Cryptonomicon

Avi skids to a stop and clutches his water bottle in both hands as if he's afraid he might drop it. "Sunken treasure, like, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum? Pieces of six? That kind of thing?"

"Pieces of eight.Same basic idea," Randy says. "The Shaftoes are treasure hunters. Doug is obsessed with the idea that there are vast hoards of treasure in and around the Philippines."

"From where? Those Spanish galleons?"

"No. Well, yes,actually. But that's not what Doug's after." He and Avi have begun walking again. "Most of it is either much older than that--pottery from sunken Chinese junks--or much more recent--Japanese war gold."

As Randy had expected, the mention of Japanese war gold makes a huge impact on Avi. Randy keeps talking. "Rumor has it that the Nipponese left a lot of gold in the area. Supposedly, Marcos recovered a big stash buried in a tunnel somewhere--that's where he got all his money. Most people think Marcos was worth something like five, six billion dollars, but a lot of people in the Philippines think he recovered more like sixty billion."

"Sixty billion!" Avi's spine stiffens. "Impossible."

"Look, you can believe the rumors or not, I don't care," Randy says. "But since it looks like one of Marcos's bag men is going to be a founding depositor in the Crypt, it is the kind of thing you should know."

"Keep talking," Avi says, suddenly ravenous for data.

"Okay. So people have been running all over the Philippines ever since the war, digging holes and dredging the seafloor, trying to find the legendary Nipponese war gold. Doug Shaftoe is one of those people. Problem is, making a thorough sidescan sonar survey of the whole area is quite expensive--you can't just go out and do it on spec. He saw an opportunity when we came along."

"I see. Very smart," Avi says approvingly. "He would do the survey work that we needed anyway, in order to lay the cables."

"Perhaps a bit more than was strictly necessary, as long as he was out there."

"Right. Now I remember some angry mail from the Dentist's due diligence harpies because the survey was costing too much and taking too long. They felt we could have hired a different company and gotten the same results quicker and cheaper."

"They were probably right," Randy admits. "Anyway, Doug wanted to cut a deal that gave us ten percent of whatever he found. More, if we wanted to underwrite recovery operations."

All of a sudden Avi's eyes go wide and he swallows a big gulp of air. "Oh, shit," he says. "He wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from the Dentist."

"Exactly. Because the Dentist would end up taking all of it. And because of the Dentist's peculiar domestic situation, that means that the Bolobolos would know everything about it too. These guys would happily kill to get their hands on gold."

"Wow!" Avi says, shaking his head. "Y'know, I don't want to seem like one of those hackneyed Jews that you see in heartwarming movies. But at times like this, all I can say is 'Oy, gevalt!' "

"I never told you about this deal, Avi, for two reasons. One of them is just our general policy of not blabbing about things. The other reason is that we decided to hire Semper Marine Services anyway--just on their own merits--so Doug Shaftoe's proposition was irrelevant."

Avi thinks this one over. "Correction. It was irrelevant, as long as Doug Shaftoe didn't find any sunken treasure."

"Right. And I assumed that he wouldn't."

"Youassumed wrong."

"I assumed wrong," Randy admits. "Shaftoe has found the remains of an old Nipponese submarine."

"How do you know that?"

"If he found a Chinese junk he was going to send me a joke about Ferdinand Marcos. If he found World War II stuff, it was going to be Imelda. If it was a surface ship, it was going to be about Imelda's shoes. If it was a submarine, her sexual habits. He sent me a joke about Imelda's sexual habits."

"Now, did you ever formally respond to Doug Shaftoe's proposition?" Avi says.

"No. Like I said, it wasn't relevant, we were going to hire him any way. But then, after the contracts were all signed and we were drawing up the survey schedule, he told me about this code involving the Marcos jokes. I realized then he believed that by hiring him, we had implicitly said yes to his proposition."

"It's a funny way to do business," Avi says, wrinkling his nose. "You'd think he would have been more explicit."

"He is the kind of guy who does deals on a handshake. On personal honor," Randy says. "Once he had made the proposition, he would never withdraw it."

"The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way."

"It is true."

"So he believes, now, that we are accomplices in this plan to hide the existence of this sunken treasure from the Dentist and the Bolobolos," Avi says.

"Unless we come clean to them right away."

"In which case we are betraying Doug Shaftoe," Avi says.