All eyes turn towards Randy, and Beryl picks up the thread. She has arrogated to herself the role of worrying about people’s feelings, since the other people in the company are so manifestly unqualified, and she speaks regretfully. “The work Randy’s been doing in the Philippines, which is very fine work, is no longer a critical part of this corporation’s activities.”
“I accept that,” Randy says. “Hey, at least I got my first tan in ten years.”
Everyone seems immediately relieved that Randy is not pissed off. Tom, typically, gets right to brass tacks: “Can we pull out of our relationship with the Dentist? Just make a clean break?”
The rhythm of the conversation is abruptly lost. It’s like a power failure in a discotheque.
“Unknown,” Avi finally says. “We looked at the contracts. But they were written by the Dentist’s lawyers.”
“Aren’t some of his partners lawyers?” Cantrell asks.
Avi shrugs impatiently, as if that’s not the half of it. “His partners. His investors. His neighbors, friends, golfing buddies. His plumber is probably a lawyer.”
“The point being that he is famously litigious,” Randy says.
“The other potential problem,” Beryl says, “is that, if we did find a way to extract ourselves from the deal with AVCLA, we would then lose the short-term cash flow that we were counting on from the Philippines network. The ramifications of that turn out to be uglier than we had expected.”
“Damn!” Randy says, “I was afraid of that.”
“What are the ramifications?” Tom says, hewing as ever to the bottom line.
“We would have to raise some more money to cover the shortfall,” Avi says. “Diluting our stock.”
“Diluting it how much?” John asks.
“Below fifty percent.”
This magic figure touches off an epidemic of sighing, groaning, and shifting around among the officers of Epiphyte Corp., who collectively hold over fifty percent of the company’s stock. As they work through the ramifications in their heads, they begin to look significantly at Randy.
Finally Randy stands, and holds out his hands as if warding them off. “Okay, okay, okay,” he says. “Where does this take us? The business plan states, over and over, that the Philippines network makes sense in and of itself—that it could be spun off into an independent business at any time and still make money. As far as we know, that’s still true, right?”
Avi thinks this over before issuing the carefully engineered statement: “It is as true as it ever was.”
This elicits a titter, and a bit of sarcastic applause, from the others. Clever Avi! Where would we be without him?
“Okay,” Randy says. “So if we stick with the Dentist—even though his project is now irrelevant to us—we hopefully make enough money that we don’t need to sell any more stock. We can retain control over the company. On the other hand, if we break our relationship with AVCLA, the Dentist’s partners start to hammer us with lawsuits—which they can do at virtually no cost, or risk. We get mired in court in L.A. We have to fly back there and testify and give depositions. We spend a ton of money on lawyers.”
“And we might even lose,” Avi says.
Everyone laughs.
“So we have to stay in,” Randy concludes. “We have to work with the Dentist whether we want to or not.”
No one says anything.
It’s not that they disagree with Randy; on the contrary. It’s just that Randy is the guy who’s been doing the Philippines stuff, and who is going to end up handling this unfortunate situation. Randy’s going to take all the force of this blow personally. It is better that he volunteer than that it be forced on him. He is volunteering now, loudly and publicly, putting on a performance. The other actors in the ensemble are Avi, Beryl, Tom, John, and Eb. The audience consists of Epiphyte Corp.’s minority shareholders, the Dentist, and various yet-to-be-empaneled juries. It is a performance that will never come to light unless someone files a lawsuit against them and brings them all to the witness box to recount it under oath.
John decides to trowel it on a little thicker. “AVCLA’s financing the Philippines on spec, right?”
“Correct,” Avi says authoritatively, playing directly to the hypothetical juries-of-the-future. “In the old days, cable-layers would sell capacity first to raise capital. AVCLA’s building it with their own capital. When it’s finished, they’ll own it outright, and they’ll sell the capacity to the highest bidder.”
“It’s not all AVCLA’s money—they’re not that rich,” Beryl says. “They got a big wad from NOHGI.”
“Which is?” Eb asks.
“Niigata Overseas Holding Group Inc.,” three people say in unison.
Eb looks baffled.
“NOHGI laid the deep-sea cable from Taiwan to Luzon,” Randy says.
“Anyway,” John says, “my point is that since the Dentist is wiring the Philippines on spec, he is highly exposed. Anything that delays the completion of that system is going to cause him enormous problems. It behooves us to honor our obligations.”
John is saying to the hypothetical jury in Dentist v. Epiphyte Corp.: we carefully observed the terms of our contract with AVCLA.
But this is not necessarily going to look so good to the hypothetical jury in the other hypothetical minority shareholder lawsuit, Springboard Group v. Epiphyte Corp. So Avi hastens to add, “As I think we’ve established, through a careful discussion of the issues, honoring our obligations to the Dentist is part and parcel of our obligation to our own shareholders. These two goals dovetail.”
Beryl rolls her eyes and heaves a deep sigh of relief.
“Let us therefore go forth and wire the Philippines,” Randy says.
Avi addresses him in formal tones, as if his hand were resting, even now, on a Gideon Bible. “Randy, do you feel that the resources allotted to you are sufficient for you to meet our contractual obligations to the Dentist?”
“We need to have a meeting about that,” Randy says.
“Can it wait until after tomorrow?” Avi says.
“Of course. Why shouldn’t it?”
“I have to use the bathroom,” Avi says.
This is a signal that Avi and Randy have used many times in the past. Avi gets up and goes into the bathroom. A moment later, Randy says, “Come to think of it…” and follows him in there.
He is startled to find that Avi is actually pissing. On the spur of the moment, Randy unzips and starts pissing right along with him. It doesn’t occur to him how remarkable this is until he’s well into it.
“What’s up?” Randy asks.
“I went down to the lobby to change money this morning,” Avi says, “and guess who came stalking into the hotel, fresh from the airport?”
“Oh, shit,” Randy says.
“The Dentist himself.”
“No yacht?”
“The yacht’s following him.”
“Did he have anyone with him?”
“No, but he might later.”
“Why is he here?”
“He must have heard.”
“God. He’s the last guy I want to run into tomorrow.”
“Why? Is there a problem?”
“Nothing I can put my finger on,” Randy says. “Nothing dramatic.”
“Nothing that, if it came to light later, would make you look negligent?”
“I don’t think so,” Randy says. “It’s just that this Philippines thing is complicated and we need to talk about it.”
“Well, for God’s sake,” Avi says, “if you run into the Dentist tomorrow, don’t say anything about your work. Keep it social.”
“Got it,” Randy says, and zips up. But what he’s really thinking is: why did I waste all those years in academia when I could have been doing great shit like this?
Which then reminds him of something: “Oh, yeah. Got a weird e-mail.”
Avi immediately says “From Andy?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Y
ou said it was weird. Did you really get e-mail from him?”
“I don’t really know who it was from. Probably not Andy. It wasn’t weird in that way.”
“Did you respond to it?”
“No. But [email protected] did.”
“Who’s that? Siblings.net is the system you used to administer, right?”
“Yeah. I still have some privileges there. I created a new account there, name of dwarf, which can’t be traced to me. Sent anonymous e-mail back to this guy telling him that until he proves otherwise, I’m assuming he is an old enemy of mine.”
“Or a new one.”
SPEARHEAD
* * *
THE YOUNG LAWRENCE PRITCHARD WATERHOUSE, visiting his grandparents in Dakota, follows a plow across a field. The diving blades of the plow heave the black soil up out of the furrows and pile it into ridges, rough and jumbled when seen up close but mathematically clean and straight, like the grooves of a phonograph record, when viewed from a distance. A tiny surfboard-shaped object projects from the crest of one of those earthen waves. Young Waterhouse bends down and plucks it out. It is an Indian spearhead neatly chipped out of flint.
U-553 is a black steel spear point thrusting into the air about ten miles north of Qwghlm. The grey rollers pick it up and slam it down, but other than that, it does not move; it is grounded on a submerged outcropping known to the locals as Caesar’s Reef, or Viking’s Grief, or the Dutch-Hammer.
On the prairie, those flint arrowheads can be found lodged in every sort of natural matrix: soil, sod, the mud of a riverbank, the heartwood of a tree. Waterhouse has a talent for finding them. How can he walk across a field salted, by the retreat of the last glacier, with countless stones, and pick out the arrowheads? Why can the human eye detect a tiny artificial form lost in nature’s torn and turbulent cosmos, a needle of data in a haystack of noise? It is a sudden, sparking connection between minds, he supposes. The arrowheads are human things broken loose from humanity, their organic parts perished, their mineral forms enduring—crystals of intention. It is not the form but the lethal intent that demands the attention of a selfish mind. It worked for young Waterhouse, hunting for arrowheads. It worked for the pilots of the airplanes that hounded U-553 this morning. It works for the listeners of the Beobachtung Dienst, who have trained their ears to hear what is being said by Churchill and FDR on what are supposed to be scrambled telephones. But it doesn’t work very well with crypto. That is too bad for everyone except the British and the Americans, who have devised mathematical systems for picking out arrowheads amid pebbles.
Caesar’s Reef gashed the underside of U-553’s bow section open while shoving the entire boat up and partly out of the water. Momentum almost carried her over the hump, but she got hung up in the middle, stranded, a wave-battered teeter-totter. Her bows have mostly filled with water now, and so it is the sharp stern that projects up above the crests of the seas. She has been abandoned by her crew, which means that according to the traditions of maritime law, she is up for grabs. The Royal Navy has called dibs. A screen of destroyers patrols the area, lest some sister U-boat slip in and torpedo the wreck.
Waterhouse had been collected from the castle in unseemly haste. Dusk is now falling like a lead curtain, and wolf packs hunt at night. He is on the bridge of a corvette, a tiny escort ship that, in any kind of chop, has the exact hydrodynamics of an empty oil drum. If he stays down below he’ll never stop vomiting, and so he stands abovedecks, feet braced wide, knees bent, holding onto a rail with both hands, watching the wreck come closer. The number 553 is painted on her conning tower, beneath a cartoon of a polar bear hoisting a beer stein.
“Interesting,” he says to Colonel Chattan. “Five-five-three is the product of two prime numbers—seven and seventy-nine.”
Chattan manages an appreciative smile, but Waterhouse can tell that it’s nothing more than a spectacular display of breeding.
The remainder of Detachment 2702 is, meanwhile, finally arriving. Having just finished with the successful Norway-ramming mission, they were on their way to their new base of operations on Qwghlm when they received word of U-553’s grounding. They rendezvoused with Waterhouse right here on this boat—haven’t even had a chance to sit down yet, much less unpack. Waterhouse has told them several times how much they are going to like Qwghlm and has run out of other things to say—the crew of this corvette lacks Ultra Mega clearance, and there is nothing that Waterhouse could conceivably talk about with Chattan and the others that is not classified at the Ultra Mega level. So he’s trying gamely with prime number chitchat.
Some of the detachment—the Marine lieutenant and most of the enlisted men—were dropped off in Qwghlm so that they could settle into their new quarters. Only Colonel Chattan and a noncom named Sergeant Robert Shaftoe have accompanied Waterhouse to the U-boat.
Shaftoe has a wiry build, bulging Alley Oop forearms and hands, and blond hair in a buzz cut that makes his big blue eyes look bigger. He has a big nose and a big Adam’s apple and big acne scars and some other scars around the orbits of his eyes. The large features in the trim body give him an intense presence; it is hard not to keep looking over in his direction. He seems like a man with powerful emotions but an even more powerful discipline that keeps them under control. He stares directly and unblinkingly into the eyes of whoever is talking. When no one is talking, he stares at the horizon and thinks. When he is thinking, he twiddles his fingers incessantly. Everyone else is using their fingers to hold on to something, but Shaftoe is planted on the deck like a fat geezer waiting in line for a movie. He, like Waterhouse, but unlike Chattan, is dressed in heavy foul weather gear that they have borrowed from the stores of this torpedo boat.
It is known, and word has gone out to all present, that the U-boat’s skipper—the last man to abandon ship—had the presence of mind to bring the boat’s Enigma machine with him. The RAF planes, still circling overhead, watched the skipper rise to a precarious kneel in his life raft and fling the wheels of the machine in different directions, into the steep pitches of hill-sized waves. Then the machine itself went overboard.
The Germans know that the machine will never be recovered. What they do not know is that it will never even be looked for, because there is a place called Bletchley Park that already knows all that there is to know about the four-wheel naval Enigma. The Brits will make a show of looking anyway, in case anyone is watching.
Waterhouse is not looking for Enigma machines. He is looking for stray arrowheads.
The corvette first approaches the U-boat head-on, thinks better of it and swings far around astern of the wreck, then beats upwind towards it. That way, Waterhouse reckons, the wind will tend to blow them away from the reef. Seen from underneath, the U-boat is actually kind of fat-cheeked. The part that’s supposed to be above water, when it’s surfaced, is neutral grey, and it’s as skinny as a knife. The part that’s supposed to be below, when it hasn’t just crashed into a great big rock, is wide and black. She has been boarded by adventuresome Royal Navy men who have cheekily raised a White Ensign from her conning tower. They have apparently reached her in a shallow-draft whaler that is tied up alongside, loosely bound to her by a sparse web of lines, kept away by bald tires slung over the rail. The corvette carrying the members of Detachment 2702 edges towards the U-boat cautiously; each rolling wave nearly slams the boats together.
“We’re definitely in a non-Euclidean spatial geometry now!” Waterhouse says puckishly. Chattan bends towards him and cups a hand to his ear. “Not only that but it’s real time dependent, definitely something that has to be tackled in four dimensions not three!”
“I beg your pardon?”
Any closer and they’ll be grounded on the reef themselves. The sailors launch an actual rocket that carries a line between the vessels, and devote some time to rigging up a ship-to-ship transfer system. Waterhouse is afraid they’re going to put him on it. Actually he’s more resentful than afraid, because he was under the impression that he wouldn’t be pu
t in any more danger for the rest of the war. He tries to kill time looking at the underside of the U-boat and watching the sailors. They’ve formed a sort of bucket brigade to haul books and papers up out of the wreck to the conning tower and from there down into the whaler. The conning tower has a complicated spidery look with gun barrels and periscopes and antennas sticking out all over the place.
Waterhouse and Shaftoe are indeed sent over to U-553 on a sort of trolley contraption that rolls along a stretched cable. The sailors put life jackets on them first, as a sort of hilarious token gesture, so that if they avoid being smashed to bits they can die of hypothermia instead of drowning.
When Waterhouse is halfway across, the trough of a wave passes beneath him, and he looks down into the sucking cavity and sees the top of Caesar’s Reef, momentarily exposed, covered with an indigo fur of mussels. You could go down there and stand on it. For an instant. Then thousands of tons of really cold water slams into the cavity and rises up and punches him in the ass.
He looks up at U-553, entirely too much of which is above him. His basic impression is that it’s hollow, more colander than warship. The hull is perforated with rows of oblong slots arranged in swirling patterns like streamlines tattooed onto the metal. It seems impossibly flimsy. Then he peers through the slots—light is shining all the way through from more slots in the deck—and perceives the silhouette of the pressure hull nested inside, curved and much more solid-looking than the outer hull. She’s got two triple- bladed brass propellers, maybe a yard across, dinged here and there from contact with who knows what. Right now they are thrust up into the air, and looking at them Waterhouse feels the same absurd embarrassment he felt looking at dead guys in Pearl Harbor whose private parts were showing. Diving planes and rudders stick out of the hull downstream of the propellers, and aft of those, near the apex of the stern, are two crude hatchlike slabs of metal which, Waterhouse realizes, must be where the torpedoes come out.
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