Cryptonomicon

Or is he? In a decade full of Hitlers and Stalins, it's hard to worry about a conspiracy that seemingly includes a priest, and that risks its very existence in order to attend a member's funeral. Waterhouse rolls over and lies on his back on some dead guy's grave and ponders it. If Mary were here, he would lay out the dilemma for her and she would tell him what to do. But Mary's in Brisbane, picking out bridesmaids' dresses and china patterns.

***

The next time he sees any of these fellows is one month later, in a clearing in the jungle a couple of hours south of Manila. Waterhouse gets there before they do, and spends a sweaty night under a mosquito net. In the morning, about half of Bischoff's submarine crew arrives, grumpy from an all-night march. As Waterhouse expected, they are quite nervous about being ambushed by the local Huk commander known as the Crocodile, and so they post a number of sentries in the jungle. That is why Waterhouse took pains to get here before they did: so that he would not have to infiltrate their picket line.

The Germans who aren't standing guard go to work with shovels, digging a hole in the ground next to a big piece of red pumice shaped vaguely like the continent of Africa. Waterhouse squats no more than twenty feet away, trying to figure out how he can make his presence known without being gunned down by a nervous white man.

He almost gets close enough to tap Rudy on the shoulder. Then he slips on a slimy rock. Rudy hears him, turns, and sees nothing except for a swatch of undergrowth being torn down by Waterhouse's falling body.

"Is that you, Lawrence?"

Waterhouse stands up cautiously, keeping his hands in plain sight. "Very good! How did you know?"

"Don't be stupid. There aren't that many people who could have found us."

They shake hands. Then they think better of it, and embrace. Rudy gives him a cigarette. The German sailors look on incredulously. There are some others: a Negro and an Indian, and a grizzled, dark man who looks like he wants to kill Waterhouse on the spot.

"You must be the famous Otto!" Waterhouse exclaims. But Otto does not seem eager to make new friends, or even acquaintances, at this juncture in his life, and turns away sourly. "Where's Bischoff?" Waterhouse asks.

"Minding the submarine. It is risky, lurking in the shallows. How did you find us, Lawrence?" He answers his own question before Waterhouse can. "By decrypting the long message, obviously."

"Yes."

"But how did you do that? Did I miss something? Is there a back door?"

"No. It wasn't easy. I broke one of your messages, a while back."

"The FUNERAL one?"

"Yes!" Waterhouse laughs.

"I could have killed Enoch for sending out a message with such an obvious crib." Rudy shrugs. "It is hard to teach crypto security, even to intelligent men. Especiallyto them."

"Maybe he wanted me to decrypt it," Waterhouse muses.

"It is possible," Rudy admits. "Perhaps he wanted me to break Detachment 2702's one-time pad, so that I would come and join him."

"I guess he figures if you're smart enough to break hard codes, you're automatically going to be on his side," Waterhouse says.

"I'm not sure that I agree . . . it is naive."

"It's a leap of faith," Waterhouse says.

"How did you break Arethusa? I am naturally curious," Rudy says.

"Because Azure/Pufferfish employs a different key every day, I assumed that Arethusa did the same."

"I call them by different names. But yes, continue."

"The difference is that the daily key for Azure/Pufferfish is simply the numerical date. Very easy to exploit, once you have figured it out."

"Yes. I intended it that way," Rudy says. He lights up another cigarette, taking extravagant pleasure in it.

"Whereas the daily key for Arethusa is something I haven't been able to put my finger on yet. Perhaps a pseudo-random function of the date, perhaps random numbers you are taking from a one-time pad. In any case it is not predictable, which makes Arethusa harder to break."

"But you did break the long message. Would you explain how?"

"Well, your meeting at the cemetery was brief. I guess you had to get out of there pretty fast."

"It did not seem a good place to linger."

"So, you and Bischoff went away--back to the submarine, I figured. Goto Dengo went back to his post at The General's headquarters. I knew that he couldn't have told you anything substantive at the cemetery. That would have to come later, and it would have to be in the form of an Arethusa-encrypted message. You are justifiably proud of Arethusa."

"Thank you," Rudy says briskly.

"But the drawback of Arethusa, as with Azure/Puffeffish, is that it requires a great deal of computation. This is fine if you happen to have a computing machine, or a room full of trained abacus operators. I assume you have a machine on board the submarine?"

"That we do," Rudy says diffidently, "nothing very special. It still requires a great deal of manual calculation."