The hierarchy was shuffled and several of the entities changed their names, as follows . . ." Shaftoe hears a new sheet of paper being torn from the notebook, but what he sees is Mr. Jaeger tearing up a diagram of a table leg bracket that the young Bobby Shaftoe had spent a week drafting. Everything has been reorganized, General MacArthur is still very high in the tree, walking a brace of giant lizards on steel leashes, but now the hierarchy is filled with grinning Arabs holding up lumps of hashish, frozen butchers, dead or doomed lieutenants, and that fucking weirdo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, dressed in a black, hooded robe, heading up a whole legion of pencil-necked Signals geeks, also in robes, holding bizarrely shaped antennas above their heads, wading through a blizzard of dollar bills printed on old Chinese newspapers. Their eyes glow, flashing on and off in Morse code.

"What are they saying?" Bobby says.

"Please, stop screaming," says Enoch Root. "Just for a little while."

Bobby's lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish-shrapnel rains down and gets hung up in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off to make lutefisk in black steel drums.

Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out of the crack around its lid.

But he's not in the thatched hut anymore; he's inside a cold black metal phallus that has been probing around down below the surface of the nightmare: Bischoff's submarine. Depth charges are going off all over the place and it's filling up with sewage. Something clocks him on the side of the head: not a ham this time, but a human leg. The sub's lined with tubes that carry voices: in English, German, Arabic, Nipponese, Shanghainese, but confined and muffled in the plumbing so that they mingle together like the running of water. Then a pipe is ruptured by a near miss from a depth charge; from its jagged end issues a German voice:

"The foregoing may be taken as a rather coarse-grained treatment of the general organization of the Reich and particularly the military. Responsibility for cryptanalysis and cryptography is distributed among a large number of small Amts and Diensts attached to various tendrils of this structure. These are continually being reorganized and rearranged, however I may be able to provide you with a reasonably accurate and detailed picture . . ."

Shaftoe, chained to a bunk in the submarine by fetters of gold, feels one of his small, concealed handguns pressing into the small of his back, and wonders whether it would be bad form to shoot himself in the mouth. He paws wildly at the broken tube and manages to slap it down into the rising sewage; bubbles come out, and von Hacklheber's words are trapped in them, like word balloons in a comic strip. When the bubbles reach the surface and burst, it sounds like screaming.

Root is sitting on the opposite bunk with the cigar box on his lap. He holds up his hand in a V for Victory, then levels it at Shaftoe's face and pokes him in the eyes. "I cannot help you with your inability to find physical comfort-it is a problem of body chemistry," he says. "It poses interesting theological questions. It reminds us that all the pleasures of the world are an illusion projected into our souls by our bodies."

A lot of the other speaking tubes have ruptured now, and screaming comes from most of them; Root has to lean close in order to shout into Bobby's ear. Shaftoe takes advantage of it to reach over and make a grab for the cigar box, which contains the stuff he wants: not morphine. Something better than morphine. Morphine is to the stuff in the cigar box what a Shanghai prostitute is to Glory.

The box flies open and blinding light comes out of it. Shaftoe covers his face. The salted and preserved body parts suspended from the ceiling tumble into his lap and begin to writhe, reaching out for other parts, assembling themselves into living bodies. Mikulski comes back to life, aims his Vickers at the ceiling of the U-boat, and cuts an escape hatch. Instead of black water, golden light rushes through.

"What was your position in all this, then?" asks Root, and Shaftoe nearly jumps out of his chair, startled by the sound of a voice other than von Hacklheber's. Given what happened the last time someone (Shaftoe) asked a question, this is heroic but risky. Starting with Hitler, von Hacklheber works his way down the chain of command.

Shaftoe doesn't care: he's on a rubber raft, along with various resurrected comrades from Guadalcanal and Detachment 2702. They are rowing across a still cove lit by giant flaming klieg lights in the sky. Standing behind the klieg lights is a man talking in a German accent: "My immediate supervisors, Wilhelm Fenner, from St. Petersburg, who headed all German military cryptanalysis from 1922 onwards, and his chief deputy, Professor Novopaschenny."

All of these names sound alike to Shaftoe, but Root says, "A Russian?" Shaftoe is really coming around now, reemerging into the World. He sits up straight, and his body feels stiff, like it hasn't moved in a long time. He is about to apologize for the way he has been behaving, but since no one is looking at him funny, Shaftoe sees no reason to fill them in on what he's been doing these last few minutes.

"Professor Novopaschenny was a Czarist astronomer who knew Fenner from St. Petersburg. Under them, I was given broad authority to pursue researches into the theoretical limits of security. I used tools from pure mathematics as well as mechanical calculating devices of my own design. I looked at our own codes as well as those of our enemies, looking for weaknesses."

"What did you find?" Bischoff asks.

"I found weaknesses everywhere," von Hacklheber says. "Most codes were designed by dilettantes and amateurs with no grasp of the underlying mathematics. It is really quite pitiable."

"Including the Enigma?" Bischoff asks.

"Don't even talk to me of that shit," von Hacklheber says. "I dispensed with it almost immediately."

"What do you mean, dispensed with it?" Root asks.

"Proved that it was shit," von Hacklheber says.

"But the entire Wehrmacht still uses it," Bischoff says.

Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. "You expect them to throw all those machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?" He stares at his cigarette a while longer, then puts it to his lips, draws on it tastefully, holds the smoke in his lungs, and finally exhales it slowly through his vocal cords whilst simultaneously causing them to emit the following sounds: "I knew that there must be people working for the enemy who would figure this out. Turing. Von Neumann. Waterhouse. Some of the Poles. I began to look for signs that they had broken the Enigma, or at least realized its weaknesses and begun trying to break it. I ran statistical analyses of convoy sinkings and U-boat attacks. I found some anomalies, some improbable events, but not enough to make a pattern. Many of the grossest anomalies were later accounted for by the discovery of espionage stations and the like.

"From this I drew no conclusion. Certainly if they were smart enough to break the Enigma they would be smart enough to conceal the fact from us at any cost. But there was one anomaly they could not cover up. I refer to human anomalies."

"Human anomalies?" Root asks. The phrase is classic Root-bait.

"I knew perfectly well that only a handful of people in the world had the acumen to break the Enigma and then to cover up the fact that they had broken it. By using our intelligence sources to ascertain where these men were, and what they were doing, I could make inferences." Von Hacklheber stubs out his cigarette, sits up straight, and drains a half-shot of schnapps, warming to the task. "This was a human intelligence problem-not signals intelligence. This is handled by a different branch of the service-" and he's off again talking about the structure of the German bureaucracy. Terrified, Shaftoe flees from the room, runs outside, and uses the outhouse. When he gets back, von Hacklheber is just winding up. "It all came down to a problem of sifting through large amounts of raw data-lengthy and tedious work."

Shaftoe cringes, wondering what something would have to be like in order to qualify as lengthy and tedious to this joker.

"After some time," von Hacklheber continues, "I learned, through some of our agents in the British Isles, that a man matching the general description of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had been stationed to a castle in Outer Qwghlm. I was able to arrange for a young lady to place this man under the closest possible surveillance," he says dryly. "His security precautions were impeccable, and so we learned nothing directly. In fact, it is quite likely that he knew that the young woman in question was an agent, and so took added precautions. But we did learn that this man communicated through one-time pads. He would read his encrypted messages over the telephone to a nearby naval base whence they would be telegraphed to a station in Buckinghamshire, which would respond to him with messages encrypted using the same system of one-time pads. By going through the records of our various radio intercept stations we were able to accumulate a stack of messages that had been sent by this mysterious unit, using this series of one-time pads, over a period of time beginning in the middle of 1942 and continuing up to the present day. It was interesting to note that this unit operated in a variety of places:

Malta, Alexandria, Morocco, Norway, and various ships at sea. Extremely unusual. I was very interested in this mysterious unit and so I began trying to break their special code."

"Isn't that impossible?" Bischoff asks. "There is no way to break a one-time pad, short of stealing a copy."

"That is true in theory," von Hacklheber says. "In practice, this is only true if the letters that make up the one-time pad are chosen perfectly randomly. But, as I discovered, this is not true of the one-time pads used by Detachment 2702-which is the mysterious unit that Waterhouse, Turing, and these two gentlemen all belong to."

"But how did you figure this out?" Bischoff asks.

"A few things helped me. There was a lot of depth-many messages to work with. There was consistency-the one-time pads were generated in the same way, always, and always exhibited the same patterns. I made some educated guesses which turned out to be correct. And I had a calculating machine to make the work go faster."

"Educated guesses?"

"I had a hypothesis that the one-time pads were being drawn up by a person who was rolling dice or shuffling a deck of cards to produce the letters. I began to consider psychological factors. An English speaker is accustomed to a certain frequency distribution of letters. He expects to see a great many e's, t's, and a's, and not so many z's and q's and x's. So if such a person were using some supposedly random algorithm to generate the letters, he would be subconsciously irritated every time a z or an x came up, and, conversely, soothed by the appearance of e or t. Over time, this might skew the frequency distribution."

"But Herr Doctor von Hacklheber, I find it unlikely that such a person would substitute their own letters for the ones that came up on the cards, or dice, or whatever."

"It is not very likely. But suppose that the algorithm gave the person some small amount of discretion." Von Hacklheber lights another cigarette, pours out more schnapps. "I set up an experiment. I got twenty volunteers-middle-aged women who wanted to do their part for the Reich. I set them to work drawing up one-time pads using an algorithm where they drew slips out of a box. Then I used my machinery to run statistical calculations on the results. I found that they were not random at all."

Root says, "The one-time pads for Detachment 2702 are being created by Mrs. Tenney, a vicar's wife. She uses a bingo machine, a cage filled with wooden balls with a letter stamped on each ball. She is supposed to close her eyes before reaching into the cage. But suppose she has become sloppy and no longer closes her eyes when she reaches into it."

"Or," von Hacklheber says, "suppose she looks at the cage, and sees how the balls are distributed inside of it, and thencloses her eyes. She will subconsciously reach toward the E and avoid the Z. Or, if a certain letter has just come up recently, she will try to avoid choosing it again. Even if she cannot see the inside of the cage, she will learn to distinguish among the different balls by their feel-being made of wood, each ball will have a different weight, a different pattern in the grain."

Bischoff's not buying it. "But it will still be mostly random!"

"Mostly random is not good enough!" von Hacklheber snaps. "I was convinced that the one-time pads of Detachment 2702 would have a frequency distribution similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible, for example. And I strongly suspected that the content of those messages would include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta. By putting my machinery to work, I was able to break some of the one-time pads. Waterhouse was careful to burn his pads after using them once, but some other parts of the detachment were careless, and used the same pads again and again. I read many messages. It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the Enigma had been broken."

Shaftoe knows what an Enigma is, if only because Bischoff won't shut up about them. When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment 2702 ever did suddenly makes sense.

"So, the secret is out then," Root says. "I assume you made your superiors aware of your discovery?"

"I made them aware of absolutely nothing," von Hacklheber snarls, "because by this time I had long since fallen into a snare of Reichsmarschall Hermann G

The knock on Rudolf von Hacklheber's door had come at four o'clock in the morning, a time exploited by the Gestapo for its psychological effect. Rudy is wide awake. Even if bombers had not been pounding Berlin all night long, he would have been awake, because he has neither seen nor heard from Angelo in three days. He throws a dressing gown over his pajamas, steps into slippers, and opens the door of his flat to reveal, predictably, a small, prematurely withered man backed up by a couple of classic Gestapo killers in long black leather coats.

"May I proffer an observation?" says Rudy von Hacklheber.

"But of course, Herr Doktor Professor. As long as it is not a state secret, of course."

"In the old days-the early days-when no one knew what the Gestapo was, and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A fine way to exploit man's primal fear of the darkness. But now it is 1942, almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they are of the dark. So, why don't you work during the daytime? You are stuck in a rut."

The bottom half of the withered man's face laughs. The top half doesn't change. "I will pass your suggestion up the chain of command," he says. "But, Herr Doktor, we are not here to instill fear. We have come at this inconvenient time because of the train schedules."

"Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?"

"You have a few minutes," the Gestapo man says, pulling back a cuff to divulge a hulking Swiss chronometer. Then he invites himself in and begins to pace up and down in front of Rudy's bookshelves, hands clasped behind his back, bending at the waist to peer at the titles. He seems disappointed to find that they are all mathematical texts-not a single copy of the Declaration of Independence in evidence, though you can never tell when a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion might be hidden between the pages of a mathematical journal. When Rudy emerges, dressed but still unshaven, he finds the man displaying a pained expression while trying to read Turing's dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like a lower primate trying to fly an aeroplane.

Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the departures board as they go in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will be able to deduce, from the track number, whether he's being taken in the direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.

It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out to be a waste of effort, because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board. A short train waits there. It does not contain any boxcars, a relief to Rudy, since he thinks that during the last few years he may have glimpsed boxcars that appeared to be crammed full of human beings. These glimpses were brief and surreal, and he cannot really sort out whether they really happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong cranial drawer.

But all of the cars on this train have doors, guarded by men in unfamiliar uniforms, and windows, shrouded on the inside with shutters and heavy curtains. The Gestapo lead him to a coach door without breaking stride, and just like that, he is through. And he is alone. No one checks his papers, and the Gestapo do not enter behind him. The door is closed behind his back.

Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated like the anteroom of an upper-class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the polished hardwood floor, heavy furniture upholstered in maroon velvet, and curtains so thick that they look bulletproof. At one end of the coach, a French maid hovers over a table set with breakfast: hard rolls, slices of meat and cheese, and coffee. Rudy's nose tells him that it is real coffee, and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to conceal dark circles, and (he realizes, as she hands him the cup) she has also painted it onto her wrists.

Rudy savors the coffee, stirring cream into it with a golden spoon bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down the length of the car, admiring the art on the walls: a series of D

The door opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board, and ends up sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him, the train has already begun to pull out of the station.

"Angelo!" Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table and throws himself into the arms of his beloved.

Angelo returns the embrace weakly. He stinks, and he shudders uncontrollably. He is wearing a coarse, dirty, pajamalike garment, and is wrapped up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half-scabbed lacerations embedded in fields of yellow-green bruises.

"Don't worry about it, Rudy," Angelo says, clenching and opening his fists to prove that they still work. "They were not kind to me, but they took care with my hands."

"Thou canst still fly?"

"I can still fly. But that is not why they were so careful with my hands."

"Why, then?"

"Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession."

Rudy and Angelo gaze into each other's eyes. Angelo looks sad, exhausted, but still has some kind of serene confidence about him. Like a baptizing priest ready to receive the infant, he holds up his hands. He silently mouths the words: But I can still fly!

A suit of clothes is brought in by a valet. Angelo cleans up in one of the coach's lavatories. Rudy tries to peer out between the curtains, but heavy shutters have been pulled down over the windows. They breakfast together as the train maneuvers through the switching-yards of greater Berlin, perhaps working its way around some bombed-out sections of track, and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.

Reichsmarschall Hermann G

Two hours later, a doctor in a white coat passes through, headed for G

Half an hour after that, an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through carrying a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with a crisp "Heil, Hitler!"

Another hour goes by, and then Rudy and Angelo are escorted back through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker and more gentlemanly than the florid parlor where they have been cooling their heels. It is paneled in darkly stained wood and contains an actual desk-a baronial monstrosity carved out of a ton of Bavarian oak. At the moment, its sole function is to support a single sheet of paper, hand-written, and signed at the bottom. Even from a distance, Rudy recognizes Angelo's handwriting.

They have to walk past the desk in order to reach G

"Good morning, gentlemen," he says brightly. "Sorry to have kept you waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?"

There is small talk. It goes on at length. G

The outdoor light seems to cause him appalling pain and he quickly looks away.

But finally the train slows, maneuvers through more switches, and coasts to a gentle stop. They can see nothing, of course. Rudy strains his ears, and thinks he hears activity around them: many feet marching, and commands being shouted. G

When G

But first his victims need to be properly terrified. "Do you know what could happen to you? Hmm? Do you?"

Neither Rudy nor Angelo answers. It is not the sort of question that really needs answering.

G

They are in the middle of an open area, surrounded by tall barbed-wire fences, filled with long rows of dark barracks. In the center, a tall stack pours smoke into a white sky. SS troops in greatcoats and jackboots pace around, blowing into their hands. Just a few yards away from them, on an adjacent railway siding, a gang of wretches in striped clothing are at work in, and around, a boxcar, unloading pale cargo. A large number of naked human bodies have become all frozen together in a solid, tangled mass inside the boxcar, and the prisoners are at work with axes, bucksaws, and prybars, dismantling them and throwing the parts onto the ground. Because they are frozen solid, there is no blood, and so the entire operation is startlingly clean. The double-glazed windows of G

One of the prisoners turns towards them, carrying a thigh toward a wheelbarrow, and risks a direct look at the Reichsmarschall's train. This prisoner has a pink triangle sewn to the breast of his uniform. The prisoner's eyes are trying to probe through the window, past the curtain, trying to make a human connection with someone on the inside of the coach. Rudy stiffens in panic for a moment, thinking that the prisoner sees him. Then G

Rudy looks at his lover. Angelo is sitting frozen, just like one of those corpses, with his hands over his face.

G

"What?" ask Rudy and Angelo simultaneously.

G

Angelo leaves eagerly. G

"I am sorry to show you these unpleasant things," G

"I can assure the Reichsmarschall that-"

G

Rudy looks at the floor, takes a deep breath, and forces out the words:

"It would be a great honor to work for you, Reichsmarschall. But since you have access to so many of the great museums and libraries of Europe, there is only one small favor I, as a scholar, might humbly request of you."

Back in the church basement in Norrsbruck, Sweden, Rudy yells, and drops a cigarette on the floor, having allowed it to burn down to his fingers, like a slow fuse, while relating this story. He puts his hand to his mouth, sucks on the finger briefly, then remembers his manners and composes himself. "G

"And you handed it over," Bischoff says.

"Yes," Rudy says, and here, for the first time all day, he allows himself a slight smile. "And it is a reasonably good system, despite the fact that I crippled it before giving it to G

"Crippled it?" Root asks. "What do you mean?"

"Imagine a new engine for an aeroplane. Imagine it has sixteen cylinders. It is more powerful than any other engine in the world. Even so, a mechanic can do certain things-very simple things-to kill its performance. Such as pulling out half of the spark plug wires. Or tampering with the timing. This is an analogy to what I did with G

"So what went wrong?" Shaftoe asks. "They figured out that you had crippled it?"

Rudolf von Hacklheber laughs. "Not very likely. Maybe half a dozen people in the world could figure that out. No, what went wrong was that you fellows, you Allies, landed in Sicily, and then in Italy, and not long afterwards, Mussolini was overthrown, the Italians withdrew from the Axis, and Angelo, like all of the other hundreds of thousands of Italian nationals living and working in the Reich, fell under suspicion. His services were badly needed as a test pilot, but his situation was tenuous. He volunteered for the most dangerous work of all-flying the new Messerschmidt prototype, with the turbine-jet engine. This proved his loyalty in the eyes of some.

"Remember that, at the same time, I was decrypting the message traffic of Detachment 2702. I kept these results to myself, as I no longer felt any particular loyalty to the Third Reich. There had been a great burst of activity around the middle of April, and then no messages for a while-as if the detachment had ceased to exist. At exactly the same time, G

"So you know about that?" Bischoff asks.

"Nat

"D

Rudy nods; it all fits.

"During all of this," Rudy continues, "I received only one message intercept in the Detachment 2702 code. It took my machinery several weeks to break it. It was a message from Enoch Root, stating that he and Sergeant Shaftoe were in Norrsbruck, Sweden, and requesting further instructions. I was aware that Kapit

"Why!?" Shaftoe says. "Of all the places-"

"Enoch and I had never met. But there are certain old family connections," Rudy says, "and certain shared interests."

Bischoff mutters something in German.

"The connections make a very long story. I would have to write a whole fucking book," Rudy says irritably.

Bischoff looks only slightly appeased, but Rudy goes on anyway. "It took us several weeks to make preparations. I packed up the Leibniz Archiv-"

"Hold on-the what?"

"Certain materials I use in my research. They had been scattered among many libraries, all over Europe. G

"No shit! How'd you manage that little stunt?" Shaftoe asks.

Rudy looks at Enoch Root as if expecting him to answer the question. Root shakes his head minutely.

"It would be too tedious to explain here," Rudy says, sounding mildly annoyed. "I found Enoch. We got a message to Angelo saying that I was safe here. Angelo then tried to make his escape in the Messerschmidt prototype, with the results that we have all seen."

A long pause.

"And now, here we are!" says Bobby Shaftoe.

"Here we are," agrees Rudolf von Hacklheber.

"What do you think we should do?" asks Shaftoe.

"I think we should form a secret conspiracy," says Rudolf von Hacklheber offhandedly, as if proposing to go in together on a fifth of bourbon. "We should all make our way separately to Manila and, once we arrive, we should take some, if not all, of the gold that the Nazis and the Nipponese have been hoarding there."

"What do you want with a shitload of gold?" Bobby asks. "You're already rich."

"There are many deserving charities," Rudy says, looking significantly at Root. Root averts his eyes.

There is another long pause.

"I can provide secure lines of communication, which is the sine qua nonof any secret conspiracy," says Rudolf von Hacklheber. "We will use the full-strength, uncrippled version of the same cryptosystem that I invented for G"

"Don't even say it, I already know," says Bobby Shaftoe.

He and Bischoff look at Root, who's sitting on his hands, staring at Rudy. Looking oddly nervous.

"Enoch the Red, your organization can get us to Manila," von Hacklheber says.

Shaftoe snorts. "Don't you think the Catholic Church has its hands sort of full right now?"

"I'm not talking about the Church," Rudy says. "I'm talking about Societas Eruditorum."

Root freezes.

"Congratulations there, Rudy!" Shaftoe says. "You surprised the padre. I didn't think it could be done. Now would you mind telling us what the fuck you're talking about?"