Cryptonomicon

Chapter 44 HOSTILITIES

As the vans, taxis, and limousines pull into the parking lot at the Ministry of Information site, the members of Epiphyte Corp. are greeted by smiling and bowing Nipponese virgins wearing, and bearing, gleaming white Goto Engineering helmets. The time is about eight in the morning, and up here on the mountain the temperature is still tolerable, though humid. Everyone mills around before the cavern's maw, carrying their hardhats in their hands, as no one wants to be the first to put his on and look stupid. Some of the younger Nipponese executives are mugging hilariously with theirs. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu circulates. He has an authentically used and battered hardhat which he whirls absentmindedly around one finger as he strolls from group to group.

“Has anyone simply asked Prag what the fuck is going on?” says Eb. He rarely uses English profanity, so when he does, it's funny.

The only member of Epiphyte Corp. who does not at least crack a smile is John Cantrell, who has been looking distant and tense ever since yesterday. (“It's one thing to write a dissertation about mathematical techniques in cryptography,” he said, on the way up here, when someone asked him what was bothering him. “And another to gamble billions of dollars' worth of Other People's Money on it.”

“We need a new category,” Randy said. “Other, Bad People's Money.”

“Speaking of which—” Tom began, but Avi cut him off by glaring significantly at the back of the driver's head.)

Everyone now turns to look towards Prag, who seems to be having trouble with his peripheral vision today. “Prag is avoiding us,” Avi snaps.

“Which means it will be completely impossible for us to reach him until after this is all over.”

Tom steps towards Avi, drawing the corporate circle in closer. “The investigator in Hong Kong?”

“Got some IDs, struck out on others,” Avi says. “Basically, the heavy set Filipino gentleman is Marcos's bagman. Responsible for keeping the famous billions out of the hands of the Philippine government. The Taiwanese guy—not Harvard Li but the other one—is a lawyer whose family has deep connections to Japan, dating back to when Taiwan was part of their empire. He has held down half a dozen government positions at various times, mostly in finance and commerce—now he's sort of a fixer who does jobs of all sorts for high-ranking Taiwanese officials.”

“What about the scary Chinese guy?”

Avi raises his eyebrows and heaves a little sigh before answering. “He's a general in the People's Liberation Army. Equivalent to a four-star rank. He's been working their investment arm for the last fifteen years.”

“Investment arm? The Army!?” Cantrell blurts. He's been getting uneasier by the minute, and now looks mildly nauseated.

“The People's Liberation Army is a titanic business empire,” Beryl says. “They control the biggest pharmaceutical company in China. The biggest hotel chain. A lot of the communications infrastructure. Railways. Refineries. And, obviously, armaments.”

“What about Mr. Cellphone?” Randy asks.

“Still working on him. My man in Hong Kong is sending his mug shot to a colleague in Panama.”

“I think that after what we saw in the lobby, we can make some assumptions,” Beryl says. (16)

Randy figures there's no better time to ask this question. And because he's known Avi longer than anyone else, he's the only one who can get away with asking it. “Do we really want to be involved with these people?” he says. “Is this what Epiphyte Corp. is for? Is this what we are for?”

Avi heaves a big sigh and thinks about it for a while. Beryl looks at him searchingly; Eb and John and Tom study their shoes, or search the triple-canopy jungle for exotic avians, while listening intently.

“You know, back in the forty-niner days, every gold mining town in California had a nerd with a scale,” Avi says. “The assayer. He sat in an office all day. Scary-looking rednecks came in with pouches of gold dust. The nerd weighed them, checked them for purity, told them what the stuff was worth. Basically, the assayer's scale was the exchange point—the place where this mineral, this dirt from the ground, became money that would be recognized as such in any bank or marketplace in the world, from San Francisco to London to Beijing. Because of the nerd's special knowledge, he could put his imprimatur on dirt and make it money. Just like we have the power to turn bits into money.”

“Now, a lot of the people the nerd dealt with were incredibly bad guys. Peg house habitues. Escaped convicts from all over the world. Psychotic gunslingers. People who owned slaves and massacred Indians. I'll bet that the first day, or week, or month, or year, that the nerd moved to the gold-mining town and hung out his shingle, he was probably scared shitless. He probably had moral qualms too—very legitimate ones, perhaps,” Avi adds, giving Randy a sidelong glance. “Some of those pioneering nerds probably gave up and went back East. But y'know what? In a surprisingly short period of time, everything became pretty damn civilized, and the towns filled up with churches and schools and universities, and the sort of howling maniacs who got there first were all assimilated or driven out or thrown into prison, and the nerds had boulevards and opera houses named after them. Now, is the analogy clear?”

“The analogy is clear,” Tom Howard says. He is less troubled by this than any of them, with the possible exception of Avi. But then, his hobby is collecting and shooting rare automatic weapons.

No one else will say anything; it is Randy's job to be troublesome. “Uh, how many of those assayers got gunned down in the street after they pissed off some psychotic gold miner?” he asks.

“I don't have any figures on that,” Avi says.

“Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this,” Randy says.

“We all need to decide that question for ourselves,” says Avi.

“And then vote, as a corporation whether to stay in or pull out right?” Randy says.

Avi and Beryl look meaningfully at each other.

“Getting out, at this point, would be, uh, complicated,” Beryl says. Then, seeing a look on Randy's face, she hastens to add: “not for individuals who might want to leave Epiphyte. That's easy. No problem. But for Epiphyte to get out of this, uh…”

“Situation,” Cantrell offers.

“Dilemma,” Randy says.

Eb mumbles a word in German.

“Opportunity,” Avi counters.

“…would be all but impossible,” Beryl says.

“Look,” Avi says, “I don't want anyone to feel compelled to stay in a situation where they have moral qualms.”

“Or fear imminent summary execution,” Randy adds helpfully.

“Right. Now, we've all put a ton of work into this thing, and that work ought to be worth something. To be totally above-board and explicit, let me reiterate what is already in the bylaws, which is that anyone can pull out; we'll buy back your stock. After what's happened here the last couple of days, I'm pretty confident that we could raise enough money to do so. You'd make at least as much as if you had stayed home doing a regular salaried job.”

Younger, less experienced high-tech entrepreneurs would have scoffed bitterly at this. But everyone on this crew actually finds it impressive that Avi can put a company together and keep it alive long enough to make it worth the work they've put into it.

The black Mercedes cruises up. Dr. Mohammed Pragasu strides over to meet it, greets the South Americans in fairly decent Spanish, makes a couple of introductions. The scattered clumps of businessmen begin to draw closer together, converging on the cavern's entrance. Prag is making a head count, taking attendance. Someone's missing.

One of the Dentist's aides is maneuvering towards Prag in lavender pumps, a cellphone clamped to her head. Randy breaks away from Epiphyte and sets a collision course, reaching Prag's vicinity just in time to hear the woman tell him, “Dr. Kepler will be joining us late—some important business in California. He sends his apologies.”

Dr. Pragasu nods brightly, somehow avoids eye contact with Randy, who is now close enough to floss Prag's teeth, and turns, clamping his hardhat down on top of his glossy hair. “Please follow me, everyone,” he announces, “the tour begins.”

It is a dull tour, even for those who have never been inside the place. Whenever Prag leads them to a new spot, everyone looks around and gets their bearings; conversation lulls for ten or fifteen seconds, then picks up again; the high-ranking executives stare unseeingly at the hewn stone walls and mutter to each other while their engineering consultants converge on the Goto engineers and ask them learned questions.

All of the construction engineers work for Goto and are, of course, Nipponese. There is another who stands apart. “Who's the heavyset blond guy?” Randy asks Tom Howard.

“German civil engineer on loan to Goto. He seems to specialize in military issues.”

“Are there any military issues?”

“At some point, about halfway into this project, Prag suddenly decided he wanted the whole thing bombproof.”

“Oh. Is that Bomb with a capital B, by any chance?”

“I think he's just about to talk about that,” Torn says, leading Randy closer.

Someone has just asked the German engineer whether this place is nuclear-hardened.

“Nuclear-hardened is not the issue,” he says dismissively. “Nuclear-hardened is easy—it just means that the structure can support a brief overpressure of so many megapascals. You see, half of Saddam's bunkers were, technically, nuclear-hardened. But this does no good against precision-guided, penetrating munitions—as the Americans proved. And it is far more likely this structure will be attacked in that way than that it would ever be nuked—we do not anticipate that the sultan will get involved in a nuclear war.”

This is the funniest thing that anyone has said all day, and it gets a laugh.

“Fortunately,” the German continues, “this rock above us is far more effective than reinforced concrete. We are not aware of any earth-penetrating munitions currently in existence that could break through.”

“What about the R and D the Americans have done on the Libyan facility?” Randy asks.

“Ah, you are talking about the gas plant in Libya, buried under a mountain,” the German says, a bit uneasily, and Randy nods.

“That rock in Libya is so brittle,” says the German, “you can shatter it with a hammer. We are working with a different kind of rock here, in many layers.”

Randy exchanges a look with Avi, who looks as if he is about to bestow another commendation for deviousness. At the same time Randy grins, he senses someone's stare. He turns and locks eyes with Prag, who is looking inscrutable, verging on pissed off. A great many people in this part of the world would cringe and wither under the glare of Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, but all Randy sees is his old friend, the pizza-eating hacker.

So Randy stares right back into Prag's black eyes, and grins. Prag prepares for the staredown. You asshole, you tricked my German—for this you shall die! But he can't sustain it. He breaks eye contact, turns away, and raises one hand to his mouth, pretending to stroke his goatee. The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever. A man like Prag can come home, throw away his Nikes, and pray to Mecca five times a day, but he can never eradicate it from his system.

The tour lasts for a couple of hours. When they emerge, the temperature has doubled. Two dozen cellphones and beepers sing out as they exit the radio silence of the cavern. Avi has a brief and clipped conversation with someone, then hangs up and herds Epiphyte Corp. towards their car. “Small change of plans,” he says. “We need to break away for a little meeting.” He utters an unfamiliar name to the driver.

Twenty minutes later, they are filing into the Nipponese cemetery, sandwiched between two busloads of elderly mourners.

“Interesting place for a meeting,” says Eberhard Föhr.

“Given the people we're dealing with, we have to assume that all of our rooms, our car, the hotel restaurant, are bugged,” Avi snaps. No one speaks for a minute, as Avi leads them down a gravel path towards a secluded corner of the garden.

They end up in the corner of two high stone walls. A stand of bamboo shields them from the rest of the garden, and rustles soothingly in a sea breeze that does little to cool their sweaty faces. Beryl's fanning herself with a Kinakuta street map.

“Just got a call from Annie-in-San-Francisco,” he says.

Annie-in-San-Francisco is their lawyer.

“It's, uh… seven P.M. there right now. Seems that just before the close of business, a courier walked into her office, fresh off the plane from LA, and handed her a letter from the Dentist's office.”

“He's suing us for something,” Beryl says.

“He's this far away from suing us.”

“For what!?” Tom Howard shouts.

Avi sighs. “In a way, Tom, that is beside the point. When Kepler thinks it's in his best interests to file a tactical lawsuit, he'll find a pretext. We must never forget that this is not about legitimate legal issues, it is about tactics.”

“Breach of contract, right?” Randy says.

Everyone looks at Randy. “Do you know something we should know?” asks John Cantrell.

“Just an educated guess,” Randy says, shaking his head. “Our contract with him states that we are to keep him informed of any changes in conditions that may materially alter the business climate.”

“That's an awfully vague clause,” Beryl says reproachfully.

“I'm paraphrasing.”

“Randy's right,” Avi says. “The gist of this letter is that we should have told the Dentist what was going on in Kinakuta.”

“But we did not know,” says Eb.

“Doesn't matter—remember, this is a tactical lawsuit.”

“What does he want?”

“To scare us,” Avi says. “To rattle us. Tomorrow or the next day, he'll bring in a different lawyer to play good cop—to make us an offer.”

“What kind of offer?” Tom asks.

“We don't know, of course,” Avi says, “but I'm guessing that Kepler wants a piece of us. He wants to own part of the company.”

Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains his almost perpetual mask of cool control. “So it's bad news, good news, bad news. Bad news number one: Anne's phone call. Good news: because of what has happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our stock.”

“What's the second bit of bad news?” Randy asks.

“It's very simple.” Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to face them again. “This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough, now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile away. It attracts pythons.” Avi pauses for a moment. “Usually, the grace period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time—weeks or months—to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were perched virtually on top of the python. Now we're not valuable any more.”

“What do you mean?” Eb says. “We're just as valuable as we were this morning.”

“A small company that's being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is most certainly not valuable. It probably has an enormous negative value. The only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away. See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom's incredible performance yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the lawsuit.”

“So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it in a cave,” Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice regretfully. “And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a lesson to you: be like the Dentist. Make up your mind and act fast.”