4
Everything that happened after this was totally unreal, because it was too real.
That’s how it goes: when things seem too real they become unreal; people have trouble believing them — just like most people can’t believe that in any mountainous area in Guangxi you can take a sewing needle and exchange it for a cow, or even for one pure silver broadsword. No one can deny, however, that it was ten years ago, whilst dreaming of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834–1907) — who had himself been given the idea of creating the periodic table in a dream — that the secret to cracking PURPLE had come to Rong Jinzhen. This was of course an extraordinary story, but what happened next far exceeded it.
In the middle of the night, Rong Jinzhen had been woken by the sound of the train pulling into a station. As was his habit, upon waking he immediately reached out his hand to touch the safety-deposit box that was under his bunk.
It was there! Still chained to the leg of the tea table. Feeling at ease, he lay back down, trying to differentiate between the scattered sound of footsteps and the blare of the train station’s public address system.
The public address system informed him that they had arrived in B City.
The next stop would be A City.
‘Still three hours to go. . And then home. . Home. . Only a hundred and eighty minutes left. . Sleep a little more, home. . ’ In a daze, he fell back to sleep.
Before a moment passed, however, the train whistle blew sharply, signalling its departure from the station, waking him up once more. The clacking upon the tracks grew ever more intense, and just as music gradually increases a person’s level of excitement, it prevented him from falling asleep. He never slept soundly in any case; how could he endure such auditory violence? The sounds of the train rolled over him, thoroughly waking him up. Light from the moon flitted into the cabin, shining directly upon his berth. The shadows tossed about, fluctuating sharply, tempting his drowsy eyes. Just then, he noticed something unusual out of the corner of his eye. What was it, what was wrong? Making a lazy attempt to ascertain what had happened, rolling it over in his mind, he finally realized that his leather attaché case which had been hanging on a hook on the wall — a bag very much like a teacher’s black briefcase — was gone. He got up abruptly, searching in his berth for it. It wasn’t there. Then he got down and looked round the floor, the tea table, under his pillow. It was nowhere to be found!
He noisily roused Vasili and the professor, the latter telling him that about an hour before when he had got up to use the toilet (please remember that it was an hour ago), he had seen a young man in military plainclothes on the connecting platform, leaning against the door-frame smoking a cigarette. On his way out, however, the young man had disappeared without a trace. In his hand he had been holding an attaché case very much like the one Rong Jinzhen had just described.
The professor said, ‘At the time, I gave it little thought, thinking that it must have been his case because he was just standing there, smoking, I never really paid much attention to what was in his hands, it seemed as though he were in no hurry, would just finish his smoke and leave, but now — ah, I should have been more attentive.’ The professor’s voice was full of empathy.
Rong Jinzhen thought it most likely that it had been that man in the military clothes who had stolen his case. Even though it seemed as though he had just been standing there, in truth he had been deciding upon his mark. The professor’s trip to the bathroom gave him his opportunity, like seeing tracks in the snow — following them would lead you to the tiger’s cave. You could speculate that whilst the professor was in the lavatory, the man had made his move, he had ‘made use of every second and every inch’.
Mulling this over in his head, Rong Jinzhen couldn’t help but laugh bitterly.
[Transcript of the interview with Director Zheng]
In truth, cryptography is very much like having to make good use of every second and every inch.
Ciphers are very much like an enormous, seamless net, thus seemingly unreal. But once a cipher is used, they are like anyone’s mouth: it is very hard to avoid slips of the tongue. These slips are like rivulets of blood, splitting open a gash, providing a glimmer of hope for those attempting to crack the cipher. Just as lightening splits open the sky, a sharp mind squirrels itself into the gaps, passes into the inner labyrinth of a cipher as if it was a normal corridor, and sometimes even finds access to heaven. These last few years, Rong Jinzhen had used an enormous amount of patience in waiting for the gaps in the sky to open, he had waited through a countless number of days and nights, and yet he still had not succeeded in deciphering BLACK.
This was highly irregular. It was downright strange.
In trying to find a cause for this state of affairs, we at Unit 701 thought about two things:
1. Cracking PURPLE had forced our adversary to grit his teeth and bear the pain, to be ever more cautious when opening his mouth, to be circumspect and deliberate, to ensure that not one drop of water was spilt. It made us feel invulnerable.
2. Rong Jinzhen had failed to detect any errors within BLACK. The drops of water fell right through his hands. And what’s more, the chances of this happening were rather high. Think about it: Liseiwicz truly understood Rong Jinzhen; he could easily have warned the creators of BLACK of Rong Jinzhen’s skill at decryption and assisted them in developing countermeasures. Quite honestly, they were once like father and son, but now, because of their respective political positions and beliefs, the spiritual gulf between them was greater than any geographical distance. I still remember to this day the moment we learnt that Liseiwicz was in fact Weinacht — everyone in our organization wanted to come clean to Rong Jinzhen, to tell him of Liseiwicz’s clever ruse, to beg him to be wary. And guess what he said upon learning about this? He said, ‘Tell him to go to hell, this devil in the temple of science!’*
* This recalls the preface written by Young Lillie for Jinzhen’s thesis.
To reiterate, our adversary was increasingly cautious, making fewer and fewer mistakes; thus making it easier for us to miss things. Even if we were less than diligent, it would still have been obvious that our opponent had begun to make fewer errors. We were like an uneven mortise and tenon, echoing each other, nipping at each other, but never quite linking up; there was a heretofore unseen perfection in the network of lies we wove. But this perfection was strange and frightening. For Rong Jinzhen, each day and each night was greeted with a feeling of cold terror. No one but his wife knew what he was going through; for he had told her everything about the problems he was experiencing in his dreams: on the path to breaking a cipher, he was already too tired to be on his guard. His faith, his inner tranquillity had already met with the threat of despair; he was sick and tired of making his moves and fending off countermoves. .
[To be continued]
Now, thinking of what had happened, thinking of how the thief had kept watch on them, thinking of his stolen leather attaché case, Rong Jinzhen’s thoughts became focused on his own vigilance and desperation. He mocked himself: ‘I thought of other people — the cryptographers who had constructed BLACK as well as those who had used it — and how difficult it was to get close to them, close to it. Yet it was so terribly easy for me to have my bag stolen, a task that took all of half a cigarette.’ He laughed to himself and smiled a bitter smile once again.