Cryptonomicon

concluded that they were stupid. In the end it turned out to be a joke.'

'A joke? What do you mean by that?'

'We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it-wrote new volumes of the Cryptonomicon.The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got anything that was worth a damn.

'After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who was especially cocky we'd put him on the Arethusa project just to give him the message that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in-the smartest kid we had seen yet-and he broke it.'

'Well, I assume you didn't place this phone call just to keep me in suspense,' Randy says. 'What did he find?'

'He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a Riemann zeta function, which has many uses-one being that it is used in some cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock's career.'

'Why?'

'Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string-the seed for the random number generator-was the boss's name.

C-O-M-S-T-O-C-K.'

'You're kidding.'

'We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed-and believe me, he really was that kind of guy-or else someone had played an enormous practical joke on him.'

'Which do you think it was?'

'Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end it didn't matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty-six. A classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance and any number of high-powered connections. He went more or less straight to Kennedy's National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history.'

'Wow!' Randy says, kind of awed. 'What a jerk!'

'No kidding,' says Pontifex. 'And now, his son-well, don't get me started on his son.'

As Pontifex's voice trails off, Randy asks, 'So, you are calling me now for what purpose?'

Pontifex doesn't answer for a few moments, as if he's wrestling with the question himself. But Randy doubts that's the case. Someone is trying to send you a message.'I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and buried.'

'But why should you care?'

'You've already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents,' Pontifex says. 'It wouldn't be fair.'

'So, it's pity, then.'

'Furthermore-as I said-it is my friend's job to keep you under surveillance. He's going to hear almost every word you say for the next few months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just let it go.'

'Well, thanks for the tip.'

'You're welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?'

'That's what Pontifex is supposed to do.'

'First a disclaimer: I've been out of circulation for a while. Have not picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments.'

'Okay, I am bracing myself.'

'My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your clients-some of them, anyway-are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote.'

'So you're talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?'

'Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.'

'Well, we provide state-of-the-art cryptographic services to all of our clients-even the ones with bones in their noses.'

'Excellent! And now-as much as I hate to sign off on a dark note-I must say good-bye.'

Randy hangs up, and the phone rings again almost immediately.

'Who the fuck are you?' Doug Shaftoe says, 'I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal.'

'I have a funny story to tell you,' Randy says, 'about a guy you ran into once while skiing. But unfortunately it will have to wait.'

Chapter 79 GLORY

Bare-chested, camouflage-painted, trench knife in hand, Colt .45 stuck in the waistband of his khaki trousers, Bobby Shaftoe moves like a cloud of mist through the jungle. He stops when he can get a clear view of the Nip Army truck, framed between the hairy, cluttered trunks of a couple of date palms. A skirmish line of ants crawls over the skin of his sandaled foot. He ignores them.

It has all the earmarks of a piss stop. Two Nipponese privates climb out of the truck and confer for a few moments. One of them wades into the jungle. The other leans against the truck's fender and lights up a cigarette. Its glowing tip echoes the light of the sunset behind him. The one in the jungle drops his trousers, squats, leans back against a tree to take a shit.

At this moment they are supremely vulnerable. The contrast between the brightness of the sunset and the dimness of the jungle renders them nearly blind. The shitter is helpless, and the smoker looks exhausted. Bobby Shaftoe sheds his sandals. He emerges from the jungle onto the road behind the truck, strides forward on ant-bitten feet, crouches behind the truck's bumper. The weapon comes out of his hip pocket silently. Without taking his eyes off the smoker's feet-visible beneath the truck's chassis-he peels away the backing and slaps the payload onto the truck's tailgate. Then, just to rub it in, he slaps up another one. Mission accomplished! Take that, Tojo!

Moments later, he's back in the jungle, watching as the Nip truck drives away, now sporting two red, white, and blue stickers reading: I SHALL RETURN! Bobby congratulates himself on another successful mission.

Long after dark, he reaches the Hukbalahap camp up on the volcano. He works his way in through the booby-trapped perimeter and makes plenty of noise as he approaches, so that the Huk sentries won't shoot at him in the darkness. But he needn't have bothered. Discipline has broken down, they are all drunk and getting drunker, because of something they heard on the radio: MacArthur has returned. The General has landed on Leyte.

Bobby Shaftoe's response is to boil up some powerful coffee and begin pouring it into their signal man, Pedro. While the caffeine works its magic, Shaftoe grabs a message pad and the stub of a pencil, and writes out his idea for the seventh time: OPPORTUNITY EXISTS TO CONTACT AND SUPPLY FILAMERICAN ELEMENTS IN CONCEPCION STOP I VOLUNTEER FOR SAME STOP AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS STOP SIGNED SHAFTOE.