“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.
They stop conversing for a while because they now have to dodge cars across the Pacific Coast Highway, and there is this unspoken agreement between them that not getting hit by speeding vehicles merits one’s full attention. They end up running across the last couple of lanes in order to exploit a fortuitous break in the northbound traffic. Then neither of them especially feels like dropping back to a walk, so they run all the way across the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store and into the wooded creek-valley where Avi has his house. They are back at the house directly, and then Avi points significantly at the ceiling, which is his way of saying that they had better assume the house is bugged now. Avi walks over to his answering machine, which is blinking, and ejects the incoming-message tape. He shoves it in his pocket and strides across the house’s living room, ignoring frosty glares from one of his Israeli nannies, who doesn’t like him to wear shoes inside the house. Avi scoops a brightly colored plastic box off the floor. It has a handle, and rounded corners, and big bright buttons, and a microphone trailing behind it on a coiled yellow cord. Avi continues through the patio doors without breaking stride, the microphone bouncing up and down behind him on its helical cord. Randy follows him outside, across a strip of dead grass, and into a grove of cypress trees. They keep walking until they have dropped into a little dell that shields them from view of the street. Then Avi squats down and ejects a Raffi tape from the little-kid tape recorder and shoves in his incoming-message tape, rewinds it, and plays it.
“Hi, Avi? This is Dave? Calling from Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems? I’m the, uh, president here, you might remember? You have this computer in our wiring closet? Well, we just, like, got some visitors here? Like, guys in suits? And they said that they wanted to see that computer? And, like, if we handed it over to them right away they would be totally cool about it? But if we didn’t, they’d come back with a subpoena and with cops and turn the place inside-out and just take it? So, now we’re playing stupid? Please call me.”
“The machine said there were two messages,” Avi says.
“Hi, Avi? This is Dave again? Playing stupid didn’t work, and so now we told them to fuck off. The head suit is very mad at us. He called me out. We had a really tense discussion in the McDonald’s across the street. He says that I am being stupid. That when they come and turn the place upside-down looking for Tombstone, that it will totally fuck up Ordo’s corporate operations and inflict major losses on our shareholders. He said that this would probably be grounds for a minority-shareholder lawsuit against me and that he’d be happy to file that lawsuit. I haven’t told him yet that Ordo has only five shareholders and that all of us work here. The manager of the McDonald’s asked us to leave because we were disrupting some children’s Happy Meals. I acted scared and told him that I would go in and look at Tombstone and see what would be involved in removing it. Instead, I am calling you. Hal and Rick and Carrie are uploading the entire contents of our own system to a remote location so that when these cops come and rip everything out nothing will be lost. Please call me. Good-bye.”
“Gosh,” Randy says, “I feel like shit for having inflicted all of this on Dave and his crew.”
“It’ll be great publicity for them,” Avi says. “I’m sure Dave has half a dozen television crews poised in the McDonald’s at this moment, stoking themselves to the rim of insanity on thirty-two-ounce coffees.”
“Well… what do you think we should do?”
“It is only fitting and proper that I should go there,” Avi says.
“You know, we could just ‘fess up. Tell the Dentist about the ten-percent handshake deal.”
“Randy, get this through your head. The Dentist doesn’t give a shit about the submarine. The Dentist doesn’t give a shit about the submarine.”
“The Dentist doesn’t give a shit about the submarine,” Randy says.
“So, I am going to replace this cassette,” Avi says, popping the tape out of the machine, “and start driving really really fast.”
“Well, I’m going to do what my conscience tells me to do,” Randy says.
“The most cigarettes,” Avi says.
“I’m not going to do it from here,” Randy says, “I’m going to do it from the Sultanate of Kinakuta.”
CHRISTMAS 1944
* * *
GOTO DENGO HAS POINTED WING OUT TO lIEUtenant Mori, and Mori’s guard troops, and made it clear that they are not to run their bayonets through Wing’s torso and wiggle the blades around in his vitals unless there is some exceptionally good reason, such as suppressing all-out rebellion. The same qualities that make Wing valuable to Goto Dengo make him the most likely leader of any organized breakout attempt.
As soon as the general and his aide have departed from Bundok, Goto Dengo goes and finds Wing, who is supervising the boring of the diagonal shaft towards Lake Yamamoto. He is one of those lead-by-example types and so he is way up at the rock face, working a drill, at the end of a few hundred meters of tunnel so narrow that it has to be negotiated on hands and knees. Goto Dengo has to present himself at the Golgotha end of the tunnel and send a messenger crawling up into it, wearing a rusty helmet to protect himself from the shattered stone that drizzles down from the rock face.
Wing appears fifteen minutes later, black from the rock dust that has condensed onto his sweaty skin, red where the skin has been abraded or slashed by stone. He devotes a few minutes to methodically hawking dust up out of his lungs. Every so often he rolls his tongue like a peashooter and fires a jet of phlegm against the wall and clinically observes it run down the stone. Goto Dengo stands by politely. These Chinese have an entire medical belief system centering on phlegm, and working in the mines gives them a lot to talk about.
“Ventilation not good?” Goto Dengo says. Whorehouse Shanghainese has not equipped him with certain technical terms like “ventilation,” so Wing has taught him the vocabulary.
Wing grimaces. “I want to finish tunnel. I do not want to sink more ventilation shaft. Waste of time!”
The only way to keep the workers at the rock face from suffocating is by sinking vertical air shafts from the surface down to the diagonal shaft at intervals. They have devoted as much effort to these as they have to the diagonal itself, and were hoping they’d never have to dig another.
“How much farther?” Goto Dengo asks, as Wing finishes another paroxysm.
Wing looks thoughtfully at the ceiling. He has Golgotha mapped out in his head better than its designer does. “Fifty meter.”
The designer cannot help grinning. “Is that all? Excellent.”
“We go fast now,” Wing says proudly, his teeth gleaming for a moment in the lamplight. Then he seems to remember that he is a slave laborer in a death camp and the teeth disappear. “We can go faster if we dig in straight line.”
Wing is alluding to the fact that the diagonal to Lake Yamamoto:
is laid out in the blueprints like this. But Goto Dengo, without changing the blueprints, has ordered that it actually be dug like this:
These bends increase the length of the tunnel by quite a bit. Furthermore the rubble tends to pile up in the flatter western section and must be raked along by hand. The only people who know about the existence of these bends are him, Wing, and Wing’s crew. The only person who understands the true r
eason for their existence is Goto Dengo.
“Do not dig in a straight line. Keep digging as I said.”
“Yes.”
“Also, you will need a new ventilation shaft.”
“More ventilation shaft! No…” Wing protests.
The ventilation shafts shown on the plans, awkward zig-zags and all, are bad enough.
But Goto Dengo has several times told Wing and his crew to begin work on some additional “ventilation shafts,” before changing his mind and telling them to abandon the work—with this result:
“These new ventilation shafts will be dug from the top down,” says Goto Dengo.
“No!” says Wing, still completely flabbergasted. This is utter madness in that if you dig a vertical shaft from the top downwards, you have to haul the rubble up out of the hole. If you do it the other way, the rubble falls down and can be easily disposed of.
“You will get new helpers. Filipino workers.”
Wing looks stunned. He is even more cut off from the world than Goto Dengo. He must infer the progress of the war from maddeningly oblique hints. He and his workers fit the crazily scattered evidence at their disposal into elaborate theories. These theories are all so wildly wrong that Goto Dengo would laugh out loud at them, if not for the fact that he is sympathetic. Neither he nor Captain Noda knew that MacArthur had landed on Leyte, or that the Imperial Navy had been crushed, until The General told them.
One thing that Wing and his men have got right is that Bundok employs imported labor in order to ensure secrecy. If any of the Chinese workers do manage to escape, they will find themselves on an island, far from home, among people who do not speak their language, and who do not especially like them. The fact that Filipino workers will soon be arriving gives them a lot to think about. They will be up all night whispering to each other, trying to reconstruct their theories.
“We don’t need new workers. We are almost done,” Wing says, his pride hurt again.
Goto Dengo taps himself on both shoulders with both index fingers, suggesting epaulets. It takes Wing only an instant to realize that he’s talking about The General, and then a profoundly conspiratorial look comes over his face and he takes half a step closer. “Orders,” Goto Dengo says. “We dig lots of ventilation shafts now.”