A soft snort of satisfaction propelled him over to the minibar, where he found a chilled split of Veuve Clicquot. Working out the cork with a soft pop, he took a long pull from the bottle. How many federal prisoners, he asked himself, had published articles in mathematics journals over the past year? Had there been another? Almost certainly not. And it wasn’t a fluke, either. This was his third publication in the last four years, which would have been good enough for tenure at a lot of universities. And his degree wasn’t even in mathematics!

Tossing the journal onto the bed, he turned his attention to the video box. Prying it open, he found a stack of hundred-dollar bills held together by a metal clip, and a blue passport with copper-colored lettering: República de Chile. Even without opening it, he knew what he’d find inside: a picture of himself and, if he was lucky, the name he’d requested of Bobojon. He opened the passport with a mixture of hope and trepidation.

And there it was. The name: d’Anconia. Francisco d’Anconia. A plume of adrenaline shot through his heart as the realization hit him: It’s on. It’s actually on. Vertigo whirled in his chest and it seemed, almost, as if he were looking into an abyss. His heart kicked. The room turned and there it was, just as Nietzsche said: The abyss was looking into him.

Maybe, he thought, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Maybe the thing to do is start all over. Just take the money and run. He could set up shop in Mexico, and go to work on his own. Just take it apart, brick by brick, all by himself. He didn’t need Bo for that. He didn’t need anybody.

But he definitely needed money. More money than this, actually. Which is why he had Bo, Bo and his partners.

Swigging champagne, he sat down on the bed and stripped the tape from the box that he’d brought with him from Allenwood. Inside were a sheaf of old patents, a battered Sony Walkman, and copies of motions his lawyers had filed. There were also a couple of cassette tapes (Colloquial Serbian, I & II) and a small collection of well-thumbed books: Hari Poter i kamen mud rosti, Atlas je zadrhtao, and Plato’s Dialogues.

Stacking the books on the table beside the bed, he slipped cassette #2 into the Walkman. He’d listen to it later.

But first, he decided to hit the stores. There were a couple of things he ought to get, just to look respectable. A coat, for one thing, and a decent pair of shoes. A sportswatch.

As he dressed, his eyes strayed to the VHS box. Its cover depicted a busty blonde, eyes wide with terror, fleeing a tidal wave of unimaginable proportions. Between the blonde and the wave was a doomed, if futuristic, metropolis on which the film’s title was stamped in bloodred letters: Atlantis – Pop. 0!

Wilson wondered if the box was supposed to be a joke, but decided that it wasn’t. In all likelihood, it was Bo’s idea of “research.” And why not? Even if the drowned civilization was a myth, its relevance was clear.

Lying awake in their cell at night, they had talked about a lot of things, including the books they were reading. Wilson introduced Bo to Nietzsche, and Bo repaid him with the words of an Arab revolutionary named Qutb. Atlantis came up in the context of a television show they’d watched and the two of them had talked about it often. Since Plato was the source of the Atlantis myth, Bo insisted that the tale must be true. Wilson was skeptical, but the myth had a certain utility: It reinforced the notion that civilization was a fragile enterprise.

It was dark when Wilson left the hotel, but it wasn’t late. He took a taxi across the Potomac to the Pentagon City mall, where he went Christmas shopping for himself, using some of the cash Bo had sent. He found a pair of shoes he liked at Allan Edmonds, a cashmere overcoat and a change of clothes at Nordstrom’s. A jeweler replaced the battery in his watch, and he bought the few toiletries he needed at the local Rite Aid. By then, it was too late to get a haircut, but not to buy a laptop. He found a cheap one at Circuit City Express, right there in the mall. Incredibly, it cost half as much as his old computer, the one the government had seized, and this one came with ten times the power and fifty times the memory.

The ride back to the hotel was bumper to bumper, but Wilson didn’t care. Sitting in the back of a taxi with a pile of presents for himself reminded him of the glory days when Goldman Sachs was calling twice a day with updates on… what did they call it? The “impending financial event.”

So it was great to be out again, out on his own, cruising the political theme park that was Washington. The Pentagon on one side, Arlington on the other. River and bridge. The shrine to Lincoln. The setting made him feel like he was starring in his own movie.

Then he was back at the Monarch, and he had to hand it to Bo. The place was a palace, a tower of glass with an eight-story atrium filled with fountains and tropical plants, marble walkways and Persian rugs. Women in expensive suits sipped martinis on white couches in the lobby, while businessmen and bureaucrats huddled over little bowls of nuts, talking quietly.

There was a time when he’d have taken all of this for granted. But that was then, when he was flying around the country looking for venture capital. Now, he took nothing for granted. Not even the little bowls of nuts.

Even the elevator was a marvel, a dimly lighted sanctum of inlaid woods, with a Cole Porter melody piped in over the soft whir of the cables. In the air, a hint of perfume. Quite a change, in other words, from the dead white light and pale green cinder block, the incessant clamor and general stink of the last few years.

When he got to his room, Wilson unpacked the laptop and plugged it into a jack beside the phone. It took about ten minutes to get everything up and running, and then he was on the Internet for the first time in a long while.

Going to my.yahoo.com, he logged on with the user ID (“wovoka”) and the password they’d agreed upon (“tunguska”). The home page loaded slowly, at first, then all in a rush. Clicking on Mail, he selected the Draft folder, where he found a single message waiting:

To:

Subject: thursday

Message: just wait in room. dont go out

Wilson erased the message, and replaced it with “That’s what I’ll do.” Then he saved the new draft and signed out.

The protocol was his idea. Yahoo!’s e-mail accounts were free, and they were accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and the right password. As easy to abandon as they were to open, the accounts contained a feature that allowed the user to store messages in a Draft folder until they were ready to be sent, which, in the case of Wilson’s communications with Bo, would be never. For them, the folder served as a bulletin board, a password-protected message center that was, to all intents and purposes, invisible. Since the messages were “drafts,” and the drafts were never sent, they wouldn’t show up on anyone else’s radar screen.

That was the idea, at least.

just wait in room. dont go out

In other words: I’m on my way.

Good, Wilson thought. The sooner we get started, the better. Meanwhile, he had the Internet. Wilson hadn’t surfed the Net for years, and the prospect excited him. This Google thing… it was like nothing he’d ever seen. He put his own name in the box, surrounded by quotes, then hit Return and watched as nearly 200,000 hits were generated. Most were not about him. He shared his name with lots of other people, including a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, a Florida car dealership, and the president of the University of Massachusetts – not to mention his namesake. So he added “prison” to the search, hit Return a second time, and watched as the number of hits fell to 1,408. He might have narrowed it down even further, adding words like “patent” and “conspiracy,” but there was something else that Jack Wilson wanted to do even more.