bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the end of the airstrip, next to the other C-47, and run through darkness, following the lead of the British pilots. Then they go down a stairway and are underground-in a bomb shelter, to be precise. They can feel the bombs now but can't hear them.
'Welcome to Malta,' someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he is surrounded by men in British and American uniforms. The Americans are familiar-it's the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that other Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men that those fellows in Washington were telling him about. The only thing they all have in common is that each man, somewhere on his uniform, is wearing the number 2702.
Chapter 18 NON-DISCLOSURE
Avi shows up on time, idling his fairly good, but not disgustingly ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly up the steep road, which has crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones.
Randy watches from the second-floor deck, staring fifty feet almost straight down through the sunroof. Avi is clad in the trousers of a good tropical-weight business suit, a tailored white Sea Island cotton shirt, dark ski goggles, and a wide-brimmed canvas hat.
The house is a tall, isolated structure rising out of the middle of a California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away. Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf on a beach. When Avi gets out of his car the first thing he does is pull on his suit-jacket.
He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment in the car's nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so that the batteries won't drain. A power conduit, with grounded three-prong outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall; primeval op-art contact paper; fake wood-grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead posters; and even the odd doorway.
One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run.
'Finux,' Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question.
Randy types 'Finux' and hits the return key. 'How many operating systems you have on this thing?'
'Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily,' Avi says. 'Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting.'
'Which one do you want now?'
'BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?'
Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it's because of his detonating hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don't use them, but Eb (or rather, one of Eb's defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he's doing, but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard, except when he's in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new risks.
'Overhead projector?' Randy says.
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then gets up and walks out of the room.
The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow. Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
'Nice goggles.'
'If you think these are weird, you should see what I'm going to put on when the sun goes down,' Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a dollhouse- scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack and the lights come on: expensive-looking blue-white halogen.
Randy raises his eyebrows.
'It's all jet-lag avoidance,' Avi explains. 'I'm adjusted to Asian time. I'm going back there in two days. I don't want my body to get back on Left Coast time while I'm here.'
'So the hat and goggles-'
'Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which, would you mind closing the blinds?'
The room has west-facing windows, affording a view down the grassy slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through. Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster's severed arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO! In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery list, a half-erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a couple of dotted quads-Internet addresses-and a few words in German, which were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Fohr scans all of this, finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an eraser.
Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting. They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on his wrist.
Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard Fohr, John Cantrell (the guy in the black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard (the fair-haired Middle American). As John and Tom reach for the pages, the silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds. Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.
'Those look new,' Randy says. 'Did they change the wording again?'
'Yeah!' John Cantrell says. 'This is version 6.0-just out last week.'
Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were suffering from some sort of life- threatening condition, such as an allergy to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS COLLECT REWARD $100,000
and on the other:
CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS I-800-NNN-NNNN
