Chez Howard is a flat-roofed concrete structure that from certain angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of grout on the top of a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles about ten minutes before they actually arrive, because the road must make several switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it's not raining here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South Seas breezes gathers on leaves and rains from their drip-tips all the time. Between the rain and the plant life, erosion must be a violent and ravenous force here, which makes Randy a little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains could only exist in such an environment if the underlying tectonic forces were thrusting rock into the air at a rate that would make your ears pop standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is naturally inclined to a conservative view.
Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down, almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle. Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy realizes he's looking at a perspective view of a door-frame with its door hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob.
'Wow,' Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary-school electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The read/write heads of Tombstone's hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a lot smaller. If they are fine-pointed draftsman's pens, then what Cantrell's drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the pulse-gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo raid must have been purely a scrap-hauling run for whoever organized it-Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General Comstock's sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat's paw. The only thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been information stored on CD-ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had none of that.
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.
