Cryptonomicon (95 page)

“I wonder if we can get the Shaftoes to suspend the salvage operation.”

“Andrew Loeb has no case against us,” Avi says, “unless he can prove that the contents of that wreck are worth something. If the Shaftoes keep bringing stuff up, that’s easy. If they stop bringing stuff up, then Andrew will have to establish the value of the wreck in some other way.”

Randy grins. “That’s going to be really difficult for him to do, Avi. The Shaftoes don’t even know what’s down there. Andrew probably doesn’t even have the coordinates of the wreck.”

“There is a latitude and longitude specified in the lawsuit.”

“Fuck! To how many decimal places?”

“I don’t remember. The precision didn’t reach out and poke me in the eye.”

“How the hell did the Dentist learn about this wreck? Doug has been trying to keep it secret. And he knows a few things about operational secrecy.”

“You yourself told me,” Avi says, “that the Shaftoes have brought in a German television producer. That doesn’t sound like secrecy to me.”

“But it is. They flew this woman into Manila, put her on board
Glory IV.
Allowed her to take minimal baggage. Went through her stuff to verify she didn’t have a GPS. Took her out into the South China Sea and ran in circles for a while so she couldn’t even use dead reckoning. Then took her to the site.”

“I’ve been on
Glory.
It’s got GPS readouts all over the place.”

“No, they didn’t let her see any of that stuff. There’s no way a guy like Doug Shaftoe would screw this up.”

“Well,” Avi says, “the Germans aren’t the most plausible source for the leak anyway. Do you remember the Bolobolos?”

“Filipino syndicate that used to pimp for Victoria Vigo, the Dentist’s wife. Probably set up the liaison between her and Kepler. Hence, presumably, still has influence over the Dentist.”

“I would phrase it differently. I would say that they have a long-standing relationship with the Dentist that probably works both ways. And I’m thinking that they got wind of the salvage operation somehow. Maybe a high-ranking Bolobolo overheard something in the German television producer’s hotel. Maybe a low-ranking one has been keeping an eye on the Shaftoes, taking note of the special equipment they’ve been shipping in.”

Randy nods. “That works. Supposedly the Bolobolos have a big presence at NAIA. They would notice something like an underwater ROV being rush-shipped to Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. So I’ll buy that.”

“Okay.”

“But that wouldn’t give them the latitude and longitude.”

“I’ll bet you half of my valuable stock in Epiphyte Corp. that they used SPOT for that.”

“SPOT? Oh. Rings a bell. French photo-imaging satellite?”

“Yeah. You can buy time on SPOT for a very reasonable fee. And it’s got enough resolution to distinguish
Glory IV
from, say, a containership or an oil tanker. So all they had to do was wait until their spies on the waterfront told them that
Glory
was out to sea, outfitted for salvage work, and then use SPOT to locate them.”

“What kind of precision can SPOT provide in terms of latitude and longitude?” Randy asks.

“That’s a very good question. I’ll have someone look into it,” Avi says.

“If it’s to within a hundred meters, then Andrew can find the wreck by just sending some people there. If it’s much more than that, he’ll have to go out and do a survey of his own.”

“Unless he subpoenas the information from us,” Avi says.

“I’d like to see Andrew Loeb go up against the Philippine legal system.”

“You aren’t in the Philippines—remember?”

Randy swallows and it comes out sounding like
gollum
again.

“Do you have any information about that wreck on your laptop?”

“If I do, it’s encrypted.”

“So he’ll just subpoena your encryption key.”

“What if I forget my encryption key?”

“Then it’s further evidence of how incompetent you are as a manager.”

“Still, it’s better than—”

“What about e-mail?” Avi asks. “Have you ever sent the location of the wreck in an e-mail message? Have you ever put it into a file?”

“Probably. But it’s all encrypted.”

This doesn’t seem to ease the sudden tension on Avi’s face.

“Why do you ask?” Randy says.

“Because,” Avi says, pivoting to face in the general
direction of downtown Los Altos. “All of a sudden I am thinking about Tombstone.”

“Through which passeth all of our e-mail,” Randy says.

“On whose hard drives all of our files are stored,” Avi says.

“Which is located in the State of California, within easy subpoena range.”

“Suppose you cc’d all of us on the same e-mail message,” Avi says. “Cantrell’s software, running on Tombstone, would have made multiple copies of that message and encrypted each one separately using the recipient’s public key. These would have been mailed out to the recipients. Most of whom keep copies of their old e-mail messages on Tombstone.”

Randy’s nodding. “So if Andrew could subpoena Tombstone, he could find all of those copies and insist that you, Beryl, Tom, John, and Eb supply your decryption keys. And if all of you claimed you had forgotten your keys, then you are obviously lying through your teeth.”

“Contempt of court for the whole gang,” Avi says.

“The most cigarettes,” Randy says. This is a contraction of the phrase, “We could end up in prison married to the guy with the most cigarettes,” which Avi coined during their earlier Andrew-related legal troubles and had so many occasions to repeat that it was eventually reduced to this vestigial three words. Hearing it come out of his own mouth takes Randy back a few years, and fills him with a spirit of defiant nostalgia. Although he would feel considerably more defiant if they had actually won that case.

“I am just trying to figure out whether Andrew would know of Tombstone’s existence,” Avi says.

He and Randy begin following their own footprints back towards Avi’s house. Randy notices that his stride is longer now. “Why not? The Dentist’s due diligence people have been lodged in our butt-cracks ever since we gave them those shares.”

“I detect some resentment in your voice, Randy.”

“Not at all.”

“Perhaps you disagree with my decision to settle the earlier breach-of-contract lawsuit by giving the Dentist some Epiphyte shares.”

“It was a sad day. But there was no other way out of the situation.”

“Okay.”

“If I’m going to resent you for that, Avi, then you should resent me for not having made a better contract with Semper Marine.”

“Ah, but you did! Handshake deal. Ten percent. Right?”

“Right. Let’s talk about Tombstone.”

“Tombstone’s in a closet that we are subletting from Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems,” Avi says. “I can tell you the due diligence boys have never been to Ordo.”

“We must be paying rent to Ordo, then. They’d see the rent checks.”

“A trivial amount of money. For storage space.”

“The computer’s a Finux box. A donated piece of junk running free software. No paper trail there,” Randy says. “What about the T1 line?”

“They would have to be aware of the T1 line,” Avi says. “That is both more expensive and more interesting than renting some storage space. And it generates a paper trail a mile wide.”

“But do they know where it goes?”

“They would only need to go to the telephone company and ask them where the line is terminated.”

“Which would give them what? The street address of an office building in Los Altos,” Randy says. “There are, what, five office suites in that building.”

“But if they were smart—and I’m afraid that Andrew does have this particular kind of intelligence—they would notice that one of those suites is leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc.—a highly distinctive name that also appears on those rent checks.”

“And a subpoena against Ordo would follow immediately,” Randy says. “When did you first hear about this lawsuit, by the way?”

“I got the call first thing this morning. You were still sleeping. I can’t believe you drove down from Seattle in one push. It’s like a thousand miles.”

“I was trying to emulate Amy’s cousins.”

“You described them as
teenagers.
”

“But I don’t think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It’s because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives.”

“And that’s kind of where you are right now?”

“It’s exactly where I am.”

“Horniness too.”

“Yeah. But there are ways to deal with that.”

“Don’t look at me that way,” Avi says. “I don’t masturbate.”

“Never?”

“Never. Formally gave it up. Swore off it.”

“Even when you’re on the road for a month?”

“Even then.”

“Why on earth would you do such a thing, Avi?”

“Enhances my devotion to Devorah. Makes our sex better. Gives me an incentive to get back home.”

“Well, that’s very touching,” Randy says, “and it might even be a good idea.”

“I’m quite certain that it is.”

“But it’s more masochism than I’m really willing to shoulder at this point in my life.”

“Why? Are you afraid that it would push you into—”

“Irrational behavior? Definitely.”

“And by that,” Avi says, “you mean, actually committing to Amy in some way.”

“I know you
think
that you just kicked me in the nuts rhetorically,” Randy says, “but your premise is totally wrong. I’m ready to commit to her at any time. But for god’s sake, I’m not even sure she’s heterosexual. It’d be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.”

“If she were a lesbian—exclusively—she’d have had the basic decency to tell you by now,” Avi says. “My feeling about Amy is that she steers by her gut feelings, and her gut feeling is that you just don’t have the level of passion that a woman like her probably would like to see as a prequisite for getting involved.”

“Whereas, if I stopped masturbating, I would become such a deranged maniac that she could trust me.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly how women think,” Avi says.

“Don’t you have some kind of rule against mixing business and personal conversations?”

“This is essentially a business conversation in that it is about your state of mind, and your current level of personal desperation, and what new options it may have opened up for you,” Avi says.

They walk for five minutes without saying anything.

Randy says, “I have a feeling that we are about to get into a conversation about tampering with evidence.”

“How interesting that you should bring that up. What’s your feeling about it?”

“I’m against it,” Randy says. “But to beat Andrew Loeb, I would do anything.”

“The most cigarettes,” Avi points out.

“First, we have to establish that it’s necessary,” Randy says. “If Andrew already knows where the wreck is, why bother?”

“Agreed. But if he has only a vague idea,” Avi says, “then Tombstone becomes perhaps very important—if the information is stored on Tombstone.”

“It almost certainly is,” Randy says. “Because of my GPS signature. I know I sent at least one e-mail message from
Glory
while we were anchored directly over the wreck. The latitude and longitude will be right there.”

“Well, if that’s the case, then this could actually be kind of significant,” Avi says. “Because if Andrew gets the exact coordinates of the wreck, he can send divers down and do an inventory and come up with some actual figures to use in the lawsuit. He can do this all very quickly. And if those figures exceed about half the value of Epiphyte, which frankly wouldn’t be very difficult, then we become indentured servants of the Dentist.”

“Avi, it’s full of fucking gold bars,” Randy says.

“It is?”

“Yes. Amy told me.”

It is Avi’s turn to come to a stop for a while and make swallowing noises.

“Sorry, I would have mentioned it earlier,” Randy says, “but I didn’t know it was relevant until now.”

“How did Amy become aware of this?”

“Night before last, before she climbed on the plane at SeaTac, I helped her check her e-mail. Her father sent her a message saying that a certain number of intact Kriegsmarine dinner plates had been found on the submarine. This was a prearranged code for gold bars.”

“You said ‘full of fucking gold bars.’ Could you translate that into an actual number, like in terms of dollars?”

“Avi, who gives a shit? I think we can agree that if the same thing is discovered by Andrew Loeb, we’re finished.”

“Wow!” Avi says. “So, in this, a hypothetical person who was not above tampering with evidence would certainly have a strong motive.”

“It is make-or-break,” Randy agrees.