Decoded (16 page)

To tell the truth, to begin with the people of Unit 701, then based in a mountain valley outside the suburbs of a certain city in China, did not realize quite what a great future Rong Jinzhen had ahead of him. Or at least you could say that they were not impressed by his work. He was engaged in lonely and difficult work – decrypting ciphers, for which in addition to training, experience and genius, you need a luck that comes from far beyond the stars. People in Unit 701 said it was perfectly possible to catch that luck that comes from far beyond the stars, but it requires that you raise your hands up high every morning and every evening at exactly the same time as black smoke comes curling out of your ancestors’ tombs.

When he first arrived, Rong Jinzhen did not understand this; or perhaps he simply did not care. But he spent the whole day reading a bunch of books that had nothing to do with anything – for example he would often have his nose in an English-language copy of the
Complete Book of Mathematical Puzzles
or a bunch of tatty old books stitched together with thread, their titles invisible. He seemed to fritter away each and every day in complete silence. He was obviously solitary (not snobbish or arrogant), but he did not say anything suggestive of particularly remarkable intelligence (in fact, he said very little to anyone), and he did not show signs of either great genius or great creative powers. People really did start to question his abilities and his luck. What was worse, no one was in any doubt as to his lack of interest in the work – as mentioned above, he was usually to be seen with his nose in a book totally unrelated to what he was supposed to be doing.

That was just the beginning. That was the first sign that he wasn’t working hard at his job, and the second was not far behind. One afternoon, Rong Jinzhen left the dining hall after lunch and, as was his wont, took a book and went for a walk in the woods. He didn’t have a siesta in the afternoons but he also didn’t do overtime – any spare time he had was usually spent reading in a quiet, out-of-the-way corner.

The north wing of the complex had been constructed on the mountain slopes. There were patches of natural woodland throughout the complex and he often went to one particular stretch of pine woods which was most conveniently located right by the main entrance to the caves where he worked. Apart from that, his other reason for selecting this particular woodland as his favourite walk was that he liked the particular piny smell of the trees, somewhat like medicated soap. Some people don’t like that resinous smell, but he enjoyed it. His love of this smell seemed closely related to his tobacco addiction, since after he took up walking regularly through the woods, he smoked a lot less.

That day, just as he walked into the wood, he heard the crunching sound of someone approaching. It was a man of about fifty. He seemed very modest and unassuming as he asked if he could play elephant chess, a sincere and ingratiating smile spreading across his face. Rong Jinzhen nodded his head and the other man happily whipped out a set and asked if he would like to play a game. Rong Jinzhen didn’t want to play – he wanted to read his book – but he felt bad saying so to the man’s face; it would have been rude to refuse, so he nodded again. Although it was now many years since he had last played, he had some experience of this game gained against Jan Liseiwicz – most people would not be able to beat him. This man wasn’t most people – the two men quickly realized that the other was a fine player in his own right and it would be very difficult for either of them to defeat the other. After that, the man often came to find him to play chess. He would come in the afternoon, he would come in the evening – sometimes he would even have the chess set waiting by the entrance to the cave or the door of the dining hall, to be sure of catching him when he went past. It was almost as if he was being stalked. This ensured that everyone knew he was playing chess with the lunatic.

Everyone in Unit 701 knew about the lunatic who liked to play chess. Before the Liberation, he had been an honours student at the mathematics department of Sun Yat-sen University, then after graduation he had been specially recruited by the KMT military and sent to Indo-China to work in their cryptography unit there. He had succeeded in cracking a high-level Japanese military cipher, making him famous in the world of cryptography. Later on, unhappy at Chiang Kai-shek’s decision to take the country into a second civil war, he managed to leave the military secretly and went to work as a foreman in a Shanghai electricity company under a different name. After the Liberation, Unit 701 went to a lot of trouble to find out what had happened to him; they invited him to come back. He had managed to crack a number of mid-level American ciphers, making him by far the most successful cryptographer they had. Two years ago, he had unfortunately developed schizophrenia – overnight he turned from a hero that everyone admired into a lunatic that they were all afraid of. If he saw someone he would curse at them, yelling and screaming; sometimes he would even hit people. Apparently this kind of acute schizophrenia, particularly when it is accompanied by a violent reaction on the part of the patient (what is commonly called paranoid schizophrenia), has a comparatively high rate of successful treatment. But because he knew too many important secrets, nobody dared to be the one that signed the order to send him to hospital. Instead, he was treated at the clinic attached to Unit 701. The doctors there were surgeons; they were quickly instructed in a handful of therapeutic methods by experts brought in from outside, and the whole thing did not go at all well. They managed to get him calmed down, but it all went far too far – other than his obsession with playing chess, he did not seem to think about anything else at all. In fact, he could not think about anything else. He had gone from being a paranoid schizophrenic to being a catatonic schizophrenic.

In actual fact, he did not know how to play elephant chess until he got sick, but by the time he left hospital he had become a very fine player. He had learned the game from one of the doctors. According to what the experts said later on, the whole problem developed as a result of the fact that the doctor taught him to play elephant chess at too early a stage in his recovery. As the expert said, when someone is starving, you can’t give them a full meal straight away. In this kind of case, when the patient begins his recovery you do not want him to concentrate his intelligence upon one object – if that happens, it may well be the case that later he finds it impossible to detach his concentration from that object. Of course, there is no reason why a surgeon should know anything about the treatment of psychological problems; what is more he was a fan of elephant chess and often played the game with his patients. One day, when he realized that the schizophrenic seemed to be able to understand the movements of the pieces on the board, he thought that this was a sign that he was beginning to recover, so he started playing the game with him too. He thought that this was consolidating the man’s recovery, but in fact it all ended in disaster; he turned a great cryptographer, who might well have made a full recovery from his breakdown, into a chessplaying lunatic.

In a nutshell, this was a failure of medical care at Unit 701, but what choice did they have? As it is, people have to muddle through life – if things go well it is because you are lucky; if things go badly who are you going to blame? You can’t blame anyone. If you want to find something to blame here, then blame the wretched man’s job; blame the fact that he knew too many secrets. It was the fact that he knew so much top-secret information that decreed that he would spend the rest of his life confined in this mountain valley, crippled in mind. People said that when he played elephant chess, you could still see how clever he must have been before he got so sick, but the rest of the time his IQ was about the same level as that of a dog. If you shouted at him he would run away; if you smiled at him he would obediently obey your commands. Because he had nothing to do, he would wander around inside Unit 701 all day every day, like a poor little lost soul.

Rong Jinzhen didn’t try and make him go away, like other people did.

It was very easy to get him to leave you alone: all you had to do was shout at him sternly a couple of times. Rong Jinzhen did not do that; he didn’t avoid him, he didn’t shout at him, he didn’t even glare at him. He treated him just the same as he treated everyone else – neither warm nor cold; quite simply as if he really didn’t care. Because of this the lunatic kept on coming to find him, he wouldn’t leave him alone; he wanted him to play another game of chess.

Another game of chess!

And another game of chess!

People were not sure if Rong Jinzhen felt sorry for the lunatic and that is why they played chess together, or whether it was because he admired the other man’s skill. Which it was did not really matter – the point is that a cryptographer does not have time to play chess. The fact is that the lunatic got that way in the first place because he became too obsessed with his ciphers – they drove him mad in the same way that a balloon that you carry on pumping air into will eventually explode. When people saw Rong Jinzhen wasting time playing chess when he should have been concentrating on his cryptography, they decided that either he really didn’t want to do this kind of work, or he was another lunatic, who imagined that he would decrypt all the ciphers in the world by moving his pieces across the board.

Was it that he didn’t want to do the work, or that he couldn’t? Very soon, they would get what seemed to be cast-iron proof that Rong Jinzhen was in the former category. It came in the form of a letter from Jan Liseiwicz.

Seven years earlier, when Professor Jan Liseiwicz scooped up his family and relatives by marriage and took them to X country to live, he certainly had no idea that one day he would have to bring these bloody people back again. The fact is, he had no choice: bargaining his way out was not an option. Originally, his mother-in-law had been a very healthy woman, but thanks to her transplantation to an entirely alien country and an ever-growing homesickness, her health was quickly undermined. When she realized that she might very well be facing the prospect of dying far from home, she demanded with as much force as ever an old Chinese person did to go home to die.

Where was home?

In China!

Half the guns in X country were trained against China! As you will have gathered, it was not going to be easy to satisfy his mother-in-law’s demands. In fact, it was so difficult that Jan Liseiwicz simply refused to even consider the idea. However, his father-in-law revealed a thuggish streak in his character – belied by his family’s respectable reputation – by putting a knife against his neck and threatening to commit suicide. It was at that moment that Liseiwicz realized that he was caught in a horrible trap; he had no choice but to obey the old brute’s demands. It was also perfectly clear that the reason his father-in-law proceeded to this extreme – where he was prepared to risk his own life – was because his wife’s demands now were exactly the same as those he was planning to make one day. The knife that he put to his neck was there to tell his son-in-law that if it turned out that survival meant that he was doomed to die abroad, he would rather kill himself immediately so he could be buried with his wife back in China!

To tell the truth, Jan Liseiwicz found it very difficult to understand this old Chinese gentleman’s strange determination, but the fact that he did not understand did not matter in the least. When the knife was at the neck and a scene of carnage looked likely to unfold at any moment, what does it matter whether you understand or not? You have no choice but to do what he wants; if you don’t understand it you still have to do it; if you find it horrible you still have to do it; and what is more, you have to do it in person. Given the constant barrage of exaggerated propaganda that they were all living under, his family (including his wife) were very worried that he would not be able to come back alive. Nevertheless, that spring Jan Liseiwicz took his failing mother-in-law back to her old home town by plane, train, and finally by car.

The story goes that when his old mother-in-law was lifted into the car that had been hired to take her to her home town, she opened her eyes wide when she heard the driver speak in familiar accents, then she peacefully closed her eyes forever. What does it mean when they say that a life is hanging by a thread? That is a life hanging by a thread. The voice of the driver speaking in the dialect of her home town was like a knife. The knife descended and the thread that was her life blew away in the wind.

On his journey, Jan Liseiwicz had to travel through C City. That did not mean that he was able to visit N University. He was under strict restrictions the whole way – I do not know if these restrictions were imposed by the Chinese or by X country, but either way he was followed everywhere by two minders: one was Chinese and the other came from X country. The trio seemed to be roped together – they dragged him along between them. Where he went and how fast he got there was entirely up to them – it was as if he were a robot, or perhaps some kind of national treasure. The fact is that he was only a mathematician, or at least that is what it said in his passport. These conditions were, to hear Master Rong tell it, imposed by the historical circumstances . . .

You know what the relationship between our country and X was like in those days: there was no good faith to speak of – we were enemies. The slightest movement on either side was treated as evidence of aggressive intent. I could never have imagined that Jan Liseiwicz would be able to come back, let alone that he would arrive at C City only to discover that he would not be allowed anywhere near N University. That meant that I had to go and see him at his hotel. When we met, I might as well have been visiting a criminal in his prison cell – the two of us were sitting there talking and we each had two further people, one on either side of us, listening and making a recording of everything we said – each sentence had to be enunciated clearly so that all four of them could hear. Thank goodness all four of them were completely bilingual or it would have been impossible for us to so much as open our mouths – we would immediately have been condemned as spies or secret agents; anything we said would have been taken as intelligence. It was a very special time – in those days when Chinese people met anyone from X country they were not treated as other human beings: they were devils, our most hated enemies – the least little thing could be evidence of evil intent, shooting out venom, sending the other to their deaths.

In actual fact, Jan Liseiwicz didn’t want to see me, but Zhendi. As you know, by that time Zhendi had left N University to go who knows where. I couldn’t see him, let alone Professor Liseiwicz. When he found this out, Liseiwicz decided that he wanted to see me; I had no doubt that this was because he was hoping to get information about what had happened to Zhendi. When I had received permission from my guards, I told him what I could about what had happened to Zhendi. It was very simple and obvious: he had stopped working on artificial intelligence and had gone on to do something else. I was surprised by Liseiwicz’s reaction to my words – he looked completely horrified. To begin with he clearly couldn’t think of anything to say, then after a long silence he spat out one word: ‘Appalling!’ He was so angry that his face went bright red; he simply could not sit still in his seat. He started pacing up and down the room, going on and on about how remarkable the results of Zhendi’s research into artificial intelligence had been and how he would achieve even greater breakthroughs if he were allowed to continue.

He said, ‘I have seen a couple of the papers that he co-authored. I can tell you that in this field, they are already achieving internationalstandard research. To give the whole thing up midway . . . how dreadful!’

‘Sometimes things don’t work out the way that one might wish . . . ‘ ‘Was Jinzhen recruited by a government unit?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘To do what?’

‘I don’t know.’

He kept on asking, and I kept on saying that I didn’t know. In the

I just repeated what I had already said: ‘I don’t know.’ It was true – I didn’t know.

The fact is that even today I don’t know what unit Zhendi was working for, where he was, or what he was doing. Maybe you know, but I am not expecting you to tell me. To my mind, that is Zhendi’s secret, but above and beyond that, it is our country’s secret. Every country, every army has its own secrets: secret organizations, secret weapons, secret agents, secret . . . too many to name. How could a country survive without its secrets? Maybe it couldn’t. Like an iceberg, if it didn’t have the part that is hidden under the water, how would it be able to survive?

Sometimes I think that it is very unfair to ask someone to keep something secret from his own closest relatives for decades – or maybe even for his whole lifetime. But if it were not like that, maybe your country wouldn’t survive, or at the very least would be in serious danger. That would also be unfair. The one seems to me to outweigh the other. I have thought this way for many years. It is only by thinking in this way that I feel I can understand the decisions that Zhendi made. Otherwise, my life with Zhendi would seem to have been a dream, a daydream, a waking dream, a dream within a dream, a long and strange dream that even he, who was so good at interpreting what other people saw in the still watches of the night, would have difficulty in understanding . . .

[The end]

During his meeting with Master Rong, Jan Liseiwicz repeated over and over again that she should tell Zhendi that if it were at all possible he should ignore all other temptations and come back to continue his work on artificial intelligence. After they said goodbye, Liseiwicz watched Master Rong walking away. Suddenly he decided to write to Jinzhen himself. He realized that he had no way of getting in touch with Jinzhen, so he shouted to Master Rong and asked for his address. Master Rong asked her companion whether she could tell him or not, and the latter indicated that she could, so she told him what it was. That evening, Liseiwicz wrote a short letter to Jinzhen. Having showed it first to his own guard and then to the Chinese one and received permission from both of them to send it, he dropped it in the letter-box.

The letter arrived at Unit 701 according to the normal route. As to whether Jinzhen would be allowed to read it or not, that would depend entirely upon the contents. Given that this was a top-secret unit, the Party inspected even personal mail – that was just one of the many ways in which this unit was special. Anyway, when the people in the surveillance team opened Liseiwicz’s letter, they were initially completely baffled because the letter was written in English. That was quite enough to put them on guard and make them take this missive very seriously. It was immediately reported to the head of the team, who demanded a translation from the relevant authorities.

The original text covered an entire sheet of paper but when it was translated into Chinese, it worked out as just a couple of lines. The text ran as follows:

Dear Jinzhen,

I have returned to China at my mother-in-law’s behest and so at the moment I am staying at the provincial capital. I have been told that you have left the university and are now engaged in some other kind of work. I don’t know what it is that you are doing, but from the level of secrecy surrounding it (including the address that I have been given) I am sure that you are engaged in important work for some top-secret unit, just as I was some twenty years ago. Out of sympathy and love for my people, I made a terrible mistake twenty years ago and accepted a mission entrusted to me by a particular country [given that Liseiwicz was Jewish, this must probably refer to the state of Israel]. That mission can be said to have ruined my life. Given my own experience and my knowledge of you, I am very worried about your present situation. Your intelligence is extremely acute, but it is also fragile; it would be disastrous for you to be placed in circumstances where you are subject to external pressure and control. You have already achieved deeply impressive results in your researches into artificial intelligence; if you carry on, I am sure that great fame and glory awaits you! You should not let yourself be diverted into another path. If at all possible, I hope that you will listen to my advice and go back to your original work!

Jan Liseiwicz

13 March 1957

The Friendship Hotel at the provincial capital

It was very clear that the contents of this letter were related to the way in which Rong Jinzhen had reacted to being recruited for Unit 701. Right then, people (at least the relevant project directors) had no difficulty at all in understanding why Rong Jinzhen seemed to be so work-shy; there was someone telling him to go back to his original field. The foreign professor, Jan Liseiwicz!