Cryptonomicon

Chapter 98 CRIBS

On a grassy knoll, a man crouches behind a tombstone, peering through a telescope on a tripod, and tracking the steady pace of a robed and hooded figure across the grass.

FUNERAL. That's the crib that broke these guys.

The Nipponese man in the American uniform, whom Enoch Root is leaving behind, must be that Goto Dengo fella. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has seen that name punched on so many ETC cards that he no longer even has to read the printed letters at the top of the card: he can identify a “Goto Dengo” from arm's length simply by glancing at the pattern of punched-out rectangles. The same is true of some two dozen other Nipponese mining engineers and surveyors who were brought to Luzon in '43 and '44, in response to Azure/Pufferfish messages emanating from Tokyo. But, as far as Waterhouse can tell, all of the others are dead. Either that, or they retreated north with Yamashita.

Only one of them is alive, well, and living in what is left of Manila, and that's Goto Dengo. Waterhouse was going to rat him out to Army Intelligence, but that doesn't seem like such a good idea now that the unkillable Nip engineer has become a personal protegé of The General.

Root is heading in the direction of those two mysterious white men who attended Bobby Shaftoe's funeral. Waterhouse peers at them through the scope, but mediocre optics, combined with the heat waves rising from the grass, complicate this. One of them seems oddly familiar. Odd because Waterhouse doesn't know that many bearded men with long swept-back blond hairdoes and black eyepatches.

An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous. Waterhouse stifles a giggle and tries not to get overly excited. The dull, tedious, bureaucratic part of his mind is feeling testy, and wants a few shreds of supporting evidence.

This is quickly supplied. Waterhouse knows, and has proved to Earl Comstock, that strange information is in the air, dotting and dashing furtively from a small number of feeble transmitters scattered around Luzon and the surrounding waters, encrypted using the Arethusa system. Lawrence and Alan have known for two years now that Rudy invented it, and from the decrypts chattering out of digital computers in Bletchley Park and Manila, they now know other things. They know that Rudy flew the coop late in 1943 and probably went to Sweden. They know that one Günter Bischoff, captain of the U-boat that plucked Shaftoe and Root out of the water, also ended up in Sweden, and that Dönitz persuaded him to take over the gold-running work that had been performed by U-553 until it ran aground off Qwghlm. The Naval Intelligence boys are fascinated by Bischoff, and so he had already been the subject of much research. Waterhouse has seen photos of him from his student days. The shorter of the two men he is peering at now could easily be the same fellow, now middle-aged. And the taller one, the one with the eyepatch, could most definitely be Rudy von Hacklheber himself.

It is, then, a conspiracy.

They have secure communications. If Rudy is the architect of Arethusa, then it will be essentially impossible to break, except for rare lapses such as this FUNERAL business.

They have a submarine. It cannot be found or sunk, because it is one of Hitler's new rocket-fuel-powered babies, and because Günter Bischoff, the greatest U-boat commander in history, is its skipper.

They have, at some level, the backing of the odd brotherhood that Root belongs too, the ignoti et quasi occulti guys.

And now they are trying to enlist Goto Dengo. The man who, it is safe to assume, buried the gold.

Three days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse's section picked up a brief flurry of Arethusa messages, exchanged between a hidden transmitter somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China Sea. Catalinas were vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first, but found nothing when they arrived on the scene. A team of journeyman codebreakers jumped on those messages and started trying to tear them apart by brute force. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, the old hand, went for a stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of a tree and smashed into the ground ten feet away. Waterhouse turned on his heel and went back to the office.

Just before the flurry of Arethusa messages began, Waterhouse had been sitting in his office listening to Armed Forces Radio. They had broadcast an announcement that, three days from now, at such-and-such a time, the funeral for the hero, Bobby Shaftoe, was going to be held at the big new cemetery down in Makati.

Sitting down in his office with the fresh Arethusa intercepts, he went to work, using FUNERAL as a crib: if this group of seven letters decrypts to FUNERAL, then what does the rest of the message look like? Gibberish? Okay, how about this group of seven letters?

Even with this gift thrown into his lap, it took him two and a half days of nonstop work to decrypt the message. The first one, transmitted from Manila, went: OUR FRIEND'S FUNERAL SATURDAY TEN THIRTY AM US MILITARY CEMETERY MAKATI.

The response from the submarine: WILL BE THERE SUGGEST YOU INFORM GD.

He aims the spyglass at Goto Dengo again. The Nipponese engineer is standing with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Perhaps his shoulders are heaving, perhaps it's just the heat waves that make it seem so.

But then Goto Dengo straightens up and takes a step in the direction of the conspirators. He stops. Then he takes another step. Then another. His posture is straightening up miraculously. He seems to feel better with every stride. He walks faster and faster, until he is almost running.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is hardly a mind-reader, but he can easily enough tell what Goto Dengo is thinking: I have a burden on my shoulders, and it has been crushing me. And now I'm going to hand that burden over to someone else. Hot damn! Bischoff and Rudy von Hacklheber step forward to meet him, holding out their right hands enthusiastically. Bischoff, Rudy, Enoch, and Goto Dengo join into a knot, practically on top of Bobby Shaftoe's grave.

It is a shame. Waterhouse knew Bobby Shaftoe, and would have liked to attend his funeral standing up—not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.

Or is he? In a decade full of Hitlers and Stalins, it's hard to worry about a conspiracy that seemingly includes a priest, and that risks its very existence in order to attend a member's funeral. Waterhouse rolls over and lies on his back on some dead guy's grave and ponders it. If Mary were here, he would lay out the dilemma for her and she would tell him what to do. But Mary's in Brisbane, picking out bridesmaids' dresses and china patterns.

The next time he sees any of these fellows is one month later, in a clearing in the jungle a couple of hours south of Manila. Waterhouse gets there before they do, and spends a sweaty night under a mosquito net. In the morning, about half of Bischoff's submarine crew arrives, grumpy from an all-night march. As Waterhouse expected, they are quite nervous about being ambushed by the local Huk commander known as the Crocodile, and so they post a number of sentries in the jungle. That is why Waterhouse took pains to get here before they did: so that he would not have to infiltrate their picket line.

The Germans who aren't standing guard go to work with shovels, digging a hole in the ground next to a big piece of red pumice shaped vaguely like the continent of Africa. Waterhouse squats no more than twenty feet away, trying to figure out how he can make his presence known without being gunned down by a nervous white man.

He almost gets close enough to tap Rudy on the shoulder. Then he slips on a slimy rock. Rudy hears him, turns, and sees nothing except for a swatch of undergrowth being torn down by Waterhouse's falling body.

“Is that you, Lawrence?”

Waterhouse stands up cautiously, keeping his hands in plain sight. “Very good! How did you know?”

“Don't be stupid. There aren't that many people who could have found us.”

They shake hands. Then they think better of it, and embrace. Rudy gives him a cigarette. The German sailors look on incredulously. There are some others: a Negro and an Indian, and a grizzled, dark man who looks like he wants to kill Waterhouse on the spot.

“You must be the famous Otto!” Waterhouse exclaims. But Otto does not seem eager to make new friends, or even acquaintances, at this juncture in his life, and turns away sourly. “Where's Bischoff?” Waterhouse asks.

“Minding the submarine. It is risky, lurking in the shallows. How did you find us, Lawrence?” He answers his own question before Waterhouse can. “By decrypting the long message, obviously.”

“Yes.”

“But how did you do that? Did I miss something? Is there a back door?”

“No. It wasn't easy. I broke one of your messages, a while back.”

“The FUNERAL one?”

“Yes!” Waterhouse laughs.

“I could have killed Enoch for sending out a message with such an obvious crib.” Rudy shrugs. “It is hard to teach crypto security, even to intelligent men. Especially to them.”

“Maybe he wanted me to decrypt it,” Waterhouse muses.

“It is possible,” Rudy admits. “Perhaps he wanted me to break Detachment 2702's one-time pad, so that I would come and join him.”

“I guess he figures if you're smart enough to break hard codes, you're automatically going to be on his side,” Waterhouse says.

“I'm not sure that I agree… it is naive.”

“It's a leap of faith,” Waterhouse says.

“How did you break Arethusa? I am naturally curious,” Rudy says.

“Because Azure/Pufferfish employs a different key every day, I assumed that Arethusa did the same.”

“I call them by different names. But yes, continue.”

“The difference is that the daily key for Azure/Pufferfish is simply the numerical date. Very easy to exploit, once you have figured it out.”

“Yes. I intended it that way,” Rudy says. He lights up another cigarette, taking extravagant pleasure in it.

“Whereas the daily key for Arethusa is something I haven't been able to put my finger on yet. Perhaps a pseudo-random function of the date, perhaps random numbers you are taking from a one-time pad. In any case it is not predictable, which makes Arethusa harder to break.”

“But you did break the long message. Would you explain how?”

“Well, your meeting at the cemetery was brief. I guess you had to get out of there pretty fast.”

“It did not seem a good place to linger.”

“So, you and Bischoff went away—back to the submarine, I figured. Goto Dengo went back to his post at The General's headquarters. I knew that he couldn't have told you anything substantive at the cemetery. That would have to come later, and it would have to be in the form of an Arethusa-encrypted message. You are justifiably proud of Arethusa.”

“Thank you,” Rudy says briskly.

“But the drawback of Arethusa, as with Azure/Puffeffish, is that it requires a great deal of computation. This is fine if you happen to have a computing machine, or a room full of trained abacus operators. I assume you have a machine on board the submarine?”

“That we do,” Rudy says diffidently, “nothing very special. It still requires a great deal of manual calculation.”

“But Enoch Root in Manila, and Goto Dengo, could not have had such a thing. They would have to encrypt the message by hand—doing all of the calculations on sheets of scratch paper. Enoch already knew the algorithm, and could tell it to Goto Dengo, but you would have to agree on a key to put into that algorithm. The only time you could have decided on the key was while you were all together at the cemetery. And during your conversation there, I saw you pointing at Shaftoe's headstone. So I figured that you were using that as a key—maybe his name, maybe his dates of birth and death, maybe his military serial number. It turned out to be the serial number.”

“But still you did not know the algorithm.”

“Yes, but I had some idea that it was related to the Azure/Pufferfish algorithm, which in turn is related to the zeta functions that we studied at Princeton. So I just sat down and said to myself if Rudy were going to build the ultimate cryptosystem on this basis, and if Azure/Pufferfish is a simplified version of that system, then what is Arethusa? That gave me a handful of possibilities.”

“And out of that handful you were able to pick the right one.”

“No,” Waterhouse says, “it was too hard. So I went to the church where Enoch was working, and looked through his wastebasket. Nothing. I went to Goto Dengo's office and did the same. Nothing. Both of them were burning their scratch paper as they went along.”

Rudy's face suddenly relaxes. “Oh, good. I was afraid they were doing something incredibly stupid.”

“Not at all. So, you know what I did?”

“What did you do, Lawrence?”

“I went and had an interview with Goto Dengo.”

“Yes. He told us that much.”

“I told him about the research I had been doing into Azure/Pufferfish, but I didn't tell him I had broken it. I got him talking, in a very general way, about what he was doing on Luzon during the last year. He told me the same story that he has stuck to all along, which is that he was building some minor fortifications somewhere, and that after escaping from that area he wandered lost in the jungle for several days before emerging near San Pablo and joining up with some Air Force troops who were heading north towards Manila.”

“ 'It's a good thing you got out of there,' I told him, 'because ever since then, the Hukbalahap leader who calls himself the Crocodile has been ransacking the jungle—he's convinced that you Nipponese buried a fortune in gold there.' ”

As soon as the word “crocodile” emerges from Waterhouse's mouth, Rudy's face screws up in disgust and he turns away.

“So when the long message was finally transmitted last week, from the transmitter that Enoch has hidden on the top of that church's bell tower, I had two cribs. First of all, I suspected that the key was a number from the tombstone of Bobby Shaftoe. Secondly, I was confident that the words 'Hukbalahap,' 'crocodile,' and probably 'gold' or 'treasure' would appear somewhere in the message. I also looked for obvious candidates like 'latitude' and 'longitude.' With all of that to go on, breaking the message wasn't that hard.”

Rudy von Hacklheber heaves a big sigh. “So. You win,” he says. “Where is the cavalry?”

“Cavalry, or calvary?” Waterhouse jokes.

Rudy smiles tolerantly. “I know where Calvary is. Not far from Golgotha.”

“Why do you think the cavalry is coming?”

“I know they are coming,” Rudy says. “Your efforts to break the long message must have required a whole room full of computers. They will talk. Surely the secret is out.” Rudy stubs out his half-smoked cigarette, as if preparing to leave. “So, you have been sent to give us an offer—surrender in a civilized way and we will get good treatment. Something like that.”

“Au contraire, Rudy. No one knows except me. I did leave a sealed envelope in my desk, to be opened if I should die mysteriously on this little trip to the jungle. That Otto character has a fearsome reputation.”

“I don't believe you. It is impossible,” Rudy says.

“You of all people. Don't you see? I have a machine, Rudy! The machine does the work for me. So I don't need a room full of computers—human ones, leastways. And as soon as I read the decrypted message, I burned all of the cards. So I am the only one who knows.”

“Ah!” Rudy says, stepping back and looking into the sky, adjusting his mind to these new facts. “So, I gather that you have come here to join us? Otto will be troublesome about it, but you are quite welcome.”

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse actually has to think about it. This surprises him a little.

“Most of it is going to help victims of the war, in one way or another,” Rudy says, “but if we take a tenth of a percent as commission, and distribute it among the entire crew of the submarine, we are all among the richest men in the world.”

Waterhouse tries to imagine himself one of the richest men in the world. It doesn't seem to fit.

“I've been exchanging letters with a college in Washington State,” he says. “My fiancée put me on to them.”

“Fiancée? Congratulations.”

“She's Qwlghmian-Australian. It seems that there's a colony of Qwghlmians in the Palouse Hills as well, where Washington and Oregon and Idaho all come together. Sheepherders mostly. But there is this little college there, and they need a mathematics professor. I could be chairman of the department within a few years.” Waterhouse stands there in the Philippine jungle smoking his cigarette and imagining this. Nothing sounds more exotic. “It sounds like a nice life!” he exclaims, as if this were the first time he had thought of such a thing. “It sounds perfectly all right to me.”

The Palouse Hills seem very far away. He is impatient to begin covering the distance.

“That it does,” says Rudy von Hacklheber.

“You don't sound very convincing, Rudy. I know it wouldn't be so great for you. But for me it's the cat's pajamas.”

“So, are you telling me you don't want in?”

“I'll tell you this. You said most of the money was going to charity. Well, the college can always use a donation. If your plan works out, how about endowing a chair for me at this college? That's all I really want.”

“I will do that,” Rudy says, “and I'll endow one for Alan too, at Cambridge, and I'll provide both of you with laboratories full of electrical computers.” Rudy's eyes wander back to the hole in the ground, where the Germans—having withdrawn most of their sentries—are making steady progress. “You know that this is nothing more than one of the outlying caches. Seed capital to finance the Golgotha work.”

“Yes. Just as the Nips planned it.”

“We'll dig it up soon enough. Sooner, now that we no longer have to worry about the Crocodile!” Rudy says, and laughs. It is an honest, genuine laugh, the first time Waterhouse has ever seen him drop his guard. “Then we will go to ground until the war is over. In the meantime, maybe there will be enough left over to give you and your Qwghlmian bride a nice wedding present.”

“Our china pattern is Lavender Rose by Royal Albert,” Waterhouse says.

Rudy takes an envelope out of his pocket and writes that down. “It was very good of you to come out and say hello,” he mumbles around his cigarette.

“Those bicycle rides in New Jersey might as well have taken place on a different planet,” Waterhouse says, shaking his head.

“They did,” Rudy says. “And when Douglas MacArthur marches into Tokyo, it's going to be a different planet yet again. See you there, Lawrence.”

“See you, Rudy. Godspeed.”

They embrace one more time. Waterhouse backs away and watches the shovels biting into the red mud for a few moments, then turns his back on all of the money in the world and starts walking.

“Lawrence!” Rudy shouts.

“Yes?”

“Don't forget to destroy that sealed envelope you left in your office.”

Waterhouse laughs. “Aw, I was just lying about that. In case someone wanted to kill me.”

“That's a relief.”

“You know how people are always saying 'I can keep a secret' and they are always wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Waterhouse says, “I can keep a secret.”