Cryptonomicon (103 page)

“Doug. You can do this,” Randy says. “You get the gold. You put it on a boat. My friends here can explain the rest.” Randy fits the laptop’s plastic case back together and begins maneuvering the little screws back into their recesses.

Cantrell says, “You bring the boat here.”

Tom continues, “To that beach, right down the hill. I’ll be waiting for you with the Humvee.”

“And you and Tom can drive it downtown and deposit that bullion in the vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta,” Cantrell concludes.

Someone has finally said something that actually knocked Doug Shaftoe off balance. “And get what in return?” he asks suspiciously.

“Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And untaxable.”

Doug’s regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. “What’ll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?”

“Soon enough, it’ll buy you anything that money
can
buy,” Tom says.

“I would have to know a little more about it,” Doug says. “But once again we are straying from the agenda. Let’s leave it at this: you guys need me to strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly.”

“It’s not just what
we
need. It might be in your best interests, too,” Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.

“Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us—and something about a Wizard?” John says.

“Yeah.”

Doug’s giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men—not to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn’t read
Lord of the Rings
.

Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.

“Randy!” Doug almost shouts. “Didn’t you at any point ask this guy why Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?”

“Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda,” Cantrell says.

“Why didn’t you ask him on the ski lift?” Randy jokes.

“I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and his eternally condemned soul,” Doug says. “Seriously! You got the messages from your grandpa’s old war souvenirs. Right?”

“Right.”

“And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?”

“Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila.”

“Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?”

“I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code.”

“But that’s bullshit!” Doug says. “Jesus! Haven’t you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can’t you recognize bullshit? Don’t you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, ‘My goodness, this appears to be bullshit’? Now. What do you think is the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?”

“I have no idea,” Randy says.

“The reason is gold,” Doug says.

Randy snorts. “You have got gold on the brain.”

“Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you something?” Doug demands.

“You did. Sorry.”

“Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise, the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify such an effort at the NSA.”

“There was an ongoing Huk insurrection,” Tom says. “But you’re right. The real focus—around here anyway—was Vietnam.”

“You know something?” fires back Doug. “During the Vietnam war—which was Old Man Comstock’s brainchild—the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary.”

“As in primary gold repository?”

“You got it.”

“Is that what Marcos eventually found?”

“Opinions differ,” Doug says. “A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered.”

“Well, there isn’t any information about the Primary, or anything else, in these messages,” Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode, with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various pieces of hardware that were present on Randy’s laptop (which is in a Ford dealership’s dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom’s. And yet the basic kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes sure it’s intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards through Chester’s card-reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds several lines of random capital letters.

“How do you know there’s no information about the primary in those messages, Randy?” Doug asks.

“The NSA couldn’t decrypt these messages in ten years,” Randy says. “It all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator.”

Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types

grep AADAA *

and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt, meaning that the search failed.

“Ho-ly shit,” Randy says.

“What?” everyone says at once.

Randy takes a long, deep breath. “These are not the same messages that Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break.”

I
T TAKES
G
OTO
D
ENGO ABOUT HALF A MINUTE TO
waddle up the narrow entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along, muttering to each other calmly.

His fingers slide over a lip and rise up into empty, dark space; he’s into the main drift now. He stands up and wades forward. Perfect blackness is cozy and reassuring to him—in it, he can always pretend that he is still a boy, back on Hokkaido. He can make believe that the last few years of his life have never happened.

But in fact he is a grownup and he is trapped in a hole in the Philippines and surrounded by armies of demons. He opens the valves on an acetylene headlamp and sparks it into life. He is perfectly capable, by this point, of finding his way around Golgotha in the dark, but his crew is not, and he leaves them far behind. He stubs his toe brutally on a large gold bar that has carelessly been left lying across the iron railway, and curses.

“Is everything okay, Lieutenant?” says one of his crew, fifty meters behind him.

“Fine,” Goto Dengo says, loudly and clearly. “You four be careful you do not break your toes on this bar.”

So now, Wing and Rodolfo and their men, waiting up ahead, know the number of Nipponese soldiers they have to kill.

“Where are the last few workers?” one of the crew shouts.

“In the fool’s vault.”

It takes them several minutes to pick their way through the main vault, because it is packed with treasure. The starry core of a galaxy must look like this. They clamber up the shaft in its ceiling and make their way to the Hall of Glory. Goto Dengo finds the bare wires that lead to the electric light bulb and attaches them to the screw terminals on a battery. Running at the wrong voltage, the bulb looks like a tangerine floating in ink.

“Shut off your headlamps,” Goto Dengo says, “to conserve fuel. I will leave mine burning in case there is an interruption in the power.”

He pulls a fistful of white cotton from a sterile box. It is the cleanest whitest thing he has seen in several years. He pulls it apart into smaller wads, like Father Ferdinand breaking the bread of the mass, and passes them out to the men, who stuff it ritualistically into their ears. “There is no more time to waste,” he hollers, “Captain Noda must be growing impatient out there.”

“Sir!” one of the men says, standing at attention and handing him a pair of wires marked
MAIN TUNNEL DEMOLITION
.

“Very well,” Goto Dengo says, and screws the wires down to a pair of terminals on a wooden switch box.

It seems as though he should say something ceremonious, but nothing comes to mind. Nipponese men are dying all over the Pacific without first getting to make speeches.

He clenches his teeth together, shuts his eyes, and twists the switch handle.

The shock wave comes through the floor first, whacking the soles of their feet like a flying plank. A moment later it comes through the air and strikes them like a moving wall of stone. The cotton in the ears seems to accomplish nothing.
Goto Dengo feels his eyes bounce off the backs of their sockets. All of his teeth feel as though they have been crisply sheared off at the gumline with cold chisels. The wind is all forced out of his lungs. They are empty for the first time since the moment of his birth. Like newborn infants, he and the other men can only writhe and look around themselves in a panic until their bodies learn how to draw breath again.

One of the men brought a bottle of sake, which has shattered. They pass around the jagged bottom of the bottle, each man taking a gulp of what remains. Goto Dengo tries to pull the cotton out of his ears and finds that the shock wave drove it in so deep that it cannot be extracted. So he merely shouts: “Check your watches.” They all do. “In two hours, Captain Noda will demolish the plug on the bottom of the lake and flood the water traps. In the meantime, we have work to do. You all know your jobs—get to work!”

They all
hai,
turn on their heels, and go their separate ways. It is the first time that Goto Dengo has actually sent men off to their deaths. But they are all dead men anyway, and so he doesn’t know how to feel about it.

If he still believed in the emperor—still believed in the war—he would think nothing of it. But if he still believed, he wouldn’t be doing what he is about to do.

It is important to keep up the appearance that this is a normal operation, and so he descends to the vault to perform his next scheduled duty: inspect what used to be the main drift. The vault is filled with a fog of rock dust around which his windpipe clenches like a fist grabbing a rope. His acetylene lamp only makes the dust glow, giving him a visibility of perhaps six inches. All he can see is the bullion right in front of his face, which still glimmers beneath a film of dust and smoke. The shock wave has deranged his formerly neat stacks of crates and bricks and turned the entire hoard into a rude mound that is still shedding avalanches, seeking its angle of repose. A 75-kilogram gold brick slides down the pile like a runaway boxcar, emerging suddenly from the cloud of dust, and he jumps out of its way. Bits of rock are still sifting
down from the crazed ceiling and plinking against his helmet.

He scrambles carefully over the heap, breathing through a wad of cotton, until he can see what used to be the main drift. The dynamite has done the right thing: shattered the roof of the drift into billions of shards. Collapsed on the floor, they occupy a larger volume than the same mass of stone did when it was all in one piece. The drift is filled with tons of loose stone, all the way down to the entrance along the Tojo River, where Captain Noda’s men are at work even now, concealing the tiny puncture wound behind river rocks.

He feels, rather than hears, a small explosion, and knows that something is going wrong. No one should be setting off explosions now.

Movement in this place is agonizingly slow, like a nightmare when you are trying to run away from a demon. It takes him so long to get back to the Hall of Glory that there is almost no point in doing it; whatever was happening is over when he arrives.

What he sees, when he arrives, is a group of three men waiting for him: Wing, Rodolfo, and the Filipino named Bong.

“The soldiers?”

“All dead,” Rodolfo says flatly, irritated by the stupidity of the question.

“The others?”

“One soldier set off a grenade. Killed himself and my two men,” Wing says.

“Another soldier heard the grenade and had a knife ready when Agustin came for him,” Bong says. He shakes his head sorrowfully. “I think that Agustin was not ready to kill a man. He hesitated.”

Goto Dengo stares at Bong, fascinated. “And you?”

Bong doesn’t understand the question for a moment. Then light dawns. “Oh, no, I did not hesitate, Lieutenant Goto. A Nipponese soldier hurt my sister one time, in a very inappropriate way.”

Goto Dengo stands there silently for a while, until he notices that the other men are all looking at him expectantly.
Then he checks his watch. He is shocked to see that only half an hour has gone by since he set off the dynamite.

“We have an hour and a half before the water traps are flooded. If we are not in the Bubble by then, we will be sealed off, with no escape possible,” says Goto Dengo.

“We go there and wait,” Wing suggests, in Shanghainese.

“No. Captain Noda listens, outside, for more explosions,” Goto Dengo says, also in Chinese; then, in English, tells the Filipinos, “We have to set off the demolition charges at certain times or Noda-san will grow suspicious.”

“Whoever sets them off will be trapped forever in this chamber,” Rodolfo says, gesturing around them at the Hall of Glory.

“We will not set them off from here,” says Goto Dengo, pulling the lid from a crate. Inside are several long coils of two-stranded telephone wire. He hands the coils out to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. They understand, and begin to splice the new wires onto the ones that terminate here.

They retreat through Golgotha in stages, lugging battery packs with them and unrolling the wires as they go, dynamiting the tunnel sections behind them one by one. As they do this, certain oddities of the tunnel system finally become clear to Rodolfo, Wing, and Bong. It becomes fully evident to them, for the first time, that the entire complex was carefully designed by Goto Dengo to serve two entirely contradictory purposes. To a loyal Nipponese engineer like Captain Noda it looks like precisely what he was ordered to build: a vault laced with booby traps. But to the four men sealed inside, Golgotha has a second function. It is an escape machine. As the purposes of certain rooms, drifts, and other features suddenly become clear, they straighten up, blinking, and turn to look at Goto Dengo, with the same expressions as the soldiers wore, weeks ago, when they discovered the Buddha in the Mercedes.

Their destination is the Bubble, a niche that Goto Dengo had them carve out of the stone during the last couple of months. He claimed, to anyone who asked, that it was a water reservoir, put there to increase the deadliness of one of the traps. It is a wide vertical shaft, four meters in diameter,
that begins in the ceiling of a peripheral drift and goes straight up for a few meters, then dead-ends. Ladders still cling to its walls, and by ascending, they can reach a rock ledge big enough to sit on. Canteens of water and boxes of biscuits have already been stocked here by Wing and his men.

By the time they reach their seats in the top of the Bubble, all of the others are in awe of Goto Dengo, and ready to do whatever he says. He senses this. It fills him with unutterable misery.

They have fifteen minutes to wait. The others spend it sipping water and nibbling biscuits. Goto Dengo fills it with self-recrimination. “I am a loathsome worm,” he says, “a traitor, a filthy piece of dog shit, not worthy to clean out the latrines of true soldiers of Nippon. I am bereft—totally cut off from the nation I’ve betrayed. I am now part of a world of people who hate Nippon—and who therefore hate me—but at the same time I am hateful to my own kind. I will stay here and die.”

“You are alive,” Rodolfo says. “You have saved our lives. And you are rich.”

“Rich?”

Wing and Rodolfo and Bong look at each other, confused. “Yes, of course!” Bong says.

Goto Dengo is still looking nonplussed. Reckoning that he has merely gone deaf or daft from the explosions, Bong reaches into his trousers and pulls out a hand-sewn pouch, teases it open, and displays a healthy double handful of diamonds. Wing and Rodolfo scarcely take note.

Goto Dengo looks away despondently. He himself has saved no treasure except these men’s lives. But that’s not why he feels so bad. He had hoped that being thus saved they would all be noble, and not think of the treasure. But maybe that was too much to hope for.

A distant thump lifts them slightly off the ledge, just for a moment. Goto Dengo feels a strange sensation in his head: the air pressure is beginning to rise. The column of air trapped in the diagonal is being compressed by a piston of water rushing down it from the lake. Captain Noda has dynamited the plug.

Goto Dengo is so excited that he forgets to die.

He is an engineer, trapped inside one of his own machines. The machine was designed to keep him alive, and he will never know whether it worked unless it works. After he has achieved that satisfaction, he supposes, he can always kill himself at leisure.

He pinches his nose shut, presses his lips together, and begins to blow air into his Eustachian tubes, equalizing the pressure. The others follow his lead.

All of Golgotha’s traps are basically the same. All of them derive their killing power from the pressure of the water communicated down to this level from the bottom of Lake Yamamoto. In any number of places in the complex, false walls have been constructed, designed to be pierced by greedy thieves, or to collapse of their own accord when thieves dig out the sand that holds them up. Then the water will rush in with explosive force and probably crush them before they have a chance to drown.

At its Golgotha end, the diagonal tunnel forks again and again, like a river breaking up into distributaries. Goto Dengo explained it to inspecting officers by likening it to the plumbing inside a modern hotel, which is supplied by a single main that is pressurized by a distant water tower, but which divides into many different pipes that supply pressurized water to taps all over the structure.

Golgotha seethes, hisses, and moans as every pipe in its ramified system is pressurized by the deluge unleashed by Captain Noda’s dynamite charge. The bubbles of air trapped at the ends of those pipes are seeking escape: some are leaking out through cracks in the walls and others are bubbling away into the diagonal. The surface of Lake Yamamoto must be boiling like a cauldron, and Captain Noda must be standing above it, watching the air flee Golgotha, grinning with satisfaction. In moments, the floors of the tunnels are obscured by whirling lagoons of dirty water, and the barrels and railcars that were left there have begun to rise, bobbing like corks and clanging together.

Most of the air trapped in the Golgotha does not, however, come bubbling up out of Lake Yamamoto. Most of it rises towards the Bubble, because that is how Goto Dengo
planned it. He knows it’s working because his ears begin to pop.