Cryptonomicon

Randy types:

randy

and hits the return key. Tombstone answers:

password:

and Randy types it in. Tombstone informs him that he's logged on, and that he has mail.

The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.

Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1)it would take several minutes to execute and (2) it would not thoroughly erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log-on, he executes a command that finds those files on the hard drive. Then he types another command that causes random numbers to be written over those areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.

The cops are slamming the battering ram against the side door of the office building when Randy's right pinky slams the Enter key and executes that command. He is almost certainly safe from the tampering-with- evidence charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of this exercise. He needs to find all the copies of the e-mail message that specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same multiple-erase trick on them. If the damn things were not encrypted, he could search for the critical strings of digits. As it is, he will have to search for files that were created during a certain time period, around the time that Randy was out on Glory,anchored over the wreck. Randy knows roughly what day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him any files created five days either side of that, just to be safe, and limits it to only those directories used for e-mail.

The search takes forever, or maybe it just seems that way because the cops have smashed the side door off its hinges now and are inside the building. The video window catches Randy's eye as it changes dramatically; he gets a veering montage of grainy frozen images of a room; a doorway; a hallway; a reception area; and finally a barricade. The Ordo guys have yanked their video camera out of the window and restationed it at their front desk, recording a barrier built of cheap modular office furniture piled against the glass entrance to the reception. The camera tilts up to show that one of the four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by (one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.

Randy's 'find' command finally returns with a list of about a hundred files. The half-dozen or so critical ones are on the list somewhere, but Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring out which is which. He has the system generate a list of the disk blocks occupied by those files, so that he can go back later and do a super-erase. Once he's got that information, he does a 'rm' or 'remove' command on all of them. This is a paltry and miserable way to expunge secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's afraid he may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The 'rm' only takes a few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By this time the barricade has been scattered all over Ordo's lobby and the cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they don't look very happy.

There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e-mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive, then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever-or until the cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window, frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.

Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high-fiving each other.

There is a screeching of tires, and the sound of a low-speed collision, out on the street. About a dozen cars have rolled quietly to a stop, and some have been rear-ended by others that are still functioning. The McDonald's has gone dark. Television technicians are cursing inside their mobile units. Police officers and lawyers are pounding their walkie-talkies and cellphones against their hands.

'Pardon me,' Randy says to the Dwarves, 'but would you gentlemen like to share anything with me?'

'We just took out the whole building,' says one of the Dwarves.

'Took it out, in what sense?'

'Nailed it with a big electromagnetic pulse. Fried every chip within range.

'So it's a scorched-earth kind of deal? Go ahead and confiscate that gear, you damn Feds, it's all worthless junk now?'

'Yeah.'

'Well, it certainly worked on those cars,' Randy says, 'and it definitely worked on this piece of junk that used to be my computer.'

'Don't worry-it has no effect on hard drives,' the Dwarf says, 'so all of your files are intact.'

'I know you are expecting me to take that as good news,' Randy says.

Chapter 77 BUDDHA

A car is coming. The engine noise is expensively muffled, but it sounds like a diesel. Goto Dengo is awake, waiting for it, and so is the rest of the camp. No one stirs at Bundok during the day anymore, except for the radio men and those manning the anti aircraft guns. They have not been told that MacArthur is on Luzon, but they all sense The General's presence. The American planes rip across the sky all day long, glittering and proud, like starships from a distant future that none of them will ever see, and the earth rings like a bell from the impacts of distant naval guns. The shipments have become smaller but more frequent: one or two broken-down lorries every night, their rear bumpers practically scraping the road under crippling burdens of gold.

Lieutenant Mori has placed anther machine gun at the front gate, concealed in the foliage, just in case some Americans happen to blunder up this road in a jeep. Somewhere out there in the dark, the barrel of that weapon is tracking this car as it jounces up the road. The men know every dip and rise in that road, and can tell where the vehicles are by listening for the scrape of their undercarriages against the hardpan, a signature pattern of metallic dots and dashes.

The car's headlamps are off, of course, and the guards at the gate dare not shine bright lights around. One of them risks opening up a kerosene lantern, and aims its beam at the visitor. A silver Mercedes-Benz hood ornament springs forth from the blackness, supported by a chrome-plated radiator grille. The beam of the lantern fondles the car's black fenders, its sweeping silver exhaust pipes, its running boards, clotted with the meat of young coconuts-it must have sideswiped a pile on its way up here. In the driver's side window is the face of a Nipponese man in his forties, so haggard and tired he looks as though he is about to burst into tears. But he is just a driver. Next to him is a sergeant with a sawed-off shotgun, Nipponese rifles being generally too long to wield in the front seat of a luxury car. Behind them, a drawn curtain conceals whatever, or whoever, is in the backseat.

'Open!' demands the guard, and the driver reaches up behind his head and parts the curtain. The lantern beam falls through the opening and bounces back sharply from a pale face in the back seat. Several of the soldiers shout. Goto Dengo steps back, rattled, then moves in for a better look.

The man in the backseat has a very large head. But the strange thing about him is that his skin is a rich yellow color-not the normal Asian yellow-and it glitters. He is wearing a peculiar, pointed hat, and he has a calm smile on his face-an expression the likes of which Goto Dengo has not seen since the war began.