Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  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 think 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 Comstoc
k 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 seve
r 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?”