Cryptonomicon

This object is so cold, and sucks the heat out of his hands so efficiently, that it hurts to touch it. He shakes his hand to bring circulation back, then grasps the thing, yanks it out briskly, and throws it down on the altar. It bounces once, twice in a seesawing motion, and rings piercingly as it does--the closest thing to a musical sound that has shaken the air of this chapel in many centuries. It shines gaudily under the electric lights they have set up around the chancel. The glittering light catches the eye of Waterhouse, who has been living on grey and cloudy Qwghlm for weeks, wearing and sleeping in things that are black or khaki or olive drab. He is mesmerized by this thing, simply because of its brightness and beauty against the dull and rude basalt, even before his mind identifies it as a bar of solid gold.

It makes a heck of a paperweight, which is a good thing, because the chapel is nothing if not drafty, and the important contents of the safe consist of onionskin pages that fly away in the tiniest breeze. The pages are ruled with faint horizontal and vertical lines, dividing each one into a grid, and the grids are filled in with hand-printed letters in groups of five.

"Well, look what you found!" says a quiet voice. Waterhouse looks up into the unsettlingly calm and placid gaze of Enoch Root.

"Yes. Encrypted messages," Waterhouse says. "Non-Enigma."

"No," Root says. "I was referring to the Root of All Evil, here." He tries to pick up the gold bar, but his fingers merely slip off of it. He gets a firmer grip and hefts it up off the altar. Something about it catches his eye, and he turns to bring it under one of the electric lights, frowning at it with the critical intensity of a diamond cutter.

"It's got Hanzi characters stamped on it," Root says.

"Beg pardon?"

"Chinese or Japanese. No, Chinese-there's the chop of a bank in Shanghai. And here are some figures--the fineness and the serial number." Showing unexpected familiarity with such matters for a missionary priest.

Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse--it's just a bulk sample of a chemical element, like a lead weight or a flask of mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting. He absolutely has to stand up and go look at it. Root is correct: the bar has been neatly marked with small Oriental characters, applied with a stamp. The tiny facets of the ideograms glitter under the light, sparks jumping the gap between the two halves of the Axis.

Root sets the gold bar down on the altar. He saunters over to a table where they keep stationery, and pulls out a sheet of onionskin and a fresh pencil. Returning to the altar, he lays the frail page over the top of the gold bar, then rubs the side of the pencil lead back and forth over it, turning it all black except for where the stamped numbers and characters are underneath. Within a few moments he has a perfect little rubbing, showing the inscription in full detail. He folds the page up and pockets it, then returns the pencil to the table.

Waterhouse has long since gone back to his examination of the pages from the safe. The numbers are all written in the same hand. Now, since they dredged all manner of other paperwork out of the sewage sloshing through the U-boat skipper's cabin, Waterhouse can recognize the captain's hand easily enough; these sheets were written by someone else.

The format of the messages makes it clear that they were not encrypted with an Enigma machine. Enigma messages always begin with two groups of three letters each, which tell the receiving clerk how to set the wheels on his machine. Those groups are missing on all of these sheets, so some other cipher system must have been used. Like every other modern nation, the Germans have a plethora of different cipher systems, some based on books and some on machines. Bletchley Park has broken most of them.

Still, it looks like an interesting exercise. Now that the rest of Detachment 2702 has arrived, making further trysts with Margaret impractical, Waterhouse has nothing to look forward to. Trying to crack the code used on these sheets will be a perfect puzzle to fill the gaping void that opened up as soon as Waterhouse broke the combination of the safe. He steals some paper of his own, sits down at the desk, and busies himself for an hour or two copying out the ciphertext from the skipper's pages, double– and triple-checking each code group to make sure he's got an accurate copy.