Cryptonomicon

  “Oh, come now, Randy! Let’s not allow this to degenerate into conspiracy theories.”

  “Sorry. I’m tired.”

  “So am I. Goodnight.”

  And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that.

  Randy doesn’t.

  To the Cryptonomicon!

  Randy is mounting a known-ciphertext attack: the hardest kind. He has the ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else. He doesn’t even know the algorithm that was used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis, this is unusual; normally the algorithms are public knowledge. That is because algorithms that have been openly discussed and attacked within the academic community tend to be much stronger than ones that have been kept secret. People who rely on keeping their algorithms secret are ruined as soon as that secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War II, when people were much less canny about such things.

  This would be a hell of a lot easier if Randy knew some of the plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all of the plaintext, he wouldn’t even need to decrypt them; breaking Arethusa in that case would be an academic exercise.

  There is a compromise between the two extremes of, on the one hand, not knowing any of the plaintext at all, and, on the other, knowing all of it. In the Cryptonomicon that falls under the heading of cribs. A crib is an educated guess as to what words or phrases might be present in the message. For example if you were decrypting German messages from World War II, you might guess that the plaintext included the phrase “HEIL HITLER” or “SIEG HEIL.” You might pick out a sequence of ten characters at random and say, “Let’s assume that this represented HEIL HITLER. If that is the case, then what would it imply about the remainder of the message?”

  Randy’s not expecting to find any HEIL HITLERs in the Arethusa messages, but there might be other predictable words. He’s been making a list of cribs in his head: MANILA, certainly. WATERHOUSE, perhaps. And now he’s thinking GOLD and BULLION. So, in the case of MANILA he could pick out any six-character string from the intercepts and say, “What if these characters are the encrypted form of MANILA?” and then work from there. If he were working with an intercept only six characters long, then there would be only one such six-character segment to choose from. A seven-character-long message would give him two possibilities: it could be the first six or the last six characters. The upshot is that for a message intercept that is n characters long, the number of six-character-long segments is equal to (n - 5). In the case of a 105-character-long intercept, he will have 100 different possible locations for the word MANILA. Actually, a hundred and one: because it’s of course possible—even likely—that MANILA is not in there at all. But each of these 100 guesses has its own set of ramifications vis-à-vis all of the other characters in the message. What those ramifications are, exactly, depends on what assumptions Randy is making about the underlying algorithm.

  As far as that goes: the more he thinks about it, the more he believes he has some good stuff to go on—thanks to Enoch, who (in retrospect) has been feeding him some useful clues when not spamming him through the bars with theogonical analysis. Enoch mentioned that when the NSA started attacking what later turned out to be the fake Arethusa intercepts, they were going on the assumption that they were somehow related to another cryptosystem dubbed Azure. And sure enough, Randy learns from the Cryptonomicon that Azure was an oddball system used by both the Nipponese and the Germans that employed a mathematical algorithm to generate a different one-time pad every day. This is awfully vague, but it helps Randy rule out a lot. He knows for example that Arethusa isn’t a rotor system like Enigma. And he knows that if he can find two messages that were sent on the same day, they will probably use the same one-time pad.

  What kind of mathematical algorithm was used? The contents of Grandpa’s trunk provide clues. He remembers the photograph of Grandpa with Turing and von Hacklheber at Princeton, where all three of them were evidently fooling around with zeta functions. And in the trunk were several monographs on the same subject. And the Cryptonomicon states that zeta functions are even today being used in cryptography, as sequence generators—which is to say, machines for spitting out series of pseudo-random numbers, which is exactly what a one-time pad is. Everything points to that Azure and Arethusa are siblings and that both are just implementations of zeta functions.

  The big thing standing in his way right now is that he doesn’t have any textbooks on zeta functions sitting around his jail cell. The contents of Grandpa’s trunk would be an excellent resource—but they are currently stored in a room in Chester’s house. But on the other hand, Chester’s rich, and he wants to help.

  Randy calls for a guard and demands to see Attorney Alejandro. Enoch Root goes very still for a few moments, and then shunts directly back into the loping, untroubled sleep of a man who is exactly where he wants to be.

  SLAVES

  * * *

  PEOPLE SMELL ALL KINDS OF WAYS BEFORE THEY HAVE burned, but only one way afterwards. As the Army boys lead Waterhouse down into the darkness, he sniffs cautiously, hoping he won’t smell that smell.

  Mostly it smells like oil, diesel, hot steel, the brimstony tang of burnt rubber and exploded munitions. These smells are overpoweringly strong. He draws in a lungful of reek, blows it out. And that, of course, is when he catches a whiff of barbecue and knows that this concrete-coated island is, among other things, a crematorium.

  He is following the Army boys down black-smudged tunnels bored through a variegated matrix of concrete, masonry, and solid rock. The caves were there first, eaten into the stone by rain and waves, then enlarged and rationalized by Spaniards with chisels, jackhammers, blasting powder. Then along came the Americans with bricks, and finally the Nipponese with reinforced concrete.

  As they work their way into the maze, they pass down some tunnels that apparently acted like blowtorches: the walls have been scoured clean as if a torrent had been running through it for a million years, silver pools lie on the floor where guns or filing cabinets melted into puddles. Stored heat still radiates from the walls, adding to the heat of the Philippine climate, making all of them sweat even more, if that is possible.

  Other corridors, other rooms were nothing more than backwaters in the river of fire. Looking into doorways, Waterhouse can see books that were charred but not consumed, blackened papers spilling from burst cabinets—

  “One moment,” he says. His escort spins around just in time to see Waterhouse ducking through a low door into a tiny room, where something has caught his eye.

  It’s a heavy wooden cabinet, mostly transmuted into charcoal now, so it looks like the cabinet’s gone but its shadow persists. Someone has already pulled one of its doors off its hinges, allowing black confetti to flood into the room. The cabinet was filled with slips of paper, mostly burned now, but thrusting his hand into the ash-heap (slowly! Most of this place is still hot) Waterhouse pulls out a bundle, nearly intact.

  “What kind of money is that?” the Army guy asks.

  Waterhouse pulls a bill from the top of the bundle. The top is printed in Japanese characters and bears an engraved picture of Tojo. He flips it over. The back is printed in English: TEN POUNDS.

  “Australian currency,” Waterhouse says.

  “Don’t look Australian to me,” the Army guy says, glowering at Tojo.

  “If the Nips had won…” Waterhouse says, and shrugs. He throws the stack of ten-pound notes onto the ash-heap of history and carries his single copy out into the corridor. A necklace of lightbulbs has been strung along the ceiling. The light glances off what looks like pools of quicksilver on the floor: the remains of guns, belt buckles, steel cabinets, and doorknobs, melted down into puddles in the holocaust, now congealed.

  The fine print on the bill says, IMPERIAL RESERVE BANK, MANILA.

  “Sir! You okay?” the Army guy says. Waterhouse realizes he’s been thinking for a while.

  “Carry on,” he says, and stuffs the bill in his pocket.

>   He was thinking about whether it was okay to take some of this money with him. It’s okay to take souvenirs, but not to loot. So he can take the money if it’s worthless, but not if it is real money.

  Now, someone who was not so inclined to think and ponder everything to the nth degree would immediately see that the money was worthless, because, after all, the Japanese did not take Australia and never will. So that money’s just a souvenir, right?

  Probably right. The money is effectively worthless. But if Waterhouse were to find a real Australian ten-pound note and read the fine print, it would also probably bear the imprimatur of a reserve bank somewhere.

  Two pieces of paper, each claiming to be worth ten pounds, each very official-looking, each bearing the name of a bank. One of them a worthless souvenir and one legal tender for all debts public and private. What gives?

  What it comes down to is that people trust the claims printed on one of those pieces of paper but don’t trust the other. They believe that you could take the real Australian note to a bank in Melbourne, slide it over the counter, and get silver or gold—or something at least—in exchange for it.

  Trust goes a long way, but at some point, if you’re going to sponsor a stable currency, you must put up or shut up. Somewhere, you have to actually have a shitload of gold in the basement. Around the time of the evacuation from Dunkirk, when the Brits were looking at an imminent invasion of their islands by the Germans, they took all of their gold reserves, loaded them on board some battleships and passenger liners, and squirted them across the Atlantic to banks in Toronto and Montreal. This would have enabled them to keep their currency afloat even if the Germans had overrun London.

  But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh, sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring the shit out of them, but it doesn’t work very well to hold a knife to someone’s throat and say, “I want you to believe that this piece of paper is worth ten pounds sterling.” They might say that they believe it, but they won’t really believe it. They won’t act as if they believe it. And if they don’t act that way, then there is no currency, workers don’t get paid (you can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy doesn’t work, you can’t extract the natural resources that prompted you to conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you’re going to run an economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.

  The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency—not just for Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Indochina, Korea, Manchuria…

  How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many human beings that your paper currency was actually worth something? Where would you put it?

  The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island, then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob-shaped, walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel-gnawed where men have seen fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.

  There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty chairs—so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of air at first, terrified that he will smell dead people. But he doesn’t.

  It figures. They’re in the center of the rock. There’s only one way into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place—no blowtorch effect—no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as thick as cold gravy.

  “Found forty dead in this room,” the escort says.

  “Dead of what?”

  “Asphyxiation.”

  “Officers?”

  “One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves.”

  Before the war started, the term “slave” was, to Lawrence Waterhouse, as obsolete as “cooper” or “chandler.” Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War’s weird.

  His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped into the chamber. There’s a single 25-watt bulb for the whole cavern and the walls absorb nearly all of the light.

  He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair. When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper—indeed, some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.

  He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends over the table.

  It’s an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.

  He turns to face the Army guy. “What’s the plural of abacus?”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Shall we say abaci?”

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?”

  There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just say “no, sir,” or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to understand that it’s important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.

  Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.

  “Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?” he says to an enlisted man.

  “Yes, sir. I helped carry ’em out.”

  “Did they look like Filipinos?”

  “No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics.”

  “Chinese, Korean, something like that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After a few minutes, the answer comes back: no one will admit to having touched an abacus. This chamber was the last part of the fortress to be reached by Americans. The bodies of the slaves were mostly found piled up near the door. The body of the Nipponese officer was on the bottom of the pile. The door had been locked from the inside. It is a metal door, and has a slight outward bulge, as the fire upstairs apparently sucked all the air out of the room in a big hurry.

  “Okay,” Waterhouse says, “I am going to go upstairs and report back to Brisbane. I am personally going to take this room apart like an archaeologist. Make sure that nothing is touched. Especially the abaci.”

  ARETHUSA

  * * *

  ATTORNEY ALEJANDRO COMES TO SEE RANDY THE next day and they swap small talk about the weather and the Philippine Basketball Association whilst exchanging handwritten slips of paper across the table. Randy gives his lawyer a note saying, “Give this note to Chester” and then another note asking Chester to go through that trunk and find any old documents on the subject of zeta functions and get them to Randy somehow. Attorney Alejandro gives Randy a somewhat defensive and yet self-congratulatory note itemizing his recent efforts on Randy’s behalf, which is probably meant to be encouraging but which Randy finds to be unsettlingly vague. He had rather expected some specific results by this point. He reads it and looks askance at Attorney Alejandro, who grimaces and taps himself on the jaw, which is code for “the Dentist” and which Randy interprets to mean that said billionaire is interfering with whatever Attorney Alejandro is trying to accomplish. Randy hands Attorney Alejandro
another note saying, “Give this note to Avi” and then yet another note asking Avi to find out whether General Wing is one of the Crypt’s clients.

  Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that he needs about zeta functions, he can’t do any actual codebreaking work during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he’ll do later. The Cryptonomicon contains numerous hunks of C code intended to perform certain basic cryptanalytical operations, but a lot of it is folk code (poorly written) and anyway needs to be translated into the more modern C++ language. So Randy does that. The Cryptonomicon also describes various algorithms that will probably come in handy, and Randy implements those in C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with every little detail of the mathematics; if you don’t understand the math you can’t write the code. As the days go by, his mind turns into some approximation of a cryptanalyst’s. This transformation is indexed by the slow accretion of code in his code-breaking library.

  He and Enoch Root get into the habit of having conversations during and after their meals. Both of them seem to have rather involved inner lives that require lots of maintenance and so the rest of the day they ignore each other. Anecdote by anecdote, Randy plots the trajectory of his life to date. Likewise Enoch speaks vaguely of some wartime events, then about what it was like to live in postwar England, and then in the U.S. in the fifties. Apparently he was a Catholic priest for a while but got kicked out of the Church for some reason; he doesn’t say why, and Randy doesn’t ask. After that all is vague. He mentions that he began spending large amounts of time in the Philippines during the Vietnam War, which fits in with Randy’s general hypothesis: if it’s true that Old Man Comstock had U.S. troops combing the Philippine boondocks for the Primary, then Enoch would have wanted to be around, to interfere or at least keep an eye on them. Enoch claims he’s also been gadding about trying to bring Internet stuff to China, but to Randy this just sounds like a cover story for something else.