Cryptonomicon

"Okay, you can tell Kia that her client's needs and demands have been communicated to the guilty party--"

"Have they?"

"Tell her that the fact that her client hasneeds and demands has been heavy-handedly insinuated to me and that it is understood that the ball is in my court."

"And we can stand down to some kind of detente while a response is prepared?"

"Certainly. Kia can return to her normal duties for the time being."

"Thank you, Randy."

Avi's Range Rover is parked in the most remote part of the roof of the parking ramp, in the center of about twenty-five empty parking spaces that form a sort of security buffer zone. When they have traversed about half of the glacis, the car's headlights flutter, and Randy hears the preparatory snap of a sound system being energized. "The Range Rover has picked us up on Doppler radar," Avi says hastily.

The Range Rover speaketh in a fearsome Oz-like voice cranked up to burning-bush decibel levels. "You are being tracked by Cerberus! Please alter your course immediately!"

"I can't believe you bought one of these things," Randy says.

"You have encroached on the Cerberus defensive perimeter! Move back. Move back," says the Range Rover. "An armed response team is being placed on standby."

"It is the only cryptographically sound car alarm system," Avi says, as if that settles the matter. He digs out a keychain attached to a black polycarbonate fob with the same dimensions, and number of buttons, as a television remote control. He enters a long series of digits and cuts off the voice in the middle of proclaiming that Randy and Avi are being recorded on a digital video camera that is sensitive into the near-infra red range.

"Normally it doesn't do that," Avi says. "I had it set to its maximum alert status."

"What's the worst that could happen? Someone would steal your car and the insurance company would buy you a new one?"

"I couldn't care less if it gets stolen. The worst that could happen would be a car bomb, or, not quite as bad, someone putting a bug in my car and listening to everything I say."

Avi drives Randy over the San Andreas Fault to his place in Pacifica, which is where Randy stores his car while he's overseas. Avi's wife Devorah is in at the doctor's for a routine prenatal and all the kids are either at school or being hustled around the neighborhood by their tag-team duo of tough Israeli nannies. Avi's nannies have the souls of war-hardened Soviet paratroopers in the bodies of nubile eighteen-year-old girls. The house has been utterly abandoned to kid-raising. The formal dining room has been converted to a nanny-barracks with bunk beds hammered together from unfinished two-by-fours, the parlor filled with cribs and changing-tables, and every square centimeter of cheap shag carpet in the place has been infused with a few dozen flakes of glitter, in various festive colors, which if they even cared about getting rid of it could only be removed through direct microsurgical extraction, one flake at a time. Avi plies Randy with a sandwich of turkey bologna and ketchup on generic Wonderoid bread. It is still too early in Manila for Randy to call Amy and make amends for whatever he did wrong. Down below them, in Avi's basement office, a fax machine shrieks and rustles like a bird in a coffee can. A laminated CIA map of Sierra Leone is spread out on the table, peeking out here and there through numerous overlying strata of dirty dishes, newspapers, coloring books, and drafts of the Epiphyte(2) Business Plan. Post-it notes are stuck to the map from place to place. Written on each note, in Avi's distinctive triple-ought Rapidograph drafting-pen hand, is a latitude and longitude with lots of significant digits, and some kind of precis of what happened there: "5 women, 2 men, 4 children, with machetes--photos:" and then serial numbers from Avi's database.

Randy was a little groggy on the drive over, and was irritable about the inappropriate daylight, but after the sandwich his metabolism tries to get into the spirit of things. He has learned to surf these mysterious endocrinological swells. "I'm going to get going," he says, and stands.

"Your overall plan, again?"

"First I go south," Randy says, superstitiously not even wanting to utter the name of the place where he used to live. "For no more than a day, I hope. Then jet lag will land on me like a plunging safe and I will hole up somewhere and watch basketball through the vee of my feet for maybe a day. Then I head north to the Palouse country."

Avi raises his eyebrows. "Home?"

"Yeah."

"Hey, before I forget--could you look for information on the Whitmans while you're up there?"

"You mean the missionaries?"

"Yeah. They came out to the Palouse to convert the Cayuse Indians, who were these magnificent horsemen. They had the best of intentions, but they accidentally gave them measles. Annihilated the whole tribe."

"Does that really land within the boundaries of your obsession? Inadvertent genocide?"