Cryptonomicon

'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 thing 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 Sultanowns 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 Comstock 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 havebeen 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?