In the dark, p.21
In the Dark, page 21
She didn’t wait for my reply. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t have your complicated history, nor your great commitment to the revolution, though I do have my own little commitment. So there’s no need for you to worry. I’m not going to commit suicide, which would be a crime against my parents; I’m also not going to stop work, which would be a crime against the Party and the Chinese people, and unfair to Director Tie, Unit Director Luo and you. From now on I will go to work regularly. Don’t worry.’
I said abruptly, ‘I’m going to Moscow tomorrow.’
She seemed a bit surprised at that, and asked if I was going to see Anderov. I said yes, and she expressed some misgivings. ‘He wouldn’t write back to you – do you think he is going to see you?’
I said he would; if I was there in person he would certainly want to see me. She said that if I popped up suddenly like that, even if I did see him he wouldn’t say anything useful, people like that being very sensitive. I said that I had a really good excuse for going to see him, given that I wanted to perform a ‘summoning the soul’ ceremony for Xiaoyu. Xiaoyu’s soul was still lost and far from home, which meant that she could not rest in peace. It was imperative that her soul be summoned. I didn’t care if he really believed in that kind of thing or not, what mattered was that it made a viable excuse. ‘The reason I have come to see you is to ask, what kind of thing is it that you want to know from Anderov?’
That question seemed to go right to the heart of things, and she immediately got excited and said, ‘Fantastic! I’ll write you a list this evening.’
I said this evening would be too late since I was leaving first thing in the morning, and besides something like that probably shouldn’t be put into writing: she should just tell me.
She thought about it, and said: ‘If at all possible, I’d like to know what Anderov thinks of Sivincy’s cryptographic skills: whether she is likely to pull any particularly nasty or unexpected tricks, and whether she is capable of producing a super-difficult cipher. If she isn’t, then we can eliminate one of the four possibilities that I discussed with you: RECOVERY can’t possibly be a super-large-value algorithmic cipher encrypted with a medium-large-value algorithmic cipher. Finding that out would be crucial, because if RECOVERY really is that kind of code it would be bad news for our chances of decrypting it. The calculations required would be massive, and we simply don’t have the capacity: we can’t deal with it. In that case we won’t be able to crack it for at least another couple of years.’
Then she asked me how long I was planning to spend in Moscow. I said I was desperate to get there, see Anderov, get the information that I needed and come back, and if possible I would like to do it all the same day.
‘You seem to be in a real hurry.’
‘Well, I am in a hurry, but if you think I shouldn’t be, then I’m not.’
‘Thanks for informing me. I won’t see you off tomorrow, but I hope you have a good journey.’ She then walked further into the wood.
Seeing her solitary, lonely shadow, I felt a sadness, disappointment, desolation and pain that is impossible to describe. It was as if I was never going to see her again.
The next day Bureau Chief Yuan of the guards unit accompanied me to the nearest town, where I got on board a whistling train and began my journey to Moscow. This was my third visit to Moscow, but it seemed that every time I went there dreadful, unexpected things happened. Moscow has been an unlucky place for me. I had made a big decision in going there, but I did not even get to hear Anderov’s voice, let alone actually see him. Every day I roamed through the streets of Moscow like a detective, trying to find out what had happened to Anderov, and everyone told me a different story. One person told me that he was being held under house arrest by the KGB, someone else told me that he had claimed asylum in France, a third person said that he was dead … and so on and so forth, no two stories the same. It was as if Anderov had been carried away by the icy blast of the Siberian winds, never to return …
It was more than a month before I returned, defeated, to Unit 701.
I handed out souvenirs from Russia to all the members of the team, and then – following closely on each other’s heels – Huang Yiyi and Comrade Chen both came to my office to ask how it had gone and whether I had got anything out of it. I shook my head and said that I hadn’t been able to see Anderov. I explained the problem and as Huang Yiyi listened she became more and more anxious, and asked, ‘So you came back empty-handed?’
Not exactly, I said, and took out the documentation I had collected in Moscow about Sivincy’s life, and her correspondence with Anderov since her arrival in the United States, which I had inadvertently discovered was in the possession of one of his former students. When I passed through Beijing, Director Tie had given me documentation from the Ministry of Public Security concerning the latest sabotage operations by KMT secret agents on the Mainland, and I handed that over to them and told them to look at it. Finally I told them something that none of us had known before, that when Sivincy was a teenager she had been gang-raped by White Russian soldiers!
Chen was confused. ‘Is that going to help us crack her cipher?’
I said, ‘Of course it is going to help us; it enables us to understand her character. For a young person to go through such a terrible experience is going to have an enormous impact on her; it will affect everything for the rest of her life. If you take that into account it is not hard to understand why she decided to plagiarize Enigma, or why she refused to attend the banquet that Stalin gave in her honour. A completely sane person wouldn’t do that sort of thing, but she has suffered great psychological damage, and so her actions are not entirely normal, and may seem perverse. Her wicked intelligence and her nasty tricks may all be connected to this experience.’ As I spoke I took out a photograph of Sivincy and gave it to them to look at. The icy gaze and arrogant mouth of the ageing woman in the picture startled both Chen and Huang Yiyi.
Comrade Chen said, ‘Bloody hell, she looks a nasty piece of work!’
Huang Yiyi said, ‘I have a feeling.’ We asked her what feeling, and she stared at Sivincy’s picture and said, ‘I don’t see a woman but a black hole, a dark pit crawling with poisonous snakes and vampire bats!’ She wanted me to give her the picture of Sivincy, and I agreed.
Just then Unit Director Luo rang me up, having heard that I was back, and wanted me to go round and report to her, so we finished our discussion there. That evening Unit Director Luo invited me to our guest house for dinner, to welcome me back. Afterwards I was walking past the office block in the dark, when I noticed that the light in Huang Yiyi’s office was still on, so I went in to see her. I found her sitting in front of her desk staring unblinkingly at the photograph of Sivincy in her hand. I asked her what she was doing, and she replied that she was in deep communication with Sivincy. I asked whether she had found anything out, and she said, ‘A lot.’
I remembered I had brought a little present back from Moscow specially for her, so I asked her to come to my office. It was a pretty Russian doll, and she loved it the moment she set eyes on it. ‘This is a pair to the one I have at home: a prince and a princess.’
‘I noticed the prince in your room, so I bought this one for you specially to make a pair.’
She praised the princess’s prettiness for a bit, and then she raised her head and said, ‘Why are you being so good to me?’
‘What do you mean, so good? It was easy, and the princess wasn’t expensive.’
She looked at me, and then as if something had disappointed her, she said to herself, ‘I don’t understand you, you are … too mysterious for me.’
I said cheerfully, ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand me: all we want is for you to understand RECOVERY.’ I asked her if she thought I was right, that Sivincy’s experience of being raped as a girl would have had a great effect in perverting her character. She said of course, it was quite sufficient to explain her abnormal psychology.
‘Would it be possible for someone psychologically abnormal to conceal that fact?’
‘I don’t think so. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t be able to hide every trace. Say I myself wanted to pretend to be reserved, I might take everyone in for a bit but I wouldn’t be able to keep it up for a lifetime. Now pretty much everyone in the unit looks at me askance. Why? Because the fox can’t hide its tail for ever. The same goes for you. Mountains may crumble and rivers change their course, but human nature is hard to change.’
‘You ought to remember that when you gave me the choice of picking which principles Sivincy would have used to construct RECOVERY, I chose a mathematical cipher created by encrypting an algorithmic cipher with a second algorithmic cipher. Do you know why I picked that? It was because Sivincy, to use your own words, had already pulled a very nasty trick on us, toying with the cryptographers trying to break her cipher. So I guessed that when she was thinking about her cipher she would do her very best to create an exceptionally difficult one, which on the one hand would prove her abilities and on the other would demonstrate that her plagiarism didn’t arise from stupidity but was in fact entirely intentional, a joke that she was playing on other cryptographers.’
She looked at me a bit startled, and then asked me to carry on talking.
‘Now we can be sure that she is psychologically abnormal, and, as we just discussed, such a person may want to conceal the fact but would not be able to. That means that when she set out to create RECOVERY, an exceptionally difficult cipher but one designed according to standard parameters, she might have had the intention but not the ability, because she found that her personality made it impossible to stick to the rules. She might have wanted to make DIFFICULT CENTURY a conventional if abstruse cipher, but she couldn’t.’
She said, feeling her way forward, ‘You mean RECOVERY cannot be an algorithmic cipher encrypted with another algorithmic cipher?’
I nodded my head.
She looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘If you’re right, normally there would be only one way to understand RECOVERY: it is an algorithmic cipher encrypted with a transposition cipher.’
‘Why can’t it be an algorithmic cipher encrypted with a substitution cipher?’ I asked.
‘Because that’s the route that Chen has been trying out, and he has got nowhere.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I thought you just said there was only one way?’
‘I said normally …’
I was listening carefully to what she was saying when suddenly she stopped speaking and indicated that I should pay attention to something outside. I could hear someone pacing up and down the corridor, and you could feel the impatience in the footsteps. I smiled. ‘It must be Chen. I dare say he wants to report some new development.’
She said, ‘I’ll go and call him in.’
‘Tell me what you think first.’
She cleared her throat. ‘I’m sure you remember the four cipher texts I gave you, which when combined gave you a four-word plain text: “I really love you”.’
I felt very uncomfortable. ‘Why are you bringing that up again?’
‘You’re scared, aren’t you? Well in that case I won’t carry on, and anyway there are people waiting to talk to you.’ She got up to go, but I stopped her and got her to carry on. She looked at me disdainfully. ‘Don’t worry, I will never talk to you about love again: that’s history and it’s all in the past. I want you to think about this sentence and what is special about it. I will read it aloud, and you can work out what is special about it. I really love you – Really I love you – You I really love – four words that you can put in any order without affecting the meaning.’
I looked at her curiously, for it was as if a fluttering and fast-moving beam of light had suddenly appeared in front of me, illuminating a strange and brilliant new world.
‘That was my first deduction concerning RECOVERY,’ Huang Yiyi went on. ‘This isn’t an ordinary cipher and it also isn’t particularly difficult, but in its cunning, artfulness, innovativeness, fascination and cleverness, it is more like a wonderful magic trick. A magic trick may not be very difficult to perform, yet it can perplex you in the same way that a cipher can. Sivincy may well have constructed a magic cipher, to trick other cryptographers.’
‘An eccentric genius like Sivincy might well enjoy pulling that kind of trick,’ I said.
‘Right. That was the reason I made this deduction.’
I was getting interested, and rubbed my hands together. ‘Fascinating! Really fascinating!’
Huang Yiyi showed that she wasn’t entirely happy with her theories when she said, ‘When my deductions about the cipher key didn’t work out, I was very upset, and I started to wonder if all my ideas were wrong. That was when I came up with a new theory: that this is an algorithmic cipher encrypted with an algorithmic cipher. If you asked someone like Sivincy, with such a massive reputation and with such impressive mathematical abilities, to create a conventional cipher, she would certainly choose that route because it would allow her to demonstrate her talents as a mathematician. But I have been moving that way for such a long time and I simply don’t feel I have got anything out of it, so perhaps it is time to wrap it up. You think that Sivincy wouldn’t have designed RECOVERY that way either?’
I nodded.
She then said: ‘I have a very strong feeling that Sivincy is most likely to have incorporated classic encryption techniques into RECOVERY, and even though my theories didn’t work out, this feeling has never gone away.’ She sighed deeply. ‘Maybe I do have to go right back to the beginning.’
That day the longer we talked, the deeper we became caught up in what we were doing, and the more excited we became, until we found that we had been chatting for several hours. We discussed with complete freedom the theories that we had and the ideas that had struck us. It was wonderful! But while Huang Yiyi and I were chatting so happily, I couldn’t help hearing Comrade Chen’s footsteps pacing up and down the corridor many times, ever more impatient and stubborn. At that time I had no idea what Chen’s angry footsteps meant, and when I did understand, it was too late.
22
That evening I stayed in my office for a while after Huang Yiyi had left, putting the documents and letters I had amassed in Russia into some sort of order, then I set out for home alone. I bumped into Chen just as I turned into the housing compound; it looked as if he had been waiting for me. I thought that he wanted to talk to me about some new ideas for how to crack RECOVERY, so I said I was feeling a bit tired and whatever it was would have to wait until tomorrow. Chen stared at me, but he didn’t say anything. We walked on together in silence, and in the distance I could see the light shining from Huang Yiyi’s windows. I sighed and said, ‘She was working in her office until past eight o’clock. It’s really late now and look, she still hasn’t gone to bed. I guess she is working.’
Chen sniffed and said disdainfully, ‘She’ll be waiting for everyone else to go to sleep, because then she can go out.’
‘Go out? Go where?’
‘To the training centre.’
‘Why on earth would she go to the training centre?’
‘You don’t know?’
I asked what was going on, and he said that it was to do with Comrade Wang, the head of the training centre. I asked what the two of them were up to, but he said nothing.
‘Tell me what is going on, Chen, please!’
‘No one has told you?’
‘If someone had told me, I wouldn’t be asking you.’
‘Find someone else; I really don’t like to say.’
I was getting angry. ‘I am asking you, and I expect you to tell me!’
He said unwillingly, ‘What do you think – they’re having an affair.’ After a short pause he added, ‘Going by what people say, she goes to the training centre every evening and comes back at dawn.’
To get from the cryptography division to the training centre you would have to cross two mountain ridges. If you walked along the main road it would be about eight kilometres, while if you went along the paths you could cut it down to maybe four, but it would still take over an hour. The regulations said that people from the cryptography division could go to the training centre, but not the other way round. So if the two of them were having an affair, it would be Huang Yiyi who had to go to him. But I really found it hard to believe, first because Wang was married and certainly wouldn’t dare do something like that, and secondly Huang Yiyi was so young and so pretty, how on earth could she fall for someone like him?
There was no point speculating. If I wanted to know the truth I would have to call Comrade Wang in and ask him.
Wang was only a departmental cadre, but he was nevertheless an important figure. Although in name I was Deputy Director of Unit 701, I was still junior to him in Party ranking, and organizational matters were outside my remit. As a result I had to ask Unit Director Luo to question him. When Unit Director Luo heard my report she was even more shocked than I had been, and immediately phoned Comrade Wang to summon him to her office. I was not expecting that the minute Unit Director Luo started questioning him, the bastard wouldn’t even try and deny it, but just caved in and admitted everything.
According to him the two of them had got together while I was in the Soviet Union. That bastard Wang really was bloody audacious: having an affair and not just with any woman – with our treasure, destined to do great things for the Party! Unit Director Luo was absolutely furious and didn’t have the least sympathy with any of his pleas for mercy: she immediately summoned all the senior people in the unit for a meeting to discuss how to punish him. At the meeting Unit Director Luo said that she had already reported the matter to our superiors at headquarters, and headquarters had requested that we come up with a means of punishing him which they would then consider. She was clearly in favour of the most severe punishment, severe and quick, and she was not going to listen to any excuses or allow any face-saving measures. ‘It is completely unacceptable, a married man, a government official and Party member of almost twenty years’ standing, to behave in such a corrupt and decadent manner! I can hardly believe it!’ Unit Director Luo said angrily.
