“Holy cow,” he finally says, “that Kraut twenty-millimeter is something else.”
“Right,” the flyboy says, “we’ve got to get spotted by a convoy and then we’ll proceed with the delivery.”
Cryptic as it is, this is the most informative statement Bobby’s ever heard about the intentions of Detachment 2702. He gets up and follows the pilot back to the cockpit, both of them stepping delicately around several quivering giblets that were presumably flung out of Ethridge.
“You mean, by an allied convoy, right?” Shaftoe asks.
“An allied convoy?” the pilot asks mockingly. “Where the hell are we going to find an allied convoy? This is Tunisia.”
“Well, then, what do you mean, we’ve got to get spotted by a convoy? You mean we have to spot a convoy, right?”
“Very sorry,” the flyboy says, “I’m busy.”
When he turns back, he finds Lieutenant Enoch Root kneeling by a relatively large piece of Ethridge, going through Ethridge’s attache case. Shaftoe cops a look of exaggerated moral outrage and points the finger of blame.
“Look, Shaftoe,” Root shouts, “I’m just following orders. Taking over for him.”
He pulls out a small bundle, all wrapped in thick, yellowish plastic sheeting. He checks it over, then glances up reprovingly, one more time, at Shaftoe.
“It was a fucking joke!” Shaftoe says. “Remember? When I thought those guys were looting the corpses? On the beach?”
Root doesn’t laugh. Either he’s pissed off that Shaftoe successfully bullshitted him, or he doesn’t enjoy corpse-looting humor. Root carries the wrapped bundle back to that other body, the one in the wetsuit. He stuffs the bundle inside the suit.
Then he squats by the body and ponders. He ponders for a long time. Shaftoe kind of gets a kick out of watching Enoch ponder, which is like watching an exotic dancer shake her tits.
The light changes again as they descend from the clouds. The sun is setting, shining redly through the Saharan haze. Shaftoe looks out a window and is startled to see that they are over the sea now. Below them is a convoy of ships each making a neat white V in the dark water, each lit up on one side by the red sun.
The airplane banks and makes a slow loop around the convoy. Shaftoe hears distant pocking noises. Black flowers bloom and fade in the sky around them. He realizes that the ships are trying to hit them with ack-ack. Then the plane ascends once more into the shelter of the clouds, and it gets nearly dark.
He looks at Enoch Root for the first time in a while. Root is sitting back in his little nook, reading by flashlight. A bundle of papers is open on his lap. It is the plastic-wrapped bundle that Root took out of Ethridge’s attache case and shoved into Gerald Hott’s wetsuit. Shaftoe figures that the encounter with convoy and ack-ack finally pushed Root over the edge, and that he yanked the bundle right back out again to have a look at it.
Root glances up and locks eyes with Shaftoe. He does not seem nervous or guilty. It is a strikingly calm and cool look.
Shaftoe holds his gaze for a long moment. If there were the slightest trace of guilt or nervousness there, he would turn the chaplain in as a German spy. But there isn’t—Enoch Root ain’t working for the Germans. He ain’t working for the Allies either. He’s working for a Higher Power. Shaftoe nods imperceptibly, and Root’s gaze softens.
“They’re all dead, Bobby,” he shouts.
“Who?”
“Those islanders. The ones you saw on the beach on Guadalcanal.”
So that explains why Root is so touchy about corpse-looting jokes. “Sorry,” Shaftoe says, moving aft so they don’t have to scream at each other. “How’d it happen?”
“After we got you back to my cabin, I transmitted a message to my handlers in Brisbane,” Root says. “Enciphered it using a special code. Told them I’d picked up one Marine Raider, who looked like he might actually live, and would someone please come round and collect him.”
Shaftoe nods. He remembers that he’d heard lots of dots and dashes, but he had been out of whack with fevers and morphine and whatever home remedies Root had pulled out of his cigar box.
“Well, they responded,” Root went on, “and said ‘We can’t go there, but would you please take him to such-and-such place and rendezvous with some other Marine Raiders.’ Which, as you’ll recall, is what we did.”
“Yeah,” Shaftoe says.
“So far so good. But when I got back to the cabin after handing you over, the Nipponese had been through. Killed every islander they could find. Burned the cabin. Burned everything. Set booby traps around the place that nearly killed me. I just barely got out of the damn place alive.”
Shaftoe nods, as only a guy who’s seen the Nips in action can nod.
“Well they evacuated me to Brisbane where I started making a stink about codes. That’s the only way they could have found me—obviously our codes had been broken. And after I’d made enough of a stink, someone apparently said, ‘You’re British, you’re a priest, you’re a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse code, and most importantly of all, you’re a fucking pain in the ass—so off you go!’ And next thing I know, I’m in that meat locker in Algiers.”
Shaftoe glances away and nods. Root seems to get the message, which is that Shaftoe doesn’t know anything more than he does.
Eventually, Enoch Root wraps the bundle up again, just like it was before. But he doesn’t put it back in the attache case. He stuffs it into Gerald Hott’s wetsuit.
Later they emerge from the clouds again, close to a moonlit port, and dip down very close to the ocean, going so slow that even Shaftoe, who knows nothing about planes, senses they are about to stall. They open the side door of the Dakota and, one-two-three-NOW, throw the body of PFC Gerald Hott out into the ocean. He makes what would be a big splash in the Oconomowoc town pool, but in the ocean it doesn’t come to much.
An hour or so later they land the same Gooney Bird on an airstrip in the midst of a stunning aerial bombardment. They abandon the Skytrain at the end of the airstrip, next to the other C-47, and run through darkness, following the lead of the British pilots. Then they go down a stairway and are underground—in a bomb shelter, to be precise. They can feel the bombs now but can’t hear them.
“Welcome to Malta,” someone says. Shaftoe looks around and sees that he is surrounded by men in British and American uniforms. The Americans are familiar—it’s the Marine Raider squad from Algiers, flown in on that other Dakota. The Brits are unfamiliar, and Shaftoe pegs them as the SAS men that those fellows in Washington were telling him about. The only thing they all have in common is that each man, somewhere on his uniform, is wearing the number 2702.
NON-DISCLOSURE
* * *
AVI SHOWS UP ON TIME, IDLING HIS FAIRLY GOOD, BUT not disgustingly ostentatious, Nipponese sports car gingerly up the steep road, which has crazed into a loose mosaic of asphalt flagstones. Randy watches from the second-floor deck, staring fifty feet almost straight down through the sunroof. Avi is clad in the trousers of a good tropical-weight business suit, a tailored white Sea Island cotton shirt, dark ski goggles, and a wide-brimmed canvas hat.
The house is a tall, isolated structure rising out of the middle of a California grassland that slopes up from the Pacific, a few kilometers away. Chilly air climbs up the slope, rising and falling in slow surges, like surf on a beach. When Avi gets out of his car the first thing he does is pull on his suit-jacket.
He hauls two oversized laptop cases out of the tiny luggage compartment in the car’s nose, walks into the house without knocking (he has not been to this particular house before, but he has been to others run along similar principles), finds Randy and Eb waiting in one of its many rooms, and hauls about fifteen thousand dollars worth of portable computer gear out of the bags. He sets them up on a table. Avi hits the start button on two laptops and, as they crawl through the boot process, plugs them into the wall so that the batteries won’t drain. A power conduit, with grounded three-pr
ong outlets spaced every eighteen inches, has been screwed down remorselessly along every inch of every wall, spanning drywall; holes in the drywall; primeval op-art contact paper; fake wood-grain paneling; faded Grateful Dead posters; and even the odd doorway.
One of the laptops is connected to a tiny portable printer, which Avi loads with a few sheets of paper. The other laptop starts up a few lines of text running across the screen, then beeps and stops. Randy ambles over and looks at it curiously. It is displaying a prompt:
FILO.
Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run.
“Finux,” Avi mumbles, answering Randy’s unspoken question.
Randy types “Finux” and hits the return key. “How many operating systems you have on this thing?”
“Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily,” Avi says. “Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting.”
“Which one do you want now?”
“BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there’s an overhead projector in this place?”
Randy looks over at Eb, the only person in the room who actually lives here. Eb seems bigger than he is, and maybe it’s because of his detonating hair: two feet long, blond with a faint reddish glow, thick and wavy and tending to congeal into ropy strands. No ponytail holder can contain it, so when he bothers to tie it back, he uses a piece of string. Eb is doodling on one of those little computers that uses a stylus so that you can write on the screen. In general, hackers don’t use them, but Eb (or rather, one of Eb’s defunct corporations) wrote the software for this model and so he has a lot of them lying around. He seems to be absorbed in whatever he’s doing, but after Randy has been looking in his direction for two seconds, he senses it, and looks up. He has pale green eyes and wears a luxuriant red beard, except when he’s in one of his shaving phases, which usually coincide with serious romantic involvements. Right now his beard is about half an inch long, indicating a recent breakup, and implying a willingness to take new risks.
“Overhead projector?” Randy says.
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, then gets up and walks out of the room.
The tiny printer begins to eke paper. The first line of text, centered at the top of the page, is: NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENT. More lines follow. Randy has seen them, or ones like them, so many times that his eyes glaze over and he turns away. The only thing that ever changes is the name of the company: in this case: EPIPHYTE(2) CORP.
“Nice goggles.”
“If you think these are weird, you should see what I’m going to put on when the sun goes down,” Avi says. He rummages in a bag and pulls out a contraption that looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, with a dollhouse-scale light fixture mounted above each eye. A wire runs down to a battery pack with belt loops. He slides a tiny switch on the battery pack and the lights come on: expensive-looking blue-white halogen.
Randy raises his eyebrows.
“It’s all jet-lag avoidance,” Avi explains. “I’m adjusted to Asian time. I’m going back there in two days. I don’t want my body to get back on Left Coast time while I’m here.”
“So the hat and goggles…”
“Simulate night. This thing simulates daylight. See, your body takes its cues from the light, adjusts its clock accordingly. Speaking of which, would you mind closing the blinds?”
The room has west-facing windows, affording a view down the grassy slope to Half Moon Bay. It is late afternoon and the sun is pouring through. Randy savors the view for a moment, then drops the blinds.
Eb stalks back into the room with an overhead projector dangling from one hand, looking for a moment like Beowulf brandishing a monster’s severed arm. He puts it on the table and aims it at the wall. There is no need for a screen, because above the ubiquitous power strips, every wall in the house is covered with whiteboards. Many of the whiteboards are, in turn, covered with cryptical incantations, written in primary colors. Some of them are enclosed in irregular borders and labeled DO NOT ERASE! or simply DNE or NO! In front of where Eb has put the overhead projector, there is a grocery list, a half-erased fragment of a flowchart, a fax number in Russia, a couple of dotted quads—Internet addresses—and a few words in German, which were presumably written by Eb himself. Dr. Eberhard Föhr scans all of this, finds that none of it is enclosed in a DNE border, and wipes it away with an eraser.
Two more men come into the room, deeply involved in a conversation about some exasperating company in Burlingame. One of them is dark and lean and looks like a gunfighter; he even wears a black cowboy hat. The other is tubby and blond and looks like he just got out of a Rotary Club meeting. They have one detail in common: each is wearing a bright silver bracelet on his wrist.
Randy takes the NDAs out of the printers and passes them out, two copies each, each pair preprinted with a name: Randy Waterhouse, Eberhard Föhr, John Cantrell (the guy in the black cowboy hat) and Tom Howard (the fair-haired Middle American). As John and Tom reach for the pages, the silver bracelets intercept stray beams of light sneaking through the blinds. Each is printed with a red caduceus and several lines of text.
“Those look new,” Randy says. “Did they change the wording again?”
“Yeah!” John Cantrell says. “This is version 6.0—just out last week.”
Anywhere else, the bracelets would mean that John and Tom were suffering from some sort of life-threatening condition, such as an allergy to common antibiotics. A medic hauling them out of a wrecked car would see the bracelet and follow the instructions. But this is Silicon Valley and different rules apply. The bracelets say, on one side:
IN CASE OF DEATH SEE REVERSE
FOR BIOSTASIS PROTOCOL
FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS COLLECT
REWARD $100,000
and on the other:
CALL NOW FOR INSTRUCTIONS
1-800-NNN-NNNN
PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV
AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING
WITH ICE TO 10C.KEEP PH 7.5
NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each other a million years from now.
The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of coffee.
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an apron-wearing, apple-pie-toting type. In twenty years, she’s been the chief financial officer of twelve different small high-tech companies. Ten of them have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was through no fault of Beryl’s. The sixth was Randy’s Second Business Foray. One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she’s just being polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid-crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes around an
d picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins to type on the laptop’s keyboard, and letters spill across one of the windows. “Just so you know,” Avi mumbles, “Epiphyte Corp., which I’ll call Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We’re in the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will go, Epiphyte(1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.”
Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy Desert.
“This probably looks weird to most of you,” Avi says. “Usually these presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or something. We don’t normally deal with maps. We’re all so used to working in a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real world and physically do something.
“But I like maps. I’ve got maps all over my house. I’m going to suggest to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work—especially pertaining to the Internet—have applications out here.” He taps the whiteboard. “In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where billions of people live.”