Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“In order for him to have a claim, the Dentist needs to prove that Semper Marine found that wreck when it was doing the cable survey. Right?” Doug asks.

“Right,” Cantrell says, before Randy can step in and say that it's a bit more complicated than that.

“Well, I have been kicking around this part of the world for half of my life, and I can always testify that I found the wreck on an earlier survey. That son of a bitch can never prove that I'm lying,” Doug says.

“Andrew Loeb—his lawyer—is smart enough to know that. He will not put you on the stand,” Randy says, screwing his own hard drive into place.

“Fine. Then all he's got is circumstantial evidence. Namely, the proximity of the wreck to the cable survey corridor.”

“Right. Which implies a correlation,” Cantrell says.

“Well, it is not that damn close,” Doug says. “I was cutting a very wide swath at the time.”

“I have bad news,” Randy says. “First of all, it is a civil case and so circumstantial evidence is all he needs to win. Secondly, I just heard from Avi, on the plane, that Andrew Loeb is filing a second suit, for breach of contract.”

“What goddamn contract?” Doug demands.

“He has anticipated everything you just said,” Randy says. “He still doesn't know where the wreck is. But if it turns out to be miles and miles away from the survey corridor, he will claim that by surveying such a wide swath you were basically risking the Dentist's money in order to go prospecting, and that thus the Dentist still deserves a share of the proceeds.”

“Why does the Dentist want a beef with me?” Doug says.

“Because then he can pressure you into testifying against Epiphyte. You get to keep all the gold. That gold becomes damages which the Dentist leverages into control of Epiphyte.”

“Jesus fuckin' Christ!” Doug exclaims. “He can kiss my ass.”

“I know that,” Randy says, “but if he gets wind of that attitude, he'll just come up with another tactic and file another suit.”

Doug begins, “Well that's kind of defeatist—”

“Where I'm headed with this,” Randy says, “is that we cannot fight the Dentist on his turf—which is the courtroom—any more than the Viet Cong could have fought a pitched battle in the open against the U.S. Army. So there are some really good reasons to get that gold out of the wreck surreptitiously, before the Dentist can prove it's there.”

Doug looks outraged. “Randy, have you ever tried to swim while holding a gold bar in one hand?”

“There's got to be a way to do it. Little submarines or something.”

Doug laughs out loud and mercifully decides not to debunk the concept of little submarines. “Supposing it was possible. What do I do with the gold then? If I deposit it in a bank account, or spend it on something, what's to keep this Andrew Loeb guy from taking that as circumstantial evidence that the wreck had a ton of money in it? You're saying I have to sit on this money for the rest of my life in order to protect you from this lawsuit.”

“Doug. You can do this,” Randy says. “You get the gold. You put it on a boat. My friends here can explain the rest.” Randy fits the laptop's plastic case back together and begins maneuvering the little screws back into their recesses.

Cantrell says, “You bring the boat here.”

Tom continues, “To that beach, right down the hill. I'll be waiting for you with the Humvee.”

“And you and Tom can drive it downtown and deposit that bullion in the vaults of the Central Bank of Kinakuta.” Cantrell concludes.

Someone has finally said something that actually knocked Doug Shaftoe off balance. “And get what in return?” he asks suspiciously.

“Electronic cash from the Crypt. Anonymous. Untraceable. And untaxable.”

Doug's regained his composure now, and is back to belly laughs. “What'll that buy me? Pictures of naked girls on the World Wide Web?”

“Soon enough, it'll buy you anything that money can buy,” Tom says. “I would have to know a little more about it,” Doug says. “But once again we are straying from the agenda. Let's leave it at this: you guys need me to strip that wreck bare, quickly and secretly.”

“It's not just what we need. It might be in your best interests, too,” Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.

“Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us—and something about a Wizard?” John says.

“Yeah.”

Doug's giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men—not to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn't read Lord of the Rings. Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.

“Randy!” Doug almost shouts. “Didn't you at any point ask this guy why Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?”

“Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda,” Cantrell says.

“Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?” Randy jokes.

“I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and his eternally condemned soul,” Doug says. “Seriously! You got the messages from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?”

“Right.”

“And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?”

“Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila.”

“Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?”

“I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code.”

“But that's bullshit!” Doug says. “Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you think is the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?”

“I have no idea,” Randy says.

“The reason is gold,” Doug says.

Randy snorts. “You have got gold on the brain.”

“Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you something?” Doug demands.

“You did. Sorry.”

“Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise, the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify such an effort at the NSA.”

“There was an ongoing Huk insurrection,” Tom says. “But you're right. The real focus—around here anyway—was Vietnam.”

“You know something?” fires back Doug. “During the Vietnam war—which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild—the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary.”

“As in primary gold repository?”

“You got it.”

“Is that what Marcos eventually found?”

“Opinions differ,” Doug says. “A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered.”

“Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else, in these messages,” Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode, with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various pieces of hardware that were present on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford dealership's dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards through Chester's card-reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds several lines of random capital letters.