Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

It would be really stupid to open the Arethusa intercepts in a window—he's not going to do that. But he can use this technique to conceal whatever else he's doing in the way of decryption work. It occurs to him, however, when he gets a few lines into writing this Perl script, that if he pulls a stunt like that so early in his incarceration, the people surveilling him will know right away that he is on to them. And maybe it's better if he lets them believe, for a while, that he suspects nothing.

So he saves his Perl script and stops working on it for now. If he writes it in short bursts, opening it once or twice a day to type in a few lines and then closing it, it's unlikely that the surveillors will be able to follow what he is up to, even if they happen to be hackers. Just to be an asshole, he modifies his X Windows options in such a way that none of the windows on the screen will have a title bar at the top. That way the surveillance people won't be able to tell what file he is working on at any given moment, which will make it a lot harder for them to string a long series of observations together into a coherent picture of what's in his Perl script.

Too, he opens up the old message from root@eruditorum.org giving the Pontifex Transform, expressed as a few lines of Perl code. The steps that looked so unwieldy when carried out by a computer seem straight forward—easy, even—now that he construes them as manipulations of a deck of cards.

“Randy.”

“Hmmm?” Randy looks up from the screen and is startled to find that he is in a jail in the Philippines.

“Dinner is served.”

It is Enoch Root, looking at him through the bars. He points at the floor of Randy's cell where a new tray of food has just been slid in. “Actually, it was served an hour ago—you might want to have at it before the rats come.”

“Thank you,” Randy says. Making sure all the windows on his screen have been closed, he goes over and lifts his dinner up from the spatter of old rat-turds on the floor. It is rice and lechon, a simple and traditional pork dish. Enoch Root finished eating a long time ago—he sits on his bed, next to Randy, and plays an unusual game of solitaire, pausing occasionally to mark down a letter. Randy watches the manipulation of the deck carefully, growingly certain that it is the same set of operations he was just reading about in the old e-mail message.

“So what are you in for?” Randy asks.

Enoch Root finishes counting through the deck, glances at a seven of spades, closes his eyes for a few moments, and marks down a W on his napkin. Then he says, “Disorderly conduct. Trespassing. Incitement to riot. I'm probably guilty of the first two.”

“Tell me about it.”

“First tell me what you're in for.”

“Heroin was found in my bag at the airport. I stand accused of being the world's stupidest drug smuggler.”

“Is someone angry at you?”

“That would make for a much longer story,” Randy says, “but I think you have the drift.”

“Well, in my case, it's like this. I have been working at a mission hospital up in the mountain.”

“You're a priest?”

“Not anymore. I'm a lay worker.”

“Where's your hospital?”

“South of here. Out in the boondocks,” Enoch Root says. “The people there cultivate pineapple, coffee, coconut, bananas, and a few other cash crops. But their land is being torn apart by treasure hunters.”

Funny that Enoch Root should suddenly be on the subject of buried treasure. And yet he has been so tight-lipped. Randy guesses he's intended to play stupid. He takes a stab at it: “Is there supposed to be some treasure down there?”

“The old-timers say that many Nipponese trucks went down a particular road during the last few weeks before MacArthur's return. Past a certain point it was not possible to know where they went, because the road was blocked, and minefields set up to discourage the curious.”

“Or kill them,” Randy says.

Enoch Root takes this in stride. “That road gives way to a rather vast area in which gold might hypothetically have been hidden. Hundreds of square miles. Much of it is jungle. Much has difficult topography. Lots of volcanoes, some extinct, some vomiting up mudflows from time to time. But some is flat enough to grow tropical crops, and in those places, people have settled during the decades since the war, and put together the rudiments of an economy.”

“Who owns the land?”

“You've gotten to know the Philippines well,” Enoch Root says. “You go immediately to the central question.”

“Around here, asking who owns the land is like complaining about the weather in the Midwest,” Randy muses.

Enoch Root nods. “I could spend a long time answering your question. The answer is that patterns of ownership changed just after the war, and then changed again under Marcos, and yet again in the last few years. So we have several epochs, if you will. First epoch: before the war. Land owned by certain families.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Second epoch: the war. A vast area sealed off by the Nipponese. Some of the families who owned the land prospered under the occupation. Others went bankrupt. Third epoch: postwar. The bankrupt families went away. The prosperous ones expanded their holdings. As did the church and the government.”

“Why?”

“The government made part of the land—the jungle—into a national park. And after the eruptions, the church established the mission where I work.”

“Eruptions?”

“In the early 1950s, just to make things interesting—you know, things are never interesting enough in the Philippines—the volcanoes acted up. A few lahars came through the area, wiped out some villages, redirected some rivers, displaced many people. The church set up the hospital to help those people.”

“A hospital doesn't take up very much land,” Randy observes.

“We also have farms. We are trying to help the locals become more self-reliant.” Enoch Root acts like he basically does not want to talk about this. “At any rate, things then settled down into a pattern that more or less endured until the Marcos era, when various people were forced to sell some of their holdings to Ferdinand and Imelda and various of their cousins, nephews, cronies, and bootlicks.”

“They were looking for Nipponese war gold.”

“Certain of the locals have made a business of pretending to remember where the gold is,” Enoch Root says. “Once it was understood just how remunerative this could be, it spread like a virus. Everyone claims to have hazy memories of the war now, or of tales that Dad or Granddad told them. The Marcos-era treasure-hunters did not display the cautious skepticism that might have been expected from people with more piercing intellects. Many holes were dug. No gold was found. Things settled down. Then, in the last few years, the Chinese came in.”

“Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, or—”

“Chinese of Chinese ancestry,” Enoch Root says. “Northern Chinese. Robust ones who like spicy food. Not the usual gracile Cantonese-speaking fish-eaters.”

“These people are from where, then—Shanghai?”

Root nods. “Their company is one of these post-Maoist monstrosities. Headed up by an actual Long March veteran. Wily survivor of many purges. Name of Wing. Mr. Wing—or General Wing as he likes to be addressed when he is feeling nostalgic—handled the transition to capitalism rather deftly. Built hydroelectric projects with slave labor during the Great Leap Forward, parlayed that into control of a very large government ministry which has now become a sort of corporation. Mr. Wing has the ability to shut off the electricity to just about any home or factory or even military base in China, and by Chinese standards this makes him into a distinguished elder statesman.”