Cryptonomicon

The driver is named Matthew, and he really turns out to be not so much a driver as a charismatic fixer/negotiator, a smoother of the way, a human road grader. Randy just stands there passively while Matthew charmingly and hilariously extricates them from this impromptu village meeting, a job that would probably be next to impossible if the priest were not so clearly complicit. The cop looks to the priest for cues as to what he should do, and the priest tells him something complicated with a series of looks and gestures, and in that way, somehow, Randy finds his way into the sport-utility vehicle's passenger seat and Matthew gets behind the wheel. Well after sunset they trundle out of the village along its execrable one-lane road, trailed by kids who run alongside keeping one hand on the car, like Secret Service agents in a motorcade. They are able to do this for quite a while because they've gone a few kilometers before the road gets good enough for Matthew to shift out of first gear.

This is not a part of the world where it makes any sense at all to drive at night, but clearly Matthew wasn't interested in an overnight stay at that village. Randy has a pretty good idea of what's going to happen now: many hours of driving very slowly on circuitous roads, half-blocked by piles of freshly harvested young coconuts, impeded by hunks of lumber thrown across the right-of-way as speed bumps to prevent kids and dogs from being run over. He leans his seat back.

Bright light is streaming into the car and he thinks: roadblock, cops, spotlights. The light's blocked by a silhouette. There's a rapping noise on the window. Randy looks over and sees the driver's seat empty, no keys in the ignition. The car's cool and dormant. He sits up and rubs his face, partly because it needs to be rubbed and partly because it's probably smart to keep one's hands in plain sight. More rapping on the windshield, growingly impatient. The windows are fogged and he can only see shapes. The light's reddish. He's got a completely inappropriate erection. Randy gropes for a window control, but the car's got power windows and they don't work when it's not running. He gropes around on the door until he's figured out how to unlock it, and almost instantly it flies open and someone's coming inside to join him.

She ends up on Randy's lap, lying sideways on top of him, her head on his chest. "Close the door," Amy says, and Randy does. Then she squirms around until she's face to face with him, her pelvic center of gravity grinding mercilessly against the huge generalized region between navel and thigh that has, in recent months, become one big sex organ for him. She brackets his neck between her forearms and grabs the carotid supports of the whiplash arrestor. He's busted. The obvious thing now would be a kiss, and she feints in that direction, but then reconsiders, as it seems like some serious looking is in order at this time. So they look at each other for probably a good minute. It's not a moony kind of look that they share, not a starry-eyed thing by any means, more like a what the fuck have we gotten ourselves intothing. As if it's really important to both of them that they mutually appreciate how serious everything is. Emotionally, yes, but also from a legal and, for lack of a better term, military standpoint. But once Amy is satisfied that her boy does indeed get it, on all of these fronts, she permits herself a vaguely incredulous-looking sneer that blossoms into a real grin, and then a chuckle that in a less heavily armed woman might be characterized as a giggle, and then, just to shut herself up, she pulls hard on the stainless steel goalposts of the whiplash arrestor and nuzzles her face up to Randy's and, after ten heartbeats' worth of exploratory sniffling and nuzzling, kisses him. It's a chaste kiss that takes a long time to open up, which is totally consistent with Amy's cautious, sardonic approach to everything, as well as with the hypothesis, alluded to once while they were driving to Whitman, that she is in fact a virgin.

Randy's life is essentially complete at the moment. He has come to understand during all of this that the light shining in through the windows is in fact the light of dawn, and he tries to fight back the thought that it's a good day to diebecause it's clear to him that although he might go on from this point to make a lot of money, become famous, or whatever, nothing's ever going to top this. Amy knows it too, and she makes the kiss last for a very long time before finally breaking away with a little gasp for air, and bowing her head so that her brow is supported on Randy's breastbone, the curve of her head following that of his throat, like the coastlines of South America and Africa. Randy almost can't take the pressure of her on his groin. He braces his feet against the floorboards of the sport-utility vehicle and squirms.