Cryptonomicon (126 page)

The shade is only four steps away: shade, and shelter from above. “A land mine just takes a leg or a foot, right?” Randy says. “If I step on one, it won’t kill Amy.”

“Not one of your better ideas, Randy!” Doug shouts, almost contemptuously. “Just calm down and take your time.”

“I just want to know my options,” Randy says. “I can’t poke around for mines while I’m carrying her.”

“Then I’ll work my way over to you,” says Enoch Root. “Oh, to hell with it!” Enoch stands up and just walks over to them in half a dozen strides.

“Fucking amateurs!” Doug bellows. Enoch Root ignores him, squats down at Randy’s feet and begins probing.

Doug rises up out of the stream onto a few boulders strewn along the bank. “I’m going to ascend the wall here,” he says, “and go up and reinforce Jackie. He and I’ll
find
this Andrew Loeb together.” It’s clear that “find” here is a euphemism for probably a long list of unpleasant operations. The bank is made of soft eroded stone with lumps of hard black volcanic rock jutting out of it frequently, and by clambering from one outcropping to the next, Doug is able to make his way halfway up the bank in the time it takes Enoch Root to locate one safe place to plant their feet. Randy wouldn’t want to be the guy who just shot an arrow into Doug Shaftoe’s daughter. Doug is stymied for a moment by the overhang; but by traversing the bank a short distance he’s able to reach a tangle of tree roots that’s almost as good as a ladder to the top.

“She’s shivering,” Randy announces. “Amy’s shivering.”

“She’s in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high,” says Enoch Root. Randy shifts Amy around, nearly losing his grip on a blood-greased leg.

One of the things that Goto Dengo spoke of during their dinner in Tokyo was the Nipponese practice of tuning streams in gardens by moving rocks from place to place. The sound of a brook is made by patterns in the flow of water, and those patterns encode the presence of rocks on the streambed. Randy found in this an echo of the Palouse winds thing, and said so, and Goto Dengo either thought it was terribly insightful or else was being polite. In any case, several minutes later there is a change in the sound of the water that is flowing around them, and so Randy naturally looks upstream to see that a man is standing in the water about a dozen feet away from them. The man has a shaved head that is sunburned as red as a three-ball. He’s wearing what used to be a decent enough business suit, which has practically become one with the jungle now: it is impregnated with red mud, which has made it so heavy that it pulls itself all out of shape as he totters to a standing position. He’s got a great big pole, a wizard’s staff. He has planted it in the riverbed and is sort of climbing up it hand-over-
hand. When he gets fully upright, Randy can see that his right leg terminates just below the knee, although the bare tibia and fibula stick out for a few inches. The bones are scorched and splintered. Andrew Loeb has fashioned a tourniquet from sticks and a hundred-dollar silk necktie that Randy’s pretty sure he has seen in the windows of airport duty-free shops. This has throttled back the flow of blood from the end of his leg to a rate comparable to what you would see coming out a Mr. Coffee during its brew cycle. Once Andy has gotten himself fully upright, he smiles brightly and begins to move towards Randy and Amy and Enoch, hopping on his intact leg and using the wizard’s staff to keep from falling down. In his free hand he is carrying a great big knife: Bowie-sized, but with all of the extra spikes, saw blades, blood grooves, and other features that go into a really top-of-the-line fighting and survival knife.

Neither Enoch nor Amy sees Andrew. Randy has this insight now that Doug pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. Randy feels certain, all of a sudden, that he’s got the mental stance now. But he doesn’t have the means.

And that is the problem right there in a nutshell. The bad guys tend to have the means.

Andy’s looking him right in the eye and smiling at him, precisely the same smile you would see on the face of some old acquaintance you had just accidentally run into on an airport concourse. As he approaches, he’s kind of shifting the big knife around in his hand, getting it into the right grip for whatever kind of attack he’s about to make. It is this detail that finally breaks Randy out of his trance and causes him to shrug Amy off and drop her into the water behind him. Andrew Loeb takes another step forward and plants his wizard’s staff, which suddenly flies into the air like a rocket, leaving a steaming crater behind in the water, which instantly fills in, of course. Now Andy’s standing there like a stork, having miraculously kept his balance. He bends his one remaining knee and hops towards Randy, then does it
again. Then he is dead and toppling backwards and Randy is deaf, or maybe it happens in some other order. Enoch Root has become a column of smoke with a barking, spitting white fire in the center. Andrew Loeb has become a red, comet-shaped disturbance in the stream, marked by a single arm thrust out of the water, a French cuff that is still uncannily white, a cuff link shaped like a little honey bee, and a spindly fist gripping the huge knife.

Randy turns around and looks at Amy. She’s levered herself up on one arm. In her opposite hand she’s got a sensible, handy sort of revolver which she is aiming in the direction of where Andrew Loeb fell.

Something’s moving in the corner of Randy’s eye. He turns his head quickly. A coherent, wraith-shaped cloud of smoke is drifting away from Enoch over the surface of the river, just coming into the sun where it is suddenly brilliant. Enoch is just standing there holding a great big old .45 and moving his lips in the unsettled cadences of some dead language.

Andrew’s fingers loosen, the knife falls, and the arm relaxes, but does not disappear. An insect lands on his thumb and starts to eat it.

“W
ELL,”
W
ATERHOUSE SAYS
, “I
KNOW A THING OR
two about keeping secrets.”

“I know that perfectly well,” says Colonel Earl Comstock. “It is a fine quality. It is why we want you. After the war.”

A formation of bombers flies over the building, rattling its shellshocked walls with a drone that penetrates into their sinuses. They take this opportunity to heave their massive Buffalo china coffee cups off their massive Buffalo china saucers and sip weak, greenish Army coffee.

“Don’t let that kind of thing fool you,” Comstock hollers over the noise, glancing up toward the bombers, which bank majestically to the north, going up to blast hell out of
the incredibly tenacious Tiger of Malaya. “People in the know think that the Nips are on their last legs. It’s not too early to think about what you will be doing after the war.”

“I told you, sir. Getting married, and—”

“Yeah, teaching math at some little school out west.” Comstock sips coffee and grimaces. The grimace is as tightly coupled to the sip as recoil is to the pull of a trigger. “Sounds delightful, Waterhouse, it really does. Oh, there’s all kinds of fantasies that sound great to us, sitting here on the outskirts of what used to be Manila, breathing gasoline fumes and swatting mosquitoes. I’ve heard a hundred guys—mostly enlisted men—rhapsodize about mowing the lawn. That’s all those guys can talk about, is mowing the lawn. But when they get back home, will they want to mow the lawn?”

“No.”

“Right. They only talk like that because mowing the lawn sounds great when you’re sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts.”

One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you. Waterhouse shrugs it off. “Could be I’ll hate it,” he concedes.

At this point Comstock sheds a few decibels, scoots closer, and gets fatherly with him. “It’s not just you,” he says. “Your wife might not be crazy about it either.”

“Oh, she loves the open countryside. Doesn’t care for cities.”

“You wouldn’t have to
live
in a city. With the kind of salary we are talking about here, Waterhouse—” Comstock pauses for effect, sips, grimaces, and lowers his voice another notch “—you could buy a nice little Ford or a Chevy.” He stops to let that sink in. “With a V-8 that would give you power to burn! You could live ten, twenty miles away, and drive in every morning at
a mile a minute
!”

“Ten or twenty miles away from where? I’m not clear, yet, on whether I would be working in New York for Electrical Till, or in Fort Meade for this, uh, this new thing—”

“We’re thinking of calling it the National Security Agency,” Comstock says. “Of course, even that name is secret.”

“I understand.”

“There was a similar thing, between the wars, called the Black Chamber. Which has a nice ring to it. But a bit old-fashioned.”

“That was disbanded.”

“Yes. Secretary of State Stimson did away with it, he said ‘Gentlemen do not read one another’s mail.’ ” Comstock laughs out loud at this. He laughs for a long time. “Ahh, the world has changed, hasn’t it, Waterhouse? Without reading Hitler’s and Tojo’s mail, where would we be now?”

“We would be in a heck of a fix,” Waterhouse concedes.

“You have seen Bletchley Park. You have seen Central Bureau in Brisbane. Those places are nothing less than factories. Mail-reading on an industrial scale.” Comstock’s eyes glitter at the idea, he is staring through the walls of the building now like Superman with his X-ray vision. “It is the way of the future, Lawrence. War will never be the same. Hitler is gone. The Third Reich is history. Nippon is soon to fall. But this only sets the stage for the struggle with Communism. To build a Bletchley Park big enough for that job, why, hell! We’d have to take over the whole state of Utah or something. That is, if we did it the old-fashioned way, with girls sitting in front of Typex machines.”

For the first time, now, Waterhouse gets it. “The digital computer,” he says.

“The digital computer,” Comstock echoes. He sips and grimaces. “A few roomfuls of that equipment would replace an acre of girls sitting in front of Typex machines.” Comstock now gets a naughty, conspiratorial grin on his face, and leans forward. A drop of sweat rolls off the point of his chin and plonks into Waterhouse’s coffee. “It would also replace a lot of the stuff that Electrical Till manufactures. So, you see, there is a confluence of interests here.” Comstock sets his cup down. Perhaps he is finally convinced that there is no deep stratum of good coffee concealed underneath the bad; perhaps coffee is a frivolous thing compared to the importance of what he is about to divulge. “I have been in constant touch with my higher-ups at Electrical Till, and there is intense interest in this digital computer business.
Intense
interest. The machinery has already been set in motion for a business deal—and, Waterhouse, I only tell you this
because, as we have established, you are good at keeping secrets.”

“I understand, sir.”

“A business deal that would bring Electrical Till, the world’s mightiest manufacturer of business machines, together with the government of the United States to construct a machine room of titanic proportions at Fort Meade, Maryland, under the aegis of this new Black Chamber: the National Security Agency. It is an installation that will be the Bletchley Park of our upcoming war against the Communist threat—a threat both internal and external.”

“And you would like me to get mixed up in this somehow?”

Comstock blinks. He draws back. He is suddenly cool and remote. “To be absolutely frank, Waterhouse, this thing will go forward with or without you.”

Waterhouse chuckles. “I figured that.”

“All I’m doing is giving you a greased path, as it were. Because I respect your skills, and I have a certain, I don’t know, fatherly affection for you as the result of our work together. I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Not at all.”

“Say! And speaking of that—” Comstock stands up, walking around behind his terrifyingly neat desk, and plucks a single piece of typing paper off the blotter. “How are you coming with Arethusa?”

“Still archiving the intercepts as they come in. Still haven’t broken it.”

“I have some interesting news about Arethusa.”

“You do?”

“Yes. Something you’re not aware of.” Comstock scans the paper. “After we took Berlin, we scooped up all of Hitler’s crypto people and flew thirty-five of them back to London. Our boys there have been interrogating them in detail. Filling in a lot of blanks for us. What do you know about this Rudolf von Hacklheber fellow?”

All traces of moisture have disappeared from Waterhouse’s mouth. He sips and does not grimace. “Knew him a little at Princeton. Dr. Turing and I thought we saw his handiwork in Azure/Pufferfish.”

“You were right,” Comstock says, rattling the paper. “But did you know that he was very likely a Communist?”

“I had no knowledge of his political leanings.”

“Well, he is a homo, for one thing, and Hitler hated homos, so that might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also, he was working under a couple of Russians at Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they were Czarists, and pro-Hitler, but you never know. Well, anyway, in the middle of the war, sometime in late ’43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn’t that funny?”

“Why’s it funny?”

“If you have the wherewithal to escape from Germany, why not go to England, and fight for the good guys? No, he went to the east coast of Sweden—directly across the water,” Comstock says portentously, “from Finland. Which borders on the Soviet Union.” He slaps the page down on his desk. “Seems pretty clear-cut to me.”

“So…”

“And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some of them emanating from right here in Manila! Some coming from a mysterious submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much like a secret espionage ring of some description. Wouldn’t you say so?”

Waterhouse shrugs. “Interpretation isn’t my department.”

“It is mine,” Comstock says, “and I say it’s espionage. Probably directed from the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that, according to you, is based on Azure/Pufferfish, which was invented by the Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only stayed in Sweden long enough to get some shuteye and maybe cornhole some nice blond boy and then scooted right over to Finland and from there to the waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria.”

“Well, gosh!” Waterhouse says, “what do you think we should do?”

“I have taken this Arethusa thing off the back burner. We have become lazy and complacent. More than once, our huffduff people observed Arethusa messages emanating from this general area.” Comstock raises his index finger to a map of Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing that this would
be more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer. Then he realizes he is too close, and has to back up a couple of steps in order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his index finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously circles a coastal region south of Manila, along the strait that separates Luzon from Mindoro. “South of all these volcanoes, along the coast here. This is where that submarine has been skulking around. We haven’t gotten a good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been way up north here.” The pointer swoops up for a lightning raid on the Cordillera Central, where Yamashita has gone to ground. “But not anymore.” Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. “I have ordered several huffduff units to set up in this area, and at the northern end of Mindoro. Next time that submarine transmits an Arethusa message, we’ll have Catalinas overhead within fifteen minutes.”

“Well,” Waterhouse volunteers, “maybe I should get cracking on breaking that darn code, then.”

“If you could accomplish that, Waterhouse, it would be brilliant. It would mean victory in this, our first cryptological skirmish with the Communists. It would be a splendid kick-off for your relationship with Electrical Till and the NSA. We could set your new bride up with a nice house in the horse country, a gas stove, and a Hoover that would make her forget all about the Palouse Hills.”

“Sounds pretty darn inviting,” Waterhouse says. “I just can’t hold myself back!” And with that, he’s out the door.

In a stone room in a half-ruined church, Enoch Root looks out of a busted window and grimaces. “I am not a mathematician,” he says. “I only did the calculations that Dengo asked me to do. You will have to ask him to encrypt the message.”

“Find another place for your transmitter,” Waterhouse says, “and be ready to use it on short notice.”

Goto Dengo is right where he said he would be, sitting on the bleachers above third base. The ballfield has been repaired, but no one is playing now. He and Waterhouse have
the place to themselves, except for a couple of poor Filipino peasants, driven down to Manila by the war up north, scavenging for dropped popcorn.

“What you ask is very dangerous,” he says.

“It will be totally secret,” Waterhouse says.

“Think into the future,” says Goto Dengo. “One day, these digital computers you speak of will break the Arethusa code. Is this not so?”

“It is so. Not for many years.”

“Say ten years. Say twenty years. The code is broken. Then they will go back and find all of the old Arethusa messages—including the message that you want to send to your friends—and read them. So?”

“Yes. It is true.”

“And then they will see this message that says, ‘Warning, warning, Comstock has laid a trap, the huffduff stations are waiting for you, do not transmit.’ Then they will know that there was a spy in Comstock’s office. Certainly they will know it was you.”

“You’re right. You’re right. I didn’t think of that,” Waterhouse says. Then he realizes something else. “They’ll know about you too.”

Goto Dengo blanches. “Please. I am so tired.”

“One of the Arethusa messages spoke of a person named GD.”

Goto Dengo puts his head in his hands and is perfectly motionless for a long time. He does not have to say it. He and Waterhouse are imagining the same thing: twenty years in the future, Nipponese police burst into the office of Goto Dengo, prosperous businessman, and arrest him for being a Communist spy.

“Only if they decrypt those old messages,” Waterhouse says.

“But they will. You said that they will decrypt them.”

“Only if they have them,” Waterhouse says.

“But they do have them.”

“They are in my office.”

Goto Dengo is shocked, horrified. “You are not thinking to steal the messages?”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

“But this will be noticed.”

“No! I will replace them with others.”

The voice of Alan Mathison Turing shouts above the buzz of the Project X synchronization tone. The long-playing record, filled with noise, spins on its turntable. “You want the latest in random numbers?”

“Yeah. Some mathematical function that will give me nearly perfect randomness. I know you’ve been working on this.”