Cryptonomicon (47 page)

On the one hand, this is a pain in the ass. On the other, it gives him a chance to go through the ciphertext by hand, at the very lowest level, which might be useful later. The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. If they do contain patterns, he does not see them just now, in any rational way. But there may be some subrational part of his mind that can go to work, now that the letters have passed before his eyes and through his pencil, and that may suddenly present him with a gift-wrapped clue—or even a full solution—a few weeks from now while he is shaving or antenna-twiddling.

He has been dimly aware, for a while, that Chattan and the others are awake now. Enlisted men are not allowed into the chancel, but the officers get to gather round and admire the gold bar.

“Breaking the code, Waterhouse?” Chattan says, ambling over to the desk, warming his hands with a mug of coffee.

“Making a clean copy,” Waterhouse says, and then, because he is not without a certain cunning, adds: “in case the originals are destroyed in transit.”

“Very prudent,” Chattan nods. “Say, you didn’t hide a second gold bar anywhere, did you?”

Waterhouse has been in the military long enough that he does not rise to the bait. “The pattern of sounds made when we tilted the safe back and forth indicated that there was only a single heavy object inside, sir.”

Chattan chuckles and takes a sip of his coffee. “I shall be interested to see whether you can break that cipher, Lieutenant Waterhouse. I am tempted to put money on it.”

“I sure appreciate that, but it would be a lousy bet, sir,” Waterhouse replied. “The chances are very good that Bletchley Park has already broken this cipher, whatever it may be.”

“What makes you say that?” Chattan asks absently.

The question is so silly, coming from a man in Chattan’s position, that it leaves Waterhouse disoriented. “Sir, Bletchley Park has broken nearly all of the German military and governmental codes.”

Chattan makes a face of mock disappointment. “Waterhouse! How unscientific. You are making assumptions.”

Waterhouse thinks back and tries to work out the meaning of this. “You think that this cipher might not be German? Or that it might not be military or governmental?”

“I am merely cautioning you against making assumptions,” Chattan says.

Waterhouse is still thinking this one over as they are approached by Lieutenant Robson, the commanding officer of the SAS squad. “Sir,” he says, “for the benefit of the fellows down in London, we would like to know the combination.”

“The combination?” Waterhouse asks blankly. This word, devoid of context, could mean almost anything.

“Yes, sir,” Robson says precisely. “To the safe.”

“Oh!” Waterhouse says. He is faintly irritated that they would ask him this question. There seems little point in writing down the combination when the equipment needed to break into the safe is sitting right there. It is much more important to have a safe-breaking algorithm than to have one particular solution to a safe-breaking problem. “I don’t know,” he says. “I forgot.”

“You forgot?” Chattan says. He says it on behalf of Robson who appears to be violently biting his tongue. “Did you perhaps write it down before you forgot it?”

“No,” Waterhouse says. “But I remember that it consists entirely of prime numbers.”

“Well! That narrows it down!” Chattan says cheerfully. Robson does not seem mollified, though.

“And there are five numbers in all, which is interesting since—”

“Since five is itself a prime number!” Chattan says. Once again, Waterhouse is pleased to see his commanding officer displaying signs of a tasteful and expensive education.

“Very well,” Robson announces through clenched teeth. “I shall inform the recipients.”

T
HE
G
RAND
W
AZIR OF
K
INAKUTA LEADS THEM INTO
the offices of his boss, the sultan, and leaves them alone for a few minutes at one corner of the conference table, to build which a whole species of tropical hardwoods had to be extinguished. After that, it is a race among the founders of Epiphyte Corp. to see who can blurt out the first witticism about the size of the sultan’s home office deduction. They are in the New Palace, three arms of which wrap around the exotic gardens of the ancient and magnificent Old Palace. This meeting room has a ten-meter-high ceiling. The walls facing onto the garden are made entirely of glass, so the effect is like looking into a terrarium that contains a model of a sultan’s palace. Randy has never known much about architecture, and his vocabulary fails him abjectly. The best he could say is that it’s sort of like a cross between the Taj Mahal and Angkor Wat.

To get here, they had to drive down a long boulevard of palm trees, enter a huge vaulted marble entrance hall, submit to metal-detection and frisking, sit in an anteroom for a while sipping tea, take their shoes off, have warm rose water poured over their hands by a turbaned servant wielding an ornate ewer, and then walk across about half a mile of polished marble and oriental carpets. As soon as the door wafts shut behind the grand wazir’s ass, Avi says, “I smell a con job.”

“A con job?” Randy scoffs. “What, you think this is a rear-screen projection? You think this table is made of Formica?”

“It’s all real,” Avi admits sourly. “But whenever someone gives you the treatment like this, it’s because they’re trying to impress you.”

“I’m impressed,” Randy says. “I admit it. I’m impressed.”

“That’s just a euphemism for, ‘I’m about to do something moronic,’ ” Avi says.

“What are we going to
do
? This isn’t the kind of meeting where anything actually gets
done,
is it?”

“If you mean, are we going to sign contracts, is money going to change hands, then no, nothing is going to get done. But plenty is going to happen.”

The door opens again and the grand wazir leads a group of Nipponese men into the room. Avi lowers his voice. “Just remember that, at the end of the day, we’re back in the hotel, and the sultan is still here, and all of this is just a memory to us. The fact that the sultan has a big garden has no relevance to anything.”

Randy starts to get irked: this is so obvious it’s insulting to mention it. But part of the reason he’s irked is because he knows Avi saw right through him. Avi’s always telling him not to be romantic. But he wouldn’t be here, doing this, if not for the romance.

Which leads to the question: why is
Avi
doing it? Maybe he has some romantic delusions of his own, carefully concealed. Maybe that’s why he can see through Randy so damn well. Maybe Avi is cautioning himself as much as he is the other members of Epiphyte Corp.

Actually this new group is not Nipponese, but Chinese—probably from Taiwan. The grand wazir shows them their assigned seats, which are far enough away that they could exchange sporadic gunfire with Epiphyte Corp. but not converse without the aid of bullhorns. They spend a minute or so pretending to give a shit about the gardens and the Old Palace. Then, a compact, powerfully built man in his fifties pivots towards Epiphyte Corp. and strides over to them, dragging out a skein of aides. Randy’s reminded of a computer simulation he saw once of a black hole passing through a galaxy, entraining a retinue of stars. Randy recognizes the man’s face vaguely: it has been printed in business journals more than once, but not often enough for Randy to remember his name.

If Randy were something other than a hacker, he’d have to step forward now and deal with protocol issues. He’d be stressed out and hating it. But, thank god, all that shit devolves automatically on Avi, who steps up to meet this Taiwanese guy. They shake hands and go through the rote
exchange of business cards. But the Chinese guy is looking straight through Avi, checking out the other Epiphyte people. Finding Randy wanting, he moves on to Eberhard Föhr. “Which one is Cantrell?” he says.

John’s leaning against the window, probably trying to figure out what parametric equation generated the petals on that eight-foot-tall, carnivorous plant. He turns around to be introduced. “John Cantrell.”

“Harvard Li. Didn’t you get my e-mail?”

Harvard Li! Now Randy is starting to remember this guy. Founder of Harvard Computer Company, a medium-sized PC clone manufacturer in Taiwan.

John grins. “I received about twenty e-mail messages from an unknown person claiming to be Harvard Li.”

“Those were from me! I do not understand what you mean that I am an unknown person.” Harvard Li is extremely brisk, but not exactly pissed off. He is, Randy realizes, not the kind of man who has to coach himself not to be romantic before a meeting.

“I hate e-mail,” John says.

Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?”

“The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.”

“Ah. You use digital signature algorithm.”

John considers this carefully. “I do not respond to any e-mail that is not digitally signed. Digital signature algorithm refers to one technique for signing them. It is a good technique, but it could be better.”

Harvard Li begins nodding about halfway through this, acknowledging the point. “Is there a structural problem? Or are you concerned by the five-hundred-and-twelve-bit key length? Would it be acceptable with a one-thousand-twenty-four-bit key?”

About three sentences later, the conversation between Cantrell and Li soars over the horizon of Randy’s crypto
graphic knowledge, and his brain shuts down. Harvard Li is a crypto maniac! He has been studying this shit personally—not just paying minions to read the books and send him notes, but personally going over the equations, doing the math.

Tom Howard is grinning broadly. Eberhard is looking about as amused as he ever gets, and Beryl’s biting back a grin. Randy is trying desperately to get the joke. Avi notes the confusion on Randy’s face, turns his back to the Taiwanese, and rubs his thumb and fingers together:
money.

Oh, yeah. It had to be something to do with that.

Harvard Li cranked out a few million PC clones in the early nineties and loaded them all with Windows, Word, and Excel—but somehow forgot to write any checks to Microsoft. About a year ago, Microsoft kicked his ass in court and won a huge judgment. Harvard claimed bankruptcy: he doesn’t have a penny to his name. Microsoft has been trying to prove he still has the odd billion or two salted away.

Harvard Li has clearly been thinking very hard about how to put money where guys like Microsoft can’t get it. There are many time-honored ways: the Swiss bank account, the false-front corporation, the big real estate project in deepest, darkest China, bars of gold in a vault somewhere. Those tricks might work with the average government, but Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li’s situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft’s state-of-the-art hellhounds.

Harvard Li needs electronic cash. Not the lame stuff that people use to buy t-shirts on the Web without giving away their credit card numbers. He needs the full-on badass kind, based on hard crypto, rooted in an offshore data haven, and he needs it bad. So nothing’s more logical than that he is sending lots of e-mail to John Cantrell.

Tom Howard sidles up to him. “The question is, is it just Harvard Li, or does he think he’s discovered a new market?”

“Probably both,” Randy guesses. “He probably knows a few other people who’d like to have a private bank.”

“The missiles,” Tom says.

“Yeah.” China’s been taking potshots at Taiwan with ballistic missiles lately, sort of like a Wild West villain shooting at the good guy’s feet to make him dance. “There have been bank runs in Taipei.”

“In a way,” Tom says, “these guys are tons smarter than us, because they’ve never had a currency they could depend on.” He and Randy look over at John Cantrell, who has crossed his arms over his chest and is unloading a disquisition on the Euler totient function while Harvard Li nods intently and his nerd-de-camp frantically scrawls notes on a legal pad. Avi stands far to one side, staring at the Old Palace, as in his mind the ramifications of this bloom and sprawl and twine about each other like a tropical garden run riot.

Other delegations file into the room behind the grand wazir and stake out chunks of the conference table’s coastline. The Dentist comes in with his Norns or Furies or Hygienists or whatever the hell they are. There’s a group of white guys talking in Down Underish accents. Other than that, they are all Asians. Some of them talk amongst themselves and some pull on their chins and watch the conversation between Harvard Li and John Cantrell. Randy watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine-tanned skin and look like killers. They are wearing bad suits, not because they can’t afford good ones, but because they don’t give a shit. They are from China. The Good Suit Asians have high-maintenance haircuts, eyeglasses from Paris, clear skin, ready smiles. They are mostly from Nippon.

“I want to exchange keys, right now, so we can e-mail,” Li says, and gestures to an aide, who scurries to the edge of the table and unfolds a laptop. “Something something Ordo,” Li says in Cantonese. The aide points and clicks.

Cantrell is gazing at the table expressionlessly. He squats down to look under it. He strolls over and feels under the edge with his hand.

Randy bends and looks too. It’s one of these high-tech conference tables with embedded power and communications lines, so that visitors can plug in their laptops without having to string unsightly cables around and fight over
power outlets. The slab must be riddled with conduits. No visible wires connect it to the world. The connections must run down hollow legs and into a hollow floor. John grins, turns to Li, and shakes his head. “Normally I’d say fine,” he says, “but for a client with your level of security needs, this is not an acceptable place to exchange keys.”

“I’m not planning on using the phone,” Li says, “we can exchange them on floppies.”

John knocks on wood. “Doesn’t matter. Have one of your staff look into the subject of Van Eck phreaking. That’s with a ‘p-h,’ not an ‘f,’ ” he says to the aide who’s writing it down. Then, sensing Li’s need for an executive summary, he says, “They can read the internal state of your computer by listening to the faint radio emissions coming out of the chips.”

“Ahhhhh,” Li says, and exchanges hugely significant looks with his technical aides, as if this explains something that has been puzzling the shit out of them.

Someone begins hollering wildly at the far end of the room—not the end by which the guests entered, but the other one. It is a chap in a getup similar to, but not quite as ornate as, the grand wazir’s. At some point he switches to English—the same dialect of English spoken by flight attendants for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue into the buckle so many times that it rushes out in one phlegmy garble. Small Kinakutan men in good suits begin filing into the room. They take seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind of thing you’d get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head, rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne. Behind is a separate table for minions. All of it is backed up by tons of priceless artwork: an eroded frieze, amputated from a jungle ruin somewhere.

All the guests gravitate instinctively towards their positions around the table, and remain standing. The grand wazir glares at each one in turn. A small man slips into the room, staring vacantly at the floor in front of him, seemingly unaware that other people are present. His hair is lac
quered down to his skull, his appearance of portliness minimized by Savile Row legerdemain. He eases into the big chair, which seems like a shocking violation of etiquette until Randy realizes that this is the sultan.

Suddenly everyone is sitting down. Randy pulls his chair back and falls into it. The leathery depths swallow his ass like a catcher’s mitt accepting a baseball. He’s about to pull his laptop out of its bag, but in this setting, both the nylon bag and the plastic computer have a strip-mall tawdriness. Besides, he has to resist this sophomoric tendency to take notes all the time. Avi himself said that nothing was going to happen at this meeting; all the important stuff is going to be subtextual. Besides, there is the matter of Van Eck phreaking, which Cantrell probably mentioned just to make Harvard Li paranoid, but which has Randy a bit rattled too. He opts for a pad of graph paper—the engineer’s answer to the legal pad—and a fine-point disposable pen.

The sultan has an Oxford English accent with traces of garlic and red pepper still wedged in its teeth. He speaks for about fifteen minutes.

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pres
surized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.