Cryptonomicon

Chapter 35 CRACKER

Waterhouse has to keep an eye on that safe; Shaftoe is itching to blow it open with high explosives, and Chattan (who firmly overrules Shaftoe) intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to have another crack at opening it himself, just to see if he can do it.

Chattan's position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear and specialized mission which most certainly does not include opening safes from U-boats. For that matter, it does not include going onto abandoned U-boats to recover safes, or other crypto data, in the first place. The only reason they did that was because they happened to be the only people with Ultra clearance who were in the neighborhood, and U-553's precarious position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts.

But Waterhouse's desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with Detachment 2702's mission, or his own personal duties, or even, particularly, with winning the war. It is something that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling down that stretched line from U-553 to the torpedo boat, battered by waves and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one moment to the next whether he would make it back to the boat or plunge into the Atlantic, he was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the half-frozen neurons in his fingertips as he twiddled the safe's submerged dial. Even as Enoch Root patched him up on board the boat, Waterhouse was constructing a crude mental model of how the safe's tumblers might be constructed, visualizing the thing in his mind's eye. And even as the rest of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping bags around the chapel of Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and bandaged Waterhouse stalks the polished corridors of that building's better corner, looking for a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon.

The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and the carbon he steals from the closet where Ghnxh keeps the galvanick lucipher. He brings them, plus a brick-sized crystal of hard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where everyone else is sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines who are basically a naval organization. Officers are in the transept: Chattan has the south arm of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds in the north. A small moiety of Detachment 2702's astounding tarp supply has, then, been hung up across the eastern end of the place, partitioning off the chancel, Holy of Holies, where once the Body and Blood of Christ were housed. Now it contains a Hallicrafters Model S-27 15-tube superheterodyne radio receiver using state-of-the-art acorn tubes in its front end, capable of tuning VHF from 27 to 143 Megahertz and of receiving AM, FM, and CW, and including a signal strength meter which would come in handy if they were really operating a huffduff station here, which they aren't.

The lights are burning behind those tarps and one of the Marines is snoring away in a chair in front of the altar. Waterhouse wakes him up and sends him to bed. The Marine is ashamed; he knows he was supposed to be awake, twiddling that antenna convincingly.

The radio itself has hardly been used—they only turn it on when someone comes to visit who is not in on the Secret. It sits there on the altar, pristine, as if it had just come from the Hallicrafters factory in Chicago, Illinois. All of the altar's fancy bits (if it ever had them) have long since succumbed to fire, rot, plunder, or the gnawing tusks of nest-building skerries. What remains is a rectangular monolith of basalt, featureless except for some marks from the tools that were used to quarry and shape it. It is a perfect foundation for tonight's experiment.

Waterhouse gets the safe up there at some cost to the disks and ligaments in his lower back. It is tubular in shape, like an excerpt of naval gun barrel. He stands it up on its back end so that its round door, with the round dial in the center, is staring up at the ceiling like a blind eye, the radial lines on the dial looking very much like the striations of an iris.

Behind that dial is a bunch of mechanical stuff that has gotten Waterhouse completely pissed off, driven him into a frantic state. By manipulating this dial in some way, he should be able to tease that mechanical stuff into some configuration that allows the door to be opened. That's all there is to it. That this door remains locked is an outrage. Why should the tiny volume inside this safe—much less than a single cubic foot—be so different from the space that Waterhouse moves through at will? What the hell is inside there?

The glue looks like bad amber, flawed and bubbled but still beautiful. He fires up the little blowtorch and plays the flame over one end of it. The glue softens, melts, and drips onto the door of the safe, next to the dial, forming a little puddle about the size of a silver dollar.

Working quickly, Waterhouse sets two single-edged razor blades into it, the blades dangerously upward-facing, parallel and somewhat less than an inch apart. He holds them in place for a few moments while the frigid metal of the safe sucks the heat out of that glue and makes it hard again. He has employed a pair of toothpicks as spacers to make sure that the blunt backs of the blades do not actually touch the door of the safe; he does not want an electrical connection between them.

He solders a wire onto each of the razor blades and runs the wires across the altar toward the radio. Then he takes a little chunk of carbon and lays it across the two blades, forming a bridge between them.

He tears open the back of the radio and does a bit of rewiring. Most of the rig is already set up the way he needs it; basically he's looking for something that will convert electrical impulses into sound and pump that sound into the headphones, which is what a radio does. But the source of the signal is no longer a transmitter on a U-boat but rather the current flowing up one of Waterhouse's wires, into the left razor blade, across the carbon bridge, into the right razor blade, and back down the other wire.

Getting this hooked up the way he wants it takes some doing. When he blunders down a blind alley and gets frustrated, he will go over and twiddle the antenna for a while, pretending to zero in on a U-boat. Then an idea will occur to him and he will go back to work.

Sometime around dawn, he hears a squeal from the headphones: a pair of Bakelite cups bridged by a contraption that looks like a primitive surgical device, hooked up to the radio by a twisted pair of black and red wires. He turns the volume down and claps the phones over his head.

He reaches out and lays one fingertip on the safe, and hears a painful thud in his ears. He slides the fingertip over the surface of the cold metal and hears a rasping sound. Any vibrations cause the bridge of carbon to tremble on the razor blades, making and breaking the electrical connection, modulating the electrical current. The blades and the carbon are a microphone, and the microphone works—almost too well.

He takes his hand off the safe and just sits there and listens for a while. He can hear the footfalls of skerries going through the detachment's rations. He can hear the impact of waves on the shore, miles away, and the thump of the Taxi's bald tires on chuckholes out on the Road. Sounds like the Taxi has a little alignment problem! He can hear the scrub, scrub of Margaret cleaning the floor of the kitchen, and some minor arrhythmias in the heartbeats of the enlisted men, and the boom of glaciers calving on the coast of Iceland, and the squirrely drone of hastily machined propellers on approaching convoy ships. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is plugged into the Universe in a way that exceeds even what Bletchley Park has to offer.

The center of that particular universe is the Safe from U-553, and its axis passes up through the center of the Dial, and now Waterhouse has his hand on it. He turns the volume way down before he touches anything so that he won't blow his eardrums out. The Dial spins heavily but easily, as if mounted on gas bearings. Still, there is mechanical friction in there which is not perceptible to Waterhouse's admittedly frozen fingers but which comes through in his earphones like a rockslide.

When the tumblers move, it sounds like Waterhouse is shooting the main bolt on the Gate of Hell. It takes him a little while, and a few more false starts, to get his bearings; he doesn't know how many numbers are in the combination, or which way he should turn the dial to begin with. But with experimentation, some patterns begin to show through, and eventually he works out the following combination:

23 right—37 left—7 right—31 left—13 right and then there's a really meaty click and he knows in his marrow that he can take off the headphones. He spins a little wheel that is mounted on the front of the safe adjacent to the dial. This withdraws the radial dogs that have been holding the door shut. He hauls the door up, careful not to slash his hand on the twin razors, and looks into the safe.

His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing to do with the contents of the safe. He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.

He sticks his arm all the way down to the bottom of the safe and finds a metal object about the size of a hot dog bun. He knew it would be there because, like children investigating wrapped presents in the days before Christmas, they have been tilting the safe this way and that, and when they did, they heard something sliding from one end to the other—going tink, tonk, tink, tonk—and wondered what it was.

This object is so cold, and sucks the heat out of his hands so efficiently, that it hurts to touch it. He shakes his hand to bring circulation back, then grasps the thing, yanks it out briskly, and throws it down on the altar. It bounces once, twice in a seesawing motion, and rings piercingly as it does—the closest thing to a musical sound that has shaken the air of this chapel in many centuries. It shines gaudily under the electric lights they have set up around the chancel. The glittering light catches the eye of Waterhouse, who has been living on grey and cloudy Qwghlm for weeks, wearing and sleeping in things that are black or khaki or olive drab. He is mesmerized by this thing, simply because of its brightness and beauty against the dull and rude basalt, even before his mind identifies it as a bar of solid gold.

It makes a heck of a paperweight, which is a good thing, because the chapel is nothing if not drafty, and the important contents of the safe consist of onionskin pages that fly away in the tiniest breeze. The pages are ruled with faint horizontal and vertical lines, dividing each one into a grid, and the grids are filled in with hand-printed letters in groups of five.

“Well, look what you found!” says a quiet voice. Waterhouse looks up into the unsettlingly calm and placid gaze of Enoch Root.

“Yes. Encrypted messages,” Waterhouse says. “Non-Enigma.”

“No,” Root says. “I was referring to the Root of All Evil, here.” He tries to pick up the gold bar, but his fingers merely slip off of it. He gets a firmer grip and hefts it up off the altar. Something about it catches his eye, and he turns to bring it under one of the electric lights, frowning at it with the critical intensity of a diamond cutter.

“It's got Hanzi characters stamped on it,” Root says.

“Beg pardon?”

“Chinese or Japanese. No, Chinese-there's the chop of a bank in Shanghai. And here are some figures—the fineness and the serial number.” Showing unexpected familiarity with such matters for a missionary priest.

Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse—it's just a bulk sample of a chemical element, like a lead weight or a flask of mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting. He absolutely has to stand up and go look at it. Root is correct: the bar has been neatly marked with small Oriental characters, applied with a stamp. The tiny facets of the ideograms glitter under the light, sparks jumping the gap between the two halves of the Axis.

Root sets the gold bar down on the altar. He saunters over to a table where they keep stationery, and pulls out a sheet of onionskin and a fresh pencil. Returning to the altar, he lays the frail page over the top of the gold bar, then rubs the side of the pencil lead back and forth over it, turning it all black except for where the stamped numbers and characters are underneath. Within a few moments he has a perfect little rubbing, showing the inscription in full detail. He folds the page up and pockets it, then returns the pencil to the table.

Waterhouse has long since gone back to his examination of the pages from the safe. The numbers are all written in the same hand. Now, since they dredged all manner of other paperwork out of the sewage sloshing through the U-boat skipper's cabin, Waterhouse can recognize the captain's hand easily enough; these sheets were written by someone else.

The format of the messages makes it clear that they were not encrypted with an Enigma machine. Enigma messages always begin with two groups of three letters each, which tell the receiving clerk how to set the wheels on his machine. Those groups are missing on all of these sheets, so some other cipher system must have been used. Like every other modern nation, the Germans have a plethora of different cipher systems, some based on books and some on machines. Bletchley Park has broken most of them.

Still, it looks like an interesting exercise. Now that the rest of Detachment 2702 has arrived, making further trysts with Margaret impractical, Waterhouse has nothing to look forward to. Trying to crack the code used on these sheets will be a perfect puzzle to fill the gaping void that opened up as soon as Waterhouse broke the combination of the safe. He steals some paper of his own, sits down at the desk, and busies himself for an hour or two copying out the ciphertext from the skipper's pages, double– and triple-checking each code group to make sure he's got an accurate copy.

On the one hand, this is a pain in the ass. On the other, it gives him a chance to go through the ciphertext by hand, at the very lowest level, which might be useful later. The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If they do contain patterns, he does not see them just now, in any rational way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work, now that the letters have passed before his eyes and through his pencil, and that may suddenly present him with a gift-wrapped clue—or even a full solution—a few weeks from now while he is shaving or antenna-twiddling.

He has been dimly aware, for a while, that Chattan and the others are awake now. Enlisted men are not allowed into the chancel, but the officers get to gather round and admire the gold bar.

“Breaking the code, Waterhouse?” Chattan says, ambling over to the desk, warming his hands with a mug of coffee.

“Making a clean copy,” Waterhouse says, and then, because he is not without a certain cunning, adds: “in case the originals are destroyed in transit.”

“Very prudent,” Chattan nods. “Say, you didn't hide a second gold bar anywhere, did you?”

Waterhouse has been in the military long enough that he does not rise to the bait. “The pattern of sounds made when we tilted the safe back and forth indicated that there was only a single heavy object inside, sir.”

Chattan chuckles and takes a sip of his coffee. “I shall be interested to see whether you can break that cipher, Lieutenant Waterhouse. I am tempted to put money on it.”

“I sure appreciate that, but it would be a lousy bet, sir,” Waterhouse replied. “The chances are very good that Bletchley Park has already broken this cipher, whatever it may be.”

“What makes you say that?” Chattan asks absently.

The question is so silly, coming from a man in Chattan's position, that it leaves Waterhouse disoriented. “Sir, Bletchley Park has broken nearly all of the German military and governmental codes.”

Chattan makes a face of mock disappointment. “Waterhouse! How unscientific. You are making assumptions.”

Waterhouse thinks back and tries to work out the meaning of this. “You think that this cipher might not be German? Or that it might not be military or governmental?”

“I am merely cautioning you against making assumptions,” Chattan says.

Waterhouse is still thinking this one over as they are approached by Lieutenant Robson, the commanding officer of the SAS squad. “Sir,” he says, “for the benefit of the fellows down in London, we would like to know the combination.”

“The combination?” Waterhouse asks blankly. This word, devoid of context, could mean almost anything.

“Yes, sir,” Robson says precisely. “To the safe.”

“Oh!” Waterhouse says. He is faintly irritated that they would ask him this question. There seems little point in writing down the combination when the equipment needed to break into the safe is sitting right there. It is much more important to have a safe-breaking algorithm than to have one particular solution to a safe-breaking problem. “I don't know,” he says. “I forgot.”

“You forgot?” Chattan says. He says it on behalf of Robson who appears to be violently biting his tongue. “Did you perhaps write it down before you forgot it?”

“No,” Waterhouse says. “But I remember that it consists entirely of prime numbers.”

“Well! That narrows it down!” Chattan says cheerfully. Robson does not seem mollified, though.

“And there are five numbers in all, which is interesting since—”

“Since five is itself a prime number!” Chattan says. Once again, Waterhouse is pleased to see his commanding officer displaying signs of a tasteful and expensive education.

“Very well,” Robson announces through clenched teeth. “I shall inform the recipients.”