Cryptonomicon

"It's not just what weneed. It might be in your best interests, too," Randy says, groping on the back of the laptop for the power switch.

"Item the second: A former NSA hondo is surveilling us--and something about a Wizard?" John says.

"Yeah."

Doug's giving Randy a queer look and so Randy launches into a brief summary of his classification system of Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, and Men--not to mention Gollums, which makes practically no sense to Doug, who hasn't read Lord of the Rings.Randy goes on to tell them about his conversation with Pontifex on the airplane phone. John Cantrell and Tom Howard are interested in this, as Randy would expect them to be, but what surprises him is how intently Doug Shaftoe listens.

"Randy!" Doug almost shouts. "Didn't you at any point ask this guy why Old Man Comstock was so interested in the Arethusa messages?"

"Coincidentally, this is the third item on the agenda," Cantrell says.

"Why didn't you ask him on the ski lift?" Randy jokes.

"I was giving him a very closely reasoned explanation of why I was about to sever the linkage between his ugly and perfumed corporeal self and his eternally condemned soul," Doug says. "Seriously! You got the messages from your grandpa's old war souvenirs. Right?"

"Right."

"And your grandpa Waterhouse picked them up where?"

"Judging from the dates, he must have been in Manila."

"Well, what do you imagine could have happened in Manila around that time that would be so damned important to Earl Comstock?"

"I told you, Comstock thought it was a Communist code."

"But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'? Now. What do you think is the real reason Comstock wanted to crack Arethusa?"

"I have no idea," Randy says.

"The reason is gold," Doug says.

Randy snorts. "You have got gold on the brain."

"Did I or did I not take you out into the jungle and show you something?" Doug demands.

"You did. Sorry."

"Gold is the only thing that could account for it. Because otherwise, the Philippines just were not that important during the fifties, to justify such an effort at the NSA."

"There was an ongoing Huk insurrection," Tom says. "But you're right. The real focus--around here anyway--was Vietnam."

"You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war--which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild--the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary."

"As in primary gold repository?"

"You got it."

"Is that what Marcos eventually found?"

"Opinions differ," Doug says. "A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered."

"Well, there isn't any information about the Primary, or anything else, in these messages," Randy says. The laptop has booted up now, in UNIX mode, with a torrent of error messages triggered by its inability to find various pieces of hardware that were present on Randy's laptop (which is in a Ford dealership's dumpster in Los Altos) but are not on Tom's. And yet the basic kernel works to the point that Randy can look at the file system and makes sure it's intact. The Arethusa directory is still there, with its long list of short files, each file the result of running a different stack of cards through Chester's card-reader. Randy opens up the first one and finds several lines of random capital letters.

"How do you know there's no information about the primary in those messages, Randy?" Doug asks.

"The NSA couldn't decrypt these messages in ten years," Randy says. "It all turned out to be a hoax. The output of a random number generator."

Randy jumps back out to the file listing and types

grep AADAA *

and hits the return key. It is a command to find the opening letter group in the ETC card messages, the famous one to which Pontifex had alluded. The machine answers back almost immediately with an empty prompt, meaning that the search failed.

"Ho-ly shit," Randy says.

"What?" everyone says at once.

Randy takes a long, deep breath. "These are not the same messages that Earl Comstock spent ten years attempting to break."

Chapter 81 DELUGE

It takes Goto Dengo about half a minute to waddle up the narrow entrance of the tunnel. He is trailing the fingers of one hand along the stone ceiling just above his head, feeling the scars of the drills. Behind him he can hear the four members of his crew making their way along, muttering to each other calmly.