'It's too noisy here,' Cantrell says, 'it works by listening to your voice, doing Fourier shit, remembering a few key numbers. We'll do it in my room later.'
Feeling some need to explain why he hasn't been keeping up with his e-mail, Randy says, 'I have been totally obsessed, interfacing with these AVCLA people in Manila.'
'Yup. How's that going?'
'Look. My job's pretty simple,' Randy says. 'There's that big Nipponese cable from Taiwan down to Luzon. A router at each end. Then there's the network of short-run, interisland cables that the AVCLA people are laying in the Philippines. Each cable segment begins and ends at a router, as you know. My job is to program the routers, make sure the data will always have a clear path from Taiwan to Kinakuta.'
Cantrell glances away, worried that he's about to get bored. Randy practically lunges across the table, because he knows it's not boring. 'John! You are a major credit card company!'
'Okay.' Cantrell meets his gaze, slightly unnerved.
'You are storing your data in the Kinakuta data haven. You need to download a terabyte of crucial data. You begin the process-your encrypted bytes are screaming up through the Philippines at a gigabyte per second, to Taiwan, from there across to the States.' Randy pauses and swigs Guinness, building the drama. 'Then a ferry capsizes off Cebu.'
'So?'
'So, in the space of ten minutes, a hundred thousand Filipinos all pick up their telephones simultaneously.'
Cantrell actually whacks his forehead. 'Oh, my god!'
'Now you understand! I've been configuring this network so that no matter what happens, the data continues to flow to that credit-card company. Maybe at a reduced speed-but it flows.'
'Well, I can see how that would keep you busy.'
'And that's why all I'm really up to speed on is these routers. And incidentally they're good routers, but they just don't have enough capacity to feed a Crypt of that size, or justify it economically.'
'The gist of Avi and Beryl's explanation,' Cantrell says, 'is that Epiphyte is no longer the sole carrier into the Crypt.'
'But we're laying the cable here from Palawan-'
'The sultan's minions have been out drumming up business,' Cantrell says. 'Avi and Beryl are being vague, but from comparing notes with Tom, and reading tea leaves, methinks there's one, maybe two other cables coming into Kinakuta.'
'Wow!' Randy says. It's all he can think of. 'Wow!' He drinks about half of his Guinness. 'It makes sense. If they're doing it once with us, they can do it again, with other carriers.
'They used us as leverage to bring in others,' Cantrell says.
'Well . . . the question is, then, is the cable through the Philippines still needed? Or wanted?'
'Yup,' Cantrell says.
'It is?'
'No. I mean, yup, that's the question, all right.'
Randy considers it. 'Actually, this could be good news for
Cantrell raises his eyebrows, a little worried about Randy's feelings. Randy leans back in his chair and says, 'We've had debates before about whether it makes sense for Epiphyte to be screwing around with cables and routers in the Philippines.'
Cantrell says, 'The business plan has always maintained that it would make economic sense to be running a cable through the Philippines even if there weren't a Crypt at the end of it.'
'The business plan has to say the Intra-Philippines network could be spun off as an independent business, and still survive,' Randy says, 'to justify our doing it.'
Neither one of them needs to say any more. They've been concentrating on each other pretty intensely for a while, shutting out the rest of the bar with their postures, and now, spontaneously, both of them lean back, stretch, and begin looking around. The timing's fortuitous, because Goto Furudenendu has just come in with a posse of what Randy guesses are civil engineers: healthy-looking, clean-cut Nipponese men in their thirties. Randy invites him over with a smile, then flags down their waiter and orders a few of those great big bottles of bitterly cold Nipponese beer.
'This reminds me-the Secret Admirers are really on my case,' Randy says.
Cantrell grins, showing some affection for those crazy Secret Admirers. 'Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology,' he says, 'but they don't always understand business.'
'Maybe they understand it too well,' Randy says. He is left with some residual annoyance that he came down to the Bomb and Grapnel party in order to answer the question posed by [email protected] ('Why are you doing it?') and he still doesn't know. As a matter of fact, he knows less now than he did before.
Then the men from Goto join them, and it just happens that Eberhard Fohr and Tom Howard show up at just the same time. There is a combinatorial explosion of name-card exchanges and introductions. It seems like protocol demands a lot of serious social drinking-now Randy's inadvertently challenged these guys' politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into karaoke. Randy gets up and sings 'Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.' It's a good choice because it's a mellow, laid-back song that doesn't demand lots of emoting. Or singing ability, for that matter.
At some point Tom Howard puts his beefy arm up on the back of Cantrell's chair, the better to shout into his ear. Their matched Eutropian bracelets, engraved with 'Hello Doctor, please freeze me as follows' messages, are glittery and conspicuous, and Randy's nervous that the Nipponese guys are going to notice this and ask questions that will be exceedingly difficult to answer. Tom is reminding Cantrell of something (for some reason they always refer to Cantrell in this way; some people are just made to be called by last names). Cantrell nods and shoots Randy a quick and somewhat furtive look. When Randy looks back at him, Cantrell glances down apologetically and takes to chivvying his beer bottle nervously between his hands. Tom just keeps looking at Randy kind of interestedly. All of this motivated glancing finally brings Randy and Tom and Cantrell together at the farthest end of the bar from the karaoke speakers.
'So, you know Andrew Loeb,' Cantrell says. It's clear he's basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.
'It's true,' Randy says. 'As well as anyone can know a guy like that.'
Cantrell is paying undue diligence to the project of picking the label off of his beer bottle and so Tom picks up the thread now. 'You were in business together?'
'Not really. Can I ask how you guys are aware of this? I mean, how do you even know that Andrew Loeb exists in the first place? Because of the Digibomber thing?'
'Oh, no-it was after that. Andy became a figure of note in some of the circles where Tom and I both hang out,' Cantrell says.
'The only circles I can imagine that Andy'd be a part of would be primitive survivalists, and people who believe they've been Satanically ritually abused.'
Randy says this mindlessly, as if his mouth is a mechanical teletype hammering out a weather forecast. It kind of hangs there.
'That helps fill in a few gaps,' Tom finally says.
'What did you think when the FBI searched his cabin?' Cantrell asks, his grin returned.
'I didn't know what to think,' Randy says. 'I remember watching the videotape on the news-the agents coming out of that shack with boxes of evidence, and thinking my name must be on papers in them. That somehow I'd get mixed up in the case as a result.'
'Did the FBI ever contact you?' Tom asks.
'No. I think that once they searched through all of his stuff, they figured out pretty quickly that he wasn't the Digibomber, and crossed him off the list.'
'Well, not long after that happened, Andy Loeb showed up on the Net,' Cantrell says.
