Cryptonomicon

To put it mildly, Central Bureau is not the kind of place where a stranger can just wander in, check the place out, introduce himself and find a job. Even the wandering-in part is potentially fatal. Fortunately, Waterhouse has Ultra Mega clearance, the highest clearance in the Entire World.

Unfortunately, this category of secrecy is itself so secret that its very existence is secret, and so he can't actually reveal it to anyone--unless he finds someone else with Ultra Mega clearance. There are only a dozen people with Ultra Mega clearance in all of Brisbane. Eight of them comprise the top of the General's command hierarchy, three work at Central Bureau, and one is Waterhouse.

Waterhouse sniffs out the nerve center in the old whorehouse. Superannuated Australian Territorial Guards in jaunty asymmetrical hats ring the place, clutching blunderbusses. Unlike Mrs. McTeague, they don't like his looks. On the other hand they are used to this kind of thing: smart boys from far away showing up at the gate with long and, in the end, boring stories about how the military screwed up their orders, put them in the wrong boat, sent them to the wrong place, gave them tropical diseases, threw their belongings overboard, left them to fend for themselves. They don't shoot him, but they don't let him in.

He hangs around and makes a nuisance of himself for a couple of days until he finally recognizes, and is recognized by, Abraham Sinkov. Sinkov is a top American cryptanalyst; he helped Schoen break Indigo. He and Waterhouse have crossed paths a few times, and though they aren't friends, per se, their minds work the same way. This makes them brothers in a weird family that has only a few hundred members, scattered about the world. In a way, it is a clearance that is rarer, harder to come by, and more mysterious than Ultra Mega. Sinkov writes him a new set of papers, giving him a clearance that is very high, but not so high that he can't reveal it.

Waterhouse gets a tour. Shirtless men sit in Quonset huts made stifling by the red-hot tubes of their radios. They pluck the Nipponese Army's messages out of the air and hand them off to legions of young Australian women who punch the intercepted messages onto ETC cards.

There is a cadre of American officers composed entirely of a whole department of the Electrical Till Corporation. One day, early in 1942, they put their white shirts and blue suits into mothballs, donned Army uniforms, and climbed on ships to Brisbane. Their ringleader is a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Comstock, and he has gotten the whole code-breaking process totally automated. The cards punched by the Aussie girls come into the machine room stacked into ingots which are fed through the machines. Decrypts fly out of a line printer on the other end and are taken off to another hut where American nisei, and some white men trained in Nipponese, translate them.

A Waterhouse is the last thing these guys need. He's beginning to understand what the major said to him the other day: they have passed over the watershed line. The codes are broken.

Which reminds him of Turing. Ever since Alan got back from New York he's been distancing himself from Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another installation, a radio center called Hanslope in north Buckinghamshire, a place of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military-formal in its atmosphere.

At the time, Waterhouse could not understand why Alan would want to move away from Bletchley. But now he knows how Alan must have felt after they turned decryption into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley Park. He must have felt that the battle was won, and with it the war. The rest might seem like glorious conquest to people like the General, but to Turing, and now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping-up. It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the whorehouse and begins to feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn't been able to decrypt. There are still dozens of minor Nipponese codes that remain to be broken. Maybe, by breaking one or two, and teaching the ETC machines to read them, Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single day, or save a single life. This is a noble calling that he undertakes willingly, but in essence it is no different from being an Army butcher who saves lives by keeping his knives clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.

Waterhouse cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month he even flies up to New Guinea, where Navy divers are salvaging code books from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and tries not to die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those recovered codebooks to good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.