Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end-loader and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte's account. That'd do it. The whole concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of the international concourse.

Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold-in-the-jungle concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi's family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the group's movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink into the men's room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus complete asthma-attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.

“So. Uh, going to Israel?”

“El Al doesn't fly to Acapulco.” Pow! Devorah is in peak form.

“Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?”

“You're asking me? I kind of assumed you would know,” Devorah says.

“Well, things have been, certainly, volatile,” Randy says. “I don't know if fleeing the country is warranted.”

“Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking out of your pocket?”

“Oh, you know… some business issues need resolving.”

“You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?” Devorah asks.

Randy sighs. “That depends. Do you?”

“Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?”

“Because you've been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes' notice.”

“We're going to Israel, Randy. That's not being uprooted. That's being rerooted.” Or perhaps she is saying “rerouted.” Without a transcript, there is no way for Randy to tell.

“Yeah, but it's still kind of a hassle—”

“Compared to what?”

“Compared to staying at home and living your life.”

“This is my life, Randy.” Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I'll-do-my job, you-do-yours, why-are-you-in-my-face attitude. Randy feels like an idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah's bag. She is clearly just this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why doesn't he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the Dentist a big hug?

Randy says, “I assume you'll be in touch with Avi before you take off. Would you give him a message?”

“What's the message?”

“Zero.”

“That's it?”

“That's it,” Randy says.

Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi's practice of conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a time, la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, “zero” means that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone's hard drive.

Air Kinakuta's first-class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un-American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport, clutching his hip spastically every time he re-realizes that his laptop isn't dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop's hard drive, and then threw away the rest.

Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news-bits even more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely surprised, to see footage of black—hatted Secret Admirers exercising their Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo's barricade avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons drawn. Paul Comstock is shown—pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and Epiphyte and now it's become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and this makes Randy irritated and confused.

He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he doesn't partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling-while-Rome-burns thing going for it that works for him just now.

As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards that are stuffed in among the in-flight magazines and vomit-sacs. One of these extols the fact that Sultan-Class passengers (as first-class passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe's GSM telephone. It's an Australian phone number, but it'll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it's something like six A.M. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a taxi.

“It's Randy. On a plane,” says Randy. “An Air Kinakuta plane.”

“Randy! Well I've just been watching you on television,” Doug says. It takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to cleanse his palate of the caviar.

“Yeah,” Doug continues, “I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed you sitting on top of a car typing. What's going on?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all,” Randy says. He figures that this is a big stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he'll be more likely to effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka and says, “Wow, this Sultan-Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web search on Ordo, you'll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with us. Nothing.”

“That's funny, because Comstock is denying that it's a crackdown on Ordo,” Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy's nose before he controls it. “They say that it's just a little old civil suit,” Doug says, now using a petal-soft, wounded innocent tone.