Cryptonomicon

You're saying I have to sit on this money for the rest of my life in order to protect you from this lawsuit.'

'Doug. You can do this,' Randy says. 'You get the gold. You put it on a boat. My friends here can explain the rest.' Randy fits the laptop's plastic case back together and begins maneuvering the little screws back into their recesses.

Cantrell says, 'You bring the boat here.'

Tom continues, 'To that beach, right down the hill. I'll be waiting for you with the Humvee.'

'And you and Tom can drive it downtown and deposit that bullion in the vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta.' Cantrell concludes.

Someone has finally said something that actually knocked Doug Shaftoe off balance. 'And get what in return?' he asks suspiciously.

'Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And untaxable.'

Doug's regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. 'What'll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?'

'Soon enough, it'll buy you anything that money can buy,' Tom says. 'I would have to know a little more about it,' Doug says. 'But once again we are straying from the agenda. Let's leave it at this: you guys need me to strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly.'

'It's not just what weneed. It might be in your best interests, too,' Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.

'Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us-and something about a Wizard?' John says.

'Yeah.'

Doug's giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men-not to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn't read Lord of the Rings.Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.

'Randy!' Doug almost shouts. 'Didn't you at any point ask this guy why Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?'

'Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda,' Cantrell says.

'Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?' Randy jokes.

'I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and his eternally condemned soul,' Doug says. 'Seriously! You got the messages from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?'

'Right.'

'And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?'

'Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila.'

'Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?'

'I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code.'

'But that's bullshit!' Doug says. 'Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you think is the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?'

'I have no idea,' Randy says.

'The reason is gold,' Doug says.

Randy snorts. 'You have got gold on the brain.'

'Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you something?' Doug demands.

'You did. Sorry.'

'Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise, the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify such an effort at the NSA.'

'There was an ongoing Huk insurrection,' Tom says. 'But you're right. The real focus-around here anyway-was Vietnam.'

'You know something?' fires back Doug. 'During the Vietnam war-which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild-the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary.'

'As in primary gold repository?'

'You got it.'

'Is that what Marcos eventually found?'

'Opinions differ,' Doug says. 'A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered.'

'Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else, in these messages,' Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode, with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various pieces of hardware that were present on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford dealership's dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards through Chester's card-reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds several lines of random capital letters.

'How do you know there's no information about the primary in those messages, Randy?' Doug asks.

'The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years,' Randy says. 'It all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator.'

Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types

grep AADAA *

and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt, meaning that the search failed.

'Ho-ly shit,' Randy says.

'What?' everyone says at once.

Randy takes a long, deep breath. 'These are not the same messages that Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break.'

Chapter 81 DELUGE

It takes Goto Dengo about half a minute to waddle up the narrow entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along, muttering to each other calmly.

His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he's into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness is cozy and reassuring to him-in it, he can always pretend that he is still a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his life have never happened.

But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not, and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.

'Is everything okay, Lieutenant?' says one of his crew, fifty meters behind him.

'Fine,' Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. 'You four be careful you do not break your toes on this bar.'

So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.

'Where are the last few workers?' one of the crew shouts.