Cryptonomicon

Prag's teeth, and turns, clamping his hardhat down on top of his glossy hair. 'Please follow me, everyone,' he announces, 'the tour begins.'

It is a dull tour, even for those who have never been inside the place. Whenever Prag leads them to a new spot, everyone looks around and gets their bearings; conversation lulls for ten or fifteen seconds, then picks up again; the high-ranking executives stare unseeingly at the hewn stone walls and mutter to each other while their engineering consultants converge on the Goto engineers and ask them learned questions.

All of the construction engineers work for Goto and are, of course, Nipponese. There is another who stands apart. 'Who's the heavyset blond guy?' Randy asks Tom Howard.

'German civil engineer on loan to Goto. He seems to specialize in military issues.'

' Arethere any military issues?'

'At some point, about halfway into this project, Prag suddenly decided he wanted the whole thing bombproof.'

'Oh. Is that Bomb with a capital B, by any chance?'

'I think he's just about to talk about that,' Torn says, leading Randy closer.

Someone has just asked the German engineer whether this place is nuclear-hardened.

'Nuclear-hardened is not the issue,' he says dismissively. 'Nuclear-hardened is easy-it just means that the structure can support a brief overpressure of so many megapascals. You see, half of Saddam's bunkers were, technically, nuclear-hardened. But this does no good against precision-guided, penetrating munitions-as the Americans proved. And it is far more likely this structure will be attacked in that way than that it would ever be nuked-we do not anticipate that the sultan will get involved in a nuclear war.'

This is the funniest thing that anyone has said all day, and it gets a laugh.

'Fortunately,' the German continues, 'this rock above us is far more effective than reinforced concrete. We are not aware of any earth-penetrating munitions currently in existence that could break through.'

'What about the R and D the Americans have done on the Libyan facility?' Randy asks.

'Ah, you are talking about the gas plant in Libya, buried under a mountain,' the German says, a bit uneasily, and Randy nods.

'That rock in Libya is so brittle,' says the German, 'you can shatter it with a hammer. We are working with a different kind of rock here, in many layers.'

Randy exchanges a look with Avi, who looks as if he is about to bestow another commendation for deviousness. At the same time Randy grins, he senses someone's stare. He turns and locks eyes with Prag, who is looking inscrutable, verging on pissed off. A great many people in this part of the world would cringe and wither under the glare of Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, but all Randy sees is his old friend, the pizza-eating hacker.

So Randy stares right back into Prag's black eyes, and grins. Prag prepares for the staredown. You asshole, you tricked my German-for this you shall die!But he can't sustain it. He breaks eye contact, turns away, and raises one hand to his mouth, pretending to stroke his goatee. The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever. A man like Prag can come home, throw away his Nikes, and pray to Mecca five times a day, but he can never eradicate it from his system.

The tour lasts for a couple of hours. When they emerge, the temperature has doubled. Two dozen cellphones and beepers sing out as they exit the radio silence of the cavern. Avi has a brief and clipped conversation with someone, then hangs up and herds Epiphyte Corp. towards their car. 'Small change of plans,' he says. 'We need to break away for a little meeting.' He utters an unfamiliar name to the driver.

Twenty minutes later, they are filing into the Nipponese cemetery, sandwiched between two busloads of elderly mourners.

'Interesting place for a meeting,' says Eberhard Fohr.

'Given the people we're dealing with, we have to assume that all of our rooms, our car, the hotel restaurant, are bugged,' Avi snaps. No one speaks for a minute, as Avi leads them down a gravel path towards a secluded corner of the garden.

They end up in the corner of two high stone walls. A stand of bamboo shields them from the rest of the garden, and rustles soothingly in a sea breeze that does little to cool their sweaty faces. Beryl's fanning herself with a Kinakuta street map.

'Just got a call from Annie-in-San-Francisco,' he says.

Annie-in-San-Francisco is their lawyer.

'It's, uh ... seven P.M. there right now. Seems that just before the close of business, a courier walked into her office, fresh off the plane from LA, and handed her a letter from the Dentist's office.'

'He's suing us for something,' Beryl says.

'He's this far away from suing us.'

'For what!?' Tom Howard shouts.

Avi sighs. 'In a way, Tom, that is beside the point. When Kepler thinks it's in his best interests to filea tactical lawsuit, he'll find a pretext. We must never forget that this is not about legitimate legal issues, it is about tactics.'

'Breach of contract, right?' Randy says.

Everyone looks at Randy. 'Do you know something we should know?' asks John Cantrell.

'Just an educated guess,' Randy says, shaking his head. 'Our contract with him states that we are to keep him informed of any changes in conditions that may materially alter the business climate.'

'That's an awfully vague clause,' Beryl says reproachfully.

'I'm paraphrasing.'

'Randy's right,' Avi says. 'The gist of this letter is that we should have told the Dentist what was going on in Kinakuta.'

'But we did not know,' says Eb.

'Doesn't matter-remember, this is a tactical lawsuit.'

'What does he want?'

'To scare us,' Avi says. 'To rattle us. Tomorrow or the next day, he'll bring in a different lawyer to play good cop-to make us an offer.'

'What kind of offer?' Tom asks.

'We don't know, of course,' Avi says, 'but I'm guessing that Kepler wants a piece of us. He wants to own part of the company.'

Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains his almost perpetual mask of cool control. 'So it's bad news, good news, bad news. Bad news number one: Anne's phone call. Good news: because of what has happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our stock.'

'What's the second bit of bad news?' Randy asks.

'It's very simple.' Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to face them again. 'This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough, now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile away. It attracts pythons.' Avi pauses for a moment. 'Usually, the grace period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time-weeks or months-to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were perched virtually on top of the python. Now we're not valuable any more.'

'What do you mean?' Eb says. 'We're just as valuable as we were this morning.'

'A small company that's being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is most certainly notvaluable. It probably has an enormous negativevalue. The only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away. See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom's incredible performance yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the lawsuit.

'So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it in a cave,' Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice regretfully. 'And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a lesson to