Cryptonomicon

Randy steps into the lane. He wants to just bolt through and head straight for Amy, but this would be a bad idea. But it's okay. Anticipation never killed anyone. Anticipation can actually be kind of enjoyable. What did Avi say? Sometimes wanting is better than having.Randy's pretty sure that having Amy would not disappoint, but wanting ain't such a bad thing either. He is holding his laptop bag out before him and drawing the big duffel behind, slowing gradually to a stop so that it won't roll forward under its own momentum and break his knees. There is the requisite long stainless-steel table and a bored fireplug-shaped gentleman behind it saying, "Nationality? Port of embarkation?" for the hundred thousandth time in his life. Randy hands over his documents and answers the questions while bending down to heft the duffel bag up onto the metal tabletop. "Remove the locks please?" the customs inspector says. Randy bends down and squints at the tiny brass wheels, trying to line them up into the right combination. While he's doing that, he hears the customs inspector working right next to his head, unzipping the tiny, empty pocket on the top of the duffel bag. There is a rustling noise. "What is this?" the inspector asks. "Sir? Sir?"

"Yes, what is it?" Randy says, straightening up and looking the inspector in the eye.

Like a model in an infomercial, the inspector holds up a small Ziploc bag right next to his head and points to it with the other hand. A door opens behind him and people come out. The Ziploc bag has been partly filled with sugar, or something--maybe confectioner's sugar--and rolled into a cigar-shaped slug.

"What is this, sir?" the inspector repeats.

Randy shrugs. "How should I know? Where did it come from?"

"It came from your bag, sir," the inspector says, and points to the little pocket.

"No, it didn't. That pocket was empty," Randy says.

"Is this your bag, sir?" the inspector says, reaching with one hand to look at the paper claim check dangling from its handle. Quite a crowd has gathered behind him, still indistinct to Randy who is understandably focusing on the inspector.

"I should hope so--I just opened the locks," Randy says. The inspector turns around and gestures to the people behind him, who en masse move forward into the light. They are wearing uniforms and most of them are carrying guns. Very soon, some of them are behind him. They are, as a matter of fact, surrounding him. Randy looks towards Amy, but sees only a pair of abandoned shoes: she is sprinting barefoot toward a line of pay telephones. He'll probably never see her in a dress again.

He wonders whether it would be a bad idea, from a narrowly tactical point of view, to ask for a lawyer this soon.

Chapter 83 THE BATTLE OF MANILA

Bobby Shaftoe is awakened by the smell of smoke. It is not the smoke of cookies left too long in the oven, piles of autumn leaves being burned, or Boy Scout campfires. It is a mixture of other kinds of smoke with which he has become quite familiar in the last couple of years: tires, fuel, and buildings, for example.

He props himself up on one elbow and realizes that he is lying in the bottom of a long skinny boat. Just above his head, a dirty canvas sail luffs in a treacherous and foul-smelling breeze. It is the middle of the night.

He turns his head to look upwind. His head doesn't like it. Fierce pain is trying to batter down the doors of his mind. But the pain is not getting in. He senses the muffled booms of the pain's hobnailed boots against his front door, but that's about it.

Ah! Someone has given him morphine. Shaftoe grins appreciatively. Life is good.

The world is dark--a matte black hemisphere inverted over the plane of the lake. But there is a horizontal crack around the edge, off to the boat's port side, where yellow light is leaking through. The light glimmers and sparkles like stars viewed through the heat waves above the hood of a black automobile.

He sits up, peers at it, gradually getting an idea of scale. The ragged trail of yellow light extends from the boat's eight o'clock, all the way around past the bow, to about one o'clock. Maybe it is some incredibly weird sunrise phenomenon.

"Myneela," says a voice behind him.

"Huh?"

"It is Manila," says another voice, closer to him, speaking the English version of the name.

"Why's it all lit up?" Bobby Shaftoe has not seen a city lit up at night since 1941, and has forgotten what it looks like.

"The Japanese have put it to the torch."

"The Pearl of the Orient!" someone says, farther back in the boat, and there is rueful laughter.