Cryptonomicon

Off to the left, some kind of huddled or teeming mass, heavy on the women and children, passes, and Randy hears some familiar voices. His mind has wrapped itself like a starving squid around this gold-in-the-jungle concept, and in order to address reality for just a second, he has to peel the tentacles away, popping those suckers off of it one by one. He eventually focuses in on the scuttling group and identifies it as Avi's family: Devorah and a bunch of kids and the two nannies, clutching passports and tickets in El Al jackets. The kids are small and prone to sudden darting tactics, the adults are tense and not inclined to let them stray, so the group's movement down the concourse has the general aspect of a sack of beagles heading in the approximate direction of some fresh meat. Randy is probably personally responsible for this exodus and would much rather slink into the men's room and crawl down a toilet, but he has to say something. So he catches up with Devorah and startles her by offering to carry the child support bag that she has slung over her shoulder. This turns out to be shockingly heavy: several gallons of apple juice, he would estimate, plus complete asthma-attack management infrastructure, and maybe a few bricks of solid gold in case of some totalizing civil breakdown en route.

"So. Uh, going to Israel?"

"El Al doesn't fly to Acapulco." Pow! Devorah is in peak form.

"Did Avi give you any kind of rationale for this?"

"You're asking me? I kind of assumed you would know," Devorah says.

"Well, things have been, certainly, volatile," Randy says. "I don't know if fleeing the country is warranted."

"Then why are you in the airport with an Air Kinakuta ticket sticking out of your pocket?"

"Oh, you know ... some business issues need resolving."

"You seem really depressed. Do you have a problem?" Devorah asks.

Randy sighs. "That depends. Do you?"

"Do I what? Have a problem? Why should I have a problem?"

"Because you've been uprooted and sent packing on ten minutes' notice."

"We're going to Israel, Randy. That's not being uprooted. That's being rerooted." Or perhaps she is saying "rerouted." Without a transcript, there is no way for Randy to tell.

"Yeah, but it's still kind of a hassle--"

"Compared to what?"

"Compared to staying at home and living your life."

"This is my life, Randy." Devorah is definitely kicking out a prickly vibe here. Randy figures that she is incredibly pissed off, but under some kind of emotional nondisclosure agreement. This is probably better than the only other two alternatives Randy can think of, namely (1) dissolving into hysterical recriminations and (2) beatific serenity. It is an I'll-do-my job, you-do-yours, why-are-you-in-my-face attitude. Randy feels like an idiot, all of a sudden, for having taken Devorah's bag. She is clearly just this side of aghast, wondering why the fuck Randy is toiling as a skycap at this critical moment. Like she and the nannies are not capable of humping a sack down a hallway. Has she, Devorah, offered to step in and help Randy write any code lately? And if Randy really has nothing better to do, why doesn't he be a man, and strap grenades all over his body and give the Dentist a big hug?

Randy says, "I assume you'll be in touch with Avi before you take off. Would you give him a message?"

"What's the message?"

"Zero."

"That's it?"

"That's it," Randy says.

Devorah is perhaps not familiar with Randy and Avi's practice of conserving precious bandwidth by communicating in binary code, one bit at a time, la Paul Revere and the Old North Church. In this case, "zero" means that Randy did not succeed in wiping out all the data on Tombstone's hard drive.

***

Air Kinakuta's first-class lounge, with its free drinks and highly un-American concept of service, beckons. Randy avoids it because he knows he will sink straight into a coma if he goes there, and they would have to load him onto the 747 with a forklift. Instead he walks around the airport, clutching his hip spastically every time he re-realizes that his laptop isn't dangling there. He is not adjusting very quickly to the fact that most of the laptop is stuffed into a wastebasket at the Ford dealership where he unloaded the Acura. While he was waiting for his man to scurry back from the bank with the five grand, he used the screwdriver attachments on his multipurpose pocket tool to extract the laptop's hard drive, and then threw away the rest.