Cryptonomicon

"So, have you found wealth in the Philippines yet?" asks the lady, whose name Randy did not quite catch. She acts as if she expects him to know her.

"Uh, my partners and I are exploring business opportunities," Randy says. "Maybe wealth will follow."

"I understand you are good with numbers," the lady says.

Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he's a numbers kind of guy? "I'm good with math,"he finally says.

"Isn't that what I said?"

"Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them--that's what computers are for."

The lady will not be denied; she has a script and she's sticking to it. "I have a math problem for you," the lady says.

"Shoot."

"What is the value of the following information: fifteen degrees, seventeen minutes, forty-one point three two seconds north, and a hundred and twenty-one degrees, fifty-seven minutes, zero point five five seconds east?"

"Uh. . . I don't know. It sounds like a latitude and longitude. Northern Luzon, right?"

The lady nods.

"You want me to tell you the value of those numbers?"

"Yes."

"Depends on what's there, I guess."

"I suppose it does," the lady says. And that's all she says, for the rest of the dance. Other than complimenting Randy on his balletic skills, which is just as hard to interpret.

Chapter 57 GIRL

Flats are harder and harder to find in Brisbane, which has become a spy boomtown--Bletchley Park Down Under. There's Central Bureau, which has set up out at the Ascot Racetrack, and another entity in a different part of town called Allied Intelligence Bureau. The people who work at Central Bureau tend to be pallid mathematics experts. The AIB people, on the other hand, remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned, and taciturn.

Half a mile from the Ascot Racetrack, he sees one of the latter tripping lightly down the steps of a nice gingerbready rooming-house, carrying a five-hundred-pound duffel bag on his back. The man is dressed for a long trip. A grandmotherish lady in an apron is on the veranda, waving a tea towel at him. It is like a scene from a movie; you wouldn't even know that only a few hours' flight from here, men are turning black like photographic paper in a developer tray as their living flesh is converted into putrid gas by Clostridium bacteria.

Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs a place to live, should happen along at the exact moment that a room has become available. Cryptanalysts wait for lucky breaks, then exploit them. After the departing soldier has disappeared round the corner, he knocks on the door and introduces himself to the lady. Mrs. McTeague says (to the extent Waterhouse can penetrate her accent) that she likes his looks. She sounds distinctly astonished. It seems clear that the improbability of Waterhouse's having happened upon this vacant room is nothing compared to the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse joins a small elite group of young men (four in all) whose looks Mrs. McTeague likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms where Mrs. McTeague's offspring grew from the brightest and most beautiful children ever born into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the King of England, the General, and Lord Mountbatten.

Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.

The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the fellows in the next room: a redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of working at Central Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged because he's not in uniform and he's too hung over to speak.

Having accomplished his mission (according to his understanding with the General's minions), found a place to live, and settled his other personal affairs, Waterhouse begins hanging around the Ascot Racetrack and the adjacent whorehouse, trying to find some way to make himself useful. Actually he would rather sit in his room all day and work on his new project, which is to design a high-speed Turing machine. But he has a duty to contribute to the war effort. Even if he didn't, he suspects that when his new roommate gets back from his mission, and finds him sitting indoors all day drawing circuit diagrams, he will thrash Waterhouse to the point where Mrs. McTeague will no longer like his looks.