Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

How do you know? Cantrell mouths.

Randy sighs, then writes: I was contacted by a Wizard.

Then, as long as John's preoccupied with working his way around a left-lane fender bender, he adds, Think of it as due diligence, underworld style.

Cantrell says out loud, “Tom has been pretty scrupulous about making sure his house is bug-free. I mean, he built the thing, or had it built, from the ground up.” He veers off onto an exit ramp and plunges into the jungle.

“Good. We can talk there,” Randy says, then writes, Remember the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow—bugs mixed into the concrete by KGB—had to be torn down.

Cantrell grabs the pad and scribbles blind on the dashboard while maneuvering the Humvee up a curving mountain road into the cloud forest. What do you want to talk about that is so secret? Arethusa? Give me agenda pls.

Randy: (1) Lawsuit & whether Epiphyte can continue to exist. (2) That NSA tapper, and Wizard, exist. (3) Maybe Arethusa.

Cantrell grins and writes, I have good news re: Tombstone's /.

“/” in this context is UNIX for the root of the file system, which in the case of Tombstone is synonymous with the hard drive that Randy tried to wipe. Randy raises his eyebrows skeptically and Cantrell grins, nods, and draws his thumb across his throat.

Chez Howard is a flat-roofed concrete structure that from certain angles looks like a very large drainage culvert set vertically in a mound of grout on the top of a foothill. It becomes visible from one of those angles about ten minutes before they actually arrive, because the road must make several switchbacks across the broad slope of that foothill, which has been involuted and fractalized by relentless drainage. Even when it's not raining here, the mere condensation of moisture from the South Seas breezes gathers on leaves and rains from their drip-tips all the time. Between the rain and the plant life, erosion must be a violent and ravenous force here, which makes Randy a little uneasy about all of these mountains, because mountains could only exist in such an environment if the underlying tectonic forces were thrusting rock into the air at a rate that would make your ears pop standing still. But then again, having just lost a house to a temblor, he is naturally inclined to a conservative view.

Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down, almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle. Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy realizes he's looking at a perspective view of a door-frame with its door hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob. STEEL FRAME, Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels. Quick meandering scribbles suggest the matrix of wall surrounding it, and the floor underneath. Where the uprights of the doorframe are planted in the floor, Cantrell draws small, carefully foreshortened circles. Holes in the floor. Then he encircles the doorframe in a continuous hoop, beginning at one of those circles and climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top, down the other side, through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door, then up through the first hole again, completing the loop. He draws one or two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado. Many turns of fine wire. Finally he draws two leads away from this huge door-sized coil and connects them to a sandwich of alternating long and short horizontal lines, which Randy recognizes as the symbol for a battery. The diagram is completed with a huge arrow drawn vigorously through the center of the doorway, like an airborne battering ram, labeled B which means a magnetic field. Ordo computer room door.

“Wow,” Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary-school electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The read/write heads of Tombstone's hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a lot smaller. If they are fine-pointed draftsman's pens, then what Cantrell's drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the pulse-gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo raid must have been purely a scrap-hauling run for whoever organized it—Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General Comstock's sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat's paw. The only thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been information stored on CD-ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had none of that.

Finally they have made it up to the top of the hill, which Tom Howard has shaved to the bedrock in a kind of monk's tonsure. Not because he hates living things, though he probably has no particular affection for them, but to hold at bay the forces of erosion and to create a defensive glacis across which the movements of incredibly poisonous snakes, squirrel-sized insects, opportunistic lower primates, and villainous upper primates will be visible on the array of video cameras he has built into fairly subtle recesses and crevices up on the walls. Seen up close, the house is surprisingly not as dour and fortresslike as it looked at first. It is not just a single large culvert but a bundle of them in different diameters and lengths, like a faggot of bamboo. There is a decent number of windows, particularly on the north side where there's a view, down the slope that John and Randy have just climbed, to a crescent-shaped beach. The windows are set deeply into the walls, partly to back them out of the nearly vertical rays of the sun and partly because each one has a retractable steel shutter, hidden in the wall, that can be dropped down in front of it. It is an okay house, and Randy wonders if Tom Howard would be willing to deed it over to the Dentist and hock his colossal suite of Gomer Bolstrood furniture and move his family into a crowded apartment building just in order to retain control of Epiphyte Corporation. But maybe that won't even be necessary.

John and Randy climb out of the Humvee to the sound of gunfire. Artificial light radiates upwards from a slot neatly dissected out of the jungle nearby. Humidity and clouds of insects make light a nearly solid and palpable thing here. John Cantrell leads Randy across the perfectly sterile parking-slab and into a screened and fenced tunnel that has been stabbed into the black vegetation. Underfoot is some kind of black plastic grid that keeps the nude soil from becoming a glue-trap. They walk down the tunnel, until twenty or thirty paces later it opens up into an extremely long, narrow clearing: the source of the light. At the far end of it, the ground rises abruptly in a sort of berm, partly natural, Randy thinks, and partly enhanced with fill dirt excavated from the house's foundation. Two large paper targets in the shape of human silhouettes are clipped to a rack there. At the near end, two men with ear protectors pulled down around their necks are examining a gun. One of these men is Tom Howard. Randy is struck but not really astonished by the fact that the other one is Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, evidently fresh in from Manila. The gun looks like exactly the same model that some of the black-hatted and bandanna-masked posse were carrying yesterday in Los Altos: a long pipe with a sickle-shaped clip curving away from one side, and a very simple stock made of a few bare metal parts bolted together.