(1) He talks about generating 'characters' in the key-stream and then adding them, modulo 26, to the plaintext. This is how people talked 50 years ago when ciphers were worked out using pencil and paper. Today we talk in terms of generating bytes and adding them modulo 256. Is your friend pretty old?
(2) He speaks of T as a 54-element permutation. There is nothing wrong with that-but Pontifex would work just as well with 64 or 73 or 699 elements, so it makes more sense to describe it as an n-element permutation where n could be 54 or any other integer. I can't figure out why he settled on 54. Possibly because it is twice the number of letters in the alphabet-but this makes no particular sense.
Conclusion: the author of Pontifex is cryptologically sophisticated but shows possible signs of being an elderly crank. I need more details in order to deliver a verdict.
—Cantrell
'Randy?' says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.
The inside of the wardroom door is decorated with a big color photograph of a massive stone staircase in a dusty church. They stand in front of it. 'Are there a
'Uh, well, it's not a
'Is there anything you'd like to share with me about your family history?'
Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him. 'What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don't think there's anything worth hiding from you.'
Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now open aluminum briefcase from the U-boat. Randy supposes that merely opening it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian.
Randy sees a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out and trying to read it. 'Most wartime paper was crap,' he says. 'It probably dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However, the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check out the glasses, the pen.'
Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.
'So what I'm getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in his briefcase,' Doug continues. 'Personal stationery. So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?'
'No. But I could do a web search . . .'
'I tried that,' Doug says. 'Turned up just a few hits. There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company. That's about it.'
'Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?'
'Check this out,' Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps of the envelope have been spread apart. 'May I?' he asks. Doug nods and hands him a couple of latex surgical gloves. 'I don't have to file a diving plan for this, do I?' Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.
Doug is not amused. 'It is deeper than it looks,' he says.
Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together, reassembling the inscription. It says:
WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE.
Chapter 54 BRISBANE
Through a small dusty window Xed with masking tape, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse gazes out at downtown Brisbane. Bustling it ain't. A taxi limps down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which is home to many mid-ranking officers. The taxi smokes and reeks-it is powered by a charcoal burner in the trunk. Marching feet can be heard through the window. It's not the tromp, tromp of combat boots, but the whack, whack of sensible shoes worn by sensible women: local volunteers. Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to the window to get a look at them, but he's wasting his time. Dressed in those uniforms, you could march a regiment of pinup girls through all the cabins and gangways of an active battleship and not draw a single wolf whistle, lewd suggestion, or butt-grab.
A delivery truck creeps out of a side street and backfires alarmingly as it tries to accelerate onto the main drag. Brisbane is still worried about attack from the air, and no one likes sudden loud noises. The truck looks like it is being attacked by an amoeba: on its back is a billowing rubberized-canvas balloon full of natural gas.
He's on the third floor of a commercial building so nondescript that the most interesting observation one can make about it is that it has four stories. There is a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest of the place must have been empty until The General-beaten like a red-headed stepchild by those Nips-came to Brisbane from Corregidor, and made this city into the capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible amount of surplus office space around here before The General showed up, because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.
Waterhouse has had plenty of time to familiarize himself with Brisbane and its environs. He's been here for four weeks, and he's been given nothing to do. When he was in Britain, they couldn't shuffle him around fast enough. Whatever his job was at the moment, he did it feverishly-until he received top-secret, highest-priority orders to rush, by any available means of transportation, to his next assignment.
Then they brought him here. The Navy flew him across the Pacific, hopping from one island base to the next in an assortment of flying boats and transports. He crossed the equator and the international date line on the same day. But when he reached the boundary between Nimitz's Pacific Theater and The General's Southwest Pacific Theater, it was like he'd glided into a stone wall. It was all he could do to talk himself onboard a troop transport to New Zealand, and then to Fremantle. The transports were almost unbelievably hellish: steel ovens packed with men, baked by the sun, no one allowed to go abovedecks for fear they'd be sighted, and marked for slaughter, by a Nip submarine. Even at night they couldn't get a breeze through there, because all openings had to be covered with blackout curtains. Waterhouse couldn't really complain; some of the men had traveled this way all the way from the East Coast of the United States.
The important thing was that he made it to Brisbane, as per his orders, and reported to the right officer, who told him to await further orders. Which he's been doing until this morning, when he was told to show up at this office upstairs of the tobacconist. It is a room full of enlisted men typing up forms, trundling them around in wire baskets, and filing them. In Waterhouse's experience with the military, he has found that it's not a good sign when one is ordered to report to a place like this.
Finally he is allowed into the presence of an Army major who has several other conversations, and various pieces of important paperwork going on at the same time. That is okay; Waterhouse doesn't need to be a cryptanalyst to get the message loud and clear, which is that he is not wanted here.
'Marshall sent you here because he thinks that The General is sloppy with Ultra,' the major says.
Waterhouse flinches to hear this word spoken aloud, in an office where enlisted men and women volunteers are coming and going. It's almost as if the major wishes to make it clear that The General is, in fact, quite sloppy with Ultra, and rather likes it that way, thank you very much.
'Marshall's afraid that the Nips will get wise to us and change their codes. It's all because of Churchill.' The major refers to General George C. Marshall and Sir Winston Churchill as if they were bullpen staff for a farm league baseball team. He pauses to light a cigarette. 'Ultra is Churchill's baby. Oh yeah, Winnie just luuuuuves his
