Cryptonomicon (100 page)

The man laughs. “As a rule the Fort Meade boys don’t bother to check in with the people whose lines they are tapping.” The caller has an un-American crispness in his voice, vaguely Northern European. “In your case the NSA might make an exception, it’s true—when I was there, they were all great admirers of your grandfather’s work. In fact, they liked it so much they stole it.”

“No higher flattery, I guess.”

“You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you’re not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, because then you’d be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices—who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.”

“Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?”

“He wasn’t interested. Said he had a higher calling. So while he made better and better computers to solve the Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned.”

“And you did too.”

“I? Oh, no, I have only modest skills with a soldering iron. I was there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather.”

“On behalf of—whom? Don’t tell me—eruditorum.org?”

“Well done, Randy.”

“What should I call you—Root? Pontifex?”

“Pontifex is a nice word.”

“It’s true,” Randy says. “I checked it out, looking for clues in the etymology—it’s an old Latin word meaning ‘priest.’ ”

“Catholics call the Pope ‘Pontifex Maximus,’ or pontiff for short,” says Pontifex agreeably, “but the word was also used by pagans to denote their priests, and Jews their rabbis—it is ever so ecumenical.”

“But the literal meaning of the word is ‘bridge builder,’ and so it’s a good name for a cryptosystem,” Randy says.

“Or, I hope, for me,” Pontifex says drily. “I am glad you feel that way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than a bridge.”

“Well, gosh. It’s nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex.”

“The pleasure is mutual.”

“You’ve been so quiet on the e-mail front recently.”

“Didn’t want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any more, you’d think I was proselytizing.”

“Not at all. By the way—people in the know think your cryptosystem is weird, but good.”

“It’s not weird at all, once you understand it,” Pontifex says politely.

“Well, uh, what occasions this phone call? Obviously your
friends
are still surveilling me on behalf of—whom, exactly?”

“I don’t even know,” Pontifex says. “But I do know that you’re trying to crack Arethusa.”

Randy cannot even remember ever uttering the word “Arethusa.” It was printed on the wrappers on the bricks of ETC cards that he ran through Chester’s card reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside Grandpa’s old trunk labeled
Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge
and dated in the early 1950s. So that at least gives him a date to peg on Pontifex. “You were at NSA during the late forties and early fifties,” Randy says. “You must have worked on Harvest.” Harvest was a legendary code-breaking supercomputer, three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA contract.

“I told you,” Pontifex says, “your grandfather’s work came in handy.”

“Chester’s got this retired ETC engineer working on his card machinery,” Randy says. “He helped me read the Arethusa cards. Saw the wrappers. He’s a friend of yours. He called you.”

Pontifex chuckles. “Among our little band there is hardly a word with more memories attached to it than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy.”

“Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?”

“Because we spent ten years of our lives trying to break the damned code! And we failed!”

“It must have been really frustrating,” Randy says, “you still sound angry.”

“I’m angry at Comstock.”

“Not the—”

“Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock.”

“What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the ski lift? The Vietnam guy?”

“No, no! I mean, yes. Earl Comstock
was
largely responsible for our Vietnam policy. And Doug Shaftoe did get his
fifteen minutes of fame by throwing him off a ski lift in, I believe, 1979. But all of that Vietnam nonsense was just a coda to his real career.”

“Which was?”

“Earl Comstock, to whom your grandfather reported in Brisbane during World War II, was one of the founders of the NSA. And he was my boss from 1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa.”

“Why?”

“He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it, we could then exploit that break to get into some later Soviet codes that were giving us difficulty. Which was ridiculous. But he believed it—or claimed to—and so we battered our heads against Arethusa for years. Strong men had nervous breakdowns. Brilliant men concluded that they were stupid. In the end it turned out to be a joke.”

“A joke? What do you mean by that?”

“We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it—wrote new volumes of the
Cryptonomicon
. The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got anything that was worth a damn.

“After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who was especially cocky we’d put him on the Arethusa project just to give him the message that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in—the smartest kid we had seen yet—and he broke it.”

“Well, I assume you didn’t place this phone call just to keep me in suspense,” Randy says. “What did he find?”

“He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a Riemann zeta function, which has many uses—one being that it is used in some cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock’s career.”

“Why?”

“Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string—the seed for the random number generator—was the boss’s name. C-O-M-S-T-O-C-K.”

“You’re kidding.”

“We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed—and believe me, he really was that kind of guy—or else someone had played an enormous practical joke on him.”

“Which do you think it was?”

“Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end it didn’t matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty-six. A classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance and any number of high-powered connections. He went more or less straight to Kennedy’s National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history.”

“Wow!” Randy says, kind of awed. “What a jerk!”

“No kidding,” says Pontifex. “And now, his son—well, don’t get me started on his son.”

As Pontifex’s voice trails off, Randy asks, “So, you are calling me now for what purpose?”

Pontifex doesn’t answer for a few moments, as if he’s wrestling with the question himself. But Randy doubts that’s the case.
Someone is trying to send you a message.
“I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and buried.”

“But why should you care?”

“You’ve already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents,” Pontifex says. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

“So, it’s pity, then.”

“Furthermore—as I said—it is my friend’s job to keep you under surveillance. He’s going to hear almost every word you say for the next few months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just let it go.”

“Well, thanks for the tip.”

“You’re welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?”

“That’s what Pontifex is supposed to do.”

“First a disclaimer: I’ve been out of circulation for a while. Have not picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments.”

“Okay, I am bracing myself.”

“My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your clients—some of them, anyway—are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote.”

“So you’re talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?”

“Yes, I am, but I’m also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.”

“Well, we provide state-of-the-art cryptographic services to all of our clients—even the ones with bones in their noses.”

“Excellent! And now—as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note—I must say good-bye.”

Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.

“Who the fuck are you?” Doug Shaftoe says, “I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal.”

“I have a funny story to tell you,” Randy says, “about a guy you ran into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait.”

B
ARE-CHESTED, CAMOUFLAGE-PAINTED, TRENCH
knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck in the waistband of his khaki trousers, Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of mist through the jungle. He stops when he can get a clear view of the Nip Army truck, framed between the hairy, cluttered trunks of a couple of date palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He ignores them.

It has all the earmarks of a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb out of the truck and confer for a few moments. One of them wades into the jungle. The other leans against the truck’s fender and lights up a cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the light of the sunset behind him. The one in the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to take a shit.

At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast between the brightness of the sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them nearly blind. The shitter is helpless, and the smoker looks exhausted. Bobby Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the jungle onto the road behind the truck, strides forward on ant-bitten feet, crouches behind the truck’s bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without taking his eyes off the smoker’s feet—visible beneath the truck’s chassis—he peels away the backing and slaps the payload onto the truck’s tailgate. Then, just to rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!

Moments later, he’s back in the jungle, watching as the Nip truck drives away, now sporting two red, white, and
blue stickers reading:
I SHALL RETURN!
Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.

Long after dark, he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up on the volcano. He works his way in through the booby-trapped perimeter and makes plenty of noise as he approaches, so that the Huk sentries won’t shoot at him in the darkness. But he needn’t have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio: MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.

Bobby Shaftoe’s response is to boil up some powerful coffee and begin pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic, Shaftoe grabs a message pad and the stub of a pencil, and writes out his idea for the seventh time:
OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO CONTACT AND SUPPLY FIL-AMERICAN ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION STOP I VOLUNTEER FOR SAME STOP AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE
.

He gets Pedro to encrypt it and send it off. After that, all he can do is wait and pray. This shit with the stickers has to stop.

He has been tempted, a thousand times, to desert, and to go into Concepcion himself. But just because he’s out in the boondocks with a band of Huk irregulars doesn’t mean he’s beyond the reach of military discipline. Deserters can still get shot or hanged, and despite the fact that he was one in Sweden, Bobby Shaftoe believes that they deserve to be.

Concepcion is down in the lowlands north of Manila. From the high places of the Zambales Mountains you can actually see the town lying amid the green rice paddies. Those lowlands are still totally Nip-controlled. But when the General lands, he’s probably going to land north of here at Lingayen Gulf, just like the Nips did when they invaded in ’41, and then Concepcion is going to lie right in the middle of his route to Manila. He’s going to need eyes there.

Sure enough, the order comes through a couple of days later:
RENDEZVOUS TARPON POINT GREEN 5 NOVEMBER STOP CONVEY TRANSMITTER CONCEPCION STOP AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS STOP
.

Tarpon is the submarine that has been bringing them ammunition, medical supplies,
I SHALL RETURN
stickers, cartons of American cigarettes with
I SHALL RETURN
inserts in each pack,
I SHALL RETURN
matchbooks,
I SHALL RETURN
coasters, and
I SHALL RETURN
condoms. Shaftoe has been stockpiling the condoms because he knows they won’t go over well in a Catholic country. He figures that when he finds Glory he’ll go through a long ton of condoms in about a week.

Three days later, he and a squad of Huks are on hand to meet Tarpon at “Point Green,” which is their code name for a tiny cove on the west coast of Luzon, down beneath Mount Pinatubo, not all that far north of Subic Bay. The submarine glides in at around midnight, running on its electric motors so it won’t make any sound, and the Huks pull up alongside in rubber boats and outrigger canoes and unload the cargo. Sure enough, the transmitter’s there. And this time there’s none of those goddamn stickers or matchbooks. The cargo is ammunition and a few fighting men: some Fil-American commandoes fresh from a debriefing with MacArthur’s intelligence chief, and a couple of Americans—MacArthur’s advance scouts.

Over the next several days, Shaftoe and a few hand-picked Huks carry the transmitter up one slope of the Zambales Mountains and down the other. They stop when the foothills finally give way to low-lying paddy land. The main north-south road, from Manila up towards Lingayen Gulf, lies directly across their path.

After a few days of scrambling and scrounging, they are able to load the transmitter on board a farm cart and bury it in manure. They harness the cart to a pathetic carabao, loaned by a loyal but poor farmer, and set out across Nip country, headed for Concepcion.

At this point they have to split up, though, because there’s no way that blue-eyed Shaftoe can travel in the open. Two Huks, pretending to be farmboys, take the manure cart while Shaftoe begins making his way cross-country, traveling at night, sleeping in ditches or in the homes of trusted American sympathizers.

It takes him a week and a half to cover the fifty kilometers, but in time, with patience and perseverance, he reaches
the town of Concepcion, and knocks on the door of their local contact around midnight. The contact is a prominent local citizen—the manager of the town’s only bank. Mr. Calagua is astonished to see an American standing at his back door. This tells Shaftoe that something must have gone wrong—the boys with the transmitter should have arrived a week ago. But the manager tells him that no one has shown up—though rumor has it that the Nips recently caught some boys trying to smuggle contraband in a farm cart and executed them on the spot.

So Shaftoe is marooned in Concepcion with no way to get orders or to send messages. He feels bad for the boys who died, but in a way, this isn’t such a bad situation for him. The only reason he wanted to be in Concepcion is that the Altamira family comes from here. Half of the local farmers are related to Glory in some way.

Shaftoe breaks into the Calaguas’ stables and improvises a bed. They would put him up in a spare bedroom if he asked, but he tells them that the stables are safer—if he gets caught, the Calaguas can at least claim ignorance. He recuperates on a pile of straw for a day or two, then starts trying to learn something about the Altamiras. He can’t go out nosing around by himself, but the Calaguas know everyone in town, and they have a good sense of who can be trusted. So inquiries go out, and within a couple of days, information has come back in.

Mr. Calagua explains it to him over glasses of bourbon in his study. Wracked by guilt over the fact that his honored guest is sleeping on a pile of hay in an outbuilding, he pushes bourbon at him all the time, which is fine with Bobby Shaftoe.

“Some of the information is reliable, some is—er—farfetched,” Mr. Calagua says. “Here is the reliable part. First of all, your guess was correct. When the Japanese took over Manila, many members of the Altamira family came back to this area to stay with relatives. They believed it would be safer.”

“Are you telling me Glory is up here?”

“No,” Mr. Calagua says sadly, “she is not up here. But she was definitely here on September 13th, 1942.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she gave birth to a baby boy on that day—the birth certificate is on file at the town hall. Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe.”

“Well, I’ll be fucked sideways,” Shaftoe says. He starts calculating dates in his head.

“Many of the Altamiras who fled here have since gone back to the city—supposedly to obtain work. But some of them are also serving as eyes and ears for the resistance.”

“I knew they would do the right thing,” Shaftoe says.

Mr. Calagua smiles cautiously. “Manila is full of people who claim to be the eyes and ears of the resistance. It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet. But some of the Altamiras are fighting, too—they have gone into the mountains to join the Huks.”

“Which mountains? I didn’t run across any of them up in the Zambales.”

“South of Manila and Laguna de Bay are many volcanoes and heavy jungle. This is where some of Glory’s family are fighting.”

“Is that where Glory is? And the baby? Or are they in the city?”

Mr. Calagua is nervous. “This is the part that may be far-fetched. It is said that Glory is a famous heroine of the fight against the Nips.”

“Are you telling me she’s dead? If she’s dead, just tell me.”

“No, I have no information that she is dead. But she is a heroine. This is for certain.”

The next day, Bobby Shaftoe’s malaria comes back and keeps him laid up for about a week. The Calaguas move him right into their house and bring in the town doctor to look after him. It’s the same doctor who delivered Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe two years ago.

When he’s feeling a little stronger, he lights out for the south. It takes him three weeks to reach the northern outskirts of Manila, hitching rides on trains and trucks, or sloshing through paddies in the middle of the night. He kills two Nipponese soldiers stealthily, and three of them in a firefight at an intersection. Each time, he has to go to
ground for a few days to avoid capture. But get to Manila he does.

He can’t go into the heart of the city—in addition to being really stupid, it would just slow him down. Instead he skirts it, taking advantage of the thriving resistance network. He is passed from one barangay to the next, all the way around the outskirts of Manila, until he has reached the coastal plain between Laguna de Bay and Manila Bay. At this point nothing is left to the south except for a few miles of rice paddies and then the volcanic mountains where Altamiras are making names for themselves as guerilla fighters. During his trip he has heard a thousand rumors about them. Most of them are patently false—people telling him what he obviously wants to hear. But several times he has heard what sounds like a genuine scrap of information about Glory.

They say that she has a healthy young son, living in the apartment in the Malate neighborhood of Manila, being cared for by the extended family while his mother serves in the war.

They say that she has put her nursing skills to work, acting as a sort of Florence Nightingale for the Huks.

They say that she is a messenger for the Fil-American forces, that no one surpasses her daring in crossing through Nipponese checkpoints carrying secret messages and other contraband.

The last part doesn’t make much sense to Shaftoe. Which is she, a nurse or a messenger? Maybe they have her confused with someone else. Or maybe she’s both—maybe she’s smuggling medicine through the checkpoints.

The farther south he gets, the more information he hears. The same rumors and anecdotes pop up over and over again, differing only in their small details. He runs into half a dozen people who are dead certain that Glory is south of here, working as a messenger for a brigade of Huk guerillas in the mountains above Calamba.

He spends Christmas Day in a fisherman’s hut on the shores of the big lake, Laguna de Bay. There are plenty of mosquitoes. Another bout of malaria strikes him then; he
spends a couple of weeks wracked with fever dreams, having bizarre nightmares about Glory.

Finally he gets well enough to move again, and hitches a boat ride into the lakeside town of Calamba. The black volcanoes that loom above it are a welcome sight. They look nice and cool, and they remind him of the ancestral Shaftoe territory. According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way—away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory. His journey’s almost over.

But he gets stuck in Calamba, forced to hide in a boathouse, when the city’s Nipponese Air Force troops begin gathering their forces for some kind of a move. Those Huks up on the mountain have been giving them a hard time, and the Nips are getting crazed and vicious.

The leader of the local Huks finally sends an emissary to get Shaftoe’s story. The emissary goes away and several days pass. Finally a Fil-American lieutenant returns bearing two pieces of good news: the Americans have landed in force at Lingayen Gulf, and Glory is alive and working with the Huks only a few miles away.

“Help me get out of this town,” Shaftoe pleads. “Take me out in a boat on the lake, drop me off in the countryside, then I can move.”

“Move where?” says the lieutenant, playing stupid.

“To the high ground! To join those Huks!”

“You would be killed. The ground is booby-trapped. The Huks are extremely vigilant.”

“But—”

“Why don’t you go the other way?” the lieutenant asks. “Go to Manila.”

“Why would I want to go there?”