Cryptonomicon

This is quickly supplied. Waterhouse knows, and has proved to Earl Comstock, that strange information is in the air, dotting and dashing furtively from a small number of feeble transmitters scattered around Luzon and the surrounding waters, encrypted using the Arethusa system. Lawrence and Alan have known for two years now that Rudy invented it, and from the decrypts chattering out of digital computers in Bletchley Park and Manila, they now know other things. They know that Rudy flew the coop late in 1943 and probably went to Sweden. They know that one Günter Bischoff, captain of the U-boat that plucked Shaftoe and Root out of the water, also ended up in Sweden, and that Dönitz persuaded him to take over the gold-running work that had been performed by U-553 until it ran aground off Qwghlm. The Naval Intelligence boys are fascinated by Bischoff, and so he had already been the subject of much research. Waterhouse has seen photos of him from his student days. The shorter of the two men he is peering at now could easily be the same fellow, now middle-aged. And the taller one, the one with the eyepatch, could most definitely be Rudy von Hacklheber himself.

It is, then, a conspiracy.

They have secure communications. If Rudy is the architect of Arethusa, then it will be essentially impossible to break, except for rare lapses such as this FUNERAL business.

They have a submarine. It cannot be found or sunk, because it is one of Hitler's new rocket-fuel-powered babies, and because Günter Bischoff, the greatest U-boat commander in history, is its skipper.

They have, at some level, the backing of the odd brotherhood that Root belongs too, the ignoti et quasi occultiguys.

And now they are trying to enlist Goto Dengo. The man who, it is safe to assume, buried the gold.

Three days ago, the intercept boys in Waterhouse's section picked up a brief flurry of Arethusa messages, exchanged between a hidden transmitter somewhere in Manila and a mobile one in the South China Sea. Catalinas were vectored toward the latter, and picked up diminishing radar echoes at first, but found nothing when they arrived on the scene. A team of journeyman codebreakers jumped on those messages and started trying to tear them apart by brute force. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, the old hand, went for a stroll along the Manila Bay seawall. A breeze suddenly rose from the bay. He stopped to let it cool his face. A coconut fell from the top of a tree and smashed into the ground ten feet away. Waterhouse turned on his heel and went back to the office.

Just before the flurry of Arethusa messages began, Waterhouse had been sitting in his office listening to Armed Forces Radio. They had broadcast an announcement that, three days from now, at such-and-such a time, the funeral for the hero, Bobby Shaftoe, was going to be held at the big new cemetery down in Makati.

Sitting down in his office with the fresh Arethusa intercepts, he went to work, using FUNERAL as a crib: if this group of seven letters decrypts to FUNERAL, then what does the rest of the message look like? Gibberish? Okay, how about thisgroup of seven letters?

Even with this gift thrown into his lap, it took him two and a half days of nonstop work to decrypt the message. The first one, transmitted from Manila, went: OUR FRIEND'S FUNERAL SATURDAY TEN THIRTY AM US MILITARY CEMETERY MAKATI.

The response from the submarine: WILL BE THERE SUGGEST YOU INFORM GD.

He aims the spyglass at Goto Dengo again. The Nipponese engineer is standing with his head bowed and his eyes tightly shut. Perhaps his shoulders are heaving, perhaps it's just the heat waves that make it seem so.

But then Goto Dengo straightens up and takes a step in the direction of the conspirators. He stops. Then he takes another step. Then another. His posture is straightening up miraculously. He seems to feel better with every stride. He walks faster and faster, until he is almost running.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is hardly a mind-reader, but he can easily enough tell what Goto Dengo is thinking: I have a burden on my shoulders, and it has been crushing me. And now I'm going to hand that burden over to someone else. Hot damn! Bischoff and Rudy von Hacklheber step forward to meet him, holding out their right hands enthusiastically. Bischoff, Rudy, Enoch, and Goto Dengo join into a knot, practically on top of Bobby Shaftoe's grave.

It is a shame. Waterhouse knew Bobby Shaftoe, and would have liked to attend his funeral standing up--not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.