Randy fundamentally does not know what the fuck is going on in his life right now, and probably hasn’t for a long time, even back in the days when he thought that he did know. But his working hypothesis is that the people who set this whole situation up (prime candidates: the Dentist and his cohorts in the Bolobolo syndicate) know that he has some cool information on his hard drive. How should they know this? Well, Pontifex—the Wizard—Enoch Root—whatever the fuck he’s called—when he phoned Randy on the plane, knew that Randy had Arethusa, so God knows who else might know. Someone set up the fake drug bust at NAIA so that they could nab his laptop and yank the hard drive and make a copy of its contents. Then they found out that it was all doubly encrypted. That is, the Arethusa intercepts are encrypted to begin with in a pretty good World War II cryptosystem, which anyone should be able to break nowadays, but on top of that they are furthermore encrypted in a state-of-the-art modern system that no one can break. If they know what’s good for them, they won’t even try to break it. The only way for them to get the information is to get Randy to decrypt it for them, which he can do by biometrically identifying himself to his laptop (by talking to it) or by typing in a pass-phrase that only he knows. They are hoping that Randy will decrypt the Arethusa intercept files and, like a moron, display their contents on the screen. The moment that stuff appears on the screen, the game is over. The Dentist’s (or whoever’s) surveillance guys can feed the intercepts to some kind of a cryptanalytic supercomputer that will break them open in no time.