s. The scattered clumps of businessmen begin to draw closer
together, converging on the cavern's entrance. Prag is making a head count,
taking attendance. Someone's missing.
One of the Dentist's aides is maneuvering towards Prag in lavender
pumps, a cellphone clamped to her head. Randy breaks away from Epiphyte and
sets a collision course, reaching Prag's vicinity just in time to hear the
woman tell him, "Dr. Kepler will be joining us late some important business
in California. He sends his apologies."
Dr. Pragasu nods brightly, somehow avoids eye contact with Randy, who
is now close enough to floss Prag's teeth, and turns, clamping his hardhat
down on top of his glossy hair. "Please follow me, everyone," he announces,
"the tour begins."
It is a dull tour, even for those who have never been inside the place.
Whenever Prag leads them to a new spot, everyone looks around and gets their
bearings; conversation lulls for ten or fifteen seconds, then picks up
again; the high ranking executives stare unseeingly at the hewn stone walls
and mutter to each other while their engineering consultants converge on the
Goto engineers and ask them learned questions.
All of the construction engineers work for Goto and are, of course,
Nipponese. There is another who stands apart. "Who's the heavyset blond
guy?" Randy asks Tom Howard.
"German civil engineer on loan to Goto. He seems to specialize in
military issues."
" Are there any military issues?"
"At some point, about halfway into this project, Prag suddenly decided
he wanted the whole thing bombproof."
"Oh. Is that Bomb with a capital B, by any chance?"
"I think he's just about to talk about that," Torn says, leading Randy
closer.
Someone has just asked the German engineer whether this place is
nuclear hardened.
"Nuclear hardened is not the issue," he says dismissively. "Nuclear
hardened is easy it just means that the structure can support a brief
overpressure of so many megapascals. You see, half of Saddam's bunkers were,
technically, nuclear hardened. But this does no good against precision
guided, penetrating munitions as the Americans proved. And it is far more
likely this structure will be attacked in that way than that it would ever
be nuked we do not anticipate that the sultan will get involved in a nuclear
war."
This is the funniest thing that anyone has said all day, and it gets a
laugh.
"Fortunately," the German continues, "this rock above us is far more
effective than reinforced concrete. We are not aware of any earth
penetrating munitions currently in existence that could break through."
"What about the R and D the Americans have done on the Libyan
facility?" Randy asks.
"Ah, you are talking about the gas plant in Libya, buried under a
mountain," the German says, a bit uneasily, and Randy nods.
"That rock in Libya is so brittle," says the German, "you can shatter
it with a hammer. We are working with a different kind of rock here, in many
layers."
Randy exchanges a look with Avi, who looks as if he is about to bestow
another commendation for deviousness. At the same time Randy grins, he
senses someone's stare. He turns and locks eyes with Prag, who is looking
inscrutable, verging on pissed off. A great many people in this part of the
world would cringe and wither under the glare of Dr. Mohammed Pragasu, but
all Randy sees is his old friend, the pizza eating hacker.
So Randy stares right back into Prag's black eyes, and grins. Prag
prepares for the staredown. You asshole, you tricked my German for this you
shall die! But he can't sustain it. He breaks eye contact, turns away, and
raises one hand to his mouth, pretending to stroke his goatee. The virus of
irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected
with it, it lives in your brain forever. A man like Prag can come home,
throw away his Nikes, and pray to Mecca five times a day, but he can never
eradicate it from his system.
The tour lasts for a couple of hours. When they emerge, the temperature
has doubled. Two dozen cellphones and beepers sing out as they exit the
radio silence of the cavern. Avi has a brief and clipped conversation with
someone, then hangs up and herds Epiphyte Corp. towards their car. "Small
change of plans," he says. "We need to break away for a little meeting." He
utters an unfamiliar name to the driver.
Twenty minutes later, they are filing into the Nipponese cemetery,
sandwiched between two busloads of elderly mourners.
"Interesting place for a meeting," says Eberhard Föhr.
"Given the people we're dealing with, we have to assume that all of our
rooms, our car, the hotel restaurant, are bugged," Avi snaps. No one speaks
for a minute, as Avi leads them down a gravel path towards a secluded corner
of the garden.
They end up in the corner of two high stone walls. A stand of bamboo
shields them from the rest of the garden, and rustles soothingly in a sea
breeze that does little to cool their sweaty faces. Beryl's fanning herself
with a Kinakuta street map.
"Just got a call from Annie in San Francisco," he says.
Annie in San Francisco is their lawyer.
"It's, uh ... seven P.M. there right now. Seems that just before the
close of business, a courier walked into her office, fresh off the plane
from LA, and handed her a letter from the Dentist's office."
"He's suing us for something," Beryl says.
"He's this far away from suing us."
"For what!?" Tom Howard shouts.
Avi sighs. "In a way, Tom, that is beside the point. When Kepler thinks
it's in his best interests to file a tactical lawsuit, he'll find a pretext.
We must never forget that this is not about legitimate legal issues, it is
about tactics."
"Breach of contract, right?" Randy says.
Everyone looks at Randy. "Do you know something we should know?" asks
John Cantrell.
"Just an educated guess," Randy says, shaking his head. "Our contract
with him states that we are to keep him informed of any changes in
conditions that may materially alter the business climate."
"That's an awfully vague clause," Beryl says reproachfully.
"I'm paraphrasing."
"Randy's right," Avi says. "The gist of this letter is that we should
have told the Dentist what was going on in Kinakuta."
"But we did not know," says Eb.
"Doesn't matter remember, this is a tactical lawsuit."
"What does he want?"
"To scare us," Avi says. "To rattle us. Tomorrow or the next day, he'll
bring in a different lawyer to play good cop to make us an offer."
"What kind of offer?" Tom asks.
"We don't know, of course," Avi says, "but I'm guessing that Kepler
wants a piece of us. He wants to own part of the company."
Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains
his almost perpetual mask of cool control. "So it's bad news, good news, bad
news. Bad news number one: Anne's phone call. Good news: because of what has
happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable
that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our
stock."
"What's the second bit of bad news?" Randy asks.
"It's very simple." Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away
for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to
face them again. "This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough,
now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably
interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable
company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on
a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile
away. It attracts pythons." Avi pauses for a moment. "Usually, the grace
period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time weeks or
months to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to
slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were
perched virtually on top of the python. Now we're not valuable any more."
"What do you mean?" Eb says. "We're just as valuable as we were this
morning."
"A small company that's being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is
most certainly not valuable. It probably has an enormous negative value. The
only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away.
See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom's incredible performance
yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a
piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he
was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the
lawsuit.
"So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it
in a cave," Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice
regretfully. "And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a
lesson to you: be like the Dentist. Make up your mind and act fast."
Chapter 45 FUNKSPIEL
Colonel Chattan's aide shakes him awake. The first thing Waterhouse
notices is that the guy is breathing fast and steady, the way Alan does when
he comes in from a cross country run.
"Colonel Chattan requests your presence in the Mansion most urgently."
Waterhouse's billet is in the vast, makeshift camp five minutes' walk from
Bletchley Park's Mansion. Striding briskly whilst buttoning up his shirt, he
covers the distance in four. Then, twenty feet from the goal, he is nearly
run over by a pack of Rolls Royces, gliding through the night as dark and
silent as U boats. One comes so close that he can feel the heat of its
engine; its muggy exhaust blows through his trouser leg and condenses on his
skin.
The old farts from the Broadway Buildings climb out of those Rolls
Royces and precede Waterhouse into the Mansion. In the library, the men
cluster obsequiously round a telephone, which rings frequently and, when
picked up, makes distant, tinny, shouting noises that can be heard, but not
understood, from across the room. Waterhouse estimates that the Rolls Royces
must have driven up from London at an average speed of about nine thousand
miles per hour.
Long tables are being looted from other rooms and chivvied into the
library by glossy haired young men in uniform, knocking flecks of paint off
the doorframes. Waterhouse takes an arbitrary chair at an arbitrary table.
Another aide wheels in a cart of wire baskets piled with file folders, still
smoking from the friction of being jerked out of Bletchley Park's infinite
archives. If this were a proper meeting, mimeographs might have been made up
ahead of time and individually served. But this is sheer panic, and
Waterhouse knows instinctively that he'd better take advantage of his early
arrival if he wants to know anything. So he goes over to the cart and grabs
the folder on the bottom of the stack, guessing that they'd have pulled the
most important one first. It is labeled: U 691.
The first few pages are just a form: a U boat data sheet consisting of
many boxes. Half of them are empty. The other half have been filled in by
different hands using different writing implements at different times, with
many erasures and cross outs and marginal notes written by bet hedging
analysts.
Then there is a log containing everything U 691 is ever known to have
done, in chronological order. The first entry is its launch, at
Wilhelmshaven on September 19, 1940, followed by a long list of the ships it
has murdered. There's one odd notation from a few months ago:
REFITTED WITH EXPERIMENTAL DEVICE (SCHNORKEL?). Since then, U 691 has
been tearing up and down like mad, sinking ships in the Chesapeake Bay,
Maracaibo, the approaches to the Panama Canal, and a bunch of other places
that Waterhouse, until now, has thought of only as winter resorts for rich
people.
Two more people come into the room and take seats: Colonel Chattan, and
a young man in a disheveled tuxedo, who (according to a rumor that makes its
way around the room) is a symphonic percussionist. This latter has clearly
made some effort to wipe the lipstick off his face, but has missed some in
the crevices of his left ear. Such are the exigencies of war.
Yet another aide rushes in with a wire basket filled with ULTRA message
decrypt slips. This looks like much hotter stuff; Waterhouse puts the file
folder back and begins leafing through the slips.
Each one begins with a block of data identifying the Y station that
intercepted it, the time, the frequency, and other minutiae. The heap of
slips boils down to a conversation, spread out over the last several weeks,
between two transmitters.
One of these is in a part of Berlin called Charlottenburg, on the roof
of a hotel at Steinplatz: the temporary site of U boat Command, recently
moved there from Paris. Most of these messages are signed by Grand Admiral
Karl Dönitz. Waterhouse knows that Dönitz has recently become the Supreme
Commander in Chief of the entire German Navy, but he has elected to hold
onto his previous title of Commander in Chief of U boats as well. Dönitz has
a soft spot for U boats and the men who inhabit them.
The other transmitter belongs to none other than U 691. These messages
are signed by her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff.
Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. This newfangled radar shit is
everywhere.
Dönitz: Acknowledged. Well done.
Bischoff: Bagged another tanker. These bastards seem to know exactly
where I am. Thank god for the schnorkel.
Dönitz: Acknowledged. Nice work as usual.
Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. Airplanes were waiting for me. I
shot one of them down; it landed on me in a fireball and incinerated three
of my men. Are you sure this Enigma thing really works?
Dönitz: Nice work, Bischoff! You get another medal! Don't worry about
the Enigma, it's fantastic.
Bischoff: I attacked a convoy and sank three merchantmen, a tanker, and
a destroyer.
Dönitz: Superb! Another medal for you!
Bischoff: Just for the hell of it, I doubled back and finished off what
was left of that convoy. Then another destroyer showed up and dropped depth
charges on us for three days. We are all half dead, steeped in our own
waste, like rats who have fallen into a latrine and are slowly drowning. Our
brains are gangrenous from breathing our own carbon dioxide.
Dönitz: You are a hero of the Reich and the Führer himself has been
informed of your brilliant success! Would you mind heading south and
attacking the convoy at such and such coordinates? P.S. please limit the
length of your messages.
Bischoff: Actually, I could use a vacation, but sure, what the heck.
Bischoff (a week later): Nailed about half of that convoy for you. Had
to surface and engage a pesky destroyer with the deck gun. This was so
utterly suicidal, they didn't expect it. As a consequence we blew them to
bits. Time for a nice vacation now.
Dönitz: You are now officially the greatest U boat commander of all
time. Return to Lorient for that well deserved R & R.
Bischoff: Actually I had in mind a Caribbean vacation. Lorient is cold
and bleak at this time of year.
Dönitz: We have not heard from you in two days. Please report.
Bischoff: Found a nice secluded harbor with a white sand beach. Would
rather not specify coordinates as I no longer trust security of Enigma.
Fishing is great. Am working on my tan. Feeling somewhat better. Crew is
most grateful.
Dönitz: Günter, I am willing to overlook much from you, but even the
Supreme Commander in Chief must answer to his superiors. Please end this
nonsense and return home.
U 691: This is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, second in command of U
691. Regret to inform you that KL Bischoff is in poor health. Request
orders. P.S. He does not know I am sending this message.
Dönitz: Assume command. Return, not to Lorient, but to Wilhelmshaven.
Take care of Günter.
Beck: KL Bischoff refuses to relinquish command.
Dönitz: Sedate him and get him back here, he will not be punished.
Beck: Thank you on behalf of me and the crew. We are underway, but
short of fuel.
Dönitz: Rendezvous with U 413 [a milchcow] at such and such
coordinates.
Now more people come into the room: a wizened rabbi; Dr. Alan Mathison
Turing; a big man in a herringbone tweed suit whom Waterhouse remembers
vaguely as an Oxford don; and some of the Naval intelligence fellows who are
always hanging around Hut 4. Chattan calls the meeting to order and
introduces one of the younger men, who stands up and gives a situation
report.
"U 691, a Type IXD/42 U boat under the nominal command of
Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, and the acting command of Oberleutnant zur
See Karl Beck, transmitted an Enigma message to U boat Command at 2000 hours
Greenwich time. The message states that, three hours after sinking a
Trinidadian merchantman, U 691 torpedoed and sank a Royal Navy submarine
that was picking up survivors. Beck has captured two of our men: Marine
Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, an American, and Lieutenant Enoch Root, ANZAC."
"How much do these men know?" demands the don, who is making a
stirringly visible effort to sober up.
Chattan fields the question: "If Root and Shaftoe divulged everything
that they know, the Germans could infer that we were making strenuous
efforts to conceal the existence of an extremely valuable and comprehensive
intelligence source."
"Oh, bloody hell," the don mumbles.
An extremely tall, lanky, blond civilian, the crossword puzzle editor
of one of the London newspapers currently on loan to Bletchley Park, hustles
into the room and apologizes for being late. More than half of the people on
the Ultra Mega list are now in this room.
The young naval analyst continues. "At 2110, Wilhelmshaven replied with
a message instructing OL Beck to interrogate the prisoners immediately. At
0150, Beck replied with a message stating that in his opinion the prisoners
belonged to some sort of special naval intelligence unit."
As he speaks, carbon copies of the fresh message decrypts are being
passed round to all the tables. The crossword puzzle editor studies his with
a tremendously furrowed brow. "Perhaps you covered this before I arrived, in
which case I apologize," he says. "but where does the Trinidadian
merchantman come in to all of this?"
Chattan silences Waterhouse with a look, and answers: "I'm not going to
tell you." There is appreciative laughter all around, as if he had just
uttered a bon mot at a dinner party. "But Admiral Dönitz, reading these same
messages, must be just as confused as you are. We should like to keep him
that way."
"Datum 1: He knows a merchantman was sunk," pipes up Turing, ticking
off points on his fingers. "Datum 2: He knows a Royal Navy submarine was on
the scene a few hours later, and was also sunk. Datum 3: He knows two of our
men were pulled out of the water, and that they are probably in the
intelligence business, which is a rather broad categorization as far as I am
concerned. But he cannot necessarily draw any inferences, based upon these
extremely terse messages, about which vessel the merchantman or the
submarine our two men came from."
"Well, that's obvious, isn't it?" says Crossword Puzzle. "They came
from the submarine."
Chattan responds only with a Cheshire grin.
"Oh!" says Crossword Puzzle. Eyebrows go up all around the room.
"As Beck continues to send messages to Admiral Dönitz, the likelihood
increases that Dönitz will learn something we don't want him to know,"
Chattan says. "That likelihood becomes a virtual certainty when U 691
reaches Wilhelmshaven intact."
"Correction!" hollers the rabbi. Everyone is quite startled and there
is a long silence while the man grips the edge of the table with quivering
hands, and rises precariously to his feet. "The important thing is not
whether Beck transmits messages! It is whether Dönitz believes those
messages!"
"Hear, hear! Very astute!" Turing says.
"Quite right! Thank you for that clarification, Herr Kahn," Chattan
says. "Pardon me for just a moment," says the don, "but why on earth
wouldn't he believe them?"
This leads to a long silence. The don has scored a telling point, and
brought everyone very much back to cold hard reality. The rabbi begins to
mumble something that sounds rather defensive, but is interrupted by a
thunderous voice from the doorway: "FUNKSPIEL!"
Everyone turns to look at a fellow who has just come in the door. He is
a trim man in his fifties with prematurely white hair, extremely thick
glasses that magnify his eyes, and a howling blizzard of dandruff covering
his navy blue blazer.
"Good morning, Elmer!" Chattan says with the forced cheerfulness of a
psychiatrist entering a locked ward.
Elmer comes into the room and turns to face the crowd. "FUNKSPIEL!" he
shouts again, in an inappropriately loud voice, and Waterhouse wonders
whether the man is drunk or deaf or both. Elmer turns his back to them and
stares at a bookcase for a while, then turns round to face them again, a
look of astonishment on his face. "Ah was expectin' a chalkboard t'be
there," he says in a Texarkana accent. "What kind of a classroom is this?"
There is nervous laughter around the room as everyone tries to figure out
whether Elmer is cutting loose with some deadpan humor, or completely out of
his mind.
"It means 'radio games,' " says Rabbi Kahn.
"Thank, you, sir!" Elmer responds quickly, sounding pissed off. "Radio
games. The Germans have been playing them all through the war. Now it's our
turn."
Just moments ago, Waterhouse was thinking about how very British this
whole scene was, feeling very far from home, and wishing that one or two
Americans could be present. Now that his wish has come true, he just wants
to crawl out of the Mansion on his hands and knees.
"How does one play these games, Mr., uh..." says Crossword Puzzle.
"You can call me Elmer!" Elmer shouts. Everyone scoots back from him.
"Elmer!" Waterhouse says, "would you please stop shouting?"
Elmer turns and blinks twice in Waterhouse's direction. "The game is
simple," he says in a more normal, conversational voice. Then he gets
excited again and begins to crescendo. "All you need is a radio and a couple
of players with good ears, and good hands!" Now he's hollering. He waves at
the corner where the albino woman with the headset and the percussionist
with lipstick on his ear have been huddled together. "You want to explain
fists, Mr. Shales?"
The percussionist stands up. "Every radio operator has a distinctive
style of keying we call it his fist. With a bit of practice, our Y Service
people can recognize different German operators by their fists we can tell
when one of them has been transferred to a different unit, for example." He
nods in the direction of the albino woman. "Miss Lord has intercepted
numerous messages from U 691, and, is familiar with the fist of that boat's
radio operator. Furthermore, we now have a wire recording of U 691 's most
recent transmission, which she and I have been studying intensively." The
percussionist draws a deep breath and screws his courage up before saying,
"We are confident that I can forge U 691's fist."
Turing chimes in. "And since we have broken Enigma, we can compose any
message we want, and encrypt it just as U 691 would have."
"Splendid. Splendid!" says one of the Broadway Buildings guys.
"We cannot prevent U 691 from sending out her own, legitimate
messages," Chattan cautions, "short of sinking her. Which we are making
every effort to do. But we can muddy the waters considerably. Rabbi?"
Once again, the rabbi rises to his feet, drawing everyone's attention
as they wait for him to fall down. But he doesn't. "I have composed a
message in German naval jargon. Translated into English, it says, roughly,
'Interrogation of prisoners proceeding slowly request permission to use
torture' and then there are several Xs in a row and then is added the words
WARNING AMBUSH U 691 HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY BRITISH COMMANDOS'"
Sharp intakes of breath all around the room.
"Is contemporary German naval jargon a normal part of Talmudic
studies?" asks the don.
"Mr. Kahn has spent a year and a half analyzing naval decrypts in Hut
4," Chattan says. "He has the lingo down pat." He goes on: "we have
encrypted Mr. Kahn's message using today's naval Enigma key, and passed it
on to Mr. Shales, who has been practicing."
Miss Lord rises to her feet, like a child reciting her lessons in a
Victorian school, and says, "I am satisfied that Mr. Shales's rendition is
indistinguishable from U 691's."
All eyes turn towards Chattan, who turns towards the old farts from the
Broadway Buildings, who even now are on the phone relaying all this to
someone of whom they are clearly terrified.
"Don't the Jerrys have huffduff?" asks the Don, as if probing a flaw in
a student's dissertation.
"Their huffduff network is not nearly so well developed as ours,"
responds one of the young analysts. "It is most unlikely that they would
bother to triangulate a transmission that appeared to come from one of their
own U boats, so they probably won't figure out the message originated in
Buckinghamshire, rather than the Atlantic."
"However, we have anticipated your objection," Chattan says, "and made
arrangements for several of our own ships, as well as various aeroplanes and
ground units, to flood the air with transmissions. Their huffduff network
will have its hands full at the time of our fake U 691 transmission."
"Very well," mutters the don.
Everyone sits there in churchly silence while the most senior of the
Broadway Buildings contingent winds up his conversation with Who Is at the
Other End. Elmer hanging up the phone, he intones solemnly, "You are
directed to proceed."
Chattan nods at some of the younger men, who dash across the room, pick
up telephones, and begin to talk in calm, clinical voices about cricket
scores. Chattan looks at his watch. "It will take a few minutes for the
huffduff smokescreen to develop. Miss Lord, you will notify us when the
traffic has risen to a suitably feverish pitch?"
Miss Lord makes a little curtsey and sits down at her radio.
"FUNKSPIEL!" shouts Elmer, scaring everyone half out of their skins,
"We already done sent out some other messages. Made 'em look like Royal Navy
traffic. Used a code the Krauts just broke a few weeks ago. These messages
have to do with an operation a fictitious operation, y'know in which a
German U boat was supposedly boarded and seized by our commandos."
There is a whole lot of tinny shouting from the telephone. The gentle
man who has the bad luck to be holding it translates into what is probably
more polite English: "What if Mr. Shales's performance is not convincing to
the radio operators at Charlottenburg? What if they do not succeed in
decrypting Mr. Elmer's false messages?"
Chattan fields that one. He steps over to a map that has been set up on
an easel at the end of the room. The map depicts a swath of the Central
Atlantic bordered on the east by France and Spain. "U 691's last reported
position was here," he says, pointing to a pin stuck in the lower left
corner of the map. "She has been ordered back to Wllhelmshaven with her
prisoners. She will go this way," he says, indicating a length of red yarn
stretched in a north northeasterly direction, "assuming she avoids the
Straits of Dover." (1)
"There happens to be another milchcow here," Chattan continues,
indicating another pin. "One of our own submarines should be able to reach
it within twenty four hours, at which point it will approach at periscope
depth and engage it with torpedoes. Chances are excellent that the milchcow
will be destroyed immediately. If she has time to send out any
transmissions, she will merely state that she is being attacked by a
submarine. Once we have destroyed this milchcow, we will call once again
upon the skills of Mr. Shales, who will transmit a fake distress call that
will appear to originate from the milchcow, stating that they have come
under attack from none other than U 691."
"Splendid!" someone proclaims.
"By the time the sun rises tomorrow," Chattan concludes, "we will have
one of our very best submarine hunting task forces on the scene. A light
carrier with several antisubmarine planes will comb the ocean night and day,
using radar, visual reconnaissance, huffduff, and Leigh lights to hunt for U
691. The chances are excellent that she will be found and sunk long before
she can approach the Continent. But should she find her way past this
formidable barrier she will find the German Kriegsmarine no less eager to
hunt her down and destroy her. Any information she may transmit to Admiral
Dönitz in the meantime will be regarded with the most profound suspicion."
"So," Waterhouse says, "the plan, in a nutshell, is to render all
information from U 691 unbelievable, and subsequently to destroy her, and
everyone on her, before she can reach Germany."
"Yes," Chattan says, "and the former task will be greatly simplified by
the fact that U 691's skipper is already known to be mentally unstable."
"So it seems likely that our guys, Shaftoe and Root, will not survive,"
Waterhouse says slowly.
There is a long, frozen silence, as if Waterhouse had interrupted high
tea by making farting sounds with his armpit.
Chattan responds in a precise, arch tone that indicates he's really
pissed off. "There is the possibility that when U 691 is engaged by our
forces, she will be forced to the surface and will surrender."
Waterhouse studies the grain of the tabletop. His face is hot and his
chest is burning.
Miss Lord rises to her feet and speaks. Several important heads turn
toward Mr. Shales, who excuses himself and goes to a table in the corner of
the room. He fiddles with the controls on a radio transmitter for a few
moments, spreads the encrypted message out in front of himself, and takes a
deep breath, as though preparing for a big solo. Finally he reaches out,
rests one hand lightly on the radio key, and begins to tap out the message,
rocking from side to side and cocking his head this way and that. Mrs. Lord
listens with her eyes closed, concentrating intensely.
Mr. Shales stops. "Finished," he announces in a quiet voice, and looks
nervously at Mrs. Lord, who smiles. Then there is polite applause around the
library, as if they had just finished listening to a harpsichord concerto.
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse keeps his hands folded in his lap. He has just
heard the death warrant of Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe.
Chapter 46 HEAP
To: root@eruditorum.org
From: dwarf@siblings.net
Subject: Re(8) Why?
Let me just take stock of what I know so far: you say that asking
"why?" is part of what you do for a living; you're not an academic; and you
are in the surveillance business. I am having trouble forming a clear
picture.
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To: dwarf@siblings.net
From: root@eruditorum.org
Subject: Re(9) Why?
Randy, I never said that I, myself, am in the surveillance business.
But I know people who are. Formerly public– and now private sector. We
stay in touch. The grapevine and all that. Nowadays, my involvement in such
things is limited to noodling around with novel cryptosystems, as a sort of
hobby.
Now, to get back to what I would consider to be the main thread of our
conversation. You guessed that I was an academic. Were you being sincere, or
was this purely an attempt to "gotcha" me?
The reason I ask is that I am, in fact, a man of the cloth, so
naturally I consider it my job to ask "why?" I assumed this would be fairly
obvious to you. But I should have taken into account that you are not the
churchy type. This is my fault.
It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over
funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue
or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric
and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be
very interesting.
But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed
almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over
weddings and funerals but also to say something thought provoking to large
numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the
profession of philosophy.
I still think of this as the priest's highest calling or at least the
most interesting part of the job hence my question to you, which I cannot
fail to notice, remains unanswered.
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"Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?"
This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging
around with Avi. "The Holocaust," Randy says dutifully.
Even if he didn't know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint.
The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone back to the Foote Mansion to prepare
for hostilities with the Dentist. Randy and Avi are sitting on a black
obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in
downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.
Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on,
and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear
view of the sky. "Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which
we can devote our allotted lifespans?"
"Uh . . . enhancing shareholder value?"
"Very funny." Avi is annoyed. He is baring his soul, which he does
rarely. Also, he's in the midst of cataloging another small h holocaust
site, adding it to his archives. It is clear he would appreciate some
fucking solemnity here. "I visited Mexico a few weeks ago," Avi continues.
"Looking for a site where the Spanish killed a bunch of Aztecs?" Randy
asks.
"This is exactly the kind of thing I'm fighting," Avi says, even more
irritated. "No, I was not looking for a place where a bunch of Aztecs were
massacred. The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the
Aztecs can go fuck themselves,"
"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves," Randy says cheerfully, drawing a
baffled look from an approaching Nipponese tour guide.
"To begin with, I was hundreds of miles from Mexico City, the former
Aztec capital. I was on the outer fringes of the territory that the Aztecs
controlled." Avi scoops his GPS off the boulder and begins to punch keys on
its pad, telling it to store the latitude and longitude in its memory. "I
was looking," Avi continues, "for the site of a Nahuatl city that was raided
by the Aztecs hundreds of years before the Spanish even showed up. You know
what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"
Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. "Something
unspeakable?"
"I hate that word 'unspeakable.' We must speak of it."
"Speak then."
"The Aztecs took twenty five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them
back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."
"Why?"
"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don't know.
The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when
I talk about Holocaust type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit
about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted,
that's why."
"Don't tell me you're about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."
"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the
Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their
worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it
really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the
Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better
around there."
"Avi?"
"Yes."
"We are sitting here in the Sultanate of Kinakuta, trying to build a
data haven while fending off an oral surgeon turned hostile take over maven.
I have pressing responsibilities in the Philippines. Why are we discussing
the Aztecs?"
"I'm giving you a pep talk," Avi says. "You are bored. Dangerously so.
The Pinoy gram thing was cool for a while, but now it's up and running,
there's no new technology there."
"True."
"But the Crypt is amazingly cool. Tom and John and Eb are going nuts,
and every Secret Admirer in the world is spamming me with resumes. The Crypt
is exactly what you would like to be doing right now."
"Again, true."
"Even if you were working on the Crypt, though, philosophical issues
would be gnawing at you issues based on the types of people who you see
getting involved, who may be our first customers."
"I cannot deny that I have philosophical issues," Randy says. Suddenly
he has come up with a new hypothesis: Avi is actually root@eruditorum.org.
"Instead, you are laying cable in the Philippines. This is a job that
because of changes we just became aware of yesterday is basically irrelevant
to our corporate mission. But it's a lingering contractual obligation, and
if we put anyone less important than you on it, the Dentist will be able to
prove to the most half witted jury of tofu brained Californians that we are
malingering."
"Well, thank you for making it so clear why I should be miserable,"
Randy says forbearingly.
"So," Avi continues, "I wanted to let you know that you aren't
necessarily just making license plates here. And furthermore that the Crypt
is not a morally bankrupt endeavor. Actually, you are playing a big role in
the most important thing in the world."
Randy says, "You asked me earlier what is the highest and best purpose
to which we could dedicate our lives. And the obvious answer is 'to prevent
future Holocausts.'"
Avi laughs darkly. "I'm glad it's obvious to you, my friend. I was
beginning to think I was the only one."
"What!? Get over yourself, Avi. People are commemorating the Holocaust
all the time."
"Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same
thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the
commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad
about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one
will want to commit genocide in the future."
"I take it you do not share this view, Avi?"
"Look at Bosnia!" Avi scoffs. "Human nature doesn't change, Randy.
Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into
Aztecs or Nazis just like that." He snaps his fingers.
"So what hope is there?"
"Instead of trying to educate the potential perpetrators of holocausts,
we try to educate the potential victims. They will at least pay some fucking
attention."
"Educate them in what way?"
Avi closes his eyes and shakes his head. "Oh, shit, Randy, I could go
on for hours I have drawn up a whole curriculum."
"Okay, we'll get into that later."
"Definitel