curiosity, then looks away. They move out of the bazaar and onto the sidewalk. It has started to rain. A dozen nearly identical young women in miniskirts and high heels march in wedge formation down the center of the street sporting huge umbrellas blazoned with the face of a video game character.
'Wing's digging for gold in Bundok,' Randy says. 'He thinks he knows where Golgotha is. If he finds it, he'll need a really special kind of bank.'
'He's not the only guy in the world who needs a special bank,' Avi says. 'Over the years, Switzerland has done a hell of a lot of business with governments, or people connected with governments. Why didn't Hitler invade Switzerland? Because the Nazis couldn't have done without it. So the Crypt definitely fills a niche.'
'Okay,' Randy says, 'so the Crypt will be allowed to remain in existence.'
'It has to. The world needs it,' Avi says. 'And we'll need it, when we dig up Golgotha.'
Suddenly Avi's got an impish look on his face; he looks to have shed about ten years of age. This gets a belly-laugh out of Randy, the first time he's really laughed in a couple of months. His mood has gone through some seismic shift all of a sudden, the whole world looks different to him. 'It's not enough to know where it is. Enoch Root says that these hoards were buried deep in mines, down in the hard rock. So we're not going to get that gold out without launching a pretty major engineering project.'
'Why do you think I'm in Tokyo?' Avi says. 'C'mon, let's get back to the hotel.'
While Avi's checking in, Randy collects his messages from the front desk, and finds a FedEx envelope waiting for him. If it was tampered with en route, the tamperers did a good job of covering their traces. It contains a hand-enciphered message from Enoch Root, who evidently has figured out some way to get himself sprung from the clink with his scruples intact. It is several lines of seemingly random block letters, in groups of five. Randy has been carrying around a deck of cards ever since he got sprung from jail: the prearranged key that will decipher this message. The prospect of several hours of solitaire seems a lot less inviting in Tokyo than it did in prison-and he knows it will take that long to decipher a message as long as this one. But he's already programmed his laptop to play Solitaire according to Enoch's rules, and he's already punched in the key that is embodied in the deck that Enoch gave him and stored it on a floppy disk that he keeps rubber-banded to the deck in his pocket. So he and Avi go up to Avi's room, pausing along the way to collect Randy's laptop, and while Avi sorts through his messages, Randy types in the ciphertext and gets it deciphered. 'Enoch's message says that the land above Golgotha is owned by the Church,' Randy mutters, 'but in order to reach it we have to travel across land owned by Wing, and by some Filipinos.'
Avi doesn't appear to hear him. He's fixated on a message slip.
'What's up?' Randy asks.
'A little change of plans for tonight. I hope you have a really good suit with you.'
'I didn't know we had plans for tonight.'
'We were going to meet with Goto Furudenendu,' Avi says. 'I sort of figured that they were the right guys to approach about digging a big hole in the ground.'
'I'm with you,' Randy says. 'What's the change in plan?'
'The old man is coming down from his retreat in Hokkaido. He wants to buy us dinner.'
'What old man?'
'The founder of the company, Goto Furudenendu's father,' Avi says. 'Protege of Douglas MacArthur. Multi-multi-multi-millionaire. Golf partner and confidant of prime ministers. An old guy by the name of Goto Dengo.'
Chapter 93 PROJECT X
It is early in April of the year 1945. A middle-aged nipponese widow feels the earth turning over, and scurries out of her paper house, fearing a temblor. Her house is on the island of Kyushu, near the sea. She gazes out over the ocean and sees a black ship on the horizon, steaming out of a rising sun of its own making: for when its guns go off the entire vessel is shrouded in red fire for a moment. She hopes that the Yamato, the world's greatest battleship, which steamed away over that horizon a few days ago, has returned victorious, and is firing its guns in celebration. But this is an American battleship and it is dropping shells into' the port that the
Until this moment, the Nipponese woman has been convinced that the armed forces of her nation were crushing the Americans, the British, the Dutch, and the Chinese at every turn. This apparition must be some kind of bizarre suicide raid. But the black ship stays there all day long, heaving ton after ton of dynamite into sacred soil. No airplanes come out to bomb it, no ships to shell it, not even a submarine to torpedo it.
In a shocking display of bad form, Patton has lunged across the Rhine ahead of schedule, to the irritation of Montgomery who has been making laborious plans and preparations to do it first.
The German submarine U-234 is in the North Atlantic, headed for the Cape of Good Hope, carrying ten containers holding twelve hundred pounds of uranium oxide. The uranium is bound for Tokyo where it will be used in some experiments, still in a preliminary phase, towards the construction of a new and extremely powerful explosive device.
General Curtis LeMay's Air Force has spent much of the last month flying dangerously low over Nipponese cities showering them with incendiary devices. A quarter of Tokyo has been leveled; 83,000 people died there, and this does not count the similar raids on Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.
The night after the Osaka raid, some Marines raised a flag on Iwo Jima and they put a picture of it in all the papers.
Within the last few days, the Red Army, now the most terrible force on earth, has taken Vienna and the oil fields of Hungary, and the Soviets have declared that their Neutrality Pact with Nippon will be allowed to expire rather than being renewed.
Okinawa has just been invaded. The fighting is the worst ever. The invasion is supported by a vast fleet against which the Nipponese have launched everything they have. The
To the irritation and bafflement of the German High Command, the Nipponese government has sent a message to them, requesting that, in the event that all of Germany's European naval bases are lost, the Kriegsmarine should be given orders to continue operating with the Nipponese in the Far East. The message is encrypted in Indigo. It is duly intercepted and read by the Allies.
In the United Kingdom, Dr. Alan Mathison Turing, considering the war to be effectively finished, has long since turned his attentions away from the problem of voice encryption and into the creation of thinking machines. For about ten months-ever since the finished Colossus Mark II was delivered to Bletchley Park-he has had the opportunity to work with a truly programmable computing machine. Alan invented these machines long before one was ever built, and has never needed hands-on experience in order to think about them, but his experiences with Colossus Mark II have helped him to solidify some ideas of how the next machine ought to be designed. He thinks of it as a postwar machine, but that's only because he's in Europe and hasn't been concerned with the problem of conquering Nippon as much as Waterhouse has.
'I've been working on BURY and DISINTER,' says a voice, coming out of small holes in a Bakelite headset clamped over Waterhouse's head. The voice is oddly distorted, nearly obscured by white noise and a maddening buzz.
'Please say it again?' Lawrence says, pressing the phones against his ear.
'BURY and DISINTER,' says the voice. 'They are, er, sets of instructions for the machine to execute, to carry out certain algorithms. They are programmes.
'Right! Sorry, I just wasn't able to hear you the first time. Yes, I've been working on them too,' Waterhouse says.
'The next machine will have a memory storage system, Lawrence, in the form of sound waves traveling
