By the time Randy reaches the Air Kinakuta boarding lounge, he has already forgotten how he reached the airport. He honestly can’t remember. Did he hail a taxi? Not likely in down town Los Altos. Did he get a ride from some hacker? He couldn’t have driven the Acura, because the Acura’s electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun. He had pulled the title out of the glove compartment and signed it over to a Ford dealer three blocks away, in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash.
Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.
He has always wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of an exotic foreign airline and saying, "Get me on the next plane to X." But now he’s just done it and it wasn’t cool and romantic as he had hoped. It was sort of bleak and stressful and expensive. He had to buy a first-class ticket, which consumed most of the five thousand dollars. But he doesn’t feel like beating himself to death over how he is managing his assets just now, i.e., at a time when his net worth is a negative number that can only be expressed using scientific notation. The probability is high that he failed to wipe Tombstone’s hard drive before the cops seized it, and that the Dentist’s lawsuit will consequently succeed.
On his way down the concourse he stands and stares at a bank of telephones for a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent events. It would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub clean of treasure as fast as possible, reducing its value and hence the damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.
The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist has a way to claim damages from Epiphyte. The amount of those damages is x, where x is what the Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper Marine. If such a contract had specified a fifty-fifty split, then x would be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other frictional effects of the real world. So if there’s ten million dollars in the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.
In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire an additional forty percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.
If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say, "You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $x. But as I look at the parlous state of the corporation’s finances I see that there’s no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is really, really close to being zero, you’re going to have to give him almost all of it."
So how to make x < y? Either reduce the value of the wreck, by stripping it of its gold, or else increase the value of Epiphyte, by—what, exactly?
In better times they could maybe take the company public. But setting up an IPO takes months. And no investor’s going to touch it when it’s encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.
Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end-loader and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte’s account. That’d do it. The whole concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of the international concourse.
Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold-in-the-jungle concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi’s family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the group’s movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink into the men’s room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus complete asthma-attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.
"So. Uh, going to Israel?"
"El Al doesn’t fly to Acapulco." Pow! Devorah is in peak form.
"Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?"
"You’re asking me? I kind of assumed you would know," Devorah says.
"Well, things have been, certainly, volatile," Randy says. "I don’t know if fleeing the country is warranted."
"Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking out of your pocket?"
"Oh, you know . . . some business issues need resolving."
"You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?" Devorah asks.
Randy sighs. "That depends. Do you?"
"Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?"
"Because you’ve been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes’ notice."
"We’re going to Israel, Randy. That’s not being uprooted. That’s being rerooted." Or perhaps she is saying "rerouted." Without a transcript, there is no way for Randy to tell.
"Yeah, but it’s still kind of a hassle—"
"Compared to what?"
"Compared to staying at home and living your life."
"This is my life, Randy." Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I’ll-do-my job, you-do-yours, why-are-you-in-my-face attitude. Randy feels like an idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah’s bag. She is clearly just this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why doesn’t he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the Dentist a big hug?
Randy says, "I assume you’ll be in touch with Avi before you take off. Would you give him a message?"
"What’s the message?"
"Zero."
"That’s it?"
"That’s it," Randy says.
Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi’s practice of conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a time, à la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, "zero" means that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone’s hard drive.
Air Kinakuta’s first-class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un-American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport, clutching his hip spastically every time he re-realizes that his laptop isn’t dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop’s hard drive, and then threw away the rest.
Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news-bits even more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely surprised, to see footage of black-hatted Secret Admirers exercising their Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo’s barricade avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons drawn. Paul Comstock is shown—pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and Epiphyte and now it’s become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and this makes Randy irritated and confused.
He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he doesn’t partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling-while-Rome-burns thing going for it that works for him just now.
As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards that are stuffed in among the in-flight magazines and vomit-sacs. One of these extols the fact that Sultan-Class passengers (as first-class passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe’s GSM telephone. It’s an Australian phone number, but it’ll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it’s something like six a.m. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a taxi.
"It’s Randy. On a plane," says Randy. "An Air Kinakuta plane."
"Randy! Well I’ve just been watching you on television," Doug says. It takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to cleanse his palate of the caviar.
"Yeah," Doug continues, "I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed you sitting on top of a car typing. What’s going on?"
"Nothing! Nothing at all," Randy says. He figures that this is a big stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he’ll be more likely to effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka and says, "Wow, this Sultan-Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web search on Ordo, you’ll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with us. Nothing."
"That’s funny, because Comstock is denying that it’s a crackdown on Ordo," Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy’s nose before he controls it. "They say that it’s just a little old civil suit," Doug says, now using a petal-soft, wounded innocent tone.
"Ordo’s status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears is just coincidental," Randy guesses.
"That’s right."
"Well then, I’m sure there’s nothing to it other than our troubles with the Dentist," Randy says.
"What troubles are those, Randy?"
"Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I’m sure you will have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning."
"Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then," Doug Shaftoe says.
"Maybe I’ll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta," Randy says.
"You have a good flight, Randall."
"Have a nice day, Douglas."
Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink into a well-deserved plane-coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It is so disorienting to have one’s phone ring on an airplane that he doesn’t know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what’s going on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.
When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, "You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan-Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he’s never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that’s been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.
"Um, who’s this?"
"Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay telephone somewhere and then call you back?"
"Who is this, please?"
"You think that’s more secure than his GSM phone? It’s not really." The speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he’s been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his conversational stride.
"Okay," Randy says, "you know who I am and whom I was calling. So obviously you are surveilling me. You’re not working for the Dentist, I take it. That leaves—what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?"
The man laughs. "As a rule the Fort Meade boys don’t bother to check in with the people whose lines they are tapping." The caller has an un-American crispness in his voice, vaguely Northern European. "In your case the NSA might make an exception, it’s true—when I was there, they were all great admirers of your grandfather’s work. In fact, they liked it so much they stole it."
"No higher flattery, I guess."
"You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you’re not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you’d be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices—who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron."
"Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?"
"He wasn’t interested. Said he had a higher calling. So while he made better and better computers to solve the Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned."
"And you did too."
"I? Oh, no, I have only modest skills with a soldering iron. I was there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather."
"On behalf of—whom? Don’t tell me—eruditorum.org?"
"Well done, Randy."
"What should I call you—Root? Pontifex?"
"Pontifex is a nice word."
"It’s true," Randy says. "I checked it out, looking for clues in the etymology—it’s an old Latin word meaning ‘priest.’ "
"Catholics call the Pope ‘Pontifex Maximus,’ or pontiff for short," says Pontifex agreeably, "but the word was also used by pagans to denote their priests, and Jews their rabbis—it is ever so ecumenical."
"But the literal meaning of the word is ‘bridge builder,’ and so it’s a good name for a cryptosystem," Randy says.
"Or, I hope, for me," Pontifex says drily. "I am glad you feel that way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than a bridge."
"Well, gosh. It’s nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex."
"The pleasure is mutual."
"You’ve been so quiet on the e-mail front recently."
"Didn’t want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any more, you’d think I was proselytizing."
"Not at all. By the way—people in the know think your cryptosystem is weird, but good."
"It’s not weird at all, once you understand it," Pontifex says politely.
"Well, uh, what occasions this phone call? Obviously your friends are still surveilling me on behalf of—whom, exactly?"
"I don’t even know," Pontifex says. "But I do know that you’re trying to crack Arethusa."
Randy cannot even remember ever uttering the word "Arethusa." It was printed on the wrappers on the bricks of ETC cards that he ran through Chester’s card reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside Grandpa’s old trunk labeled Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge and dated in the early 1950s. So that at least gives him a date to peg on Pontifex. "You were at NSA during the late forties and early fifties," Randy says. "You must have worked on Harvest." Harvest was a legendary code-breaking supercomputer, three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA contract.
"I told you," Pontifex says, "your grandfather’s work came in handy."
"Chester’s got this retired ETC engineer working on his card machinery," Randy says. "He helped me read the Arethusa cards. Saw the wrappers. He’s a friend of yours. He called you."
Pontifex chuckles. "Among our little band there is hardly a word with more memories attached to it than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy."
"Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?"
"Because we spent ten years of our lives trying to break the damned code! And we failed!"
"It must have been really frustrating," Randy says, "you still sound angry."
"I’m angry at Comstock."
"Not the—"
"Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock."
"What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the ski lift? The Vietnam guy?"
"No, no! I mean, yes. Earl Comstock was largely responsible for our Vietnam policy. And Doug Shaftoe did get his fifteen minutes of fame by throwing him off a ski lift in, I believe, 1979. But all of that Vietnam nonsense was just a coda to his real career."
"Which was?"
"Earl Comstock, to whom your grandfather reported in Brisbane during World War II, was one of the founders of the NSA. And he was my boss from 1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa."
"Why?"
"He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it, we could then exploit that break to get into some later Soviet codes that were giving us difficulty. Which was ridiculous. But he believed it—or claimed to—and so we battered our heads against Arethusa for years. Strong men had nervous breakdowns. Brilliant men concluded that they were stupid. In the end it turned out to be a joke."
"A joke? What do you mean by that?"
"We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it—wrote new volumes of the Cryptonomicon. The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got anything that was worth a damn.
"After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who was especially cocky we’d put him on the Arethusa project just to give him the message that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in—the smartest kid we had seen yet—and he broke it."
"Well, I assume you didn’t place this phone call just to keep me in suspense," Randy says. "What did he find?"
"He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a Riemann zeta function, which has many uses—one being that it is used in some cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock’s career."
"Why?"
"Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string—the seed for the random number generator—was the boss’s name. C-O-M-S-T-O-C-K."
"You’re kidding."
"We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed—and believe me, he really was that kind of guy—or else someone had played an enormous practical joke on him."
"Which do you think it was?"
"Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end it didn’t matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty-six. A classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance and any number of high-powered connections. He went more or less straight to Kennedy’s National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history."
"Wow!" Randy says, kind of awed. "What a jerk!"
"No kidding," says Pontifex. "And now, his son—well, don’t get me started on his son."
As Pontifex’s voice trails off, Randy asks, "So, you are calling me now for what purpose?"
Pontifex doesn’t answer for a few moments, as if he’s wrestling with the question himself. But Randy doubts that’s the case. Someone is trying to send you a message. "I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and buried."
"But why should you care?"
"You’ve already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents," Pontifex says. "It wouldn’t be fair."
"So, it’s pity, then."
"Furthermore—as I said—it is my friend’s job to keep you under surveillance. He’s going to hear almost every word you say for the next few months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just let it go."
"Well, thanks for the tip."
"You’re welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?"
"That’s what Pontifex is supposed to do."
"First a disclaimer: I’ve been out of circulation for a while. Have not picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments."
"Okay, I am bracing myself."
"My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your clients—some of them, anyway—are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote."
"So you’re talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?"
"Yes, I am, but I’m also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery."
"Well, we provide state-of-the-art cryptographic services to all of our clients—even the ones with bones in their noses."
"Excellent! And now—as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note—I must say good-bye."
Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.
"Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal."
"I have a funny story to tell you," Randy says, "about a guy you ran into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait."