Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Annie-in-San-Francisco is their lawyer.

  “It’s, uh… seven P.M. there right now. Seems that just before the close of business, a courier walked into her office, fresh off the plane from LA, and handed her a letter from the Dentist’s office.”

  “He’s suing us for something,” Beryl says.

  “He’s this far away from suing us.”

  “For what!?” Tom Howard shouts.

  Avi sighs. “In a way, Tom, that is beside the point. When Kepler thinks it’s in his best interests to file a tactical lawsuit, he’ll find a pretext. We must never forget that this is not about legitimate legal issues, it is about tactics.”

  “Breach of contract, right?” Randy says.

  Everyone looks at Randy. “Do you know something we should know?” asks John Cantrell.

  “Just an educated guess,” Randy says, shaking his head. “Our contract with him states that we are to keep him informed of any changes in conditions that may materially alter the business climate.”

  “That’s an awfully vague clause,” Beryl says reproachfully.

  “I’m paraphrasing.”

  “Randy’s right,” Avi says. “The gist of this letter is that we should have told the Dentist what was going on in Kinakuta.”

  “But we did not know,” says Eb.

  “Doesn’t matter—remember, this is a tactical lawsuit.”

  “What does he want?”

  “To scare us,” Avi says. “To rattle us. Tomorrow or the next day, he’ll bring in a different lawyer to play good cop—to make us an offer.”

  “What kind of offer?” Tom asks.

  “We don’t know, of course,” Avi says, “but I’m guessing that Kepler wants a piece of us. He wants to own part of the company.”

  Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains his almost perpetual mask of cool control. “So it’s bad news, good news, bad news. Bad news number one: Anne’s phone call. Good news: because of what has happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our stock.”

  “What’s the second bit of bad news?” Randy asks.

  “It’s very simple.” Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to face them again. “This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough, now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile away. It attracts pythons.” Avi pauses for a moment. “Usually, the grace period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time—weeks or months—to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were perched virtually on top of the python. Now we’re not valuable any more.”

  “What do you mean?” Eb says. “We’re just as valuable as we were this morning.”

  “A small company that’s being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is most certainly not valuable. It probably has an enormous negative value. The only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away. See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom’s incredible performance yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the lawsuit.

  “So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it in a cave,” Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice regretfully. “And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a lesson to you: be like the Dentist. Make up your mind and act fast.”

  FUNKSPIEL

  * * *

  COLONEL CHATTAN’S AIDE SHAKES HIM AWAKE. THE first thing Waterhouse notices is that the guy is breathing fast and steady, the way Alan does when he comes in from a cross-country run. “Colonel Chattan requests your presence in the Mansion most urgently.”

  Waterhouse’s billet is in the vast, makeshift camp five minutes’ walk from Bletchley Park’s Mansion. Striding briskly whilst buttoning up his shirt, he covers the distance in four. Then, twenty feet from the goal, he is nearly run over by a pack of Rolls-Royces, gliding through the night as dark and silent as U-boats. One comes so close that he can feel the heat of its engine; its muggy exhaust blows through his trouser leg and condenses on his skin.

  The old farts from the Broadway Buildings climb out of those Rolls-Royces and precede Waterhouse into the Mansion. In the library, the men cluster obsequiously round a telephone, which rings frequently and, when picked up, makes distant, tinny, shouting noises that can be heard, but not understood, from across the room. Waterhouse estimates that the Rolls-Royces must have driven up from London at an average speed of about nine thousand miles per hour.

  Long tables are being looted from other rooms and chivvied into the library by glossy-haired young men in uniform, knocking flecks of paint off the doorframes. Waterhouse takes an arbitrary chair at an arbitrary table. Another aide wheels in a cart of wire baskets piled with file folders, still smoking from the friction of being jerked out of Bletchley Park’s infinite archives. If this were a proper meeting, mimeographs might have been made up ahead of time and individually served. But this is sheer panic, and Waterhouse knows instinctively that he’d better take advantage of his early arrival if he wants to know anything. So he goes over to the cart and grabs the folder on the bottom of the stack, guessing that they’d have pulled the most important one first. It is labeled: U-691.

  The first few pages are just a form: a U-boat data sheet consisting of many boxes. Half of them are empty. The other half have been filled in by different hands using different writing implements at different times, with many erasures and cross-outs and marginal notes written by bet-hedging analysts.

  Then there is a log containing everything U-691 is ever known to have done, in chronological order. The first entry is its launch, at Wilhelmshaven on September 19, 1940, followed by a long list of the ships it has murdered. There’s one odd notation from a few months ago: REFITTED WITH EXPERIMENTAL DEVICE (SCHNORKEL?). Since then, U-691 has been tearing up and down like mad, sinking ships in the Chesapeake Bay, Maracaibo, the approaches to the Panama Canal, and a bunch of other places that Waterhouse, until now, has thought of only as winter resorts for rich people.

  Two more people come into the room and take seats: Colonel Chattan, and a young man in a disheveled tuxedo, who (according to a rumor that makes its way around the room) is a symphonic percussionist. This latter has clearly made some effort to wipe the lipstick off his face, but has missed some in the crevices of his left ear. Such are the exigencies of war.

  Yet another aide rushes in with a wire basket filled with ULTRA message decrypt slips. This looks like much hotter stuff; Waterhouse puts the file folder back and begins leafing through the slips.

  Each one begins with a block of data identifying the Y station that intercepted it, the time, the frequency, and other minutiae. The heap of slips boils down to a conversation, spread out over the last several weeks, between two transmitters.

  One of these is in a part of Berlin called Charlottenburg, on the roof of a hotel at Steinplatz: the temporary site of U-boat Command, recently moved there from Paris. Most of these messages are signed by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Waterhouse knows that Dönitz has recently become the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the entire German Navy, but he has elected to hold onto his previous title of Commander-in-Chief of U-boats as well. Dönitz has a soft spot for U-boats and the men who inhabit them.

  The other transmitter belongs to none other than U-691. These messages are signed by her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff.

  Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. This newfangled radar shit is everywhere.
r />   Dönitz: Acknowledged. Well done.

  Bischoff: Bagged another tanker. These bastards seem to know exactly where I am. Thank god for the schnorkel.

  Dönitz: Acknowledged. Nice work as usual.

  Bischoff: Sank another merchantman. Airplanes were waiting for me. I shot one of them down; it landed on me in a fireball and incinerated three of my men. Are you sure this Enigma thing really works?

  Dönitz: Nice work, Bischoff! You get another medal! Don’t worry about the Enigma, it’s fantastic.

  Bischoff: I attacked a convoy and sank three merchantmen, a tanker, and a destroyer.

  Dönitz: Superb! Another medal for you!

  Bischoff: Just for the hell of it, I doubled back and finished off what was left of that convoy. Then another destroyer showed up and dropped depth charges on us for three days. We are all half dead, steeped in our own waste, like rats who have fallen into a latrine and are slowly drowning. Our brains are gangrenous from breathing our own carbon dioxide.

  Dönitz: You are a hero of the Reich and the Führer himself has been informed of your brilliant success! Would you mind heading south and attacking the convoy at such-and-such coordinates? P.S. please limit the length of your messages.

  Bischoff: Actually, I could use a vacation, but sure, what the heck.

  Bischoff (a week later): Nailed about half of that convoy for you. Had to surface and engage a pesky destroyer with the deck gun. This was so utterly suicidal, they didn’t expect it. As a consequence we blew them to bits. Time for a nice vacation now.

  Dönitz: You are now officially the greatest U-boat commander of all time. Return to Lorient for that well-deserved R & R.

  Bischoff: Actually I had in mind a Caribbean vacation. Lorient is cold and bleak at this time of year.

  Dönitz: We have not heard from you in two days. Please report.

  Bischoff: Found a nice secluded harbor with a white sand beach. Would rather not specify coordinates as I no longer trust security of Enigma. Fishing is great. Am working on my tan. Feeling somewhat better. Crew is most grateful.

  Dönitz: Günter, I am willing to overlook much from you, but even the Supreme Commander-in-Chief must answer to his superiors. Please end this nonsense and return home.

  U-691: This is Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, second-in-command of U-691. Regret to inform you that KL Bischoff is in poor health. Request orders. P.S. He does not know I am sending this message.

  Dönitz: Assume command. Return, not to Lorient, but to Wilhelmshaven. Take care of Günter.

  Beck: KL Bischoff refuses to relinquish command.

  Dönitz: Sedate him and get him back here, he will not be punished.

  Beck: Thank you on behalf of me and the crew. We are underway, but short of fuel.

  Dönitz: Rendezvous with U-413 [a milchcow] at such-and-such coordinates.

  Now more people come into the room: a wizened rabbi; Dr. Alan Mathison Turing; a big man in a herringbone tweed suit whom Waterhouse remembers vaguely as an Oxford don; and some of the Naval intelligence fellows who are always hanging around Hut 4. Chattan calls the meeting to order and introduces one of the younger men, who stands up and gives a situation report.

  “U-691, a Type IXD/42 U-boat under the nominal command of Kapitänleutnant Günter Bischoff, and the acting command of Oberleutnant zur See Karl Beck, transmit ted an Enigma message to U-boat Command at 2000 hours Greenwich time. The message states that, three hours after sinking a Trinidadian merchantman, U-691 torpedoed and sank a Royal Navy submarine that was picking up survivors. Beck has captured two of our men: Marine Sergeant Robert Shaftoe, an American, and Lieutenant Enoch Root, ANZAC.”

  “How much do these men know?” demands the don, who is making a stirringly visible effort to sober up.

  Chattan fields the question: “If Root and Shaftoe divulged everything that they know, the Germans could infer that we were making strenuous efforts to conceal the existence of an extremely valuable and comprehensive intelligence source.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” the don mumbles.

  An extremely tall, lanky, blond civilian, the crossword puzzle editor of one of the London newspapers currently on loan to Bletchley Park, hustles into the room and apologizes for being late. More than half of the people on the Ultra Mega list are now in this room.

  The young naval analyst continues. “At 2110, Wilhelmshaven replied with a message instructing OL Beck to interrogate the prisoners immediately. At 0150, Beck replied with a message stating that in his opinion the prisoners belonged to some sort of special naval intelligence unit.”

  As he speaks, carbon copies of the fresh message decrypts are being passed round to all the tables. The crossword puzzle editor studies his with a tremendously furrowed brow. “Perhaps you covered this before I arrived, in which case I apologize,” he says. “but where does the Trinidadian merchantman come in to all of this?”

  Chattan silences Waterhouse with a look, and answers: “I’m not going to tell you.” There is appreciative laughter all around, as if he had just uttered a bon mot at a dinner party. “But Admiral Dönitz, reading these same messages, must be just as confused as you are. We should like to keep him that way.”

  “Datum 1: He knows a merchantman was sunk,” pipes up Turing, ticking off points on his fingers. “Datum 2: He knows a Royal Navy submarine was on the scene a few hours later, and was also sunk. Datum 3: He knows two of our men were pulled out of the water, and that they are probably in the intelligence business, which is a rather broad categorization as far as I am concerned. But he cannot necessarily draw any inferences, based upon these extremely terse messages, about which vessel—the merchantman or the submarine—our two men came from.”

  “Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?” says Crossword Puzzle. “They came from the submarine.”

  Chattan responds only with a Cheshire grin.

  “Oh!” says Crossword Puzzle. Eyebrows go up all around the room.

  “As Beck continues to send messages to Admiral Dönitz, the likelihood increases that Dönitz will learn something we don’t want him to know,” Chattan says. “That likelihood becomes a virtual certainty when U-691 reaches Wilhelmshaven intact.”

  “Correction!” hollers the rabbi. Everyone is quite startled and there is a long silence while the man grips the edge of the table with quivering hands, and rises precariously to his feet. “The important thing is not whether Beck transmits messages! It is whether Dönitz believes those messages!”

  “Hear, hear! Very astute!” Turing says.

  “Quite right! Thank you for that clarification, Herr Kahn,” Chattan says.

  “Pardon me for just a moment,” says the don, “but why on earth wouldn’t he believe them?”

  This leads to a long silence. The don has scored a telling point, and brought everyone very much back to cold hard reality. The rabbi begins to mumble something that sounds rather defensive, but is interrupted by a thunderous voice from the doorway: “FUNKSPIEL!”

  Everyone turns to look at a fellow who has just come in the door. He is a trim man in his fifties with prematurely white hair, extremely thick glasses that magnify his eyes, and a howling blizzard of dandruff covering his navy blue blazer.

  “Good morning, Elmer!” Chattan says with the forced cheerfulness of a psychiatrist entering a locked ward.

  Elmer comes into the room and turns to face the crowd. “FUNKSPIEL!” he shouts again, in an inappropriately loud voice, and Waterhouse wonders whether the man is drunk or deaf or both. Elmer turns his back to them and stares at a bookcase for a while, then turns round to face them again, a look of astonishment on his face. “Ah was expectin’ a chalkboard t’be there,” he says in a Texarkana accent. “What kind of a classroom is this?” There is nervous laughter around the room as everyone tries to figure out whether Elmer is cutting loose with some deadpan humor, or completely out of his mind.

  “It means ‘radio games,’ ” says Rabbi Kahn.

  “Thank, you, sir!” Elmer responds quickly, soundi
ng pissed off. “Radio games. The Germans have been playing them all through the war. Now it’s our turn.”

  Just moments ago, Waterhouse was thinking about how very British this whole scene was, feeling very far from home, and wishing that one or two Americans could be present. Now that his wish has come true, he just wants to crawl out of the Mansion on his hands and knees.

  “How does one play these games, Mr., uh…” says Crossword Puzzle.

  “You can call me Elmer!” Elmer shouts. Everyone scoots back from him.

  “Elmer!” Waterhouse says, “would you please stop shouting?”

  Elmer turns and blinks twice in Waterhouse’s direction. “The game is simple,” he says in a more normal, conversational voice. Then he gets excited again and begins to crescendo. “All you need is a radio and a couple of players with good ears, and good hands!” Now he’s hollering. He waves at the corner where the albino woman with the headset and the percussionist with lipstick on his ear have been huddled together. “You want to explain fists, Mr. Shales?”

  The percussionist stands up. “Every radio operator has a distinctive style of keying—we call it his fist. With a bit of practice, our Y Service people can recognize different German operators by their fists—we can tell when one of them has been transferred to a different unit, for example.” He nods in the direction of the albino woman. “Miss Lord has intercepted numerous messages from U-691, and is familiar with the fist of that boat’s radio operator. Furthermore, we now have a wire recording of U-691’s most recent transmission, which she and I have been studying intensively.” The percussionist draws a deep breath and screws his courage up before saying, “We are confident that I can forge U-691’s fist.”

  Turing chimes in. “And since we have broken Enigma, we can compose any message we want, and encrypt it just as U-691 would have.”

  “Splendid. Splendid!” says one of the Broadway Buildings guys.

  “We cannot prevent U-691 from sending out her own, legitimate messages,” Chattan cautions, “short of sinking her. Which we are making every effort to do. But we can muddy the waters considerably. Rabbi?”