Cryptonomicon

'As far as the Dentist is concerned,' Avi said, 'our advantage is that, when it comes to the Philippines, he will be predictable. Tame. Even docile.' He smiles cryptically.

'How so?'

'Victoria Vigo whored her way up out of Smoky Mountain, right?'

'Well, there seems to be a lot of nudging and winking to that effect, but I've never heard anyone come out and sayit before,' Randy said, glancing around nervously.

'Believe me, it's the only way she could have gotten out of there. Pimping arrangements were handled by the Bolobolos. This is a group from Northern Luzon that was brought into power along with Marcos. They run that part of town-police, organized crime, local politics, you name it. Consequently, they own her-they have photographs, videos from the days when she was an underage prostitute and porn film starlet.'

Randy shook his head in disgust and amazement. 'How the hell do you get this information?'

'Never mind. Believe me, in some circles it's as well known as the value of pi.'

'Not my circles.'

'Anyway, the point is that her interests are aligned with the Bolobolos and always will be. And the Dentist is always going to obediently do whatever his wife tells him to.'

'Can you really assume that?' Randy said. 'He's a tough guy. He probably has a lot more money and power than the Bolobolos. He can do whatever he wants.'

'But he won't,' Avi says, smiling that little smile again. 'He'll do what his wife tells him to.

'How do you know that?'

'Look,' Avi said, 'Kepler is a major control freak-just like most powerful, rich men. Right?'

'Right.'

'If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does that translate into?'

'I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman.

'Wrong!' Avi said. 'Sex is more complicated than that, Randy. Sex is a place where people's repressed desires come out. People get most turned on when their innermost secrets are revealed-'

'Shit! Kepler's a masochist?'

'He is such a fucking masochist that he was famous for it. At least in the Southeast Asian sex industry. Pimps and Madams in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shenzhen, Manila, they all had files on him-they knew exactly what he wanted. And that's how he met Victoria Vigo. He was in Manila, see, working on the FiliTel deal. Spent a lot of time here, staying in a hotel that's owned, and bugged, by the Bolobolos. They studied his mating habits like entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed Victoria Vigo-their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator-to give Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a guided fucking missile and pow! true love.'

'You'd think he would have been suspicious, or something. I'm surprised he'd get that involved with a whore.'

'He didn't know she was a whore! That's the beauty of the plan! The Bolobolos set her up with a fake identity as a concierge at Kepler's hotel! A demure Catholic school girl! It starts with her getting him tickets to a play, and inside of a year. he's chained to his bed on that fucking mega-yacht of his with strap marks on his ass, and she's standing over him with a wedding ring on her finger the size of a headlamp, the hundred and thirty-eighth richest woman in the world.'

'Hundred and twenty-fifth,' Randy corrected him, 'FiliTel stock has been on a bull run lately.'

* * *

Randy spends the next days trying not to run into the Dentist. He stays at a small private inn up on the top of the island, eating continental breakfast every morning with an assortment of American and Nipponese war veterans who have come here with their wives to (Randy supposes) deal with emotional issues a million times more profound than anything Randy's ever had to contend with. The Rui Faleirois nothing if not conspicuous, and Randy can get a pretty good idea of whether the Dentist is aboard it by watching the movements of the helicopter and the speedboat.

When he thinks it's safe, he goes down to the beach below the microwave antenna and watches Amy's divers work on the cable installation. Some of them are working out in the surf zone, bolting sections of cast-iron pipe around the cable. Some are working a couple of miles offshore coordinating with a barge that is injecting the cable directly into the muddy seafloor with a giant, cleaver-like appendage.

The shore end of the cable runs into a new reinforced-concrete building set back about a hundred meters from the high-tide level. It is basically just a big room filled with batteries, generators, air-conditioning units, and racks of electronic equipment. The software running on that equipment is Randy's responsibility, and so he spends most of his time in that building, staring into a computer screen and typing. From there, transmission lines run up the hill to the microwave tower.

The other end is being extended out towards a buoy that is bobbing in the South China Sea a few kilometers away. Attached to that buoy is the end of the North Luzon Coastal Festoon, a cable, owned by FiliTel, that runs up the coast of the island. If you follow it far enough you reach a building at the northern tip of the island, where a big cable from Taiwan comes in. Taiwan, in turn, is heavily webbed into the world submarine cable network; it is easy and cheap to get data into or out of Taiwan.

There is only one gap left in the private chain of transmission that Epiphyte and FiliTel are trying to establish from Taiwan to downtown Manila, and that gap gets narrower by the day, as the cable barge grinds its way towards the buoy.

* * *

When it finally gets there, Rui Faleiroweighs anchor and glides out to meet it. The helicopter and the speedboat, and a flotilla of hired boats, go into action ferrying dignitaries and media crews out from Manila. Avi shows up carrying two fresh tuxedos from a tailor shop in Shanghai ('All those famous Hong Kong tailors were refugees from Shanghai'). He and Randy tear off the tissue paper, put them on, and then ride in an un-air conditioned jeepney down the hill to the dock, where Gloryawaits them.

Two hours later, Randy gets to lay eyes on the Dentist and the Diva for the first time ever-in the grand ballroom of the Rui Faleiro.To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.

The one thing that is special about this party is that two tar-covered cables, each about the thickness of a baseball bat, are running up onto the quarterdeck. If you go to the rail and look down you can see them disappear into the brine. The cable ends meet on a tabletop in the middle of the deck, where a technician, flown in from Hong Kong and duded up in a tuxedo, sits with a box of tools, working on the splice. He is also working on a big hangover, but that is fine with Randy since he knows that it's all fake-the cables are just scraps, their loose ends trailing in the water alongside the yacht. The real splice was performed yesterday and is already lying on the bottom of the sea with bits running through it.

There is another man on the quarterdeck, mostly staring at Bata'an and Corregidor but also keeping an eye on Randy. The moment Randy notices him, this man nods as if checking something off a list in his head, stands up, walks over, and joins him. He is wearing a very ornate uniform, the U.S. Navy equivalent of black tie. He is mostly bald, and what hair he does have is battleship grey, and shorn to a length of perhaps five millimeters. As he walks toward Randy, several Filipinos watch him with obvious curiosity.

'Randy,' he says. Medals clink together as he grips Randy's right hand and shakes it. He looks to be around fifty, but he has the skin of an eighty-year-old Bedouin. He has a lot of ribbons on his chest, and many of them are red and yellow, which are colors that Randy vaguely associates with Vietnam. Above his pocket is a little plastic nameplate reading, SHAFTOE. 'Don't be deceived, Randy,' says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, 'I'm not on active duty. Retired eons ago. But I'm still entitled to wear this uniform. And it's a hell of a lot easier than going out and trying to find a tuxedo that fits me.'

'Pleased to meet you.'

'Pleasure's mine. Where'd you get yours, by the way?'