cklheber says. "Most codes were
designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying
mathematics. It is really quite pitiable."
"Including the Enigma?" Bischoff asks.
"Don't even talk to me of that shit," von Hacklheber says. "I dispensed
with it almost immediately."
"What do you mean, dispensed with it?" Root asks.
"Proved that it was shit," von Hacklheber says.
"But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it," Bischoff says.
Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette.
"You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician
writes a paper?" He stares at his cigarette a while longer, then puts it to
his lips, draws on it tastefully, holds the smoke in his lungs, and finally
exhales it slowly through his vocal cords whilst simultaneously causing them
to emit the following sounds: "I knew that there must be people working for
the enemy who would figure this out. Turing. Von Neumann. Waterhouse. Some
of the Poles. I began to look for signs that they had broken the Enigma, or
at least realized its weaknesses and begun trying to break it. I ran
statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U boat attacks. I found some
anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern. Many of
the grossest anomalies were later accounted for by the discovery of
espionage stations and the like.
"From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to
break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact from us at
any cost. But there was one anomaly they could not cover up. I refer to
human anomalies."
"Human anomalies?" Root asks. The phrase is classic Root bait.
"I knew perfectly well that only a handful of people in the world had
the acumen to break the Enigma and then to cover up the fact that they had
broken it. By using our intelligence sources to ascertain where these men
were, and what they were doing, I could make inferences." Von Hacklheber
stubs out his cigarette, sits up straight, and drains a half shot of
schnapps, warming to the task. "This was a human intelligence problem not
signals intelligence. This is handled by a different branch of the service "
and he's off again talking about the structure of the German bureaucracy.
Terrified, Shaftoe flees from the room, runs outside, and uses the outhouse.
When he gets back, von Hacklheber is just winding up. "It all came down to a
problem of sifting through large amounts of raw data lengthy and tedious
work."
Shaftoe cringes, wondering what something would have to be like in
order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker.
"After some time," von Hacklheber continues, "I learned, through some
of our agents in the British Isles, that a man matching the general
description of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had been stationed to a castle
in Outer Qwghlm. I was able to arrange for a young lady to place this man
under the closest possible surveillance," he says dryly. "His security
precautions were impeccable, and so we learned nothing directly. In fact, it
is quite likely that he knew that the young woman in question was an agent,
and so took added precautions. But we did learn that this man communicated
through one time pads. He would read his encrypted messages over the
telephone to a nearby naval base whence they would be telegraphed to a
station in Buckinghamshire, which would respond to him with messages
encrypted using the same system of one time pads. By going through the
records of our various radio intercept stations we were able to accumulate a
stack of messages that had been sent by this mysterious unit, using this
series of one time pads, over a period of time beginning in the middle of
1942 and continuing up to the present day. It was interesting to note that
this unit operated in a variety of places:
Malta, Alexandria, Morocco, Norway, and various ships at sea. Extremely
unusual. I was very interested in this mysterious unit and so I began trying
to break their special code."
"Isn't that impossible?" Bischoff asks. "There is no way to break a one
time pad, short of stealing a copy."
"That is true in theory," von Hacklheber says. "In practice, this is
only true if the letters that make up the one time pad are chosen perfectly
randomly. But, as I discovered, this is not true of the one time pads used
by Detachment 2702 which is the mysterious unit that Waterhouse, Turing, and
these two gentlemen all belong to."
"But how did you figure this out?" Bischoff asks.
"A few things helped me. There was a lot of depth many messages to work
with. There was consistency the one time pads were generated in the same
way, always, and always exhibited the same patterns. I made some educated
guesses which turned out to be correct. And I had a calculating machine to
make the work go faster."
"Educated guesses?"
"I had a hypothesis that the one time pads were being drawn up by a
person who was rolling dice or shuffling a deck of cards to produce the
letters. I began to consider psychological factors. An English speaker is
accustomed to a certain frequency distribution of letters. He expects to see
a great many e's, t's, and a's, and not so many z's and q's and x's. So if
such a person were using some supposedly random algorithm to generate the
letters, he would be subconsciously irritated every time a z or an x came
up, and, conversely, soothed by the appearance of e or t. Over time, this
might skew the frequency distribution."
"But Herr Doctor von Hacklheber, I find it unlikely that such a person
would substitute their own letters for the ones that came up on the cards,
or dice, or whatever."
"It is not very likely. But suppose that the algorithm gave the person
some small amount of discretion." Von Hacklheber lights another cigarette,
pours out more schnapps. "I set up an experiment. I got twenty volunteers
middle aged women who wanted to do their part for the Reich. I set them to
work drawing up one time pads using an algorithm where they drew slips out
of a box. Then I used my machinery to run statistical calculations on the
results. I found that they were not random at all."
Root says, "The one time pads for Detachment 2702 are being created by
Mrs. Tenney, a vicar's wife. She uses a bingo machine, a cage filled with
wooden balls with a letter stamped on each ball. She is supposed to close
her eyes before reaching into the cage. But suppose she has become sloppy
and no longer closes her eyes when she reaches into it."
"Or," von Hacklheber says, "suppose she looks at the cage, and sees how
the balls are distributed inside of it, and then closes her eyes. She will
subconsciously reach toward the E and avoid the Z. Or, if a certain letter
has just come up recently, she will try to avoid choosing it again. Even if
she cannot see the inside of the cage, she will learn to distinguish among
the different balls by their feel being made of wood, each ball will have a
different weight, a different pattern in the grain."
Bischoff's not buying it. "But it will still be mostly random!"
"Mostly random is not good enough!" von Hacklheber snaps. "I was
convinced that the one time pads of Detachment 2702 would have a frequency
distribution similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible, for
example. And I strongly suspected that the content of those messages would
include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta. By putting
my machinery to work, I was able to break some of the one time pads.
Waterhouse was careful to burn his pads after using them once, but some
other parts of the detachment were careless, and used the same pads again
and again. I read many messages. It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in
the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the
Enigma had been broken."
Shaftoe knows what an Enigma is, if only because Bischoff won't shut up
about them. When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment
2702 ever did suddenly makes sense.
"So, the secret is out then," Root says. "I assume you made your
superiors aware of your discovery?"
"I made them aware of absolutely nothing," von Hacklheber snarls,
"because by this time I had long since fallen into a snare of
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. I had become his pawn, his slave, and had
ceased to feel any loyalty whatsoever towards the Reich."
***
The knock on Rudolf von Hacklheber's door had come at four o'clock in
the morning, a time exploited by the Gestapo for its psychological effect.
Rudy is wide awake. Even if bombers had not been pounding Berlin all night
long, he would have been awake, because he has neither seen nor heard from
Angelo in three days. He throws a dressing gown over his pajamas, steps into
slippers, and opens the door of his flat to reveal, predictably, a small,
prematurely withered man backed up by a couple of classic Gestapo killers in
long black leather coats.
"May I proffer an observation?" says Rudy von Hacklheber.
"But of course, Herr Doktor Professor. As long as it is not a state
secret, of course."
"In the old days the early days when no one knew what the Gestapo was,
and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A
fine way to exploit man's primal fear of the darkness. But now it is 1942,
almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they
are of the dark. So, why don't you work during the daytime? You are stuck in
a rut."
The bottom half of the withered man's face laughs. The top half doesn't
change. "I will pass your suggestion up the chain of command," he says.
"But, Herr Doktor, we are not here to instill fear. We have come at this
inconvenient time because of the train schedules."
"Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?"
"You have a few minutes," the Gestapo man says, pulling back a cuff to
divulge a hulking Swiss chronometer. Then he invites himself in and begins
to pace up and down in front of Rudy's bookshelves, hands clasped behind his
back, bending at the waist to peer at the titles. He seems disappointed to
find that they are all mathematical texts not a single copy of the
Declaration of Independence in evidence, though you can never tell when a
copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion might be hidden between the
pages of a mathematical journal. When Rudy emerges, dressed but still
unshaven, he finds the man displaying a pained expression while trying to
read Turing's dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like a lower
primate trying to fly an aeroplane.
Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the
departures board as they go in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will
be able to deduce, from the track number, whether he's being taken in the
direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.
It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out to be a waste of effort,
because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board.
A short train waits there. It does not contain any boxcars, a relief to
Rudy, since he thinks that during the last few years he may have glimpsed
boxcars that appeared to be crammed full of human beings. These glimpses
were brief and surreal, and he cannot really sort out whether they really
happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong
cranial drawer.
But all of the cars on this train have doors, guarded by men in
unfamiliar uniforms, and windows, shrouded on the inside with shutters and
heavy curtains. The Gestapo lead him to a coach door without breaking
stride, and just like that, he is through. And he is alone. No one checks
his papers, and the Gestapo do not enter behind him. The door is closed
behind his back.
Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated
like the anteroom of an upper class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the
polished hardwood floor, heavy furniture upholstered in maroon velvet, and
curtains so thick that they look bulletproof. At one end of the coach, a
French maid hovers over a table set with breakfast: hard rolls, slices of
meat and cheese, and coffee. Rudy's nose tells him that it is real coffee,
and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup
with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to
conceal dark circles, and (he realizes, as she hands him the cup) she has
also painted it onto her wrists.
Rudy savors the coffee, stirring cream into it with a golden spoon
bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down the length of
the car, admiring the art on the walls: a series of Dürer engravings, and,
unless his eyes deceive him, a couple of pages from a Leonardo da Vinci
codex.
The door opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board,
and ends up sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him,
the train has already begun to pull out of the station.
"Angelo!" Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table and throws himself
into the arms of his beloved.
Angelo returns the embrace weakly. He stinks, and he shudders
uncontrollably. He is wearing a coarse, dirty, pajamalike garment, and is
wrapped up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half scabbed
lacerations embedded in fields of yellow green bruises.
"Don't worry about it, Rudy," Angelo says, clenching and opening his
fists to prove that they still work. "They were not kind to me, but they
took care with my hands."
"Thou canst still fly?"
"I can still fly. But that is not why they were so careful with my
hands."
"Why, then?"
"Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession."
Rudy and Angelo gaze into each other's eyes. Angelo looks sad,
exhausted, but still has some kind of serene confidence about him. Like a
baptizing priest ready to receive the infant, he holds up his hands. He
silently mouths the words: But I can still fly!
A suit of clothes is brought in by a valet. Angelo cleans up in one of
the coach's lavatories. Rudy tries to peer out between the curtains, but
heavy shutters have been pulled down over the windows. They breakfast
together as the train maneuvers through the switching yards of greater
Berlin, perhaps working its way around some bombed out sections of track,
and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring makes his way through the car, headed
towards the rear of the train, where the most ornate coach is located. His
body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus tent
sized Chinese silk robe, the sash of which drags on the floor behind him,
like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy
has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly
curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his
genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating
breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one
of life's small anomalies, not really worth noticing. Given that Göring is
the number two man in the Third Reich the designated successor to Hitler
himself Rudy and Angelo really should jump to attention and give him a "Heil
Hitler!" But they are too stunned to move. Göring stumbles down the middle
of the coach, paying them no mind. Halfway down, he begins talking, but he's
talking to himself, and his words are slurred. He slams open the door at the
end of the coach and proceeds into the next car.
Two hours later, a doctor in a white coat passes through, headed for
Göring's coach, carrying a silver tray with a white linen cloth on it.
Tastefully arrayed on this, like caviar and champagne, are a blue bottle and
a glass hypodermic syringe.
Half an hour after that, an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through
carrying a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with a crisp "Heil,
Hitler!"
Another hour goes by, and then Rudy and Angelo are escorted back
through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker
and more gentlemanly than the florid parlor where they have been cooling
their heels. It is paneled in darkly stained wood and contains an actual
desk a baronial monstrosity carved out of a ton of Bavarian oak. At the
moment, its sole function is to support a single sheet of paper, hand
written, and signed at the bottom. Even from a distance, Rudy recognizes
Angelo's handwriting.
They have to walk past the desk in order to reach Göring, who is spread
across an equally massive couch at the end of the car, underneath a Matisse,
and flanked between a couple of Roman busts on marble pedestals. He is
dressed in red leather jodhpurs, red leather boots, a red leather uniform
jacket, a red leather riding crop with a fat diamond set into the butt of
the handle. Bracelet sized gold rings, infected with big rubies, grip his
pudgy fingers. A red leather officer's cap is perched on his head, with a
gold death's head, with ruby eyes, centered above the bill. All of this is
illuminated only by a few striations of dusty light that have forced their
way in through tiny crevices between curtains and shutters; the sun is up
now, but Göring's blue eyes, dilated to dime sized pits by the morphine,
cannot face it. He has his cherry colored boots up on an ottoman; no doubt
he has trouble with circulation in his legs. He is drinking tea from a
thimble sized porcelain cup, encrusted with gold leaf, looted from a chateau
somewhere. Heavy cologne fails to mask his odor: bad teeth, intestinal
trouble, and necrotizing hemorrhoids.
"Good morning, gentlemen," he says brightly. "Sorry to have kept you
waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?"
There is small talk. It goes on at length. Göring is fascinated with
Angelo's work as a test pilot. Not only that, he has any number of peculiar
ideas adapted from the Bavarian Illuminati, and is groping for some way to
tie these in with higher mathematics. Rudy is afraid, for a while, that this
task is about to be placed on his shoulders. But even Göring himself seems
impatient with this phase of the conversation. Once or twice he reaches out
with his riding crop to part a curtain slightly.
The outdoor light seems to cause him appalling pain and he quickly
looks away.
But finally the train slows, maneuvers through more switches, and
coasts to a gentle stop. They can see nothing, of course. Rudy strains his
ears, and thinks he hears activity around them: many feet marching, and
commands being shouted. Göring catches the eye of an aide and waves his
riding crop towards the desk. The aide springs forward, snatches up the
handwritten document, and bears it over to the Reichsmarschall, presenting
it with a small, neat bow. Göring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up
at Rudy and Angelo and makes tut tut tut noises, shaking his gigantic head
from side to side. Various layers of jowls, folds, and wattles follow,
always a few degrees out of phase. "Homosexuality," Göring says. "You must
be aware of the Führer's policy regarding this sort of behavior." He holds
up the sheet and shakes it. "Shame on you! Both of you. A test pilot who is
a guest in our country, and an eminent mathematician working on great
secrets. You must have known that the Sicherheitsdienst would get wind of
this." He heaves an exhausted sigh. "How am I going to patch this up?"
When Göring says this, Rudy knows for the first time since the knock on
his door that he is not going to die today. Göring has something else in
mind.
But first his victims need to be properly terrified. "Do you know what
could happen to you? Hmm? Do you?"
Neither Rudy nor Angelo answers. It is not the sort of question that
really needs answering.
Göring answers it for them by reaching out with his riding crop and
lifting up the curtain. Harsh blue light, reflected from snow, peals into
the coach. Göring shuts his eyes and looks the other way.
They are in the middle of an open area, surrounded by tall barbed wire
fences, filled with long rows of dark barracks. In the center, a tall stack
pours smoke into a white sky. SS troops in greatcoats and jackboots pace
around, blowing into their hands. Just a few yards away from them, on an
adjacent railway siding, a gang of wretches in striped clothing are at work
in, and around, a boxcar, unloading pale cargo. A large number of naked
human bodies have become all frozen together in a solid, tangled mass inside
the boxcar, and the prisoners are at work with axes, bucksaws, and prybars,
dismantling them and throwing the parts onto the ground. Because they are
frozen solid, there is no blood, and so the entire operation is startlingly
clean. The double glazed windows of Göring's coach block sound so
effectively that the impact of a big fire ax on a frozen abdomen comes
through as a nearly imperceptible thud.
One of the prisoners turns towards them, carrying a thigh toward a
wheelbarrow, and risks a direct look at the Reichsmarschall's train. This
prisoner has a pink triangle sewn to the breast of his uniform. The
prisoner's eyes are trying to probe through the window, past the curtain,
trying to make a human connection with someone on the inside of the coach.
Rudy stiffens in panic for a moment, thinking that the prisoner sees him.
Then Göring withdraws the riding crop and the curtain falls. A few moments
later, the train begins to move again.
Rudy looks at his lover. Angelo is sitting frozen, just like one of
those corpses, with his hands over his face.
Göring flicks his crop dismissively. "Get out," he says.
"What?" ask Rudy and Angelo simultaneously.
Göring laughs heartily. "No, no! I don't mean get out of the train! I
mean, Angelo, get out of this coach. I want to talk to Herr Doktor Professor
von Hacklheber in private. You may wait in the parlor car."
Angelo leaves eagerly. Göring waves his crop at a couple of hovering
aides, and they leave too. Göring and Rudy are alone together.
"I am sorry to show you these unpleasant things," Göring says. "I
simply wanted to impress upon you the importance of keeping secrets."
"I can assure the Reichsmarschall that "
Göring shushes him with a wave of the crop. "Don't be tedious. I know
that you have sworn any number of great oaths, and been through all of the
indoctrination concerning secrecy. I have no doubt of your sincerity. But it
is all just words, and not good enough for the work that I wish you to begin
doing for me. To work for me, you must see the thing I have shown you, so
that you can really understand the stakes."
Rudy looks at the floor, takes a deep breath, and forces out the words:
"It would be a great honor to work for you, Reichsmarschall. But since
you have access to so many of the great museums and libraries of Europe,
there is only one small favor I, as a scholar, might humbly request of you."
***
Back in the church basement in Norrsbruck, Sweden, Rudy yells, and
drops a cigarette on the floor, having allowed it to burn down to his
fingers, like a slow fuse, while relating this story. He puts his hand to
his mouth, sucks on the finger briefly, then remembers his manners and
composes himself. "Göring knew a surprising amount about cryptology, and was
aware of my work on the Enigma. He didn't trust the machine. He told me that
he wanted me to come up with the very best cryptosystem in the world, one
that could never be broken he wanted to communicate (he said) with U boats
at sea and with installations in Manila and Tokyo. And so, I came up with
such a system."
"And you handed it over," Bischoff says.
"Yes," Rudy says, and here, for the first time all day, he allows
himself a slight smile. "And it is a reasonably good system, despite the
fact that I crippled it before giving it to Göring."
"Crippled it?" Root asks. "What do you mean?"
"Imagine a new engine for an aeroplane. Imagine it has sixteen
cylinders. It is more powerful than any other engine in the world. Even so,
a mechanic can do certain things very simple things to kill its performance.
Such as pulling out half of the spark plug wires. Or tampering with the
timing. This is an analogy to what I did with Göring's cryptosystem."
"So what went wrong?" Shaftoe asks. "They figured out that you had
crippled it?"
Rudolf von Hacklheber laughs. "Not very likely. Maybe half a dozen
people in the world could figure that out. No, what went wrong was that you
fellows, you Allies, landed in Sicily, and then in Italy, and not long
afterwards, Mussolini was overthrown, the Italians withdrew from the Axis,
and Angelo, like all of the other hundreds of thousands of Italian nationals
living and working in the Reich, fell under suspicion. His services were
badly needed as a test pilot, but his situation was tenuous. He volunteered
for the most dangerous work of all flying the new Messerschmidt prototype,
with the turbine jet engine. This proved his loyalty in the eyes of some.
"Remember that, at the same time, I was decrypting the message traffic
of Detachment 2702. I kept these results to myself, as I no longer felt any
particular loyalty to the Third Reich. There had been a great burst of
activity around the middle of April, and then no messages for a while as if
the detachment had ceased to exist. At exactly the same time, Göring's
people were very active for a few days they were afraid that Bischoff was
going to broadcast the secret of U 553."
"So you know about that?" Bischoff asks.
"Natürlich. U 553 was Göring's treasure ship. Its existence was
supposed to be a secret. When you, Sergeant Shaftoe, turned up on board
Bischoff's U boat, talking about this thing, Göring was very concerned for a
few days. But then everything settled down, and there was no Detachment 2702
traffic through the late spring and early summer. Mussolini was overthrown
in late June. Then the troubles began for me and Angelo. The Wehrmacht was
defeated by the Russians at Kursk absolute proof, for those who needed it,
that the Eastern Front is lost. Since then Göring has redoubled his efforts
to get his gold, jewels, and art out of the country." Rudy looks at
Bischoff. "I am frankly surprised that he has not tried to recruit you."
"Dönitz has," Bischoff admits.
Rudy nods; it all fits.
"During all of this," Rudy continues, "I received only one message
intercept in the Detachment 2702 code. It took my machinery several weeks to
break it. It was a message from Enoch Root, stating that he and Sergeant
Shaftoe were in Norrsbruck, Sweden, and requesting further instructions. I
was aware that Kapitänleutnant Bischoff was also in the same town, and
became interested. I decided that this would be a good place for me and
Angelo to escape to."
"Why!?" Shaftoe says. "Of all the places "
"Enoch and I had never met. But there are certain old family
connections," Rudy says, "and certain shared interests."
Bischoff mutters something in German.
"The connections make a very long story. I would have to write a whole
fucking book," Rudy says irritably.
Bischoff looks only slightly appeased, but Rudy goes on anyway. "It
took us several weeks to make preparations. I packed up the Leibniz Archiv "
"Hold on the what?"
"Certain materials I use in my research. They had been scattered among
many libraries, all over Europe. Göring brought them all together for me it
makes men like him feel powerful, to do these little favors for their
slaves. I departed from Berlin last week, on the pretext of going to
Hannover, to do my Leibniz research. Instead I made my way to Sweden through
channels that were quite involved "
"No shit! How'd you manage that little stunt?" Shaftoe asks.
Rudy looks at Enoch Root as if expecting him to answer the question.
Root shakes his head minutely.
"It would be too tedious to explain here," Rudy says, sounding mildly
annoyed. "I found Enoch. We got a message to Angelo saying that I was safe
here. Angelo then tried to make his escape in the Messerschmidt prototype,
with the results that we have all seen."
A long pause.
"And now, here we are!" says Bobby Shaftoe.
"Here we are," agrees Rudolf von Hacklheber.
"What do you think we should do?" asks Shaftoe.
"I think we should form a secret conspiracy," says Rudolf von
Hacklheber offhandedly, as if proposing to go in together on a fifth of
bourbon. "We should all make our way separately to Manila and, once we
arrive, we should take some, if not all, of the gold that the Nazis and the
Nipponese have been hoarding there."
"What do you want with a shitload of gold?" Bobby asks. "You're already
rich."
"There are many deserving charities," Rudy says, looking significantly
at Root. Root averts his eyes.
There is another long pause.
"I can provide secure lines of communication, which is the sine qua non
of any secret conspiracy," says Rudolf von Hacklheber. "We will use the full
strength, uncrippled version of the same cryptosystem that I invented for
Göring. Bischoff can be our man on the inside, since Dönitz wants him so
badly. Sergeant Shaftoe can be "
"Don't even say it, I already know," says Bobby Shaftoe.
He and Bischoff look at Root, who's sitting on his hands, staring at
Rudy. Looking oddly nervous.
"Enoch the Red, your organization can get us to Manila," von Hacklheber
says.
Shaftoe snorts. "Don't you think the Catholic Church has its hands sort
of full right now?"
"I'm not talking about the Church," Rudy says. "I'm talking about
Societas Eruditorum."
Root freezes.
"Congratulations there, Rudy!" Shaftoe says. "You surprised the padre.
I didn't think it could be done. Now would you mind telling us what the fuck
you're talking about?"
Chapter 59 HOARD
Like a client of one of your less reputable pufferfish sushi chefs,
Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety
minutes after the jumbo leaves Ninoy Aquino International Airport. A can of
beer is embedded in the core of his spiraled hand. His arm lies on the extra
wide Business Class armrest, a shank on a slab. He does not turn his head,
or turret his eyeballs, even, to look out the window at northern Luzon. All
that's out there is jungle, which has two sets of connotations going for it
now. One is the spooky Tarzan/Stanley & Livingstone/"The horror, the
horror"/natives are restless/Charlie's out there somewhere waiting for us
kind. The second is the more modern and enlightened sort of Jacques
Cousteauian teeming repository of brilliant and endangered species lungs of
the planet kind. Neither really works for Randy anymore, which is why
despite the state of hibernatory torpor he shunted into the moment his ass
impacted on the navy blue leather of the seat, he feels a little spike of
irritation every time one of the other passengers, peering out a window,
pronounces the word "jungle." To him, it is just a shitload of trees now,
trees going on for miles and miles, up the little hilly willies and down the
little hilly willies. It is easy, now, for him to understand tropical
denizens' shockingly frank and blunt craving to drive through this sort of
territory in the largest and widest available bulldozers (the only parts of
his body that move during the first hour and a half of the flight are
certain facial muscles which pull the corners of his mouth back into an
ironic rictus when he imagines what Charlene would think of this it is just
too perfect Randy goes off on a Business Foray and comes back identifying
with people who bulldoze rainforests). Randy wants to bulldoze the jungle,
all of it. Actually, thermonuclear weapons, detonated at a suitable height,
would do the job faster. He needs to rationalize this urge. He will do so,
as soon as he solves the running out of planetary oxygen problem.
By the time it even occurs to him to lift the beer to his lips, the
heat of his body has gone into it, and his hand has become as chilly and
stiff as an uncooked rolled roast. For that matter, his whole body has
adjourned into some kind of metabolic recess, and his brain is not exactly
purring at high RPM's either. He feels kind of the way he does, sometimes,
the day before he comes down with a total body cold and flu scenario, one of
those crushing viral Tet Offensives that, every few years, swats you out of
the land of the fully living for a week or two. It is as if about three
quarters of his body's resources of nutrients and energy have been diverted
to the task of manufacturing quintillions of viruses. At the currency
exchange window of NAIA, Randy had stood behind a Chinese man who, just
before he stepped back from the window with his money, unloaded a Sneeze of
such titanic force that the rolling pressure wave turbulating outwards from
his raw, flapping facial orifices caused the wall of bulletproof glass
separating him from the moneychangers to flex slightly, so that the
reflection of the Chinese man, Randy behind him, the lobby of NAIA and the
sunlit passenger dropoff lane outside underwent a subtle warpage. The
viruses must have roiled back from the glass, reflected like light, and
enveloped Randy. So maybe Randy is the personal vector of this year's
version of the flu named after some city in East Asia that annually tours
the United States, just barely preceded by rush shipments of flu vaccine. Or
maybe it's Ebola.
Actually, he feels fine. Other than the fact that his mitochondria have
gone on strike, or that his thyroid seems to be failing (perhaps it was
secretly removed by black market organ transplanters? He makes a mental note
to check for new scars in the next mirror) he is not experiencing any viral
symptoms at all.
It is some kind of post stress thing. This is the first time he has
relaxed in a couple of weeks. Not once has he sat down in a bar with a beer,
or put his feet up on a desk, or just collapsed like a decaying corpse in
front of the television set. Now his body is telling him it's payback time.
He does not sleep; he does not feel drowsy at all. Actually, he's been
sleeping rather well. But his body refuses to move for an hour, and then
most of another hour, and to the extent his brain is working at all it can
only chase its tail.
But there is something that he could be doing. This is why laptops were
invented, so that important business persons would not fritter away long
flights relaxing. He can see it right there on the floor in front of him. He
knows he should reach for it. But it would break the spell. He feels as if
water condensed on his skin and froze into a carapace that will shatter as
soon as he moves any part of his body. This is, he realizes, exactly how a
laptop computer must feel when it drops into its power saving mode.
Then a flight attendant is there holding a menu in front of his face
and saying something that jolts him like a cattle prod. He nearly jumps out
of his seat, spills his beer a little, gropes for the menu. Before he can
drop back into his demi coma, he continues the motion and reaches down for
his laptop. The seat next to him is empty and he can put his dinner over
there while he works on the computer.
People around him are watching CNN live, from CNN Center in Atlanta not
a canned thing on tape. According to the plethora of pseudotechnical data
cards jammed into the seatbacks, which Randy is the only person who ever
reads, this plane has some kind of antenna that can keep a lock on a
communications satellite as it flies across the Pacific. Furthermore, it's
two way, so you can even transmit e mail. Randy spends a while familiarizing
himself with the instructions, checks the rates, as if he really gives a
shit how much it costs, then jacks the thing into the anus of his laptop. He
opens up the laptop and checks his e mail. Traffic is low because everyone
in Epiphyte knows he's en route somewhere.
Nevertheless, there are three messages from Kia, Epiphyte's only actual
employee, the administrative assistant for the whole company. Kia works in a
totally alienated, abstracted office in the Springboard Capital corporate
incubator complex in San Mateo. It is some sort of a federal regulation that
nascent high tech companies must not hire pudgy fifty year old support
staff, the way big established companies do. They must hire topologically
enhanced twenty year olds with names that sound like new models of cars.
Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when
it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be
concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers. In the part of
a federal equal opportunity form where Randy would simply check a box
labeled CAUCASIAN, Kia would have to attach multiple sheets on which her
family tree would be ramified backwards through time ten or twelve
generations until reaching ancestors who could actually be pegged to one
specific ethnic group without glossing anything over, and those ethnic
groups would be intimidatingly hip ones not Swedes, let's say, but Lapps,
and not Chinese but Hakka, and not Spanish but Basque. Instead of doing
this, on her job app for Epiphyte she simply checked "other" and then wrote
in TRANS ETHNIC. In fact, Kia is trans– just about every system of
human categorization, and what she isn't trans– she is post .
Anyway, Kia does a great job (it is part of the unspoken social
contract with these people that they always do an absolutely fantastic job)
and she has sent e mail to Randy notifying him that she has recently fielded
four trans Pacific telephone calls from America Shaftoe, who wants to know
Randy's whereabouts, plans, state of mind, and purity of spirit. Kia has
informed Amy that Randy's on his way to California and has somehow
insinuated, or Amy has somehow figured out, that the purpose of the visit is
NOT BUSINESS. Randy senses a small pane of glass shattering over a
neurological alarm button somewhere. He is in trouble. This is divine
retribution for his having dared to sit still and not do anything for ninety
whole minutes. He uses his word processor to whip out a note explaining to
Amy that he needs to straighten out some paperwork in order to sever the
last clinging tendrils of his dead, dead, dead relationship with Charlene
(which was such a lousy idea to begin with that it causes him to lie awake
at night questioning his own judgment and fitness to live), and that he has
to be in California in order to do it. He faxes the note to Semper Marine in
Manila, and also faxes it to Glory IV in case Amy's out on the water.
He then does something that probably means he's certifiably crazy. He
gets up and strolls up and down the business class aisle on pretext of using
the bathroom, and checks out the people sitting nearby, paying special
attention to their luggage, the stuff they've jammed into the overhead
compartments, the bags under the seats in front of them. He is looking for
anything that might contain a Van Eck phreaking type of antenn