Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  As Sergeant Robert Shaftoe lies there with his face pressed against that chilly grid, taking a few deep breaths and trying to regain his nerve, a big wave rocks the boat back so hard that he’s afraid he’s going to fall backwards and plummet all the way to the submerged bow. The swill in the battery hold rolls downhill, gathering power and velocity as it falls, and batters the forward bulkhead of the hold with terrifying power; he can hear rivets giving way under the impact. As this happens, most of the battery hold is exposed to the beam of Bobby Shaftoe’s flashlight, all the way down to the bottom. And that is when he sees the splintered crates down there—very small crates, such as might be used to contain very heavy supplies. They have been busted open. Through the gaps in the wreckage, Shaftoe can see yellow bricks, once neatly stacked, now scattered. They look exactly like he would imagine gold bars. The only thing wrong with that theory is that there are way too many of them down there for them to be gold bars. It is like when he turned over rotten logs in Wisconsin and found thousands of identical insect eggs sown on the dark earth, glowing with promise.

  For a moment, he’s tempted. The amount of money down there is beyond calculation. If he could get his hands on just one of those bars—

  The explosives must have detonated, because Bobby Shaftoe has just gone deaf. That’s his cue to get the fuck out of here. He forgets about the gold—morphine’s good enough plunder for one day. He half scrambles and half climbs up the grid, up the passageway, up the skipper’s cabin, smoke pouring out of its hatch, its bulkheads now weirdly ballooned by the blast wave.

  The safe has broken loose! And the cable that he and Harvey attached to it, though it’s damaged, is still intact. Someone must be hauling away on it up abovedecks because it is stubbornly and annoying taut. Right now the safe is caught up on jagged obstructions. Shaftoe has to pry it loose. The safe jerks onward and upward, drawn by the taut cable, until it gets caught in something else. Shaftoe follows the safe out of the cabin, up the passageway, up the conning tower ladder, and finally levers himself up out of the submarine and into the teeth of the storm, to a hearty cheer from the waiting sailors.

  No more than five minutes later, the U-boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines it tumbling end-over-end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black water like fairy dust. Shaftoe’s back on the corvette and everyone is pounding him on the back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up that purple bottle.

  SUIT

  * * *

  RANDY’S POSTURE IS RIGHTEOUS AND ALERT: IT IS ALL because of his suit.

  It is trite to observe that hackers don’t like fancy clothes. Avi has learned that good clothes can actually be comfortable—the slacks that go with a business suit, for example, are really much more comfortable than blue jeans. And he has spent enough time with hackers to obtain the insight that it is not wearing suits that they object to, so much as getting them on. Which includes not only the donning process per se but also picking them out, maintaining them, and worrying whether they are still in style—this last being especially difficult for men who wear suits once every five years.

  So it’s like this: Avi has a spreadsheet on one of his computers, listing the necks, inseams, and other vital measurements of every man in his employ. A couple of weeks before an important meeting, he will simply fax it to his tailor in Shanghai. Then, in a classic demonstration of the Asian just-in-time delivery system as pioneered by Toyota, the suits will arrive via Federal Express, twenty-four hours ahead of time so that they can be automatically piped to the hotel’s laundry room. This morning, just as Randy emerged from the shower, he heard a knock at his door, and swung it open to reveal a valet carrying a freshly cleaned and pressed business suit, complete with shirt and tie. He put it all on (a tenth-generation photocopy of a bad diagram of the half-Windsor knot was thoughtfully provided). It fit perfectly. Now he stands in a lobby of the Foote Mansion, watching electric numbers above an elevator count down, occasionally sneaking a glance at himself in a big mirror. Randy’s head protruding from a suit is a sight gag that will be good for grins at least through lunchtime.

  He is pondering the morning’s e-mail.

  To: dwarf@siblings.net

  From: root@eruditorum.org

  Subject: Re: Why?

  Dear Randy,

  I hope you don’t mind if I address you as Randy, since it’s quite obvious that you are you, despite your use of an anonymous front. This is a good idea, by the way. I applaud your prudence.

  Concerning the possibility that I am “an old enemy” of yours, I’m dismayed that one so young can already have old enemies. Or perhaps you are referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years? Several candidates come to mind. But I suspect you are referring to Andrew Loeb. I am not he. This would be obvious to you if you had visited his website recently.

  Why are you building the Crypt?

  Signed,

  —BEGIN ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK—

  (etc., etc.)

  —END ORDO SIGNATURE BLOCK—

  It is not at all interesting to watch the numbers over the elevators and try to predict which one will arrive first, but it is more interesting than just standing there. One of them has been stuck on the floor above Randy’s for at least a minute; he can hear it buzzing angrily. In Asia many businessmen—especially some of the overseas Chinese—would think nothing of commandeering one of the hotel’s elevators around the clock for their own personal use, stationing minions in it, in eight-hour shifts, to hold their thumbs on the DOOR OPEN button, ignoring its self-righteous alarm buzzer.

  Ding. Randy spins around on the balls of his feet (just try that little maneuver in a pair of sneakers!). Once again he has backed the wrong horse: the winner is an elevator that was on the very top floor of the hotel last time he scanned it. This is an elevator with purpose, a fast-track lift. He walks towards the green light. The doors part. Randy stares squarely into the face of Dr. Hubert (the Dentist) Kepler, D.D.S.

  Or perhaps you are referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years?

  “Good morning, Mr. Waterhouse! When you stand with your mouth open like that, you remind me of one of my patients.”

  “Good morning, Dr. Kepler.” Randy hears his words from the other end of a mile-long bumwad tube, and immediately reviews them in his own mind to make sure he has not revealed any proprietary corporate information or given Dr. Kepler any reason to file a lawsuit.

  The doors start to close and Randy has to whack them open with his laptop case.

  “Careful! That’s an expensive piece of equipment, I’d wager,” says the Dentist.

  Randy is about to say I go through laptops like a transvestite goes through nylons though maybe like a high-speed drill through a necrotic molar would be more thematically apropos, but instead he clams up and says nothing at all, finding himself in dangerous territory: he is carrying proprietary AVCLA information on this thing, and if the Dentist gets the impression that Randy’s being cavalier with it, he might spew out a barrage of torts, like Linda Blair and the pea soup.

  “It’s, uh, a pleasant surprise to see you in Kinakuta,” Randy stammers.

  Dr. Kepler wears eyeglasses the size of a 1959 Cadillac’s windshield. They are special dentist eyeglasses, as polished as the Palomar mirror, coated with ultrareflective material so that you can always see the reflection of your own yawning maw in them, impaled on a shaft of hot light. The Dentist’s own eyes merely haunt the background, like a childhood memory. They are squinty grey-blue eyes, turned down at the edges as if he is tired of the world, with Stygian pupils. A trace of a smile always seems to be playing around his withered lips. It is the smile of a man who is worrying about how to meet his next malpractice insurance payment while patiently maneuvering the point of his surgical-steel crowbar under the edge of your dead bicuspid, but who has read in a professional magazine that patients are more likely to come back, and less likely to sue you, if you s
mile at them. “Say,” he says, “I wonder if I could have a quick huddle with you sometime later.”

  Spit, please.

  Saved by the bell! They have reached the ground floor. The elevator doors open to reveal the endangered-marble lobby of the Foote Mansion. Bellhops, disguised as wedding cakes, glide to and fro as if mounted on casters. Not ten feet away is Avi, and with him are two beautiful suits from which protrude the heads of Eb and John. All three heads turn towards them. Seeing the Dentist, Eb and John adopt the facial expressions of B-movie actors whose characters have just taken small-caliber bullets to the center of the forehead. Avi, by contrast, stiffens up like a man who stepped on a rusty nail a week ago and has just felt the first stirrings of the tetanus infection that will eventually break his spine.

  “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us,” Randy says. “I guess my answer is yes, subject to availability.”

  “Good. I’ll hold you to it,” says Dr. Kepler, and steps out of the elevator. “Good morning, Mr. Halaby. Good morning, Dr. Föhr. Good morning, Mr. Cantrell. Nice to see you all looking so very much like gentlemen.”

  Nice to see you acting like one.

  “The pleasure is ours,” Avi says. “I take it we’ll be seeing you later?”

  “Oh, yes,” says the Dentist, “you’ll be seeing me all day.” This procedure will be a lengthy one, I’m afraid. He turns his back on them and walks across the lobby without further pleasantries. He is headed for a cluster of leather chairs nearly obscured by an explosion of bizarre tropical flowers. The occupants of those chairs are mostly young, and all smartly dressed. They snap to attention as their boss glides towards them. Randy counts three women and two men. One of the men is obviously a gorilla, but the women—inevitably referred to as Fates, Furies, Graces, Norns, or Harpies—are rumored to have bodyguard training, and to carry weapons, too.

  “Who are those?” John Cantrell asks. “His hygienists?”

  “Don’t laugh,” Avi says. “Back when he was in practice, he got used to having a staff of women do the pick-and-floss work for him. It shaped his paradigm.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Randy asks.

  “You know how it works,” Avi says. “When you go to the dentist, you never actually see the dentist, right? Someone else makes the appointment. Then there’s always this elite coterie of highly efficient women who scrape the plaque out of the way, so that the dentist doesn’t have to deal with it, and take your X-rays. The dentist himself sits in the back somewhere and looks at the X-rays—he deals with you as this abstract greyscale image on a little piece of film. If he sees holes, he goes into action. If not, he comes in and exchanges small talk with you for a minute and then you go home.”

  “So, why is he here?” demands Eberhard Föhr.

  “Exactly!” Avi says. “When he walks into the room, you never know why he’s here—to drill a hole in your skull, or just talk about his vacation in Maui.”

  All eyes turn to Randy. “What went on in that elevator?”

  “I—nothing!” Randy blurts.

  “Did you discuss the Philippines project at all?”

  “He just said he wanted to talk to me about it.”

  “Well, shit.” Avi says. “That means we have to talk about it first.”

  “I know that,” Randy says, “so I told him that I might talk to him if I had a free moment.”

  “Well, we’d best make damn sure you have no free moments today,” Avi says. He thinks for a moment and continues, “Did he have a hand in his pocket at any time?”

  “Why? You expecting him to pull out a weapon?”

  “No,” Avi says, “but someone told me, once, that the Dentist is wired.”

  “You mean, like a police informant?” John asks incredulously.

  “Yeah,” Avi says, like it’s no big deal. “He makes a habit of carrying a tiny digital recorder the size of a matchbook around in his pocket. Perhaps with a wire running up inside his shirt to a tiny microphone somewhere. Perhaps not. Anyway, you never know when he’s recording you.”

  “Isn’t that illegal or something?” Randy asks.

  “I’m not a lawyer,” Avi says. “More to the point, I’m not a Kinakutan lawyer. But it wouldn’t matter in a civil suit—if he slapped us with a tort, he could introduce any kind of evidence he wanted.”

  They all look across the lobby. The Dentist is standing flatfooted on the marble, arms folded over his chest, chin pointed at the floor as he absorbs input from his aides.

  “He might have put his hand in his pocket. I don’t remember,” Randy says. “It doesn’t matter. We kept it extremely general. And brief.”

  “He could still subject the recording to a voice-stress analysis, to figure out if you were lying,” John points out. He relishes the sheer unbridled paranoia of this. He’s in his element.

  “Not to worry,” Randy says, “I jammed it.”

  “Jammed it? How?” Eb asks, not catching the irony in Randy’s voice. Eb looks surprised and interested. It is clear from the look on his face that Eb longs to get into a conversation about something arcane and technical.

  “I was joking,” Randy explains. “If the Dentist analyzes the recording, he’ll find nothing but stress in my voice.”

  Avi and John laugh sympathetically. But Eb is crestfallen. “Oh,” Eb says. “I was thinking that we could absolutely jam his device if we so wanted.”

  “A tape recorder doesn’t use radio,” John says. “How could we jam it?”

  “Van Eck phreaking,” Eb says.

  At this point, Tom Howard emerges from the cafe with a thoroughly ravished copy of the South China Morning Post under his arm, and Beryl emerges from an elevator, prepped for combat in a dress and makeup. The men avert their eyes shyly and pretend not to notice. Greetings and small talk ensue. Then Avi looks at his watch and says, “Let’s head over to the sultan’s palace,” as if he were proposing they go grab some french fries at Mickey Ds.

  CRACKER

  * * *

  WATERHOUSE HAS TO KEEP AN EYE ON THAT SAFE; Shaftoe is itching to blow it open with high explosives, and Chattan (who firmly overrules Shaftoe) intends to ship it back to London so that it can be opened by experts at the Broadway Buildings. Waterhouse only wants to have another crack at opening it himself, just to see if he can do it.

  Chattan’s position is the correct one. Detachment 2702 has a very clear and specialized mission which most certainly does not include opening safes from U-boats. For that matter, it does not include going onto abandoned U-boats to recover safes, or other crypto data, in the first place. The only reason they did that was because they happened to be the only people with Ultra clearance who were in the neighborhood, and U-553’s precarious position did not give Bletchley Park time to send out its own experts.

  But Waterhouse’s desire to open the safe himself has nothing to do with Detachment 2702’s mission, or his own personal duties, or even, particularly, with winning the war. It is something that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is driven to do. His is not to reason why. Even as he was reeling down that stretched line from U-553 to the torpedo boat, battered by waves and wind and rain, with a busted arm and a busted head, not knowing from one moment to the next whether he would make it back to the boat or plunge into the Atlantic, he was remembering the infinitesimal tremors picked up by the half-frozen neurons in his fingertips as he twiddled the safe’s submerged dial. Even as Enoch Root patched him up on board the boat, Waterhouse was constructing a crude mental model of how the safe’s tumblers might be constructed, visualizing the thing in his mind’s eye. And even as the rest of Detachment 2702 collapses into their cots and hammocks and sleeping bags around the chapel of Qwghlm Castle, the splinted and bandaged Waterhouse stalks the polished corridors of that building’s better corner, looking for a couple of used razor blades and a hunk of carbon.

  The razors he finds in a rubbish bin and the carbon he steals from the closet where Ghnxh keeps the galvanick lucipher. He brings them, plus a brick-sized crystal of h
ard glue and a blowtorch, back to the chapel, where everyone else is sleeping. Enlisted men are in the nave, as befits Marines who are basically a naval organization. Officers are in the transept: Chattan has the south arm of it all to himself, Waterhouse and Root and the SAS and USMC lieutenants have bunk beds in the north. A small moiety of Detachment 2702’s astounding tarp supply has, then, been hung up across the eastern end of the place, partitioning off the chancel, Holy of Holies, where once the Body and Blood of Christ were housed. Now it contains a Hallicrafters Model S-27 15-tube superheterodyne radio receiver using state-of-the-art acorn tubes in its front end, capable of tuning VHF from 27 to 143 Megahertz and of receiving AM, FM, and CW, and including a signal strength meter which would come in handy if they were really operating a huffduff station here, which they aren’t.

  The lights are burning behind those tarps and one of the Marines is snoring away in a chair in front of the altar. Waterhouse wakes him up and sends him to bed. The Marine is ashamed; he knows he was supposed to be awake, twiddling that antenna convincingly.

  The radio itself has hardly been used—they only turn it on when someone comes to visit who is not in on the Secret. It sits there on the altar, pristine, as if it had just come from the Hallicrafters factory in Chicago, Illinois. All of the altar’s fancy bits (if it ever had them) have long since succumbed to fire, rot, plunder, or the gnawing tusks of nest-building skerries. What remains is a rectangular monolith of basalt, featureless except for some marks from the tools that were used to quarry and shape it. It is a perfect foundation for tonight’s experiment.

  Waterhouse gets the safe up there at some cost to the disks and ligaments in his lower back. It is tubular in shape, like an excerpt of naval gun barrel. He stands it up on its back end so that its round door, with the round dial in the center, is staring up at the ceiling like a blind eye, the radial lines on the dial looking very much like the striations of an iris.