Chattan nods at some of the younger men, who dash across the room, pick up telephones, and begin to talk in calm, clinical voices about cricket scores. Chattan looks at his watch. 'It will take a few minutes for the huffduff smokescreen to develop. Miss Lord, you will notify us when the traffic has risen to a suitably feverish pitch?'
Miss Lord makes a little curtsey and sits down at her radio.
'FUNKSPIEL!' shouts Elmer, scaring everyone half out of their skins, 'We already done sent out some other messages. Made 'em look like Royal Navy traffic. Used a code the Krauts just broke a few weeks ago. These messages have to do with an operation-a fictitious operation, y'know-in which a German U-boat was supposedly boarded and seized by our commandos.'
There is a whole lot of tinny shouting from the telephone. The gentle man who has the bad luck to be holding it translates into what is probably more polite English: 'What if Mr. Shales's performance is not convincing to the radio operators at Charlottenburg? What if they do not succeed in decrypting Mr. Elmer's false messages?'
Chattan fields that one. He steps over to a map that has been set up on an easel at the end of the room. The map depicts a swath of the Central Atlantic bordered on the east by France and Spain. 'U-691's last reported position was here,' he says, pointing to a pin stuck in the lower left corner of the map. 'She has been ordered back to Wllhelmshaven with her prisoners. She will go this way,' he says, indicating a length of red yarn stretched in a north-northeasterly direction, 'assuming she avoids the Straits of Dover.'[17]
'There happens to be another milchcow here,' Chattan continues, indicating another pin. 'One of our own submarines should be able to reach it within twenty-four hours, at which point it will approach at periscope depth and engage it with torpedoes. Chances are excellent that the milchcow will be destroyed immediately. If she has time to send out any transmissions, she will merely state that she is being attacked by a submarine. Once we have destroyed this milchcow, we will call once again upon the skills of Mr. Shales, who will transmit a fake distress call that will appear to originate from the milchcow, stating that they have come under attack from none other than U- 691.'
'Splendid!' someone proclaims.
'By the time the sun rises tomorrow,' Chattan concludes, 'we will have one of our very best submarine- hunting task forces on the scene. A light carrier with several antisubmarine planes will comb the ocean night and day, using radar, visual reconnaissance, huffduff, and Leigh lights to hunt for U-691. The chances are excellent that she will be found and sunk long before she can approach the Continent. But should she find her way past this formidable barrier she will find the German Kriegsmarine no less eager to hunt her down and destroy her. Any information she may transmit to Admiral Donitz in the meantime will be regarded with the most profound suspicion.'
'So,' Waterhouse says, 'the plan, in a nutshell, is to render all information from U-691 unbelievable, and subsequently to destroy her, and everyone on her, before she can reach Germany.'
'Yes,' Chattan says, 'and the former task will be greatly simplified by the fact that U-691's skipper is already known to be mentally unstable.'
'So it seems likely that our guys, Shaftoe and Root, will not survive,' Waterhouse says slowly.
There is a long, frozen silence, as if Waterhouse had interrupted high tea by making farting sounds with his armpit.
Chattan responds in a precise, arch tone that indicates he's really pissed off. 'There is the possibility that when U-691 is engaged by our forces, she will be forced to the surface and will surrender.'
Waterhouse studies the grain of the tabletop. His face is hot and his chest is burning.
Miss Lord rises to her feet and speaks. Several important heads turn toward Mr. Shales, who excuses himself and goes to a table in the corner of the room. He fiddles with the controls on a radio transmitter for a few moments, spreads the encrypted message out in front of himself, and takes a deep breath, as though preparing for a big solo. Finally he reaches out, rests one hand lightly on the radio key, and begins to tap out the message, rocking from side to side and cocking his head this way and that. Mrs. Lord listens with her eyes closed, concentrating intensely.
Mr. Shales stops. 'Finished,' he announces in a quiet voice, and looks nervously at Mrs. Lord, who smiles. Then there is polite applause around the library, as if they had just finished listening to a harpsichord concerto. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse keeps his hands folded in his lap. He has just heard the death warrant of Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe.
Chapter 46 HEAP
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re(8) Why?
Let me just take stock of what I know so far: you say that asking 'why?' is part of what you do for a living; you're not an academic; and you are in the surveillance business. I am having trouble forming a clear picture.
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From: [email protected]
Subject: Re(9) Why?
Randy, I never said that I, myself, am in the surveillance business. But I know people who are. Formerly public— and now private-sector. We stay in touch. The grapevine and all that. Nowadays, my involvement in such things is limited to noodling around with novel cryptosystems, as a sort of hobby.
Now, to get back to what I would consider to be the main thread of our conversation. You guessed that I was an academic. Were you being sincere, or was this purely an attempt to 'gotcha' me?
The reason I ask is that I am, in fact, a man of the cloth, so naturally I consider it my job to ask 'why?' I assumed this would be fairly obvious to you. But I should have taken into account that you are not the churchy type. This is my fault.
It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting.
But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.
I still think of this as the priest's highest calling-or at least the most interesting part of the job-hence my question to you, which I cannot fail to notice, remains unanswered.
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'Randy, what is the worst thing that ever happened?'
This is never a difficult question to answer when you are hanging around with Avi. 'The Holocaust,' Randy says dutifully.
Even if he didn't know Avi, their surroundings would give him a hint. The rest of Epiphyte Corp. have gone back to the Foote Mansion to prepare for hostilities with the Dentist. Randy and Avi are sitting on a black obsidian bench planted atop the mass grave of thousands of Nipponese in downtown Kinakuta, watching the tour buses come and go.
Avi pulls a small GPS receiver out of his attache case, turns it on, and sets it out on a boulder in front of them where it will have a clear view of the sky. 'Correct! And what is the highest and best purpose to which we can devote our allotted lifespans?'
'Uh . . . enhancing shareholder value?'
