Cryptonomicon

Very large television sets hang from the ceilings in the departure lounge, showing the Airport Channel, which is a parade of news-bits even more punishingly flimsy than normal television news, mixed in with a great deal of weather and stock quotes. Randy is struck, but not precisely surprised, to see footage of black--hatted Secret Admirers exercising their Second Amendment rights in the streets of Los Altos, and of Ordo's barricade avalanching towards the camera, and the police storming over it weapons drawn. Paul Comstock is shown--pausing, as he climbs into a limousine to say something, looking hale and smug. The conventional wisdom about TV news is that the image is everything and if that is the case then this is a big win for Ordo, which looks like the victim of jackbooted thugs. Which gets Epiphyte nowhere, since Ordo is, or ought to be, nothing more than a bystander. This is supposed to be a private conflict between the Dentist and Epiphyte and now it's become a public one between Comstock and Ordo, and this makes Randy irritated and confused.

He goes and gets on his plane and starts eating caviar. Normally he doesn't partake, but caviar has a decadent fiddling-while-Rome-burns thing going for it that works for him just now.

As is his nerdly custom, Randy actually reads the informational cards that are stuffed in among the in-flight magazines and vomit-sacs. One of these extols the fact that Sultan-Class passengers (as first-class passengers are called) can not only make outgoing phone calls from their seats but can also receive incoming ones. So Randy dials the number for Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe's GSM telephone. It's an Australian phone number, but it'll ring anywhere on the planet. Right now it's something like six A.M. in the Philippines, but Doug is bound to be awake, and indeed he answers his phone on the second ring. Randy can tell from the sound of horns and diesels that he is stuck in Manila traffic, probably in the back of a taxi.

"It's Randy. On a plane," says Randy. "An Air Kinakuta plane."

"Randy! Well I've just been watching you on television," Doug says. It takes a minute for that to sink in; Randy has used a couple of vodkas to cleanse his palate of the caviar.

"Yeah," Doug continues, "I turned on CNN when I woke up and glimpsed you sitting on top of a car typing. What's going on?"

"Nothing! Nothing at all," Randy says. He figures that this is a big stroke of luck. Now that Doug has seen him on CNN, he'll be more likely to effect superbly dramatic measures out of sheer paranoia. Randy slurps vodka and says, "Wow, this Sultan-Class service is great. Anyway, if you do a Web search on Ordo, you'll see this nonsense had absolutely nothing to do with us. Nothing."

"That's funny, because Comstock is denying that it's a crackdown on Ordo," Doug says. When speaking of official U.S. government denials, Vietnam combat veterans like Doug are capable of summoning up a drawling irony that is about as subtle as having automotive jumper cables connected directly to your fillings, but much funnier. Vodka climbs about halfway up Randy's nose before he controls it. "They say that it's just a little old civil suit," Doug says, now using a petal-soft, wounded innocent tone.

"Ordo's status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears is just coincidental," Randy guesses.

"That's right."

"Well then, I'm sure there's nothing to it other than our troubles with the Dentist," Randy says.

"What troubles are those, Randy?"

"Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I'm sure you will have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning."

"Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then," Doug Shaftoe says.

"Maybe I'll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta," Randy says.

"You have a good flight, Randall."

"Have a nice day, Douglas."

Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink into a well-deserved plane-coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that he doesn't know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what's going on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.

When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, "You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan-Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.

"Um, who's this?"

"Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay telephone somewhere and then call you back?"

"Who is this, please?"

"You think that's more secure than his GSM phone? It's not really." The speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he's been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his conversational stride.