tion about Glory.
They say that she has a healthy young son, living in the apartment in
the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared for by the extended family
while his mother serves in the war.
They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort
of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.
They say that she is a messenger for the Fil American forces, that no
one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying
secret messages and other contraband.
The last part doesn't make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse
or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe
she's both maybe she's smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.
The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same
rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their
small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that
Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk
guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.
He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman's hut on the shores of the big
lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria
strikes him then; he spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams,
having bizarre nightmares about Glory.
Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into
the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a
welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral
Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to
come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields,
raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in
sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed
uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way away from the
malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey's almost over.
But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the
city's Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind
of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time,
and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.
The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe's
story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil American
lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have
landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the
Huks only a few miles away.
"Help me get out of this town," Shaftoe pleads. "Take me out in a boat
on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move."
"Move where?" says the lieutenant, playing stupid.
"To the high ground! To join those Huks!"
"You would be killed. The ground is booby trapped. The Huks are
extremely vigilant."
"But "
"Why don't you go the other way?" the lieutenant asks. "Go to Manila."
"Why would I want to go there?"
"Your son is there. And that is where you are needed. Soon the big
battle will be in Manila."
"Okay," Shaftoe says, "I'll go to Manila. But first I want to see
Glory."
"Ah," the lieutenant says, as if light has finally dawned. "You say you
want to see Glory."
"I'm not just saying it. I do want to see Glory."
The lieutenant exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and shakes his head.
"No you don't," he says flatly.
"What?"
"You don't want to see Glory."
"How can you say that? Are you fucking out of your mind?"
The lieutenant's face goes stony. "Very well," he says, "I will make
inquiries. Perhaps Glory will come here and visit you."
"That's crazy. It's much too dangerous."
The lieutenant laughs. "No, you don't understand," he says. "You are a
white man in a provincial city in the Philippines occupied by starving,
berserk Nips. It is impossible for you to show your face outside.
Impossible. Glory, on the other hand, is free to move."
"You said they're inspecting people almost every block."
"They will not bother Glory."
"Do the Nips ever you know. Molest women?"
"Ah. You are worried about Glory being raped." The lieutenant takes
another long draw on his cigarette. "I can assure you that this will not
happen." He rises to his feet, tired of the conversation. "Wait here," he
says. "Gather your strength for the Battle of Manila."
He walks out, leaving Shaftoe more frustrated than ever.
Two days later, the owner of the boathouse, who speaks very little
English, shakes Shaftoe awake before sunrise. He beckons Shaftoe into a
small boat and rows him out into the lake, then half a mile up the shore
toward a sandbar. The dawn is just breaking over the other side of the big
lake, illuminating planet sized cumulus clouds. It's as if the biggest fuel
dump in the whole world is being blown up in a sky diced into vast
trapezoids by the linear contrails of American planes on dawn patrol.
Glory is strolling out on the sandbar. He can't see her face because
she is wrapped in a silk scarf, but he would know the shape of her body
anywhere. She walks back and forth along the shore, letting the warm water
of the lake lap against her bare feet. She is really loving that sunrise she
keeps her back turned to Shaftoe so that she can enjoy it. What a flirt.
Shaftoe gets as hard as an oar. He pats his back pocket, making sure he's
well stocked with I SHALL RETURN condoms. It will be tricky, bedding down
with Glory on a sandbar with this old codger here, but maybe he can pay the
guy to go out and exercise his back for an hour.
The guy keeps looking over his shoulder to judge the distance to the
sandbar. When they are about a stone's throw away, he sits up and ships the
oars. They coast for a few yards and then come to a stop.
"What are you doing?" Shaftoe asks. Then he heaves a sigh. "You want
money?" He rubs his thumb and fingertips together. "Huh? Like that?"
But the guy is just staring into his face, with an expression as tough
and stony as anything that Shaftoe has seen on a hundred battlefields around
the world. He waits for Shaftoe to shut up, then cocks his head and jerks it
back in the direction of Glory.
Shaftoe looks up at Glory, just as she's turning around to face him.
She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth
like a mummy's, and paws the scarf away from her face.
Or what used to be a face. Now it's just the front of her skull.
Bobby Shaftoe breathes in deep, and lets out a scream that can probably
be heard in downtown Manila.
The boatman casts an anxious look toward the town, then stands up,
blocking Shaftoe's view as he's drawing in another breath. One of the oars
is in his hands. Shaftoe is just cutting loose with another scream when the
oar clocks him in the side of the head.
Chapter 80 THE PRIMARY
The sun has made a long, skidding crash landing along the Malay
Peninsula a few hundred kilometers west, breaking open and spilling its
thermonuclear fuel over about half of the horizon, trailing out a wall of
salmon and magenta clouds that have blown a gash all the way through the
shell of the atmosphere and erupted into space. The mountain containing the
Crypt is just a charcoal shard against that backdrop. Randy is annoyed with
the sunset for making it difficult to see the construction site. By now the
scar in the cloud forest has mostly healed over, or, at least, some kind of
green stuff has taken over the bare, lipstick colored mud. A few GOTO
ENGINEERING containers still glower in the color distorting light of the
mercury vapor lamps around the entrance, but most of them have either moved
inside the Crypt or gone back to Nippon. Randy can make out the headlights
of one house sized Goto truck winding down the road, probably filled with
debris for another one of the sultan's land reclamation projects.
Seated up in the plane's nose, Randy can actually look forward out his
window and see that they are landing on the new runway, built partly on such
fill. The buildings of downtown are streaks of blue green light on either
side of the plane, tiny black human figures frozen in them: a man with a
phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, a woman in a skirt hugging a
pile of books to her chest but thinking about something far away. The view
turns empty and indigo as the plane's nose tilts up for the landing, and
then Randy's looking out over the Sulu Sea at dusk, where the badjaos' kite
sailed boats are scuttling into port from a day's fishing, hung all about
with gutted stingrays, flying fresh sharks' tails like flags. Not long ago
it was ridiculously exotic to him, but now he feels more at home here then
he did in California.
For Sultan Class passengers, everything happens with cinematic, quick
cut speed. The plane lands, a beautiful woman hands you your jacket, and you
get off. The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the
tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their
twenty eighth birthdays.
Usually there's someone waiting for a Sultan Class passenger. This
evening it's John Cantrell, still ponytailed but now clean shaven;
eventually the heat has its way with everyone. He's even taken to shaving
the back of his neck, a good trick for shedding a couple of extra BTUs.
Cantrell greets Randy with an awkward simultaneous handshake and one armed
hug/body check maneuver.
"Good to see you, John," Randy says.
"You too, Randy," John says, and each man averts his eyes shyly.
"Who's where?"
"You and I are here in the airport. Avi checked into a hotel in
downtown San Francisco for the duration."
"Good. I didn't think he was safe in that house by himself."
Cantrell looks provoked. "Any particular reason? Have there been
threats?"
"None that I know of. But it's hard to ignore the high number of
vaguely terrifying people wrapped up in this."
"No victim Avi. Beryl's flying back to S.F. from Amsterdam actually
she's probably there by now."
"I heard she was in Europe. Why?"
"Strange government shit is going on there. I'll tell you later."
"Where's Eb?"
"Eb has been holed up in the Crypt for a week with his team, doing this
kind of incredible D Day like push to finalize the biometric identification
system. We won't bother him. Tom's been drifting back and forth between his
house and the Crypt, running various kinds of torture tests on the internal
Crypt network systems. Probing the inner trust boundaries. That's where
we're going now."
"To the inner trust boundaries?"
"No! Sorry. His house." Cantrell shakes his head. "It's ... well. It's
not the house I would build."
"I want to see it."
"His paranoia is getting just a little out of hand."
"Hey speaking of that.. ." Randy stops. He was about to tell Cantrell
about Pontifex, but they are very close to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, and
people are looking at them. There's no way of telling who might be
listening. "I'll tell you later."
Cantrell looks momentarily baffled and then grins wickedly. "Good one."
"We have a car?"
"I borrowed Tom's car. His Humvee. Not one of those cushy civilian
models. A real military one."
"Oh, that's great," Randy says. "Does it come complete with big machine
gun on the back?"
"He looked into it he could certainly get a license to own one in
Kinakuta but his wife drew the line at having an actual heavy machine gun in
their domicile."
"How about you? Where do you stand on this gun stuff?"
"I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware," Cantrell says.
They are winding their way down a gauntlet of duty free shops, really
more of a duty free shopping mall. Randy cannot figure out who actually buys
all of these large bottles of liquor and expensive belts. What kind of
blandly orgiastic lifestyle demands this particular selection of goods?
In the time that's thus passed Cantrell has evidently decided that a
more thorough answer to Randy's gun question is merited. "But the more I
practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed."
"What do you mean?" This is Randy in unaccustomed sounding board mode,
psychotherapeutically prompting Cantrell for his feelings. It must have been
a weird day for John Cantrell, and no doubt there are some feelings that
need to be addressed.
"Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and
shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face to face with what a
desperate, last ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the
point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have
completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in
making sure we could do without them."
"And hence the Crypt?" Randy asks.
"My involvement in the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very
bad dreams that I had about guns."
It is wonderfully healthy to be talking like this, but it is a
portentous departure from their usual hard core technical mode. They are
wondering about whether it is even worth it for them to be mixed up in this
stuff. Heedless certainty sure is easier.
"Well, what about those Secret Admirers who were hanging around outside
Ordo?" Randy asks.
"What about them? You're asking me about their state of mind?"
"Yeah. That is what we are talking about. States of mind."
Cantrell shrugs. "I don't know specifically who they were. I'd guess
there are one or two honest to god scary fanatics. Setting them aside, maybe
a third of them are just too young and immature to understand what's going
on. It was just a lark for them. The other two thirds probably had very
sweaty palms."
"They looked like they were trying awfully hard to keep up a cheerful
front."
"They were probably happy to get out of there, and to go sit in a dark
cool room and drink beer afterwards. Certainly a lot of them have been
sending me e mail about the Crypt since then."
"As an alternative to violent resistance to the United States
Government, I assume and hope you mean."
"Exactly. Sure. I mean, that's what the Crypt is becoming. Right?"
The question sounds a little querulous to Randy. "Right," he says. He
wonders why he feels so much more settled about this stuff than John
Cantrell does, and then recalls, that he has nothing left to lose.
Randy takes one last breath of dry, machine cooled air and holds it
refreshingly in his lungs as they step out into the heat of the evening. He
has learned to relax into the climate; you can't fight it. There is a
humming logjam of black Mercedes Benzes waiting to pick up the Sultan–
and Vizier Class passengers. Very few Wallah Class passengers get off at
Kinakuta; most of them are in transit to India. Because this is the kind of
place where everything works just perfectly, Randy and John are in the
Humvee about twenty seconds later, and twenty seconds after that driving at
a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour down a long horizontal shaft of
ghastly blue green freeway light.
"We have been assuming that this Humvee is not bugged," Cantrell says,
"so, if you were holding back on something, you can speak freely now."
Randy writes, Let's stop assuming anything of the kind on a notepad and
holds it up. Cantrell raises his eyebrows one notch but of course does not
seem especially surprised he spends all of his time around people trying to
outdo each other in paranoia. Randy writes We have been under srv'nce by a
former NSA hondo gone private. Then he adds, Prob. Working for 1 or more
Crypt clients.
How do you know? Cantrell mouths.
Randy sighs, then writes: I was contacted by a Wizard.
Then, as long as John's preoccupied with working his way around a left
lane fender bender, he adds, Think of it as due diligence, underworld style.
Cantrell says out loud, "Tom has been pretty scrupulous about making
sure his house is bug free. I mean, he built the thing, or had it built,
from the ground up." He veers off onto an exit ramp and plunges into the
jungle.
"Good. We can talk there," Randy says, then writes, Remember the new
U.S. Embassy in Moscow bugs mixed into the concrete by KGB had to be torn
down.
Cantrell grabs the pad and scribbles blind on the dashboard while
maneuvering the Humvee up a curving mountain road into the cloud forest.
What do you want to talk about that is so secret? Arethusa? Give me agenda
pls.
Randy: (1) Lawsuit & whether Epiphyte can continue to exist. (2)
That NSA tapper, and Wizard, exist. (3) Maybe Arethusa.
Cantrell grins and writes, I have good news re: Tombstone's /.
"/" in this context is UNIX for the root of the file system, which in
the case of Tombstone is synonymous with the hard drive that Randy tried to
wipe. Randy raises his eyebrows skeptically and Cantrell grins, nods, and
draws his thumb across his throat.
Chez Howard is a flat roofed concrete structure that from certain
angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of
grout on the top of a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles
about ten minutes before they actually arrive, because the road must make
several switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been
involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it's not raining
here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South Seas breezes gathers
on leaves and rains from their drip tips all the time. Between the rain and
the plant life, erosion must be a violent and ravenous force here, which
makes Randy a little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains
could only exist in such an environment if the underlying tectonic forces
were thrusting rock into the air at a rate that would make your ears pop
standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is
naturally inclined to a conservative view.
Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down,
almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle.
Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit
downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy
realizes he's looking at a perspective view of a door frame with its door
hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob. STEEL FRAME,
Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels. Quick meandering scribbles suggest
the matrix of wall surrounding it, and the floor underneath. Where the
uprights of the doorframe are planted in the floor, Cantrell draws small,
carefully foreshortened circles. Holes in the floor. Then he encircles the
doorframe in a continuous hoop, beginning at one of those circles and
climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top, down the other side,
through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door,
then up through the first hole again, completing the loop. He draws one or
two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole
thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado. Many turns of fine wire.
Finally he draws two leads away from this huge door sized coil and connects
them to a sandwich of alternating long and short horizontal lines, which
Randy recognizes as the symbol for a battery. The diagram is completed with
a huge arrow drawn vigorously through the center of the doorway, like an
airborne battering ram, labeled B which means a magnetic field. Ordo
computer room door.
"Wow," Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary school
electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a
nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound
around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the
walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless
they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern
world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The
read/write heads of Tombstone's hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a
lot smaller. If they are fine pointed draftsman's pens, then what Cantrell's
drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no
effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that
was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the
pulse gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within
range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo
raid must have been purely a scrap hauling run for whoever organized it
Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General
Comstock's sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat's paw. The only
thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been
information stored on CD ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had
none of that.
Finally they have made it up to the top of the hill, which Tom Howard
has shaved to the bedrock in a kind of monk's tonsure. Not because he hates
living things, though he probably has no particular affection for them, but
to hold at bay the forces of erosion and to create a defensive glacis across
which the movements of incredibly poisonous snakes, squirrel sized insects,
opportunistic lower primates, and villainous upper primates will be visible
on the array of video cameras he has built into fairly subtle recesses and
crevices up on the walls. Seen up close, the house is surprisingly not as
dour and fortresslike as it looked at first. It is not just a single large
culvert but a bundle of them in different diameters and lengths, like a
faggot of bamboo. There is a decent number of windows, particularly on the
north side where there's a view, down the slope that John and Randy have
just climbed, to a crescent shaped beach. The windows are set deeply into
the walls, partly to back them out of the nearly vertical rays of the sun
and partly because each one has a retractable steel shutter, hidden in the
wall, that can be dropped down in front of it. It is an okay house, and
Randy wonders if Tom Howard would be willing to deed it over to the Dentist
and hock his colossal suite of Gomer Bolstrood furniture and move his family
into a crowded apartment building just in order to retain control of
Epiphyte Corporation. But maybe that won't even be necessary.
John and Randy climb out of the Humvee to the sound of gunfire.
Artificial light radiates upwards from a slot neatly dissected out of the
jungle nearby. Humidity and clouds of insects make light a nearly solid and
palpable thing here. John Cantrell leads Randy across the perfectly sterile
parking slab and into a screened and fenced tunnel that has been stabbed
into the black vegetation. Underfoot is some kind of black plastic grid that
keeps the nude soil from becoming a glue trap. They walk down the tunnel,
until twenty or thirty paces later it opens up into an extremely long,
narrow clearing: the source of the light. At the far end of it, the ground
rises abruptly in a sort of berm, partly natural, Randy thinks, and partly
enhanced with fill dirt excavated from the house's foundation. Two large
paper targets in the shape of human silhouettes are clipped to a rack there.
At the near end, two men with ear protectors pulled down around their necks
are examining a gun. One of these men is Tom Howard. Randy is struck but not
really astonished by the fact that the other one is Douglas MacArthur
Shaftoe, evidently fresh in from Manila. The gun looks like exactly the same
model that some of the black hatted and bandanna masked posse were carrying
yesterday in Los Altos: a long pipe with a sickle shaped clip curving away
from one side, and a very simple stock made of a few bare metal parts bolted
together.
Doug is in the middle of saying something, and is not the type to
interrupt his train of thought and fall all over himself being friendly just
because Randy has recently traversed the Pacific Ocean. "I never knew my
father," he says, "but my Filipino uncles used to tell me stories that he
had told. When he was on Guadalcanal, they the Marines were still using
their Springfields, the ought three model, so four decades old when finally
the M 1 rifle began to show up. So they took one of each rifle and tossed it
into the water and rolled it around in the sand for a while and did God
knows what else to it but nothing that would be unusual in a real combat
situation, for a Marine and then tried to operate them and found that the
ought three still worked and the M 1 didn't. So they stuck to their
Springfields. And I would say that some testing along those lines would be
in order if you think you are really designing an insurgency weapon, as you
say. Good evening, Randy."
"Doug, how are you?"
"I am just fine, thank you!" Doug is one of these guys who always
interprets "how are you" as a literal request for information, not just an
empty formality, and always seems slightly touched that someone would care
enough to ask. "Mr. Howard here says that when you were sitting on top of
that car typing you were actually doing something clever. And dangerous. At
least from a legal point of view."
"Were you monitoring that?" Randy asks Tom.
"I saw packets moving through the Crypt, and later saw you on
television. I put two and two together," Tom says. "Nice job, Randy." He
lumbers forward and shakes Randy's hand. This is an almost embarrassing
outpouring of emotion by Tom Howard standards.
"What I did there probably failed," Randy says. "If Tombstone's disk
was blanked, it was blanked by the doorframe coil, and not by what I did."
"Well, you deserve recognition anyway, which is what your friend is
trying to give you," Doug says, mildly irked at Randy's obtuseness.
"I should offer you a drink, and a chance to relax, and all of that,"
Tom says, looking towards his house, "but on the other hand Doug says you
were flying Sultan Class."
"Let's talk out here," Randy says. "But actually there is one thing you
could get me."
"What's that?" Tom asks.
Randy pulls the little disembodied hard drive out of his pocket and
holds it up in the light, the wire ribbon adangle. "A laptop computer and a
screwdriver."
"Done," Tom says, and disappears down the tunnel. Doug meanwhile begins
dismantling the weapon, as if just to keep his hands busy. He takes the
parts out one by one and regards them curiously.
"What do you think of the HEAP gun?" Cantrell asks.
"I don't think it's as crazy as when I first heard of it," Doug says,
"but if your friend Avi thinks that people are going to be able to
manufacture rifled gun barrels in their basements to protect themselves
against ethnic cleansing, he's got another thing coming."
"Rifled barrels are hard," Cantrell says. "There's no way around it.
They'd have to be stockpiled and smuggled. But the idea is that anyone who
downloaded the HEAP, and who had access to some basic machine tools, could
build the rest of the weapon."
"I need to sit down with you sometime and explain everything else
that's wrong with the idea," Doug says.
Randy changes the subject. "How's Amy?"
Doug looks up and eyes Randy carefully. "You want my opinion? I think
she is lonely, and in need of reliable support and companionship."
Now that Doug has totally alienated both Randy and John, the gun range
is completely silent for a while, which is probably how Doug likes it. Tom
comes out with a laptop in one hand and, in the other, half a dozen blue
plastic water bottles all shrink wrapped together, already dribbling a trail
of condensation.
"I have an agenda," Cantrell says, holding up the notepad.
"Wow! You guys are organized," Tom says.
"Item the first: Lawsuit and whether Epiphyte can continue to exist."
Randy lays the laptop out on the same table where Doug is working with the
HEAP gun and begins to remove screws. "I assume you guys know of the lawsuit
and have worked out the implications of it yourself," he says. "If the
Dentist can prove that Doug discovered the wreck as a byproduct of work he
did for us, and if the value of that wreck is high enough compared to the
value of the company, then the Dentist owns us, and for all practical
purposes owns the Crypt."
"Whoa! Wait a minute. The Sultan owns the Crypt," Tom says. "If the
Dentist controls Epiphyte, all he gets out of it is a contract to provide
certain technical services in the Crypt."
Randy senses everyone's looking at him. He twirls screws out of the
computer, refusing to agree with this.
"Unless there's something here I'm not getting," Tom says.
"I guess I'm just being paranoid and sort of assuming that the Dentist
is somehow collaborating with forces in the U.S. government that are anti
privacy and anti crypto," Randy says.
"Attorney General Comstock's cabal, in other words," Tom says.
"Yeah. For which I have never actually seen any evidence at all. But in
the wake of the Ordo raid everyone seems to be assuming it. If that is the
case, and the Dentist ends up providing technical services to the Crypt,
then the Crypt is compromised. We have to assume, in that case, that
Comstock has a man on the inside."
"Not just Comstock," Cantrell says.
"Okay, the U.S. government."
"Not just the U.S. government," Cantrell says. "The Black Chamber."
"What the hell do you mean by that?" Doug asks.
"There was a high level conference a couple of weeks ago in Brussels.
Hastily organized we think. Chaired by Attorney General Comstock.
Representatives of all the G7 countries and a few others. We know people
from the NSA were there. People from Internal Revenue. Treasury people
Secret Service. Their counterparts in the other countries. And a lot of
mathematicians known to have been co opted by the government. The U.S. vice
president was there. Basically we think that they are planning to form some
kind of international body to clamp down on crypto and particularly on
digital money."
"The International Data Transfer Regulatory Organization," Tom Howard
says.
"The Black Chamber is a nickname for that?" Doug asks.
"That's what people on the Secret Admirers mailing list have started
calling it," Cantrell says.
"Why form this organization now?" Randy wonders.
"Because the Crypt is about to go hot, and they know it," Cantrell
says.
"They are scared shitless about their ability to collect taxes when
everyone is using systems like the Crypt," Tom explains to Doug.
"This has been the talk of the Secret Admirers mailing list for the
last week. And so when Ordo was raided, it really hit a raw nerve.
"Okay," Randy says, "I've been wondering why people showed up there
almost immediately with guns and stranger things." He has got the laptop
opened up now and disconnected its hard drive.
"You have wandered off the agenda," Doug says, pulling an oily rag down
the barrel of the HEAP gun. "The question is, does the Dentist have you guys
by the balls, or only by the short hairs? And that question basically
revolves around yours truly. Right?"
"Right!" Randy says, a little too forcefully he's feeling desperate for
a change in subject. The whole Kepler/Epiphyte/Semper Marine thing is
stressful enough all by itself, and the last thing he needs is to be hanging
around with people who believe it is nothing more than a skirmish in a war
to decide the fate of the Free World a preliminary round of the Apocalypse.
Avi's obsession with the Holocaust seemed fine to Randy as long as
Holocausts were things that happened long ago or far away being personally
involved in one is something Randy can do without. He should have stayed in
Seattle. But he didn't, and so the next best thing for him is to limit the
conversation to straightforward things like bars of gold.
"In order for him to have a claim, the Dentist needs to prove that
Semper Marine found that wreck when it was doing the cable survey. Right?"
Doug asks.
"Right," Cantrell says, before Randy can step in and say that it's a
bit more complicated than that.
"Well, I have been kicking around this part of the world for half of my
life, and I can always testify that I found the wreck on an earlier survey.
That son of a bitch can never prove that I'm lying," Doug says.
"Andrew Loeb his lawyer is smart enough to know that. He will not put
you on the stand," Randy says, screwing his own hard drive into place.
"Fine. Then all he's got is circumstantial evidence. Namely, the
proximity of the wreck to the cable survey corridor."
"Right. Which implies a correlation," Cantrell says.
"Well, it is not that damn close," Doug says. "I was cutting a very
wide swath at the time."
"I have bad news," Randy says. "First of all, it is a civil case and so
circumstantial evidence is all he needs to win. Secondly, I just heard from
Avi, on the plane, that Andrew Loeb is filing a second suit, for breach of
contract."
"What goddamn contract?" Doug demands.
"He has anticipated everything you just said," Randy says. "He still
doesn't know where the wreck is. But if it turns out to be miles and miles
away from the survey corridor, he will claim that by surveying such a wide
swath you were basically risking the Dentist's money in order to go
prospecting, and that thus the Dentist still deserves a share of the
proceeds."
"Why does the Dentist want a beef with me?" Doug says.
"Because then he can pressure you into testifying against Epiphyte. You
get to keep all the gold. That gold becomes damages which the Dentist
leverages into control of Epiphyte."
"Jesus fuckin' Christ!" Doug exclaims. "He can kiss my ass."
"I know that," Randy says, "but if he gets wind of that attitude, he'll
just come up with another tactic and file another suit."
Doug begins, "Well that's kind of defeatist "
"Where I'm headed with this," Randy says, "is that we cannot fight the
Dentist on his turf which is the courtroom any more than the Viet Cong could
have fought a pitched battle in the open against the U.S. Army. So there are
some really good reasons to get that gold out of the wreck surreptitiously,
before the Dentist can prove it's there."
Doug looks outraged. "Randy, have you ever tried to swim while holding
a gold bar in one hand?"
"There's got to be a way to do it. Little submarines or something."
Doug laughs out loud and mercifully decides not to debunk the concept
of little submarines. "Supposing it was possible. What do I do with the gold
then? If I deposit it in a bank account, or spend it on something, what's to
keep this Andrew Loeb guy from taking that as circumstantial evidence that
the wreck had a ton of money in it? You're saying I have to sit on this
money for the rest of my life in order to protect you from this lawsuit."
"Doug. You can do this," Randy says. "You get the gold. You put it on a
boat. My friends here can explain the rest." Randy fits the laptop's plastic
case back together and begins maneuvering the little screws back into their
recesses.
Cantrell says, "You bring the boat here."
Tom continues, "To that beach, right down the hill. I'll be waiting for
you with the Humvee."
"And you and Tom can drive it downtown and deposit that bullion in the
vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta." Cantrell concludes.
Someone has finally said something that actually knocked Doug Shaftoe
off balance. "And get what in return?" he asks suspiciously.
"Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And
untaxable."
Doug's regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs.
"What'll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?"
"Soon enough, it'll buy you anything that money can buy," Tom says. "I
would have to know a little more about it," Doug says. "But once again we
are straying from the agenda. Let's leave it at this: you guys need me to
strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly."
"It's not just what we need. It might be in your best interests, too,"
Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.
"Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us and something
about a Wizard?" John says.
"Yeah."
Doug's giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief
summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men not
to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn't
read Lord of the Rings. Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation
with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are
interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him
is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.
"Randy!" Doug almost shouts. "Didn't you at any point ask this guy why
Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?"
"Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda," Cantrell says.
"Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?" Randy jokes.
"I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was
about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and
his eternally condemned soul," Doug says. "Seriously! You got the messages
from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?"
"Right."
"And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?"
"Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila."
"Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that
time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?"
"I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code."
"But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any
time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't
you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to
be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your
head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you think is
the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?"
"I have no idea," Randy says.
"The reason is gold," Doug says.
Randy snorts. "You have got gold on the brain."
"Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you
something?" Doug demands.
"You did. Sorry."
"Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise,
the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify
such an effort at the NSA."
"There was an ongoing Huk insurrection," Tom says. "But you're right.
The real focus around here anyway was Vietnam."
"You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war which
was Old Man Comstock's brainchild the American military presence in the
Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling
over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking
for something. I think they were looking for the Primary."
"As in primary gold repository?"
"You got it."
"Is that what Marcos eventually found?"
"Opinions differ," Doug says. "A lot of people think that the Primary
is still waiting to be discovered."
"Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else,
in these messages," Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode,
with a