Cryptonomicon

of Eb and John. All three heads turn towards them. Seeing the Dentist, Eb and John adopt the facial expressions of B-movie actors whose characters have just taken small-caliber bullets to the center of the forehead. Avi, by contrast, stiffens up like a man who stepped on a rusty nail a week ago and has just felt the first stirrings of the tetanus infection that will eventually break his spine.

'We've got a busy day ahead of us,' Randy says. 'I guess my answer is yes, subject to availability.'

'Good. I'll hold you to it,' says Dr. Kepler, and steps out of the elevator. 'Good morning, Mr. Halaby. Good morning, Dr. Fohr. Good morning, Mr. Cantrell. Nice to see you all looking so very much like gentlemen.'

Nice to see you acting like one.

'The pleasure is ours,' Avi says. 'I take it we'll be seeing you later?'

'Oh, yes,' says the Dentist, 'you'll be seeing me all day.' This procedure will be a lengthy one, I'm afraid.He turns his back on them and walks across the lobby without further pleasantries. He is headed for a cluster of leather chairs nearly obscured by an explosion of bizarre tropical flowers. The occupants of those chairs are mostly young, and all smartly dressed. They snap to attention as their boss glides towards them. Randy counts three women and two men. One of the men is obviously a gorilla, but the women-inevitably referred to as Fates, Furies, Graces, Norns, or Harpies-are rumored to have bodyguard training, and to carry weapons, too.

'Who are those?' John Cantrell asks. 'His hygienists?'

'Don't laugh,' Avi says. 'Back when he was in practice, he got used to having a staff of women do the pick-and-floss work for him. It shaped his paradigm.'

'Are you shitting me?' Randy asks.

'You know how it works,' Avi says. 'When you go to the dentist, you never actually see the dentist, right? Someone else makes the appointment. Then there's always this elite coterie of highly efficient women who scrape the plaque out of the way, so that the dentist doesn't have to deal with it, and take your X-rays. The dentist himself sits in the back somewhere and looks at the X-rays-he deals with you as this abstract greyscale image on a little piece of film. If he sees holes, he goes into action. If not, he comes in and exchanges small talk with you for a minute and then you go home.'

'So, why is he here?' demands Eberhard Fohr.

'Exactly!' Avi says. 'When he walks into the room, you never know why he's here-to drill a hole in your skull, or just talk about his vacation in Maui.'

All eyes turn to Randy. 'What went on in that elevator?'

'I-nothing!' Randy blurts.

'Did you discuss the Philippines project at all?'

'He just said he wanted to talk to me about it.'

'Well, shit.' Avi says. 'That means wehave to talk about it first.'

'I know that,' Randy says, 'so I told him that I might talk to him if I had a free moment.'

'Well, we'd best make damn sure you have no free moments today,' Avi says. He thinks for a moment and continues, 'Did he have a hand in his pocket at any time?'

'Why? You expecting him to pull out a weapon?'

'No,' Avi says, 'but someone told me, once, that the Dentist is wired.'

'You mean, like a police informant?' John asks incredulously.

'Yeah,' Avi says, like it's no big deal. 'He makes a habit of carrying a tiny digital recorder the size of a matchbook around in his pocket. Perhaps with a wire running up inside his shirt to a tiny microphone somewhere. Perhaps not. Anyway, you never know when he's recording you.'

'Isn't that illegal or something?' Randy asks.

'I'm not a lawyer,' Avi says. 'More to the point, I'm not a Kinakutan lawyer. But it wouldn't matter in a civil suit-if he slapped us with a tort, he could introduce any kind of evidence he wanted.'

They all look across the lobby. The Dentist is standing flatfooted on the marble, arms folded over his chest, chin pointed at the floor as he absorbs input from his aides.

'He might have put his hand in his pocket. I don't remember,' Randy says. 'It doesn't matter. We kept it extremely general. And brief.'

'He could still subject the recording to a voice-stress analysis, to figure out if you were lying,' John points out. He relishes the sheer unbridled paranoia of this. He's in his element.

'Not to worry,' Randy says, 'I jammed it.'

'Jammed it? How?' Eb asks, not catching the irony in Randy's voice. Eb looks surprised and interested, It is clear from the look on his face that Eb longs to get into a conversation about something arcane and technical.

'I was joking,' Randy explains. 'If the Dentist analyzes the recording, he'll find nothing but stress in my voice.'

Avi and John laugh sympathetically. But Eb is crestfallen. 'Oh,' Eb says. 'I was thinking that we could absolutely jam his device if we so wanted.'

'A tape recorder doesn't use radio,' John says. 'How could we jam it?'

'Van Eck phreaking,' Eb says.

At this point, Tom Howard emerges from the cafe with a thoroughly ravished copy of the South China Morning Postunder his arm, and Beryl emerges from an elevator, prepped for combat in a dress and makeup. The men avert their eyes shyly and pretend not to notice. Greetings and small talk ensue. Then Avi looks at his watch and says, 'Let's head over to the sultan's palace,' as if he were proposing they go grab some french fries at Mickey Ds.

Chapter 35 CRACKER

Waterhouse has to keep an eye on that safe; Shaftoe is itching to blow it open with high explosives, and Chattan (who firmly overrules Shaftoe) intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to have another crack at opening it himself, just to see if he can do it.

Chattan's position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear and specialized mission which most certainly does not include opening safes from U-boats. For that matter, it does not include going onto abandoned U-boats to recover safes, or other crypto data, in the first place. The only reason they did that was because they happened to be the only people with Ultra clearance who were in the neighborhood, and U-553's precarious position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts.

But Waterhouse's desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with Detachment 2702's mission, or his own personal duties, or even, particularly, with winning the war. It is something that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling down that stretched line from U-553 to the torpedo boat, battered by waves and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one moment to the next whether he would make it back to the boat or plunge into the Atlantic, he was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the half-frozen neurons in his fingertips as he twiddled the safe's submerged dial. Even as Enoch Root patched him up on board the boat, Waterhouse was constructing a crude mental model of how the safe's tumblers might be constructed, visualizing the thing in his mind's eye. And even as the rest of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping bags around the chapel of Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and bandaged Waterhouse stalks the polished corridors of that building's better corner, looking for a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon.

The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and the carbon he steals from the closet where Ghnxh keeps the galvanick lucipher. He brings them, plus a brick-sized crystal of hard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where everyone else is sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines who are basically a naval organization. Officers are in the transept: Chattan has the south arm of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds in the north. A small moiety of Detachment 2702's astounding tarp supply has, then, been hung up across the eastern end of the place, partitioning off the chancel, Holy of Holies,