sent in his
place," Waterhouse explains, "not to waste time covering logistical details,
but to convey our enormous gratitude for the most generous offer made in
regards to the castle." There! No pronouns, no gaffe.
"Not at all!" The duke is taking the whole thing as an affront to his
generosity. He speaks in the unhurried, dignified cadences of a man who is
mentally thumbing through a German English dictionary. "Even setting aside
my own... patriotic obligations... cheerfully accepted, of course..., it has
almost become almost... terribly fashionable to have a whole... crew...
of... uniformed fellows and whatnot running around in one's... pantry.
"Many of the great houses of Britain are doing their bit for the War,"
Waterhouse agrees.
"Well... by all means, then... use it!" the duke says. "Don't be...
reticent! Use it... thoroughly! Give it a good... working over! It has...
survived... a thousand Qwghlm winters and it will... survive your worst."
"We hope to have a small detachment in place very soon," Waterhouse
says agreeably.
"May I... know..., to satisfy my own... curiosity..., what sort of...
?" the duke says, and trails off.
Waterhouse is ready for this. He is so ready that he has to hold back
for a moment and try to make a show of discretion. "Huffduff."
"Huffduff?"
"HFDF. High Frequency Direction Finding. A technique for locating
distant radio transmitters by triangulating from several points."
"I should have... thought you knew where all the... German...
transmitters were."
"We do, except for the ones that move."
"Move!?" The duke furrows his brow tremendously, imagining a giant
radio transmitter building, tower and all mounted on four parallel rail road
tracks like Big Bertha, creeping across a steppe, drawn by harnessed
Ukrainians.
"Think U boats," Waterhouse says delicately.
"Ah!" the duke says explosively. "Ah!" He leans back in his creaky
leather chair, examining a whole new picture with his mind's eye. "They...
pop up, do they, and send out... wireless?"
"They do."
"And you... eavesdrop."
"If only we could!" Waterhouse says. "No, the Germans have used all of
that world famous mathematical brilliance of theirs to invent ciphers that
are totally unbreakable. We don't have the first idea what they are saying.
But, by using huffduff, we can figure out where they are saying it from, and
route our convoys accordingly."
"Ah."
"So what we propose to do is mount big rotating antennas, or aerials as
you call them here, on the castle, and staff the place with huffduff
boffins."
The duke frowns. "There will be proper... safeguards for lightning?"
"Naturally."
"And you are aware that you may... anticipate... ice storms as late in
the year as August?"
"The Royal Qwghlm Meteorological Station's reports, as a body of work,
don't leave a heck of a lot to the imagination."
"Fine, then!" the duke blusters, warming to the concept. "Use the
castle, then! And give them... give them hell!"
Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION
As evidence of the allies' slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by
smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there's this one
pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel
barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America,
Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how
to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with
stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it is mounded higher
and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with
salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.
A man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to get any more of
that gull shit on his khakis. He is wearing the uniform of a major in the
United States Army and is badly encumbered by a briefcase. His name is
Comstock.
Inside the briefcase are various identity papers, credentials, and an
impressive letter from the office of The General in Brisbane. Comstock has
had occasion to show all of the above to the doddering and yet queerly
formidable Australian guards who, with their doughboy helmets and rifles,
infest the waterfront. These men do not speak any dialect of the English
language that the major can recognize and vice versa, but they can all read
what is on those papers.
The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been
clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the
military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier
that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that
pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and
vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along.
After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of
drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but
smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it all
day and can't really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he
opens up his briefcase. There's a paperback novel in there, which he's
already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed,
crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist
could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of
Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some
stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball like
through the cluttered infinitude of America's military and civilian
bureaucracies; how the stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured,
trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some
evidence to the effect that said ship was in Sydney Harbor several months
ago. There's no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question,
but unloading stuff is what ships always do when they reach port and so
Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.
After Major Comstock finishes his cigarette, he resumes his search.
Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought
to be stenciled on the outside of the crates in question; at least, that's
what he's been assuming since he started this search at daybreak, and if
he's wrong, he'll have to go back and search every crate in Sydney Harbor
again. Actually getting a look at each crates' numbers means squeezing his
body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease
and grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any
combat grunt.
When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one
cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their
salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools,
their rough sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has
warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto
them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's
heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning
sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked
with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his
comrades in arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en
masse, into the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded
and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the
logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC the Electrical Till
Corporation.
Chapter 23 CRYPT
The terminal is supposed to echo the lines of a row of Malay longhouses
jammed together side by side. A freshly painted jetway gropes out like a
giant lamprey and slaps its neoprene lips onto the side of the plane. The
elderly Nipponese tour group makes no effort to leave the plane,
respectfully leaving the aisles clear for the businessmen: You go ahead, the
people we're going to visit won't mind waiting.
On his march up the jetway, humidity and jet fuel condense onto Randy's
skin in equal measure, and he begins to sweat. Then he's in the terminal,
which notwithstanding the Malay longhouses allusion has been engineered
specifically to look like any other brand new airport terminal in the world.
The air conditioning hits like a spike through the head. He puts his bags
down on the floor and stands there for a moment, collecting his wits beneath
a Leroy Neiman painting the dimensions of a volleyball court, depicting the
sultan in action on a polo pony. Trapped in a window seat during a short and
choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one
now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.
As he steps back, perfectly satisfied, he becomes conscious of a man
backing away from an adjacent urinal one of the Nipponese businessmen who
just got off the plane. A couple of months ago, the presence of this man
would have ruled out Randy's taking a leak at all. Today, he didn't even
notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy
is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince
yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in
your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your
body's way of telling you that you're thinking too hard, that you need to
get off the campus and go get a fucking job.
"You were looking at the Ministry of Information site?" the businessman
says. He is in a perfect charcoal grey pinstripe suit, which he wears just
as easily and comfortably as Randy does his souvenir t shirt from the fifth
Hackers Conference, surfer's jams, and Teva sandals.
"Oh!" Randy blurts, annoyed with himself. "I completely forgot to look
for it." Both men laugh. The Nipponese man produces a business card with
some deft sleight of hand. Randy has to rip open his nylon and velcro wallet
and delve for his. They exchange cards in the traditional Asian two handed
style, which Avi has forced Randy to practice until he gets it nearly right.
They bow at each other, triggering howls from the nearest couple of
computerized self flushing urinals. The bath room door swings open and an
aged Nip wanders in, a precursor of the silver horde.
Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired,
to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy
of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist
slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees
Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same
thing, isn't it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink?
During the hundreds of hours of meetings, and megabytes of encrypted e mail
messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and
Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has
occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese in
the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course
Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your
state of mind at the time you utter the word. If you're just trying to
abbreviate, it's not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as
Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that's
different.
This particular Nipponese individual is identified, on his card, as
GOTO Furudenendu ("Ferdinand Goto"). Randy, who has spent a lot of time
recently puzzling over organizational charts of certain important Nipponese
corporations, knows already that he is a vice president for special projects
(whatever that means) at Goto Engineering. He also knows that organizational
charts of Nipponese companies are horseshit and that job titles mean
absolutely nothing. That he has the same surname as the guy who founded the
company is presumably worth taking note of.
Randy's card says that he is Randall L. WATERHOUSE ("Randy") and that
he is vice president for network technology development at Epiphyte
Corporation.
Goto and Waterhouse stroll out of the washroom and start to follow the
baggage claim icons that are strung across the terminal like bread crumbs.
"You have jet lag now?" Goto asks brightly following (Randy assumes) a
script from an English textbook. He's a handsome guy with a winning smile.
He's probably in his forties, though Nipponese people seem to have a whole
different aging algorithm so this might be way off.
"No," Randy answers. Being a nerd, he answers such questions badly,
succinctly, and truthfully. He knows that Goto essentially does not care
whether Randy has jet lag or not. He is vaguely conscious that Avi, if he
were here, would use Goto's question as it was intended as an opening for
cheery social batter. Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact
that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll
probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the
common enterprise, he tries his best. "I've actually been in Manila for
several days, so I've had plenty of time to adjust."
"Ah! Did your activities in Manila go well?" Goto fires back.
"Yes, very well, thank you," Randy lies, now that his social skills,
such as they are, have had a moment to get unlimbered. "Did you come
directly from Tokyo?"
Goto's smile freezes in place for a moment, and he hesitates before
saying, "Yes.''
This is, at root, a patronizing reply. Goto Engineering is
headquartered in Kobe and they would not fly out of the Tokyo airport. Goto
said yes anyway, because, during that moment of hesitation, he realized that
he was just dealing with a Yank, who, when he said "Tokyo," really meant
"the Nipponese home islands" or "wherever the hell you come from."
"Excuse me," Randy says, "I meant to say Osaka."
Goto grins brilliantly and seems to execute a tiny suggestion of a bow.
"Yes! I came from Osaka today."
Goto and Waterhouse drift apart from each other at the luggage claim,
exchange grins as they breeze through immigration, and run into each other
at the ground transportation section. Kinakutan men in brilliant white
quasinaval uniforms with gold braid and white gloves are buttonholing
passengers, proffering transportation to the local hotels.
"You are staying at the Foote Mansion also?" Goto says. That being the
luxury hotel in Kinakuta. But he knows the answer already tomorrow's meeting
has been planned as exhaustively as a space shuttle launch.
Randy hesitates. The largest Mercedes Benz he's ever seen has just
pulled up to the curb, condensed moisture not merely fogging its windows but
running down them in literal streamlines. A driver in Foote Mansion livery
has erupted from it to divest Mr. Goto of his luggage, Randy knows that he
need only make a subtle move toward that car and he will be whisked to a
luxury hotel where he can take a shower, watch TV naked while drinking a
hundred dollar bottle of French wine, go swimming, get a massage.
Which is precisely the problem. He can already feel himself wilting in
the equatorial heat. It's too early to go soft. He's only been awake for six
or seven hours. There's work to be done. He forces himself to stand up at
attention, and the effort makes him break a sweat so palpably that he almost
expects to moisten everything within a radius of several meters. "I would
enjoy sharing a ride to the hotel with you," he says, "but I have one or two
errands to run first."
Goto understands. "Perhaps drinks this evening."
"Leave me a message," Randy says. Then Goto's waving at him through the
smoked glass of the Mercedes as it pulls seven gees away from the curb.
Randy does a one eighty, goes back inside to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, which
accepts eight currencies, and sates himself. Then he