called Palawan.
'This reminds us that national boundaries are artificial and silly,' Avi says. 'The Sulu Sea is a basin in the middle of a larger plateau shared by the Philippines and Borneo. So if you're wiring up the Philippines, you can just as easily wire Borneo up to that network at the same time, just by outlining the Sulu Sea with shallow, short-hop cables. Like this.'
Avi clicks again and the computer draws in more colored lines.
'Avi, why are we here?' Eberhard asks.
'That is a very profound question,' Avi says.
'We know the economics of these startups,' Eb says. 'We begin with nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for-to protect your idea. We work on the idea together-put our brainpower into it-and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it into a product, to market it, and so on. That's how the system works, but I'm beginning to think you don't understand it.'
'Why do you say that?'
Eb looks confused. 'How can we contribute to this? How can we turn our brainpower into equity that an investor will want to own a part of?'
Everyone looks at Beryl. Beryl's nodding agreement with Eb. Tom Howard says, 'Avi. Look. I can engineer big computer installations. John wrote Ordo-he knows everything about crypto. Randy does Internet, Eb does weird stuff, Beryl does money. But as far as I know, none of us knows diddly about undersea cable engineering. What good will our resumes do you when you go up in front of some venture capitalists?'
Avi's nodding. 'Everything you say is true,' he concedes smoothly.
'We would have to be crazy to get involved in running cables through the Philippines. That is a job for FiliTel, with whom Epiphyte(1) has been joint-venturing.'
'Even if we were crazy, Beryl says, 'we wouldn't have the opportunity, because no one would give us the money.'
'Fortunately we don't need to worry about that,' Avi says, 'because it's being done for us.' He turns to the whiteboard, picks up a red magic marker, and draws a fat line between Taiwan and Luzon, his hands picking up a leprous, mottled look from the shaded relief of the ocean floor that is being projected against his skin. 'KDD, which is anticipating major growth in the Philippines, is already laying another big cable here.' He moves down and begins to draw smaller, shorter links between islands in the archipelago. 'And FiliTel, which is funded by AVCLA-Asia Venture Capital Los Angeles-is wiring the Philippines.'
'What does Epiphyte(l) have to do with that?' Tom Howard asks.
'To the extent they want to use that network for Internet Protocol traffic, they need routers and network savvy,' Randy explains.
'So, to repeat my question: why are we here?' Eberhard says, patiently but firmly.
Avi works with his pen for a while. He circles an island at one corner of the Sulu Sea, centered in the gap between North Borneo and the long skinny Philippine island called Palawan. He labels it in block letters:
SULTANATE OF KINAKUTA.
'Kinakuta was run by white sultans for a while. It's a long story. Then it was a German colony,' Avi says. 'Back then, Borneo was part of the Dutch East Indies, and Palawan-like the rest of the Philippines-was first Spanish and then American. So this was the Germans' foothold in the area.'
'Germans always ended up holding the shittiest colonies,' Eb says ruefully.
'After the First World War, they handed it over to the Japanese, along with a lot of other islands much farther to the east. All of these islands, collectively, were called the Mandates because Japan controlled them under a League of Nations Mandate. During the Second World War the Japanese used Kinakuta as a base for attacks on the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. They retained a naval base and airfield there. After the war, Kinakuta became independent, as it had been before the Germans. The population is Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges, animist in the center, and it's always been ruled by a sultan-even while occupied by the Germans and the Japanese, who both co-opted the sultans but kept them in place as figureheads. Kinakuta had oil reserves, but they were unreachable until the technology got better and prices went up, around the time of the Arab oil embargo, which was also when the current sultan came into power. That sultan is now a very rich man-not as rich as the Sultan of Brunei, who happens to be his second cousin, but rich.'
'The sultan is backing your company?' Beryl asks.
'Not in the way you mean,' Avi says.
'What way do you mean?' Tom Howard asks, impatient.
'Let me put it this way,' Avi says. 'Kinakuta is a member of the United Nations. It is every bit as much an independent country and member of the community of nations as France or England. As a matter of fact, it is exceptionally independent because of its oil wealth. It is basically a monarchy-the sultan makes the laws, but only after extensive consultation with his ministers, who set policy and draft legislation. And I've been spending a lot of time, recently, with the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. I have been helping the minister draft a new law that will govern all telecommunications passing through Kinakutan territory.'
'Oh, my god!' John Cantrell says. He is awestruck.
'One free share of stock to the man in the black hat!' Avi says. 'John has figured out Avi's secret plan. John, would you like to explain to the other contestants?'
John takes his hat off and runs his hand back through his long hair. He puts his hat back on and heaves a sigh. 'Avi is proposing to start a data haven,' he says.
A little murmur of admiration runs through the room. Avi waits for it to subside and says, 'Slight correction: the sultan's starting the data haven. I'm proposing to make money off it.'
Chapter 19 ULTRA
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse goes into battle armed with one-third of a sheet of British typing paper on which has been typed some words that identify it as a pass to Bletchley Park. His name and some other things have been scribbled on it in some upper-class officer's Mont Blanc blue-black, the words ALL SECTIONS circled, and a stamp smashed across it, blurred into a red whore's kiss, with sheer carelessness conveying greater Authority and Power than the specious clarity of a forger.
He finds his way round the mansion to the narrow lane that runs between it and its row of red-brick garages (or stables, as his grandparents would be likely to peg them). He finds it a very pleasant place for a cigarette. The lane is lined with trees, a densely planted hedge of them. The sun is just setting now. It is still high enough to snipe through any small defects that it finds in the defensive perimeter of the horizon, so narrow red beams strike him surprisingly in the eye as he ambles back and forth. He knows one is shining invisibly through the clear air several feet above him, because it is betraying an aerial: a strand of copper wire stretched from the wall of the mansion to a nearby cypress. It catches the light in precisely the same way as the strand of the spiderweb that Waterhouse was playing with earlier.
The sun will be down soon; it is already down in Berlin, as in most of the hellish empire that Hitler has built from Calais to the Volga. Time for the radio operators to begin their work. Radio does not, in general, go around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world, which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military units over the horizon. But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the
As Waterhouse has just observed, the mansion has an aerial or two. But Bletchley Park is a huge and ravenous spider that requires a web the size of a nation to feed it. He has seen enough evidence, from the black cables climbing the mansion's walls and the smell and hiss of the massed teletypes, to know that the web is at least partly made of copper wires. Another piece of the web is made of rude stuff like concrete and asphalt.
The gate swings open and a man on a green motorcycle banks steeply into the lane, the two cylinders of
