Cryptonomicon

  The latitude and longitude of Golgotha are expressed, in the Arethusa intercept, in degrees, minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second of latitude and longitude. A minute is a nautical mile, a second is about a hundred feet. In the seconds figure, the Golgotha numbers have one digit after the decimal point, which implies a precision of ten feet. GPS receivers can give you that kind of precision. Randy’s not so sure about the sextants that the Nipponese surveyors presumably used during the war. Before he left, he wrote the numbers down on a scrap of paper, but he rounded off the seconds part and just expressed it in the form of “XX degrees and twenty and a half minutes” implying a precision of a couple of thousand feet. Then he invented three other locations in the same general vicinity, but miles away, and put them all into a list, with the real location being number two on the list. Above it he wrote “Who owns these parcels of land?” or, in crypto-speak, WHOOW NSTHE SEPAR etc. and then spent an almost unbelievably tedious evening synchronizing the two decks of cards and encrypting the entire message with the Solitaire algorithm. He gave the ciphertext and the unused deck to Enoch Root, then swiped the plaintext through some of the leftover grease in his dinner tray and left it by the open drain. Within the hour, a rat had come around and eaten it.

  He wanders all day. At first it is just bleak and depressing and he thinks he’s going to give up very soon, but then he gets into the spirit of it, and learns how to eat: you approach gentlemen on streetcorners selling little fried-octopus balls and make neolithic grunting noises and proffer yen until you discover food in your hands and then you eat it.

  Through some kind of nerdish homing instinct he finds Akihabara, the electronics district, and spends a while wandering through stores looking at all of the consumer electronics that will go on sale in the States a year from now. That’s where he is when his GSM telephone rings.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me. I’m standing behind a fat yellow line.”

  “Which airport?”

  “Narita.”

  “Delighted to hear it. Tell your driver to take you to the Mr. Donut in Akihabara.”

  Randy’s there an hour later, flipping through a phone-book-sized manga epic, when Avi walks in. The unspoken Randy/Avi greeting protocol dictates that they hug each other at this point, so they do, somewhat to the astonishment of their fellow donut-eaters who usually make do with bowing. The Mr. Donut is a three-level affair jammed into a sliver of real estate with approximately the same footprint as a spiral staircase and is quite crowded with people who took compulsory English in their excellent and highly competitive schools. Besides, Randy broadcast the time and location of the meeting over a radio an hour ago. So as long as they are there, Randy and Avi talk about relatively innocuous things. Then they go out for a stroll. Avi knows his way around this neighborhood. He leads Randy through a doorway and into nerdvana.

  “Many people,” Avi explains, “do not know that the word normally spelled and pronounced ‘nirvana’ can be more accurately transliterated ‘nirdvana’ or, arguably, ‘nerdvana.’ This is nerdvana. The nucleus around which Akihabara accreted. This is where the pasocon otaku go to get the stuff they need.”

  “Pasocon otaku?”

  “Personal computer nerds,” Avi says. “But as in so many other things, the Nipponese take it to an extreme that we barely imagine.”

  The place is laid out precisely like an Asian food market: it is a maze of narrow aisles winding among tiny stalls, barely larger than phone booths, where merchants have their wares laid out for inspection. The first thing they see is a wire stall: at least a hundred reels of different types and gauges of wire in gaily hued plastic insulation. “How apropos!” Avi says, admiring the display, “we need to talk about wires.” It need not be stated that this place is a great venue for a conversation: the paths between the stalls are so narrow that they have to walk in single file. No one can follow them, or get close to them, here, without being ridiculously blatant. An array of soldering irons bristles wickedly, giving one stall the look of a martial arts store. Coffee-can-sized potentiometers are stacked in pyramids. “Tell me about wires,” Randy says.

  “I don’t need to tell you how dependent we are on submarine cables,” Avi says.

  “ ‘We’ meaning the Crypt, or society in general?”

  “Both. Obviously the Crypt can’t even function without communications linkages to the outside world. But the Internet and everything else are just as dependent on cables.”

  A pasocon otaku in a trench coat, holding a plastic bowl as shopping cart, hunches over a display of gleaming copper toroidal coils that look to have been hand-polished by the owner. Finger-sized halogen spotlights mounted on an overhead rack emphasize their geometric perfection.

  “So?”

  “So, cables are vulnerable.”

  They wander past a stall that specializes in banana plugs, with a sideline in alligator clips, arranged in colorful rosettes around disks of cardboard.

  “Those cables used to be owned by PTAs. Which were basically just branches of governments. Hence they pretty much did what governments told them to. But the new cables going in today are owned and controlled by corporations beholden to no one except their investors. Puts certain governments in a position they don’t like very much.”

  “Okay,” Randy says, “they used to have ultimate control over how information flowed between countries in that they ran the PTTs that ran the cables.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now they don’t.”

  “That’s right. There’s been this big transfer of power that has taken place under their noses, without their having foreseen it.” Avi stops in front of a stall that sells LEDs in all manner of bubble-gum colors, packed into tiny boxes like ripe tropical fruits in crates, and standing up from cubes of foam like psychedelic mushrooms. He is making big transfer-of-power gestures with his hands, but to Randy’s increasingly warped mind this looks like a man moving heavy gold bars from one pile to another. Across the aisle, they are being stared at by the dead eyes of a hundred miniature video cameras. Avi continues, “And as we’ve talked about many times, there are many reasons why different governments might want to control the flow of information. China might want to institute political censorship, whereas the U.S. might want to regulate electronic cash transfers so that they can keep collecting taxes. In the old days they could ultimately do this insofar as they owned the cables.”

  “But now they can’t,” Randy says.

  “Now they can’t, and this change happened very fast, or at least it looked fast to government with its retarded intellectual metabolism, and now they are way behind the curve, and scared and pissed off, and starting to lash out.”

  “They are?”

  “They are.”

  “In what way are they lashing out?”

  A toggle switch merchant snaps a rag over rows and columns of stainless steel merchandise. The tip of the rag breaks the sound barrier and generates a tiny sonic pop that blasts a dust mote from the top of a switch. Everyone is politely ignoring them. “Do you have any idea what down time on a state-of-the-art cable costs nowadays?”

  “Of course I do,” Randy says. “It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute.”

  “That’s right. And it takes at least a couple of days to repair a broken cable. A couple of days. A single break in a cable can cost the companies that own it tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.”

  “But that hasn’t been that much of an issue,” Randy says. “The cables are plowed in so deeply now. They’re only exposed in the deep ocean.”

  “Yes—where only an entity with the naval resources of a major government could sever them.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “This is the new balance of power, Randy.”

  “You can’t seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to—”

  “The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable—first-generation optical fiber—joining Korea to Nippo
n. The cable wasn’t that important—they only did it as a warning shot. And what’s the rule of thumb about governments cutting submarine cables?”

  “That it’s like nuclear war,” Randy says. “Easy to start. Devastating in its results. So no one does it.”

  “But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a vested interest in throttling information flow can say, ‘Hey, the Chinese did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.’ ”

  “Is that actually happening?”

  “No, no, no!” Avi says. They’ve stopped in front of the largest display of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. “It’s all posturing. It’s not aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and operate the new cables.”

  Light dawns in Randy’s mind. “Such as the Dentist.”

  “The Dentist has put more money into privately financed submarine cables than just about anyone. He has a minority stake in that cable that the Chinese cut between Korea and Nippon. So he’s trapped like a rat. He has no choice—no choice at all—other than to do as he’s told.”

  “And who’s giving the orders?”

  “I’m sure that the Chinese are very big in this—they don’t have any internal checks and balances in their government, so they are more prone to do something that is grossly irregular like this.”

  “And they obviously have the most to lose from unfettered information flow.”

  “Yeah. But I’m just cynical enough to suspect that a whole lot of other governments are right behind them.”

  “If that’s true,” Randy says, “then everything is completely fucked. Sooner or later a cable-cutting war is going to break out. All the cables will get chopped through. End of story.”

  “The world doesn’t work that way anymore, Randy. Governments get together and negotiate. Like they did in Brussels just after Christmas. They come up with agreements. War does not break out. Usually.”

  “So—there’s an agreement in place?”

  Avi shrugs. “As best as I can make out. A balance of power has been struck between the people who own navies—i.e., the people who have the ability to cut cables with impunity—and the people who own and operate cables. Each side is afraid of what the other can do to it. So they have come to a genteel understanding. The bureaucratic incarnation of it is IDTRO.”

  “And the Dentist is in on it.”

  “Precisely.”

  “So maybe the Ordo siege really was ultimately directed by the government.”

  “I very much doubt that Comstock ordered it,” Avi says. “I think it was the Dentist demonstrating his loyalty.”

  “How about the Crypt? Is the sultan party to this understanding?”

  Avi shrugs. “Pragasu isn’t saying much. I told him what I have just told you. I laid out my theory of what is going on. He looked tolerantly amused. He did not confirm or deny. But he did give me cause to believe that the Crypt is still going to be up and running on schedule.”

  “See, I find that hard to believe,” Randy says. “It seems like the Crypt is their worst nightmare.”

  “Whose worst nightmare?”

  “Any government that needs to collect taxes.”

  “Randy, governments will always find ways to collect taxes. If worse comes to worst, the IRS can just base everything on property taxes—you can’t hide real estate in cyberspace. But keep in mind that the U.S. government is only a part of this thing—the Chinese are very big in it, too.”

  “Wing!” Randy blurts. He and Avi cringe and look around them. The pasocon otaku don’t care. A man selling rainbow-colored wire ribbons eyes them with polite curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and onto the sidewalk. It has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young women in miniskirts and high heels march in wedge formation down the center of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game character.

  “Wing’s digging for gold in Bundok,” Randy says. “He thinks he knows where Golgotha is. If he finds it, he’ll need a really special kind of bank.”

  “He’s not the only guy in the world who needs a special bank,” Avi says. “Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with governments, or people connected with governments. Why didn’t Hitler invade Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn’t have done without it. So the Crypt definitely fills a niche.”

  “Okay,” Randy says, “so the Crypt will be allowed to remain in existence.”

  “It has to. The world needs it,” Avi says. “And we’ll need it, when we dig up Golgotha.”

  Suddenly Avi’s got an impish look on his face; he looks to have shed about ten years of age. This gets a belly-laugh out of Randy, the first time he’s really laughed in a couple of months. His mood has gone through some seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. “It’s not enough to know where it is. Enoch Root says that these hoards were buried deep in mines, down in the hard rock. So we’re not going to get that gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project.”

  “Why do you think I’m in Tokyo?” Avi says. “C’mon, let’s get back to the hotel.”

  While Avi’s checking in, Randy collects his messages from the front desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en route, the tamperers did a good job of covering their traces. It contains a hand-enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured out some way to get himself sprung from the clink with his scruples intact. It is several lines of seemingly random block letters, in groups of five. Randy has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail: the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several hours of solitaire seems a lot less inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison—and he knows it will take that long to decipher a message as long as this one. But he’s already programmed his laptop to play Solitaire according to Enoch’s rules, and he’s already punched in the key that is embodied in the deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber-banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi’s room, pausing along the way to collect Randy’s laptop, and while Avi sorts through his messages, Randy types in the ciphertext and gets it deciphered. “Enoch’s message says that the land above Golgotha is owned by the Church,” Randy mutters, “but in order to reach it we have to travel across land owned by Wing, and by some Filipinos.”

  Avi doesn’t appear to hear him. He’s fixated on a message slip.

  “What’s up?” Randy asks.

  “A little change of plans for tonight. I hope you have a really good suit with you.”

  “I didn’t know we had plans for tonight.”

  “We were going to meet with Goto Furundenendu,” Avi says. “I sort of figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging a big hole in the ground.”

  “I’m with you,” Randy says. “What’s the change in plan?”

  “The old man is coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants to buy us dinner.”

  “What old man?”

  “The founder of the company, Goto Furudenendu’s father,” Avi says. “Protegé of Douglas MacArthur. Multi-multi-multi-millionaire. Golf partner and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo.”

  PROJECT X

  * * *

  IT IS EARLY in APRIL OF THE YEAR 1945. A MIDDLE-aged Nipponese widow feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a temblor. Her house is on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out over the ocean and sees a black ship on the horizon, steaming out of a rising sun of its own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is shrouded in red fire for a moment. She hopes that the Yamato, the world’s greatest battleship, which steamed away over that horizon a few days ago, has returned victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is an American battleship and it is dropping shells into the port that the Yamato just left, making the earth’s bowels heave as if it were pr
eparing to throw up.

  Until this moment, the Nipponese woman has been convinced that the armed forces of her nation were crushing the Americans, the British, the Dutch, and the Chinese at every turn. This apparition must be some kind of bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship stays there all day long, heaving ton after ton of dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come out to bomb it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.

  In a shocking display of bad form, Patton has lunged across the Rhine ahead of schedule, to the irritation of Montgomery who has been making laborious plans and preparations to do it first.

  The German submarine U-234 is in the North Atlantic, headed for the Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide. The uranium is bound for Tokyo where it will be used in some experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new and extremely powerful explosive device.

  General Curtis LeMay’s Air Force has spent much of the last month flying dangerously low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000 people died there, and this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

  The night after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima and they put a picture of it in all the papers.

  Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the most terrible force on earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of Hungary, and the Soviets have declared that their Neutrality Pact with Nippon will be allowed to expire rather than being renewed.

  Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have launched everything they have. The Yamato came after them, her eighteen-inch guns at the ready, carrying only enough fuel for a one-way voyage. But the cryptanalysts of the U.S. Navy intercepted and decrypted her orders and the great ship was sent to the bottom with 2,500 men. The Nipponese have launched the first of their Floating Chrysanthemum assaults against the invasion fleet: clouds of kamikaze planes, human bombs, human torpedoes, speedboats packed with explosives.