Cryptonomicon

Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him. "What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don't think there's anything worth hiding from you."

Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now open aluminum briefcase from the U-boat. Randy supposes that merely opening it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian.

Randy sees a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out and trying to read it. "Most wartime paper was crap," he says. "It probably dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However, the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check out the glasses, the pen."

Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.

"So what I'm getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in his briefcase," Doug continues. "Personal stationery. So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?"

"No. But I could do a web search . . ."

"I tried that," Doug says. "Turned up just a few hits. There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company. That's about it."

"Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?"

"Check this out," Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps of the envelope have been spread apart. "May I?" he asks. Doug nods and hands him a couple of latex surgical gloves. "I don't have to file a diving plan for this, do I?" Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.

Doug is not amused. "It is deeper than it looks," he says.

Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together, reassembling the inscription. It says:

WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE.

Chapter 54 BRISBANE

Through a small dusty window Xed with masking tape, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse gazes out at downtown Brisbane. Bustling it ain't. A taxi limps down the street and pulls into the drive of the nearby Canberra Hotel, which is home to many mid-ranking officers. The taxi smokes and reeks--it is powered by a charcoal burner in the trunk. Marching feet can be heard through the window. It's not the tromp, tromp of combat boots, but the whack, whack of sensible shoes worn by sensible women: local volunteers. Waterhouse instinctively leans closer to the window to get a look at them, but he's wasting his time. Dressed in those uniforms, you could march a regiment of pinup girls through all the cabins and gangways of an active battleship and not draw a single wolf whistle, lewd suggestion, or butt-grab.

A delivery truck creeps out of a side street and backfires alarmingly as it tries to accelerate onto the main drag. Brisbane is still worried about attack from the air, and no one likes sudden loud noises. The truck looks like it is being attacked by an amoeba: on its back is a billowing rubberized-canvas balloon full of natural gas.

He's on the third floor of a commercial building so nondescript that the most interesting observation one can make about it is that it has four stories. There is a tobacconist on the ground floor. The rest of the place must have been empty until The General--beaten like a red-headed stepchild by those Nips--came to Brisbane from Corregidor, and made this city into the capital of the Southwest Pacific Theater. There must have been an incredible amount of surplus office space around here before The General showed up, because a lot of Brisbaners had fled south, expecting an invasion.