Cryptonomicon (121 page)

“Yes, it does. But why would he want us to?”

“I have no idea. The old Azure/Pufferfish messages may contain some clues. I am having my Digital Computer generate retroactive one-time pads so that I can decrypt those messages and read them.”

“Well, then, I shall have Colossus do the same. It is busy just now,” Alan says, “working on Fish decrypts. But I don’t think Hitler has much longer to go. When he is finished, I can probably get down to Bletchley and decrypt those messages.”

“I’m also working on Arethusa,” Lawrence says. “I’m guessing it all has something to do with gold.”

“Why do you say that?” Alan says. But at this point the tone arm of the phonograph reaches the end of its spiral groove and lifts off the record. Time’s up. Bell Labs, and the might of the Allied governments, did not install the Project X network so that mathematicians could indulge in endless chitchat about obscure functions.

THE SAILING SHIP
Gertrude
wheezes into the cove shortly after sunrise, and Bischoff cannot help but laugh. Barnacles have grown so thick around her hull that the hull itself (he supposes) could be removed entirely, and the shell of barnacles could be outfitted with a mast and canvas, and sailed to Tahiti. A hundred-yard-long skein of seaweed, rooted in those barnacles, trails behind her, making a long greasy disturbance in her wake. Her mast has evidently been snapped off at least once. It has been replaced by a rude jury-rigged thing, a tree trunk that has received some attention from a drawknife but still has bark adhering to it in places, and long dribbles of golden sap like wax trails on a candle, themselves streaked with sea salt. Her sails are nearly black with dirt and mildew, and rudely patched, here and there, with fat black stitches, like the flesh of Frankenstein’s monster.

The men on board are scarcely in better shape. They do not even bother to drop anchor—they just run
Gertrude
aground on a coral head at the entrance to the cove, and call it a day. Most of Bischoff’s crew has gathered on the top of
V-Million,
the rocket-submarine; they think it’s the most hilarious thing they’ve ever seen. But when the men on
Gertrude
climb into a dinghy and begin rowing towards them, Bischoff’s men remember their manners, and stand at attention, and salute.

Bischoff tries to recognize them as they row closer. It takes a while. There are five in all. Otto has lost his pot-belly and gone much greyer. Rudy is a completely different man: he has long flowing hair ponytailed down his back, and a surprisingly thick, Viking-like beard, and he appears to have lost his left eye somewhere along the way, because he’s got an actual black patch over it!

“My god,” Bischoff says, “pirates!”

The other three men he has never seen before: a Negro with dreadlocks; a brown-skinned, Indian-looking fellow; and a red-headed European.

Rudy is watching a stingray furling and unfurling its meaty wings ten meters straight down.

“The clarity of the water is exquisite,” he remarks.

“When the Catalinas come for us, Rudy, then you will long for the old northern murk,” Bischoff says.

Rudolf von Hacklheber swings his one eye around to bear on Bischoff, and allows just a trace of amusement to show on his face. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?” Rudy asks.

“Granted with pleasure,” Bischoff says. The dinghy has come alongside the round hull of the submarine, and Bischoff’s crew unrolls a rope ladder to them. “Welcome to the
V-Million
!”

“I have heard of the V-1 and the V-2, but…”

“We could not guess how many other V-weapons Hitler might have invented, and so we chose a very, very large number,” Bischoff says proudly.

“But Günter, you know what the V stands for?”

“
Vergeltungswaffen,
” Bischoff says. “You’re not thinking about it hard enough, Rudy.”

Otto’s puzzled, and being puzzled makes him angry. “
Vergeltung
means revenge, doesn’t it?”

“But it can also mean to pay someone back, to compensate them, to reward them,” says Rudy, “even to
bless
them. I like it very much, Günter.”

“Admiral Bischoff to you,” Günter returns.

“You are the supreme commander of the
V-Million
—there is no one above you?”

Bischoff clicks his heels together sharply and holds out his right arm. “Heil Dönitz!” he shouts.

“What the hell are you talking about?” asks Otto.

“Haven’t you been reading the papers? Hitler killed himself yesterday. In Berlin. The new Führer is my personal friend Karl Dönitz.”

“Is
he
part of the conspiracy too?” Otto mutters.

“I thought my dear mentor and protector Hermann Göring was going to be Hitler’s successor,” Rudy says, sounding almost crestfallen.

“He is down in the south somewhere,” Bischoff says, “on a diet. Just before Hitler took cyanide, he ordered the SS to arrest that fat bastard.”

“But in all seriousness, Günter—when you boarded this U-boat in Sweden, it was called something else, and there were some Nazis on board, yes?” asks Rudy.

“I had completely forgotten about them.” Bischoff cups his hands around his mouth and shouts down the hatch in the top of the sleek rounded-off conning tower. “Has anyone seen our Nazis?”

The command echoes down the length of the U-boat from sailor to sailor:
Nazis? Nazis? Nazis?
but somewhere it turns into
Nein! Nein! Nein!
and echoes back up the conning tower and out the hatch.

Rudy climbs up
V-Million
’s smooth hull on bare feet. “Do you have any citrus fruit?” He smiles, showing magenta craters in his gums where teeth might be expected.

“Get the calamansis,” Bischoff says to one of his mates. “Rudy, for you we have the Filipino miniature limes, great piles of them, with more vitamin C than you could ever want.”

“I doubt that,” Rudy says.

Otto just looks at Bischoff reproachfully, holding him
personally responsible for having been thrown together with these four other men for all of 1944 and the first four months of 1945. Finally he speaks: “Is that son of a bitch Shaftoe here?”

“That son of a bitch Shaftoe is dead,” Bischoff says.

Otto averts his glare and nods his head.

“I take it you received my letter from Buenos Aires?” asks Rudy von Hacklheber.

“Mr. G. Bishop, General Delivery, Manila, the Philippines,” Bischoff recites. “Of course I did, my friend, or else we would not have known where to meet you. I picked it up when I went into town to renew my acquaintance with Enoch Root.”

“He made it?”

“He made it.”

“How did Shaftoe die?”

“Gloriously, of course,” Bischoff says. “And there is other news from Julieta: the conspiracy has a son! Congratulations, Otto, you are a grand-uncle.”

This actually elicits a smile, albeit black and gappy, from Otto. “What’s his name?”

“Günter Enoch Bobby Kivistik. Eight pounds, three ounces—superb for a wartime baby.”

There is hand-shaking all around. Rudy, ever debonair, produces some Honduran cigars to mark the occasion. He and Otto stand in the sun and smoke cigars and drink calamansi juice.

“We have been waiting here for three weeks,” Bischoff says. “What kept you?”

Otto spits out something that is pretty bad-looking. “I am sorry that you have had to spend three weeks tanning yourselves on the beach while we have been sailing this tub of shit across the Pacific!”

“We were dismasted, and lost three men, and my left eye, and two of Otto’s fingers, and a few other items, going around Cape Horn,” Rudy says apologetically. “Our cigars got a little wet. It played havoc with our schedule.”

“No matter,” Bischoff says. “The gold isn’t going anywhere.”

“Do we know where it is?”

“Not exactly. But we have found one who does.”

“Clearly, we have much to discuss,” Rudy says, “but I have to die first. Preferably on a soft bed.”

“Fine,” Bischoff says. “Is there anything that needs to be removed from
Gertrude
before we cut her throat, and let her barnacles pull her to the bottom?”

“Sink the bitch now, please,” Otto says. “I will even stay up here and watch.”

“First you must remove five crates marked
Property of the Reichsmarschall,
” Rudy says. “They are down in the bilge. We used them as ballast.”

Otto looks startled, and scratches his beard in wonderment. “I forgot those were down there.” The year-and-a-half-old memory is slowly resolving in his mind’s eye. “It took a whole day to load them in. I wanted to kill you. My back still aches from it.”

Bischoff says, “Rudy—you made off with Göring’s pornography collection?”

“I wouldn’t like
his
kind of pornography,” Rudy answers evenly. “These are cultural treasures. Loot.”

“They will have been ruined by bilge water!”

“It’s all gold. Sheets of gold foil with holes in it. Impervious.”

“Rudy, we are supposed to be
exporting
gold from the Philippines, not
importing
it.”

“Don’t worry. I shall export it again one day.”

“By that time, we’ll have money to hire stevedores, so poor Otto won’t have to put his back out again.”

“We won’t need stevedores,” Rudy says. “When I export what is on those sheets, I’ll do it on wires.”

They all stand there on the deck of
V-Million
in the tropical cove watching the sun set and the flying fish leap and hearing birds and insects cry and buzz from the flowering jungle all around. Bischoff’s trying to imagine wires strung from here to Los Angeles, and sheets of gold foil sliding down them. It doesn’t really work. “Come below, Rudy,” he says, “we need to get some vitamin C into you.”

A
VI MEETS
R
ANDY IN THE HOTEL LOBBY.
H
E HAS
burdened himself with a square, old-fashioned briefcase that pulls his slender frame to one side, giving him the asymptotic curve of a sapling in a steady wind. He and Randy take a taxi to Some Other Part of Tokyo—Randy cannot begin to fathom how the city is laid out—enter the lobby of a skyscraper, and take an elevator up far enough that Randy’s ears pop. When the doors slide open, a maître d’ is standing right there anticipating them with a radiant smile and a bow. He leads them into a foyer where four men wait: a couple of younger minions; Goto Furudenendu; and an elderly gentleman. Randy was expecting one of these gracile, translucent Nipponese seniors, but Goto Dengo is a blocky fellow with a white buzz-cut, somewhat hunched and collapsed with age, which only goes to make him seem more compact and solid. At first blush he seems more like a retired village blacksmith, or perhaps a master sergeant in a daimyo’s army, than a business executive, and yet within five or ten seconds this impression is swallowed up by a good suit, good manners, and Randy’s knowledge of who he really is. He’s the only guy in the place who isn’t grinning from ear to ear: apparently when you reach a certain age you are allowed to get away with staring tunnels through other people’s skulls. In the manner of many old people, he looks vaguely startled that they have actually shown up.

Still, he levers himself up on a big, gnarled cane and shakes their hands firmly. His son Furudenendu proffers a hand to help him to his feet and he shrugs it off with a glare of mock outrage—this transaction looks pretty well-practiced. There’s a brief exchange of small talk that goes right over Randy’s head. Then the two minions peel off, like a fighter escort no longer needed, and the maître d’ leads Randy, Avi, and Goto
père et fils
across a totally empty restaurant—twenty or thirty tables set with white linen and
crystal—to a corner table, where waiters stand at attention to pull their chairs back. This building is of the sheer-walls-of-solid-glass school of architecture and so the windows go floor-to-ceiling, providing, through a bead curtain of raindrops, a view of nighttime Tokyo that stretches over the horizon. Menus are handed out, printed in French only. Randy and Avi get the girl menus, with no prices. Goto Dengo gets the wine list, and pores over it for a good ten minutes before grudgingly selecting a white from California and a red from Burgundy. Meanwhile, Furudenendu is leading them in exceedingly pleasant small talk about the Crypt.

Randy can’t stop looking at Tokyo on the one hand and the empty restaurant on the other. It’s like this setting was picked specifically to remind them that the Nipponese economy has been on the skids for the last several years—a situation that the Asian currency crisis has only worsened. He half expects to see executives dropping past the window.

Avi ventures to ask about various tunnels and other stupefyingly vast engineering projects that he happens to have noticed around Tokyo and whether Goto Engineering had anything to do with them. This at least gets the patriarch to glance up momentarily from his wine list, but the son handles the inquiries, allowing as how, yes, their company did play a small part in those endeavors. Randy figures that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to engage a personal friend of the late General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in polite chitchat; it’s not like you can ask him if he caught the latest episode of
Star Trek: More Time-Space Anomalies
. All they can really do is cling to Furudenendu and let him take the lead. Goto Dengo clears his throat like the engine of a major piece of earth-moving equipment rumbling to life, and recommends the Kobe beef. The sommelier comes around with the wines and Goto Dengo interrogates him in a mixture of Nipponese and French for a while, until a film of sweat has broken out on the sommelier’s brow. He samples the wines very carefully. The tension is explosive as he swirls them around in his mouth, staring off into the distance. The sommelier seems genuinely startled, not to mention relieved, when he accepts both of them. The subtext
here would seem to be that hosting a really first-class dinner is a not insignificant management challenge, and that Goto Dengo should not be bothered with social chatter while he is coping with these responsibilities.

At this point Randy’s paranoia finally kicks in: is it possible that Goto-sama bought the whole restaurant out for the evening, just to get a little privacy? Were the two minions just aides with unusually bulky briefcases, or were they security, sweeping the place for surveillance devices? Again, subtext-wise, the message seems to be that Randy and Avi are not to worry their pretty, young little heads about these things. Goto Dengo is seated underneath a can light in the ceiling. His hair stands perpendicularly out from his head, a bristling stand of normal vectors, radiating halogenically. He has a formidable number of scars on his face and his hands, and Randy suddenly realizes that he must have been in the war. Which should’ve been perfectly obvious considering his age.

Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo takes it pretty calmly and instantly cross-correlates it to late-breaking developments in the Nipponese game industry, which has been doing this gradual paradigm shift from arcade to role-playing games with actual narratives; by the time he’s finished he makes them feel not like lightweight nerds but like visionary geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time. This more or less obligates Avi (who is taking conversational point) to ask Goto Dengo how he got into
his
line of work. Both of the Gotos try to laugh it off, as if how could a couple of young American visionary Dungeons and Dragons pioneers possibly be interested in something as trivial as how Goto Dengo singlehandedly rebuilt postwar Nippon, but after Avi displays a bit of persistence, the patriarch finally shrugs and says something about how his pop was in the mining racket and so he’s always had a certain knack for digging holes in the
ground. His English started out minimal and is getting better and better as the evening proceeds, as if he is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power, nursing them on-line like tube amplifiers.

Dinner arrives; and so everyone has to eat for a bit, and to thank Goto-sama for his excellent recommendation. Avi gets a bit reckless and asks the old man if he might regale them with some reminiscences about Douglas MacArthur. He grins, as if some secret has been ferreted out of him, and says, “I met the General in the Philippines.” Just like that, he’s jujitsued the topic of conversation around to what everyone actually wants to talk about. Randy’s pulse and respiration ratchet up by a good twenty-five percent and all of his senses become more acute, almost as if his ears have popped again, and he loses his appetite. Everyone else seems to be sitting up a bit straighter too, shifting in their chairs slightly. “Did you spend much time in that country?” Avi asks.

“Oh, yes. Much time. A hundred years,” says Goto Dengo, with a rather frosty grin. He pauses, giving everyone a chance to get good and uneasy, and then continues, “My son tells me that you want to dig a grave there.”

“A hole,” Randy ventures, after much uncomfortableness.

“Excuse me. My English is rusty,” says Goto Dengo, none too convincingly.

Avi says, “What we have in mind would be a major excavation by our standards. But probably not by yours.”

Goto Dengo chuckles. “That all depends on the circumstances. Permits. Transportation issues. The Crypt was a big excavation, but it was easy, because the sultan was supporting it.”

“I must emphasize that the work we are considering is still in a very early planning phase,” Avi says. “I regret to say I can’t give you good information about the logistical issues.”

Goto Dengo comes this close to rolling his eyes. “I understand,” he says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “We will not talk about these things this evening.”

This produces a really awkward pause, while Randy and Avi ask themselves
what the hell are we going to talk about then
?
“Very well,” Avi says, sort of weakly lobbing the ball back in Goto Dengo’s general direction.

Furudenendo steps in. “There are many people who dig holes in the Philippines,” he explains with a big knowing wink.

“Ah!” Randy says. “I have met some of the people you are talking about!” This produces a general outburst of laughter around the table, which is none the less sincere for being tense.

“You understand, then,” says Furudenendo, “that we would have to study a joint venture very carefully.” Even Randy easily translates this to:
we will participate in your loony-tunes treasure hunt when hell freezes over
.

“Please!” Randy says, “Goto Engineering is a distinguished company. Top of the line. You have much better things to do than to gamble on joint ventures. We would never propose such a thing. We would be able to pay for your services up front.”

“Ah!” The Gotos look at each other significantly. “You have a new investor?”
We know you are broke.

Avi grins. “We have new resources.” This leaves the Gotos nonplussed. “If I may,” Avi says. He heaves his briefcase up off the floor and onto his lap, flips the latches open, and reaches into it with both hands. Then he performs a maneuver that, in a bodybuilding gym, would be called a barbell curl, and lifts a brick of solid gold into the light.

The faces of Goto Dengo and Goto Furudenendo are transmuted to stone. Avi holds the bar up for a few moments, then lowers it back into his briefcase.

Eventually, Furudenendo scoots his chair back a couple of centimeters and rotates it slightly toward his father, basically excusing himself from the conversation. Goto Dengo eats dinner and drinks wine calmly, and silently, for a very, very long fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally, he looks across the table at Randy and says, “Where do you want to dig?”

“The site is in mountains south of Laguna de Bay—”

“Yes, you already told my son that. But that is a large area of boondocks. Many holes have been dug there. All worthless.”

“We have better information.”

“Some old Filipino has sold you his memories?”

“Better than that,” Randy says. “We have a latitude and longitude.”

“To what degree of precision?”

“Tenths of a second.”

This occasions another pause. Furudenendo tries to say something in Nipponese, but his father cuts him off gruffly. Goto Dengo finishes his dinner and crosses his fork and knife on the plate. A waiter’s there five seconds later to clear the table. Goto Dengo says something to him that sends him fleeing back into the kitchen. They have essentially a whole floor of the skyscraper to themselves now. Goto Dengo utters something to his son, who produces a fountain pen and two business cards. Furudenendo hands the pen, and one card, to his father, and the other card to Randy. “Let’s play a little game,” Goto Dengo says. “You have a pen?”

“Yes,” Randy says.

“I am going to write down a latitude and longitude,” Goto Dengo says, “but only the seconds portion. No degrees and no minutes. Only the seconds part. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“The information is useless by itself. You agree?”

“Yes.”

“Then there is no risk for you to write down the same.”

“It’s true.”

“Then we will exchange cards. Agreed?”

“I agree.”

“Very well.” Goto Dengo starts writing. Randy takes a pen from his pocket and jots down the seconds and tenths of a second: latitude 35.2, longitude 59.0. When he’s done, Goto Dengo’s looking at him expectantly. Randy holds out his card, numbers facing down, and Goto Dengo holds out his. They exchange them with the small bow that is obligatory around here. Randy cups Goto-sama’s card in his palm and turns it into the light. It says

35.2/59.0

No one says anything for ten minutes. It’s a measure of how stunned Randy is that he doesn’t realize, for a long time, that Goto Dengo is just as stunned as he is. Avi and
Furudenendu are the only people at the table whose minds are still functioning, and they spend the whole time looking at each other uncertainly, neither one really understanding what’s going on.

Finally Avi says something that Randy doesn’t hear. He nudges Randy firmly and says it again: “I’m going to the lavatory.”

Randy watches him go, counts to ten, and says, “Excuse me.” He follows Avi to the men’s washroom: black polished stone, thick white towels, Avi standing there with his arms crossed. “He knows,” Randy says.

“I don’t believe it.”

Randy shrugs. “What can I say? He knows.”

“If he knows, everyone knows. Our security broke down somewhere along the line.”

“Everyone doesn’t know,” Randy says. “If everyone knew, all hell would be breaking loose down there, and Enoch would have gotten word to us.”

“Then how can he know?”

“Avi,” Randy says, “
he must be the one who buried it
.”

Avi looks outraged. “Are you shitting me?”

“You have a better theory?”

“I thought all the people who buried the stuff were killed.”

“It’s fair to say that he’s a survivor. Wouldn’t you agree?”