Cryptonomicon

The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.

Randy could just reformat the hard drive with a single command, but (1)it would take several minutes to execute and (2) it would not thoroughly erase the incriminating bits, which could be lifted from the hard drive by a motivated technician. Because he knows which files have recorded his log-on, he executes a command that finds those files on the hard drive. Then he types another command that causes random numbers to be written over those areas of the hard drive seven times in a row.

The cops are slamming the battering ram against the side door of the office building when Randy's right pinky slams the Enter key and executes that command. He is almost certainly safe from the tampering-with-evidence charge now. But he hasn't actually tampered yet, which is the whole point of this exercise. He needs to find all the copies of the e-mail message that specifies the latitude and longitude of the wreck, and do the same multiple-erase trick on them. If the damn things were not encrypted, he could search for the critical strings of digits. As it is, he will have to search for files that were created during a certain time period, around the time that Randy was out on Glory,anchored over the wreck. Randy knows roughly what day that was, and so he sets the limits of the search to give him any files created five days either side of that, just to be safe, and limits it to only those directories used for e-mail.

The search takes forever, or maybe it just seems that way because the cops have smashed the side door off its hinges now and are inside the building. The video window catches Randy's eye as it changes dramatically; he gets a veering montage of grainy frozen images of a room; a doorway; a hallway; a reception area; and finally a barricade. The Ordo guys have yanked their video camera out of the window and restationed it at their front desk, recording a barrier built of cheap modular office furniture piled against the glass entrance to the reception. The camera tilts up to show that one of the four glass door slabs has already been crystallized by (one supposes) the impact of the battering ram.

Randy's "find" command finally returns with a list of about a hundred files. The half-dozen or so critical ones are on the list somewhere, but Randy doesn't have time to go through the list figuring out which is which. He has the system generate a list of the disk blocks occupied by those files, so that he can go back later and do a super-erase. Once he's got that information, he does a "rm" or "remove" command on all of them. This is a paltry and miserable way to expunge secrets from a hard drive, but Randy's afraid he may not have time to do it more thoroughly. The "rm" only takes a few moments and then Randy goes back and has the system write random numbers on top of those disk blocks seven times in a row, just as he did earlier. By this time the barricade has been scattered all over Ordo's lobby and the cops are inside. They have weapons drawn and pointed at the ceiling and they don't look very happy.

There is one thing left to do. Actually it's a pretty big thing. The Epiphyte people use Tombstone for all kinds of purposes, and there's no way of telling whether other copies of that latitude and longitude exist on it somewhere. Most of Epiphyte is made up of inveterate computer users who would be just the sort to write little scripts to back up all of their old e-mail messages to an archive every week. So he whips up his own script that will just write random information to every sector on the entire hard drive, then go back and do it again, and again, and again, forever--or until the cops pull the plug. Just after he whacks the Enter key to send this command in to Tombstone, he hears an electrical buzzing noise from the van that makes his hair stand on end for a moment. He sees a cop in the video window, frozen. Then the screen of his computer goes blank.

Randy looks over toward the old van. The Dwarves are high-fiving each other.