Cryptonomicon

food has just been slid in. 'Actually, it was served an hour ago-you might want to have at it before the rats come.'

'Thank you,' Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old rat-turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago-he sits on his bed, next to Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully, growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading about in the old e-mail message.

'So what are you in for?' Randy asks.

Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin. Then he says, 'Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I'm probably guilty of the first two.'

'Tell me about it.'

'First tell me what you're in for.'

'Heroin was found in my bag at the airport. I stand accused of being the world's stupidest drug smuggler.'

'Is someone angry at you?'

'That would make for a much longer story,' Randy says, 'but I think you have the drift.'

'Well, in my case, it's like this. I have been working at a mission hospital up in the mountain.'

'You're a priest?'

'Not anymore. I'm a lay worker.'

'Where's your hospital?'

'South of here. Out in the boondocks,' Enoch Root says. 'The people there cultivate pineapple, coffee, coconut, bananas, and a few other cash crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters.'

Funnythat Enoch Root should suddenly be on the subject of buried treasure. And yet he has been so tight-lipped. Randy guesses he's intended to play stupid. He takes a stab at it: 'Is there supposed to be some treasure down there?'

'The old-timers say that many Nipponese trucks went down a particular road during the last few weeks before MacArthur's return. Past a certain point it was not possible to know where they went, because the road was blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious.'

'Or kill them,' Randy says.

Enoch Root takes this in stride. 'That road gives way to a rather vast area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square miles. Much of it is jungle. Much has difficult topography. Lots of volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting up mudflows from time to time. But some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have settled during the decades since the war, and put together the rudiments of an economy.'

'Who owns the land?'

'You've gotten to know the Philippines well,' Enoch Root says. 'You go immediately to the central question.'

'Around here, asking who owns the land is like complaining about the weather in the Midwest,' Randy muses.

Enoch Root nods. 'I could spend a long time answering your question. The answer is that patterns of ownership changed just after the war, and then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years. So we have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by certain families.'

'Of course.'

'Of course. Second epoch: the war. A vast area sealed off by the Nipponese. Some of the families who owned the land prospered under the occupation. Others went bankrupt. Third epoch: postwar. The bankrupt families went away. The prosperous ones expanded their holdings. As did the church and the government.'

'Why?'

'The government made part of the land-the jungle-into a national park. And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work.'

'Eruptions?'

'In the early 1950s, just to make things interesting-you know, things are never interesting enough in the Philippines-the volcanoes acted up. A few lahars came through the area, wiped out some villages, redirected some rivers, displaced many people. The church set up the hospital to help those people.'

'A hospital doesn't take up very much land,' Randy observes.

'We also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self-reliant.' Enoch Root acts like he basically does not want to talk about this. 'At any rate, things then settled down into a pattern that more or less endured until the Marcos era, when various people were forced to sell some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins, nephews, cronies, and bootlicks.'

'They were looking for Nipponese war gold.'

'Certain of the locals have made a business of pretending to remember where the gold is,' Enoch Root says. 'Once it was understood just how remunerative this could be, it spread like a virus. Everyone claims to have hazy memories of the war now, or of tales that Dad or Granddad told them. The Marcos-era treasure-hunters did not display the cautious skepticism that might have been expected from people with more piercing intellects. Many holes were dug. No gold was found. Things settled down. Then, in the last few years, the Chinese came in.'

'Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, or-'

'Chinese of Chinese ancestry,' Enoch Root says. 'Northern Chinese. Robust ones who like spicy food. Not the usual gracile Cantonese-speaking fish-eaters.'

'These people are from where, then-Shanghai?'

Root nods. 'Their company is one of these post-Maoist monstrosities. Headed up by an actual Long March veteran. Wily survivor of many purges. Name of Wing. Mr. Wing-or General Wing as he likes to be addressed when he is feeling nostalgic-handled the transition to capitalism rather deftly. Built hydroelectric projects with slave labor during the Great Leap Forward, parlayed that into control of a very large government ministry which has now become a sort of corporation. Mr. Wing has the ability to shut off the electricity to just about any home or factory or even military base in China, and by Chinese standards this makes him into a distinguished elder statesman.'

'What does Mr. Wing want there?'

'Land.Land. More land.'

'What sort of land?'

'Land in the jungle. Oddly enough.'

'Maybe he wants to build a hydroelectric project.'

'Yes, and maybe you're a heroin smuggler. Say, Randy, don't think I'm rude for saying so, but you have sauce in your beard.' Enoch Root thrusts a hand through the bars, proffering a paper napkin. Randy takes it and, lifting it to his face, notes that the following letters are written on it: OSKJJ JGTMW. Randy pretends to daub sauce off his beard.

'Now I've gone and done it,' says Enoch Root, 'given you my whole supply of bumwad.'

'Greater love hath no man,' Randy says. 'And I see you gave me your other deck of cards too-you are too generous.'

'Not at all-I thought you might want to play solitaire, just as I did.'

'Don't mind if I do,' Randy says, setting his dinner tray aside and reaching for the deck.

The card on top is an eight of spades. Skimming it and a few more cards out of the way, he finds a joker, with small stars in the corners; according to hints that Enoch has already dropped, this is the A joker. It's the work of a moment to slip it beneath the card below, which happens to be a Jack of clubs. About two-thirds of the way down into the pack he finds a big-star joker, and B stands for Big, so he knows that is Joker B; he moves it down two cards, below the six of clubs and the nine of diamonds. Straightening up the pack and then smearing though it once more, he sticks various fingers in as he re-finds those jacks, and ends up with a good half of the pack-the full inter-Joker span, plus the two Jokers themselves-trapped between his index and forefingers. The thinner stacks above and below he pulls out and swaps with each other. Enoch watches all of this and seems to approve.