Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Seated up in the plane's nose, Randy can actually look forward out his window and see that they are landing on the new runway, built partly on such fill. The buildings of downtown are streaks of blue-green light on either side of the plane, tiny black human figures frozen in them: a man with a phone clamped between his ear and his shoulder, a woman in a skirt hugging a pile of books to her chest but thinking about something far away. The view turns empty and indigo as the plane's nose tilts up for the landing, and then Randy's looking out over the Sulu Sea at dusk, where the badjaos' kite-sailed boats are scuttling into port from a day's fishing, hung all about with gutted stingrays, flying fresh sharks' tails like flags. Not long ago it was ridiculously exotic to him, but now he feels more at home here then he did in California.

For Sultan-Class passengers, everything happens with cinematic, quick-cut speed. The plane lands, a beautiful woman hands you your jacket, and you get off. The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their twenty-eighth birthdays.

Usually there's someone waiting for a Sultan-Class passenger. This evening it's John Cantrell, still ponytailed but now clean-shaven; eventually the heat has its way with everyone. He's even taken to shaving the back of his neck, a good trick for shedding a couple of extra BTUs. Cantrell greets Randy with an awkward simultaneous handshake and one-armed hug/body check maneuver.

“Good to see you, John,” Randy says.

“You too, Randy,” John says, and each man averts his eyes shyly.

“Who's where?”

“You and I are here in the airport. Avi checked into a hotel in downtown San Francisco for the duration.”

“Good. I didn't think he was safe in that house by himself.”

Cantrell looks provoked. “Any particular reason? Have there been threats?”

“None that I know of. But it's hard to ignore the high number of vaguely terrifying people wrapped up in this.”

“No victim Avi. Beryl's flying back to S.F. from Amsterdam—actually she's probably there by now.”

“I heard she was in Europe. Why?”

“Strange government shit is going on there. I'll tell you later.”

“Where's Eb?”

“Eb has been holed up in the Crypt for a week with his team, doing this kind of incredible D-Day-like push to finalize the biometric identification system. We won't bother him. Tom's been drifting back and forth between his house and the Crypt, running various kinds of torture tests on the internal Crypt network systems. Probing the inner trust boundaries. That's where we're going now.”

“To the inner trust boundaries?”

“No! Sorry. His house.” Cantrell shakes his head. “It's… well. It's not the house I would build.”

“I want to see it.”

“His paranoia is getting just a little out of hand.”

“Hey speaking of that…” Randy stops. He was about to tell Cantrell about Pontifex, but they are very close to the halal Dunkin' Donuts, and people are looking at them. There's no way of telling who might be listening. “I'll tell you later.”

Cantrell looks momentarily baffled and then grins wickedly. “Good one.”

“We have a car?”

“I borrowed Tom's car. His Humvee. Not one of those cushy civilian models. A real military one.”

“Oh, that's great,” Randy says. “Does it come complete with big machine gun on the back?”

“He looked into it—he could certainly get a license to own one in Kinakuta—but his wife drew the line at having an actual heavy machine gun in their domicile.”

“How about you? Where do you stand on this gun stuff?”

“I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware,” Cantrell says.

They are winding their way down a gauntlet of duty-free shops, really more of a duty-free shopping mall. Randy cannot figure out who actually buys all of these large bottles of liquor and expensive belts. What kind of blandly orgiastic lifestyle demands this particular selection of goods?

In the time that's thus passed Cantrell has evidently decided that a more thorough answer to Randy's gun question is merited. “But the more I practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed.”

“What do you mean?” This is Randy in unaccustomed sounding-board mode, psychotherapeutically prompting Cantrell for his feelings. It must have been a weird day for John Cantrell, and no doubt there are some feelings that need to be addressed.

“Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them.”

“And hence the Crypt?” Randy asks.

“My involvement in the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very bad dreams that I had about guns.”

It is wonderfully healthy to be talking like this, but it is a portentous departure from their usual hard-core technical mode. They are wondering about whether it is even worth it for them to be mixed up in this stuff. Heedless certainty sure is easier.

“Well, what about those Secret Admirers who were hanging around outside Ordo?” Randy asks.

“What about them? You're asking me about their state of mind?”

“Yeah. That is what we are talking about. States of mind.”

Cantrell shrugs. “I don't know specifically who they were. I'd guess there are one or two honest-to-god scary fanatics. Setting them aside, maybe a third of them are just too young and immature to understand what's going on. It was just a lark for them. The other two-thirds probably had very sweaty palms.”

“They looked like they were trying awfully hard to keep up a cheerful front.”

“They were probably happy to get out of there, and to go sit in a dark cool room and drink beer afterwards. Certainly a lot of them have been sending me e-mail about the Crypt since then.”

“As an alternative to violent resistance to the United States Government, I assume and hope you mean.”

“Exactly. Sure. I mean, that's what the Crypt is becoming. Right?”

The question sounds a little querulous to Randy. “Right,” he says. He wonders why he feels so much more settled about this stuff than John Cantrell does, and then recalls, that he has nothing left to lose.

Randy takes one last breath of dry, machine-cooled air and holds it refreshingly in his lungs as they step out into the heat of the evening. He has learned to relax into the climate; you can't fight it. There is a humming logjam of black Mercedes-Benzes waiting to pick up the Sultan– and Vizier-Class passengers. Very few Wallah-Class passengers get off at Kinakuta; most of them are in transit to India. Because this is the kind of place where everything works just perfectly, Randy and John are in the Humvee about twenty seconds later, and twenty seconds after that driving at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour down a long horizontal shaft of ghastly blue-green freeway-light.

“We have been assuming that this Humvee is not bugged,” Cantrell says, “so, if you were holding back on something, you can speak freely now.”

Randy writes, Let's stop assuming anything of the kind on a notepad and holds it up. Cantrell raises his eyebrows one notch but of course does not seem especially surprised—he spends all of his time around people trying to outdo each other in paranoia. Randy writes We have been under srv'nce by a former NSA hondo gone private. Then he adds, Prob. working for 1 or more Crypt clients.