Cryptonomicon

"He'd be perfect," Randy continues, "because he would be a true believer. He wouldn't think that he was just out there being an asshole. He would really, truly, sincerely believe that he was representing this class of shareholders who had been Satanically ritually abused by the people running the company. He would work thirty-six hours at a stretch digging up dirt on them. Corporate memories that had been repressed. No trick would be too dirty, because he would be on the side of righteousness. He would only sleep or eat under medical orders."

"I can see that you got to know him incredibly well," Avi says.

"Wow! So, whom is he suing at the moment?"

"Us," Avi says.

There is now this five-minute stoppage in the conversation, and in the hike, and possibly in some of Randy's neurological processes. The color map of his vision goes out of whack: everything's in extremely washed-out shades of yellow and purple. Like someone's clammy fingers are around his neck, modulating the flow in his carotids to the bare minimum needed to sustain life. When Randy finally returns to full consciousness, the first thing he does is to look down at his shoes, because he is convinced for some reason that he has sunk into the wet sand to his knees. But his shoes are barely making an impression on the firmly packed sand.

A big wave collapses into a sheet of foam that skims up the beach and divides around his feet.

"Gollum," Randy says.

"Was that an utterance, or some kind of physiological transient?" Avi says.

"Gollum. Andrew is Gollum."

"Well, Gollum is suing us."

"Us, as in you and me?" he asks. It takes Randy about a full minute of time to get these words around his tongue. "He's suing us over the game company?"

Avi laughs.

"It's possible!" Randy says. "Chester told me that the game company is now like the size of Microsoft or something."

"Andrew Loeb has filed a minority-shareholder lawsuit against the board of directors of Epiphyte(2) Corporation," Avi says.

Randy's body has now finally had time to deploy a full-on fight-or-flight reaction--part of his genetic legacy as a stupendous badass. This must have been very useful when saber-toothed tigers tried to claw their way into his ancestors' caves but is doing him absolutely no good in these circumstances.

"On behalf of whom?"

"Oh, come on, Randy. There aren't that many candidates."

"Springboard Capital?"

"You told me yourself that Andrew's dad was a white-shoe Orange County lawyer. Now, archetypally, where would a guy like that put his retirement money?"

"Oh, shit."

"That's right. Bob Loeb, Andrew's dad, got in on AVCLA very early. He and the Dentist have been sending each other Christmas cards for like twenty years. And so when Bob Loeb's idiot son graduated from law school, Bob Loeb, knowing full well that the kid was too much of a head case to be employable anywhere else, paid a call on Dr. Hubert Kepler, and Andrew's been working for him ever since.

"Fuck. Fuck!" Randy says. "All these years. Treading water."

"How's that?"

"That time in Seattle--during the lawsuit--was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."

"Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive."

"Shut up," Randy says, "I'm trying to agonize."

"Well, I think that agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it borders on funny," Avi says. "But please go ahead."

"Now, after all those years--all that fucking work--I'm back where I started. A net worth of zero. Except this time I don't even have a girlfriend per se."

"Well," Avi says, "to begin with, I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene."

"Ouch! You are a cruel man."

"Sometimes wanting is better than having."

"Well, that's good news," Randy says brightly, "because--"

"Look at Chester. Would you rather be Chester, or you?"

"Okay, okay."

"Also, you have a substantial amount of stock in Epiphyte, which I'm quite convinced is worth something."

"Well, that all depends on the lawsuit, right?" Randy says. "Have you actually seen any of the documents?"

"Of course I have," Avi says, irked. "I'm the president and CEO of the fucking corporation."

"Well, what's his beef? What's the pretext for the lawsuit?"

"Apparently the Dentist is convinced that Semper Marine has stumbled upon some kind of vast hoard of sunken war gold, as a direct byproduct of the work they did for us."

"He knows this, or he suspects this?"

"Well," Avi says, "reading between the lines, I gather that he only suspects it. Why do you ask?"

"Never mind for now--but he's going after Semper Marine, too?"

"No! That would rule out the lawsuit he's filing against Epiphyte."

"What do you mean?"

"His point is that if Epiphyte had been competently managed--if we had exercised due diligence--then we would have drawn up a much more thorough contract with Semper Marine than we did."

"We've got a contract with Semper Marine."