Cryptonomicon

Lieutenant Mori's crew awaits him down below, in front of the mouse-hole that leads into Golgotha: four hand-picked soldiers. Each wears a thousand-stitch headband, and so each has an orange ball centered on his forehead, reminding Goto Dengo not of the Rising Sun but of an exit wound. The water is up to mid-thigh now, and the entrance tunnel is half full. When Goto Dengo arrives, followed closely by Captain Noda, the men all cheer him politely.

Goto Dengo squats in the opening. Only his head and shoulders are above the water. Before him the tunnel is black. It takes a powerful effort of will for him to enter. But it is no worse than what he used to do in the abandoned mines, back in Hokkaido.

Of course, the abandoned mines weren't going to be dynamited shut behind him.

Going forward is his chance to survive. If he hesitates, Noda will kill him on the spot, and all his crew, and others will be sent in to finish the job. Noda made sure that others were trained to do it.

"See you at Yasukuni," he says to Captain Noda, and without waiting for a response he sloshes forward into blackness.

Chapter 78 PONTIFEX

By the time Randy reaches the Air Kinakuta boarding lounge, he has already forgotten how he reached the airport. He honestly can't remember. Did he hail a taxi? Not likely in down town Los Altos. Did he get a ride from some hacker? He couldn't have driven the Acura, because the Acura's electronics had been burned to a crisp by the electromagnetic pulse gun. He had pulled the title out of the glove compartment and signed it over to a Ford dealer three blocks away, in exchange for five thousand dollars in cash.

Oh, yeah. The Ford dealer gave him a ride to the airport.

He has always wanted to pull the stunt of walking up to the counter of an exotic foreign airline and saying, "Get me on the next plane to X." But now he's just done it and it wasn't cool and romantic as he had hoped. It was sort of bleak and stressful and expensive. He had to buy a first-class ticket, which consumed most of the five thousand dollars. But he doesn't feel like beating himself to death over how he is managing his assets just now, i.e., at a time when his net worth is a negative number that can only be expressed using scientific notation. The probability is high that he failed to wipe Tombstone's hard drive before the cops seized it, and that the Dentist's lawsuit will consequently succeed.

On his way down the concourse he stands and stares at a bank of telephones for a while. He very much wants to notify the Shaftoes of recent events. It would be a good thing if they could somehow strip the sunken sub clean of treasure as fast as possible, reducing its value and hence the damage that the Dentist can inflict on Epiphyte.

The math is pretty simple here. The Dentist has a way to claim damages from Epiphyte. The amount of those damages is x, where x is what the Dentist, as a minority shareholder, would have made in capital gains if Randy had been responsible enough to write a better contract with Semper Marine. If such a contract had specified a fifty-fifty split, then x would be equal to fifty percent of the cash value of the wreck times the one tenth of Epiphyte that the Dentist owns minus a few percent for taxes and other frictional effects of the real world. So if there's ten million dollars in the wreck, then x works out to around half a million bucks.

In order for the Dentist to gain control of Epiphyte, he has to acquire an additional forty percent of its stock. The price of that stock (if it were for sale) is simply 0.4 times the total value of Epiphyte. Call it y.

If x > y, the Dentist wins. Because then the judge is going to say, "You, Epiphyte, owe this poor aggrieved minority shareholder $x. But as I look at the parlous state of the corporation's finances I see that there's no way for you to raise that kind of money. And so the only way to settle the debt is to give the plaintiff the one asset you have in abundance, which is your crappy stock. And since the value of the whole corporation is really, really close to being zero, you're going to have to give him almost all of it."

So how to make x < y? Either reduce the value of the wreck, by stripping it of its gold, or else increase the value of Epiphyte, by--what, exactly?

In better times they could maybe take the company public. But setting up an IPO takes months. And no investor's going to touch it when it's encumbered by a lawsuit from the Dentist.

Randy has this vision of driving through the jungle with an end-loader and scooping up that big pile of gold bars he found with Doug and taking it straight to a bank and depositing it in Epiphyte's account. That'd do it. The whole concept makes his body tingle as he stands there in the middle of the international concourse.