'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
'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
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
