Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Doug is in the middle of saying something, and is not the type to interrupt his train of thought and fall all over himself being friendly just because Randy has recently traversed the Pacific Ocean. “I never knew my father,” he says, “but my Filipino uncles used to tell me stories that he had told. When he was on Guadalcanal, they—the Marines—were still using their Springfields, the ought-three model, so four decades old—when finally the M-1 rifle began to show up. So they took one of each rifle and tossed it into the water and rolled it around in the sand for a while and did God knows what else to it—but nothing that would be unusual in a real combat situation, for a Marine—and then tried to operate them and found that the ought-three still worked and the M-1 didn't. So they stuck to their Springfields. And I would say that some testing along those lines would be in order if you think you are really designing an insurgency weapon, as you say. Good evening, Randy.”

“Doug, how are you?”

“I am just fine, thank you!” Doug is one of these guys who always interprets “how are you” as a literal request for information, not just an empty formality, and always seems slightly touched that someone would care enough to ask. “Mr. Howard here says that when you were sitting on top of that car typing you were actually doing something clever. And dangerous. At least from a legal point of view.”

“Were you monitoring that?” Randy asks Tom.

“I saw packets moving through the Crypt, and later saw you on television. I put two and two together,” Tom says. “Nice job, Randy.” He lumbers forward and shakes Randy's hand. This is an almost embarrassing outpouring of emotion by Tom Howard standards.

“What I did there probably failed,” Randy says. “If Tombstone's disk was blanked, it was blanked by the doorframe coil, and not by what I did.”

“Well, you deserve recognition anyway, which is what your friend is trying to give you,” Doug says, mildly irked at Randy's obtuseness.

“I should offer you a drink, and a chance to relax, and all of that,” Tom says, looking towards his house, “but on the other hand Doug says you were flying Sultan Class.”

“Let's talk out here,” Randy says. “But actually there is one thing you could get me.”

“What's that?” Tom asks.

Randy pulls the little disembodied hard drive out of his pocket and holds it up in the light, the wire-ribbon adangle. “A laptop computer and a screwdriver.”

“Done,” Tom says, and disappears down the tunnel. Doug meanwhile begins dismantling the weapon, as if just to keep his hands busy. He takes the parts out one by one and regards them curiously.

“What do you think of the HEAP gun?” Cantrell asks.

“I don't think it's as crazy as when I first heard of it,” Doug says, “but if your friend Avi thinks that people are going to be able to manufacture rifled gun barrels in their basements to protect themselves against ethnic cleansing, he's got another thing coming.”

“Rifled barrels are hard,” Cantrell says. “There's no way around it. They'd have to be stockpiled and smuggled. But the idea is that anyone who downloaded the HEAP, and who had access to some basic machine tools, could build the rest of the weapon.”

“I need to sit down with you sometime and explain everything else that's wrong with the idea,” Doug says.

Randy changes the subject. “How's Amy?”

Doug looks up and eyes Randy carefully. “You want my opinion? I think she is lonely, and in need of reliable support and companionship.”

Now that Doug has totally alienated both Randy and John, the gun range is completely silent for a while, which is probably how Doug likes it. Tom comes out with a laptop in one hand and, in the other, half a dozen blue plastic water bottles all shrink-wrapped together, already dribbling a trail of condensation.

“I have an agenda,” Cantrell says, holding up the notepad.

“Wow! You guys are organized,” Tom says.

“Item the first: Lawsuit and whether Epiphyte can continue to exist.” Randy lays the laptop out on the same table where Doug is working with the HEAP gun and begins to remove screws. “I assume you guys know of the lawsuit and have worked out the implications of it yourself,” he says. “If the Dentist can prove that Doug discovered the wreck as a byproduct of work he did for us, and if the value of that wreck is high enough compared to the value of the company, then the Dentist owns us, and for all practical purposes owns the Crypt.”

“Whoa! Wait a minute. The Sultan owns the Crypt,” Tom says. “If the Dentist controls Epiphyte, all he gets out of it is a contract to provide certain technical services in the Crypt.”

Randy senses everyone's looking at him. He twirls screws out of the computer, refusing to agree with this.

“Unless there's something here I'm not getting,” Tom says.

“I guess I'm just being paranoid and sort of assuming that the Dentist is somehow collaborating with forces in the U.S. government that are anti-privacy and anti-crypto,” Randy says.

“Attorney General Comstock's cabal, in other words,” Tom says.

“Yeah. For which I have never actually seen any evidence at all. But in the wake of the Ordo raid everyone seems to be assuming it. If that is the case, and the Dentist ends up providing technical services to the Crypt, then the Crypt is compromised. We have to assume, in that case, that Comstock has a man on the inside.”

“Not just Comstock,” Cantrell says.

“Okay, the U.S. government.”

“Not just the U.S. government,” Cantrell says. “The Black Chamber.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Doug asks.

“There was a high-level conference a couple of weeks ago in Brussels. Hastily organized we think. Chaired by Attorney General Comstock. Representatives of all the G7 countries and a few others. We know people from the NSA were there. People from Internal Revenue. Treasury people—Secret Service. Their counterparts in the other countries. And a lot of mathematicians known to have been co-opted by the government. The U.S. vice president was there. Basically we think that they are planning to form some kind of international body to clamp down on crypto and particularly on digital money.”

“The International Data Transfer Regulatory Organization,” Tom Howard says.

“The Black Chamber is a nickname for that?” Doug asks.

“That's what people on the Secret Admirers mailing list have started calling it,” Cantrell says.

“Why form this organization now?” Randy wonders.

“Because the Crypt is about to go hot, and they know it,” Cantrell says.

“They are scared shitless about their ability to collect taxes when everyone is using systems like the Crypt,” Tom explains to Doug.

“This has been the talk of the Secret Admirers mailing list for the last week. And so when Ordo was raided, it really hit a raw nerve.”

“Okay,” Randy says, “I've been wondering why people showed up there almost immediately with guns and stranger things.” He has got the laptop opened up now and disconnected its hard drive.

“You have wandered off the agenda,” Doug says, pulling an oily rag down the barrel of the HEAP gun. “The question is, does the Dentist have you guys by the balls, or only by the short hairs? And that question basically revolves around yours truly. Right?”

“Right!” Randy says, a little too forcefully—he's feeling desperate for a change in subject. The whole Kepler/Epiphyte/Semper Marine thing is stressful enough all by itself, and the last thing he needs is to be hanging around with people who believe it is nothing more than a skirmish in a war to decide the fate of the Free World—a preliminary round of the Apocalypse. Avi's obsession with the Holocaust seemed fine to Randy as long as Holocausts were things that happened long ago or far away—being personally involved in one is something Randy can do without. He should have stayed in Seattle. But he didn't, and so the next best thing for him is to limit the conversation to straightforward things like bars of gold.