Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Oh.”

  “Begin the work immediately.”

  THE MOST CIGARETTES

  * * *

  To: randy@epiphyte.com

  From: cantrell@epiphyte.com

  Subject: Pontifex Transform: tentative verdict

  Randy,

  I forwarded the Pontifex transform to the Secret Admirers mailing list as soon as you forwarded it to me, so it has been rattling around there for a couple of weeks now. Several very smart people have analyzed it for weaknesses, and found no obvious flaws. Everyone agrees that the specific steps involved in this transform are a little bit peculiar, and wonders who came up with them and how—but that is not uncommon with good cryptosystems.

  So the verdict, for now, is that root@euditorum.org knows what he’s doing—notwithstanding his strange fixation on the number 54.

  —Cantrell

  “Andrew Loeb,” Avi says.

  He and Randy are enduring some kind of a forced march up the beach in Pacifica; Randy’s not sure why. Over and over again, Randy is surprised by Avi’s physical vigor. Avi looks like he is wasting away from some vague disease invented as a plot device by a screenwriter. He is kind of tall, but this just makes him seem more perilously drawn out. His slender body is a tenuous link between huge feet and a huge head; he has the profile of a lump of silly putty that has been drawn apart until the middle part is just a tendril. But he can stomp up a beach like a Marine. It is January, after all, and according to the Weather Channel there is this flume of water vapor originating in a tropical storm about halfway between Nippon and New Guinea and jetting directly across the Pacific and taking a violent left turn just about here. The waves thrashing the beach, not that far away, are so big that Randy has to look slightly upwards to see their crests.

  He has been telling Avi all about Chester, and Avi has (Randy thinks) used this as a segue into reminiscing about the old days back in Seattle. It is somewhat unusual for Avi to do this; he tends to be very disciplined about having any given conversation be either business or personal, but never both at once. “I’ll never forget,” Randy says, “going up to the roof of Andrew’s building to talk to him about the software, thinking to myself ‘gosh, this is kind of fun,’ and watching him just slowly and gradually go berserk before my eyes. It could almost make you believe in demonic possession.”

  “Well, his dad apparently believed in it,” Avi says. “It was his dad, right?”

  “It’s been a long time. Yeah, I think it was his mom who was the hippie, who had him in this commune, and then his dad was the one who extracted him from there, forcibly—he brought in these paramilitary guys from Northern Idaho to actually do the job—they literally took Andrew out in a bag—and then put him through all kinds of repressed-memory therapy to prove that he’d been Satanically ritually abused.”

  This tweaks Avi’s interest. “Do you think his dad was into the militia thing?”

  “I only met him once. During the lawsuit. He took my deposition. He was just this Orange County white-shoe lawyer, in a big practice with a bunch of Asians and Jews and Armenians. So I assumed he was just using the Aryan Nations guys because they were convenient, and for sale.”

  Avi nods, apparently finding that a satisfactory hypothesis. “So he was probably not a Nazi. Did he believe in the Satanic ritual abuse?”

  “I doubt it,” Randy says. “Though after spending some time with Andrew I found it highly plausible. Do we have to talk about this? Gives me the creeps,” Randy says. “Depresses me.”

  “I recently learned what became of Andrew,” Avi says.

  “I saw his web site a while ago.”

  “I’m speaking of very recent developments.”

  “Let me guess. Suicide?”

  “Nope.”

  “Serial killer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thrown into prison for stalking someone?”

  “He is not dead or in prison,” Avi says.

  “Hmmm. Is this anything to do with his hive mind?”

  “Nope. Are you aware that he went to law school?”

  “Yeah. Is this something to do with his legal career?”

  “It is.”

  “Well, if Andrew Loeb is practicing law, it must be some really annoying and socially nonconstructive form of it. Probably something to do with suing people on light pretexts.”

  “Excellent,” Avi says. “You’re getting warm now.”

  “Okay, don’t tell me, let me think,” Randy says. “Is he practicing in California?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve got it, then.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Andrew Loeb would be one of these guys who gins up minority-shareholder lawsuits against high-tech companies.”

  Avi smiles with his lips pressed tightly together, and nods.

  “He’d be perfect,” Randy continues, “because he would be a true believer. He wouldn’t think that he was just out there being an asshole. He would really, truly, sincerely believe that he was representing this class of shareholders who had been Satanically ritually abused by the people running the company. He would work thirty-six hours at a stretch digging up dirt on them. Corporate memories that had been repressed. No trick would be too dirty, because he would be on the side of righteousness. He would only sleep or eat under medical orders.”

  “I can see that you got to know him incredibly well,” Avi says.

  “Wow! So, whom is he suing at the moment?”

  “Us,” Avi says.

  There is now this five-minute stoppage in the conversation, and in the hike, and possibly in some of Randy’s neurological processes. The color map of his vision goes out of whack: everything’s in extremely washed-out shades of yellow and purple. Like someone’s clammy fingers are around his neck, modulating the flow in his carotids to the bare minimum needed to sustain life. When Randy finally returns to full consciousness, the first thing he does is to look down at his shoes, because he is convinced for some reason that he has sunk into the wet sand to his knees. But his shoes are barely making an impression on the firmly packed sand.

  A big wave collapses into a sheet of foam that skims up the beach and divides around his feet.

  “Gollum,” Randy says.

  “Was that an utterance, or some kind of physiological transient?” Avi says.

  “Gollum. Andrew is Gollum.”

  “Well, Gollum is suing us.”

  “Us, as in you and me?” he asks. It takes Randy about a full minute of time to get these words around his tongue. “He’s suing us over the game company?”

  Avi laughs.

  “It’s possible!” Randy says. “Chester told me that the game company is now like the size of Microsoft or something.”

  “Andrew Loeb has filed a minority-shareholder lawsuit against the board of directors of Epiphyte(2) Corporation,” Avi says.

  Randy’s body has now finally had time to deploy a full-on fight-or-flight reaction—part of his genetic legacy as a stupendous badass. This must have been very useful when saber-toothed tigers tried to claw their way into his ancestors’ caves but is doing him absolutely no good in these circumstances.

  “On behalf of whom?”

  “Oh, come on, Randy. There aren’t that many candidates.”

  “Springboard Capital?”

  “You told me yourself that Andrew’s dad was a white-shoe Orange County lawyer. Now, archetypally, where would a guy like that put his retirement money?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “That’s right. Bob Loeb, Andrew’s dad, got in on AVCLA very early. He and the Dentist have been sending each other Christmas cards for like twenty years. And so when Bob Loeb’s idiot son graduated from law school, Bob Loeb, knowing full well that the kid was too much of a head case to be employable anywhere else, paid a call on Dr. Hubert Kepler, and Andrew’s been working for him ever since.”

  “Fuck. Fuck!” Randy says. “All these years. Treading water.”

  “How’s that?”r />
  “That time in Seattle—during the lawsuit—was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Avi says. “Normally those two are mutually exclusive.”

  “Shut up,” Randy says, “I’m trying to agonize.”

  “Well, I think that agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it borders on funny,” Avi says. “But please go ahead.”

  “Now, after all those years—all that fucking work—I’m back where I started. A net worth of zero. Except this time I don’t even have a girlfriend per se.”

  “Well,” Avi says, “to begin with, I think it’s better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene.”

  “Ouch! You are a cruel man.”

  “Sometimes wanting is better than having.”

  “Well, that’s good news,” Randy says brightly, “because—”

  “Look at Chester. Would you rather be Chester, or you?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Also, you have a substantial amount of stock in Epiphyte, which I’m quite convinced is worth something.”

  “Well, that all depends on the lawsuit, right?” Randy says. “Have you actually seen any of the documents?”

  “Of course I have,” Avi says, irked. “I’m the president and CEO of the fucking corporation.”

  “Well, what’s his beef? What’s the pretext for the lawsuit?”

  “Apparently the Dentist is convinced that Semper Marine has stumbled upon some kind of vast hoard of sunken war gold, as a direct byproduct of the work they did for us.”

  “He knows this, or he suspects this?”

  “Well,” Avi says, “reading between the lines, I gather that he only suspects it. Why do you ask?”

  “Never mind for now—but he’s going after Semper Marine, too?”

  “No! That would rule out the lawsuit he’s filing against Epiphyte.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His point is that if Epiphyte had been competently managed—if we had exercised due diligence—then we would have drawn up a much more thorough contract with Semper Marine than we did.”

  “We’ve got a contract with Semper Marine.”

  “Yes,” Avi says, “and Andrew Loeb is disparaging it as little better than a handshake agreement. He asserts that we should have turned negotiations over to a big-time law firm with expertise in maritime and salvage law. That such a law firm would have anticipated the possibility that the sidescan sonar plots created by Semper Marine for the cable project would reveal something like a sunken wreck.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  Avi gets a look of forced patience. “Andrew has produced, as exhibits, actual copies of actual contracts that other companies made in similar circumstances, which all contain such language. He argues it’s practically boilerplate stuff, Randy.”

  “I.e., that it’s gross negligence to have failed to put it in our contract with Semper.”

  “Precisely. Now, Andrew’s lawsuit can’t go anywhere unless there are some damages. Can you guess what the damages are in this case?”

  “If we’d made a better contract, then Epiphyte would own a share of what is salvaged from the submarine. As it is, we, and the shareholders, get nothing. Which constitutes obvious damages.”

  “Andrew Loeb himself could not have put it any better.”

  “Well, what do they expect us to do about it? It’s not like the corporation has deep pockets. We can’t give them a cash settlement.”

  “Oh, Randy, it’s not about that. It’s not like the Dentist needs our cigar box full of petty cash. It’s a control thing.”

  “He wants a majority share in Epiphyte.”

  “Yes. Which is a good thing!”

  Randy throws back his head and laughs.

  “The Dentist can have any company he wants,” says Avi, “but he wants Epiphyte. Why? Because we are badass, Randy. We have got the Crypt contract. We have got the talent. The prospect of running the world’s first proper data haven, and creating the world’s first proper digital currency, is fantastically exciting.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you how excited I am.”

  “You should never forget what a fundamentally strong position we are in. We are like the sexiest girl in the world. And all of this bad behavior on the Dentist’s part is just his way of showing that he wants to mate with us.”

  “And control us.”

  “Yes. I’m sure that Andrew has been ordered to produce an outcome in which we are found negligent, and liable for damage. And then upon looking into our books the court will find that the damages exceed our ability to pay. At which point the Dentist will magnanimously agree to take his payment in the form of Epiphyte stock.”

  “Which will strike everyone as poetic justice because it will also enable him to take control of the company and make sure it’s managed competently.”

  Avi nods.

  “So, that’s why he’s not going up against Semper Marine. Because if he recovers anything from them, it renders his beef against us null and void.”

  “Right. Although, that would not prevent him from suing them later, after he’s gotten what he wanted from us.”

  “So—Jesus! This is perverse,” Randy says. “Every valuable item that the Shaftoes pull up from that wreck actually gets us in deeper trouble.”

  “Every nickel that the Shaftoes make is a nickel of damages that we allegedly inflicted on the shareholders.”

  “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.